Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

part diagnosis of what went wrong in 1914 and a corresponding two-part
prescription for avoiding similar disasters in the future.
The first element of this diagnosis and prescription concerned domestic
politics. A firm liberal belief was that the ‘people’ do not want war; war
comes about because the people are led into it by militarists or autocrats,
or because their legitimate aspirations to nationhood are blocked by unde-
mocratic, multinational, imperial systems. An obvious answer here is to
promote democratic political systems, that is, liberal-democratic, constitu-
tional regimes, and the principle of national self-determination. The rationale
is that if all regimes were national and liberal-democratic, there would be
no war.
This belief links to the second component of liberal internationalism, its
critique of pre-1914 international institutional structures. The basic thesis
here was that the anarchic pre-1914 system of international relations under-
mined the prospects for peace. Secret diplomacy led to an alliance system that
committed nations to courses of action that had not been sanctioned by
Parliaments or Assemblies (hence the title of the Union for Democratic
Control). There was no mechanism in 1914 to prevent war, except for the
‘balance of power’ – a notion which was associated with unprincipled power-
politics. What was deemed necessary was the establishment of new principles
of international relations, such as ‘open covenants openly arrived at’, but,
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most of all, a new institutional structure for international relations – a League
of Nations.
The aim of a League of Nations would be to provide the security that
nations attempted, unsuccessfully, to find under the old, balance of power,
system. The balance of power was based on private commitments of assis-
tance made by specific parties; the League would provide public assurances
of security backed by the collective will of all nations – hence the term
‘collective security’. The basic principle would be ‘one for all and all for
one’. Each country would guarantee the security of every other country, and
thus there would be no need for nations to resort to expedients such as
military alliances or the balance of power. Law would replace war as the
underlying principle of the system.
These two packages of reforms – to domestic and institutional structures –
were liberal in two senses of the word. In political terms, they were liberal
in so far as they embodied the belief that constitutional government and the
rule of law were principles of universal applicability both to all domestic
regimes and to the international system as such. But they were also liberal
in a more philosophical sense, in so far as they relied quite heavily on the
assumption of an underlying harmony of real interests. The basic premise of
virtually all this thought was that although it might sometimes appear that
there were circumstances where interests clashed, in fact, once the real inter-
ests of the people were made manifest it would be clear that such circum-
stances were the product of distortions introduced either by the malice of
special interests, or by simple ignorance. Thus, although liberal internation-
alists could hardly deny that in 1914 war was popular with the people, they
could, and did, deny that this popularity was based on a rational appraisal
of the situation. On the liberal view, international politics are no more based
on a ‘zero-sum’ game than are international economics; national interests are
always reconcilable.
The liberal belief in a natural harmony of interests led as a matter of
course to a belief in the value of education. Education was seen as a means
of combating the ignorance that is the main cause of a failure to see interests
as harmonious, and thereby can be found one of the origins of International
Relations as an academic discipline. Thus, in Britain, philanthropists such
as David Davies, founder of the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International
Politics at University College Wales, Aberystwyth – the first such chair to be
established in the world – and Montague Burton, whose eponymous chairs
of International Relations are to be found at Oxford and the London School
of Economics, believed that by promoting the study of international rela-
tions they would also be promoting the cause of peace. Systematic study of
international relations would lead to increased support for international
law and the League of Nations. Thus it was that liberal internationalism
became the first orthodoxy of the new discipline although, even then, by no
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means all scholars of International Relations subscribed to it – international
historians, for example, were particularly sceptical.
The peace settlement of 1919 represented a partial embodiment of liberal
internationalist thinking. The principle of national self-determination was
promoted, but only in Europe – and even there it was rather too frequently
abused when it was the rights of Germans or Hungarians that were in ques-
tion. The Versailles Treaty was dictated to the Germans, rather than negoti-
ated with them, even though the Kaiser had been overthrown at the end of
the war and a liberal-democratic republic established in Germany. Germany
was held responsible for the war and deemed liable to meet its costs; the
allies very sensibly did not put a figure on this notional sum, hoping to
decide the matter in a calmer atmosphere later, but the issue of German
reparations was to be a running sore of the inter-war years. A League of
Nations was established, incorporating the principle of collective security,
but it was tied to the Versailles Treaty and thus associated with what the
Germans regarded as an unjust status quo – a judgement soon shared by
much liberal opinion after the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s The
Economic Consequences of The Peace which attacked the motives of the
allies and portrayed the new Germany as the victim of outmoded thinking
(Keynes 1919). The United States Senate refused to join the League as
constituted by the Treaty, and, initially, neither Germany nor Russia
were allowed to join. The unfortunate truth was that liberal interna-
tionalist ideas were not dominant in the minds of any statesmen other
than Wilson, and Wilson – by then a sick man – was unable to sell these
ideas to his fellow-countrymen, partly because he had allowed opposition
leaders of the Senate no part in the negotiation of the peace. This was a
mistake that Franklin Roosevelt learnt from and did not repeat a generation
later.
For all that, the 1919 peace settlement was by no means as harsh as might
have been expected, and in the 1920s it seemed quite plausible that the
undoubted defects of Versailles would be corrected by the harmonious actions
of the major powers. The Locarno Treaties of 1926 symbolically confirmed
the western borders of Germany, and, more importantly, re-established more-
or-less amicable relationships between the leading powers, a process helped by
changes of personnel at the top. Gustav Stresemann in Germany, Aristide
Briand in France, and Austen Chamberlain (followed by Arthur Henderson)
in Britain seemed committed to peaceful solutions to Europe’s problems.
A symbolic high tide was reached at the Treaty of Paris in 1928 – the 
so-called Kellogg–Briand Pact, in which a proposal to mark 150 years of
US–French friendship by the signature of a non-aggression pact somehow
became transformed into a general treaty to abolish war, thereby closing the
legal loopholes that the sharp-eyed found in the Covenant of the League of
Nations. Virtually all countries signed this Treaty – albeit usually with legal
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reservations – which, a cynic might remark, is one of the reasons why
virtually all wars started since 1928 have been wars of ‘self-defence’.
In short, as the 1930s dawned it seemed at least possible that a new and
better system of international relations might be emerging. As no one needs
to be told, this possibility did not materialize: the 1930s saw economic col-
lapse, the rise of the dictators, a series of acts of aggression in Asia, Africa
and Europe, an inability of the League powers led by Britain and France to
develop a coherent policy in response to these events, and, finally, the global
war that the peace settlement of 1919 had been designed to prevent. Clearly
these events were catastrophic in the ‘real world’ but they were equally
damaging in the world of ideas. Indeed, the two worlds, as always, were
interwoven together – it was the inability of decision-makers and intellectu-
als to think sensibly about these events which, at least in part, explained
their inability to produce effective policy. The apparent inability of liberal
internationalists to cope with these events suggested the need for a new
conceptual apparatus, or perhaps for the rediscovery of some older ideas.