E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis (current printing, New York: Harper & Row, 1981 [original printing, London: Macmillan and Company Limited, and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1939]). 240 pp., $7.95.
E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939 is not, as the title suggests, a history of international affairs between the two world wars. It is more accurately described by the subtitle, An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. Carr wanted to explain how sovereign states behaved toward one another (especially in Europe, since the world in 1939, when the book appeared, was highly Eurocentric) and to encourage thinking that would be realistic and not utopian. It is this dichotomy between realism and utopianism that has given the book its reputation and Carr his place among theorists of international relations.
I.
Carr begins by saying that "the science of international politics is in its infancy," having, in his view, only been taken seriously since 1914. Before that there was no organized study of international affairs in universities or anywhere else. The fact that such study began after World War I provided Carr with a continuing basis for his treatment of opinions and attitudes with which he disagrees. To put the matter briefly, he believed that nearly all the people who had been writing about the international system were so absorbed in finding ways of preventing another war that they created utopian constructs that failed to resemble the real world in various vital particulars. Men such as Arnold Toynbee, Norman Angell, and Alfred Zimmern were his prime targets. To him, they were so obsessed by the need to employ the League of Nations as an instrument of collective security, and later to forge some grand alliance to resist Mussolini and Hitler, that they neglected the true nature of international anarchy and of what could and could not be done within it.
