Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

The ‘realist’ critique of liberal internationalism
Returning to the root ideas of liberal internationalism, it is easy to identify
the problems this approach faced in the 1930s. In 1919 liberal internation-
alists believed that ‘the people’ had a real interest in and desire for peace
and that democratic regimes would, if given the chance, allow these inter-
ests and desires to dominate. The enemy of peace, on this account, was the
kind of militarist, authoritarian, autocratic, anti-democratic regime which
had, allegedly, dominated Germany, Austria–Hungary and Russia in 1914.
Now, some of the crises of the 1930s were caused by this kind of regime –
Japanese militarism in Manchuria and China and ‘Francoism’ in the Spanish
Civil War fit the bill quite well – but most were not. Hitler’s Germany and
Mussolini’s Italy were not traditional military autocracies; rather, they were
regimes which had come to power by quasi-democratic means and remained
in power by the mobilization of popular support. There were no elections in
Germany after 1933, but what evidence exists suggests that the National
Socialists had clear majority support well into the war, perhaps even to its
very end.
Moreover, these regimes, although popularly supported, actually glorified
war. The rhetoric of fascism and national socialism stressed the virtues of
armed struggle and its importance in building the nation. And, of course,
the stated ends of these regimes – turning the Mediterranean into an Italian
lake, depopulating Eastern Europe of Slavs, Jews and other alleged inferiors
and repopulating it with ‘Aryans’ – could not be achieved by any means
other than war. Although Hitler still maintained in his public orations that
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Understanding International Relations

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he was forced to resort to force by the obstinate and malicious behaviour of
the enemies of the Volk, it was quite clear that this was nonsense – unless
a reluctance to commit suicide be deemed a sign of obstinacy. The fact that
Nazism remained a popular force in spite of this posture – perhaps, in some
cases, because of it – dealt a terrible blow to liberal thinking.
The consequences of this blow were felt in particular with respect to
support for the League of Nations and the rule of law. The basic premise of
liberal internationalism was that the force of world opinion would but-
tress the League of Nations and that no state would be able to act against
this force. The point of collective security under the League was to prevent
wars, not to fight them. The League’s cumbersome procedures would act as
a brake to prevent a nation that had, as it were, temporarily taken leave of
its senses from acting rashly – international disputes would be solved peace-
fully because that was what the people really wanted. The behaviour of
Hitler and Mussolini made it clear that, in this context at least, these ideas
were simply wrong. The liberal internationalist slogan was ‘law not war’ –
but it became clear, as the 1930s progressed, that the only way in which
‘law’ could be maintained was by ‘war’.
An inability to understand this basic point bedevilled liberal thought in
the 1930s. Well-meaning people simultaneously pledged full support for the
League and never again to fight a war, without any apparent awareness that
the second pledge undermined the first. When the British and French govern-
ments attempted to resolve the crisis caused by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia
by the Hoare–Laval Pact which was seen as rewarding the aggressor, public
opinion was outraged, Hoare was forced to resign, and the last real chance
to prevent Mussolini from falling under Hitler’s influence was lost. The
public wanted the League to act, but the British government held, almost
certainly correctly, that the public would not support a war, and therefore
ensured that the sanctions that were introduced would not bring Italy to its
knees. The ‘appeasement’ policy of Britain and France (and, as is often for-
gotten, of the United States and the USSR) posed a real dilemma for many
liberal internationalists. They did not know whether to praise figures like
Chamberlain for avoiding war, or condemn them for condoning breaches of
international legality and betraying the weak. Usually they resolved this
dilemma by doing both.
What this seemed to suggest to many was that there were flaws in the
root ideas of liberal internationalism, its account of how the world worked,
and, in particular, its account of the mainsprings of human conduct.
Gradually, new ideas emerged – or, perhaps more accurately, re-emerged,
since many of them would have been familiar to pre-1914 thinkers. Perhaps
the deepest thinker on these matters in the 1930s was the radical American
theologian and critic Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr’s message is conveyed in
shorthand in the title of his 1932 book, Moral Man and Immoral Society;