Today, it does not seem to matter much that Carr thought the policy of buying Hitler off would succeed.  Certainly, he was too much inclined to regard Hitler as a normal human being (there are numerous quotations from Mein Kampf in the book, most of them involving approval or at least respect on Carr's part), and he overemphasized Chamberlain's capacity to manage international affairs.  But all this needs to be seen not in the light of hindsight or Churchill's memoirs but in terms of the very great support that Chamberlain had in Britain in 1938 and the early part of 1939, and of the abhorrence of war that had been so much a feature of British (and French and American) opinion in the 1930s.  It was unfortunate for Carr that he guessed wrong about how Hitler would move after he had been appeased; and it was reasonable for the Toynbees and Angells to rejoice that they had guessed right about Hitler and that within two years the kind of grand alliance they had been advocating--of Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union--was ranged against Hitler and Mussolini.  But the mistake about Hitler does not in itself invalidate Carr's general analysis of international politics.

Carr's wrong guess raises the question of just what constitutes "realism" in any consideration of international affairs.  Clearly, it is a matter of giving full weight to what is and what has been in order to formulate a policy about what should be.  But there is also the matter of time.  Carr, with his vision of the bureaucrat as having a better sense of reality than the intellectual (he uses both terms), was inclined to favor the immediate and allegedly practical solution to a problem rather than the attempt to achieve a long-term one.  He reminds me of the remark of one of my friends, an Australian diplomat of much experience: "It's all very well for the academics--they have months to work out the answers; we have only till 4:30 to tell the Minister whether to send in a battalion."  Carr's wish to avoid war, and his conviction (strongly expressed during the time of the Italo-Abyssinian war, earlier in the 1930s) that attempts at economic and military sanctions would lead to disastrous war, led him to think that immediate rather than fundamental solutions to the German problem needed to be pursued.  These, he presumably hoped, would provide time and opportunity for later structural changes which would pacify Germany.  He guessed wrong, but everyone who recommends on policy has to guess.

Apart from this dispute about appeasement, the impact of The Twenty Years' Crisis was long-term rather than immediate.  To have a book in page proof on September 3, 1939, when Britain declared war on Germany, was not to expect much public concentration on its argument.  Carr dated his Preface as September 30, 1939.  Recognition of the book as a new departure in the study of international relations increased during the war and seemed to accelerate once the war was over.  When I read it in 1946 or 1947 it seemed a revelation that had nothing to do with Hitler and Chamberlain.  The revelation lay in the book's abrupt dismissal of politicians' cant about foreign policy, in its demonstration of the plurality of national interests, in its description of the forms that power might take and the uses to which they might be put, and in its almost brutal indication of how power might triumph in spite of the efforts of moralistic men and women.  I was less impressed by Carr's wish to see realism and utopianism reconciled than by his effective denunciation of the utopians--it was a time when utopian expectations about the United Nations and the permanence of the alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers were in vogue, and a corrective was badly needed.  It was tempting to become a realist and to debunk much of the current orthodoxy about foreign policy and international organization.  Much later, I saw that Carr's approach to policy involved too short term a perspective and that Norman Angell's had more to be said for it than Carr had allowed.  But at the time, Carr's critique seemed to me to open a vista of understanding that no one else had made clear.

III.

Edward Hallett Carr was born in 1892.  He went to Merchant Taylors' School in London and then on to Trinity College, Cambridge.  He entered the Foreign Office in 1916 and served in Paris and Riga (at a time when it was the listening-post for events in the Soviet Union).  As assistant adviser on League of Nations Affairs he gained much knowledge of how the League operated.  During World War II he left official employment to become Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University College of Wales, combining this with being assistant editor of The Times.  In the postwar years he worked steadily on a History of the Soviet Union and held academic posts in Oxford and Cambridge.  He died in 1982.

Carr's other works display a continuing interest in Russia (books on Herzen and Bakunin, the History just mentioned which takes four volumes to cover the first twelve years of the Communist regime, and a book of reprinted lectures of 1946, The Soviet Impact on the Western World), in historical change (What is History? and The New Society), and in the course of international relations (Conditions of Peace, Nationalism and After, and International Relations Since the Peace Treaties).  All are written with clarity and verve.  They have, in varying degrees, certain features in common with The Twenty Years' Crisis.

The most obvious of these is an interest in power, so obvious that many of Carr's critics accused him of mistaking power for destiny, and of making power the test of political success.  Carr's approach to Hitler and Stalin was assumed to be much the same in each case: because both had taken control of their countries and transformed them, Carr found them worthy of attention.  This laid him open to the attacks of those for whom either or both of the dictators was abhorrent.  Carr found power fascinating.  Dividing it into military and economic aspects, together with power over opinion, and noting how effective Nazi Germany and Communist Russia seemed to have been in harnessing each of these three, he tended to be critical of the western democracies for their comparative inactivity.

This was particularly so in the sphere of economic power.  Carr was hostile toward the free trade orthodoxy that still passed for economic thinking in the Britain of the 1930s.  He was convinced that economic planning of one kind or another would become the norm after World War II, and he reacted violently against any attempt to separate politics from economics in analysis, since he believed that only dominant economies (such as Britain's in the nineteenth century) could afford to do so, and then only for a while.  Attempts to regard politics and economics as separate went hand-in-hand with the notion of laissez-faire, which Carr found unrealistic since he did not believe that laissez-faire was ever practiced in anything like its pure form.  The upshot of these beliefs was that Carr saw a future in which political management of economics was inevitable.

This is the main theme of The New Society, a set of talks on the BBC Third Programme in 1951.  It is also the basis for Carr's treatment of Stalin's attempt at forced industrialization; and it was this, more than anything else, that brought enmity down upon him, and still does.  Carr seemed to admire the active policies of both Hitler and Stalin; he was attacked for this; and, being a polemical man, he tended to put further emphasis on the point.  He could not see either domestic or international politics as divorced from power.  He saw the military form of power as the most important, but recognized that it had to rest on economic power, which he regarded as directly subject to political control.  The official utterances of his own society rejected this formulation in the 1930s.  His reaction was to press it forcefully, and to respect--in a reserved but prominent manner--the regimes that acknowledged it.

There is a degree of economic determinism in Carr's thinking, which reinforces his emphasis on political control of economies.  "Experience shows," he wrote in The New Society, "that the structure of society at any given time or place, as well as the prevailing theories and beliefs about it, are largely governed by the way in which the material needs of the society are met."  This basically Marxist attitude is combined in his writings with the view that at any given time the rich and powerful (i.e., those in charge of the means of production) will decide how the societies are governed and which values will predominate.  In The Twenty Years' Crisis such a view is stated as fundamental.  Carr transfers it from the domestic scene to the international, specifically to the leading roles of Britain and France in Europe in the 1920s.

Essay Types: Book Review