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.

Carr's book is not a sustained attack on the Toynbees and Zimmerns; they are used as examples of a general state of mind that Carr saw as characteristic of those who drew up the Covenant of the League of Nations, among whom President Wilson took pride of place as someone whose kind of thinking needed to be avoided.  The book's argument runs somewhat as follows.

There are two methods of approach to politics, "the inclination to ignore what was and what is in contemplation of what would be, and the inclination to deduce what should be from what was and what is."  In Carr's view, students and theorists of international politics tend to ignore what is and to put forward utopian schemes for what should be, whereas officials who have to live with the realities of diplomacy tend to be much more realistic.  They recognize the limits of the situation, while the utopians are impatient with the idea of limits and take refuge in plans "in which wishing prevails over thinking, generalization over observation, and in which little attempt is made at a critical analysis of existing facts or available means."

Carr thought that this utopian frame of mind was typical of an early stage in the development of the study of international politics, as of other studies.  In effect, the time had now come when "realism [would be] the necessary corrective to the exuberance of utopianism, just as in other periods utopianism must be invoked to counteract the barrenness of realism" (i.e., the realist's tendency to believe that whatever is, is right).  His own attitude was very much that of the realist, but he emphasized at various points in his book that realism was not enough.  Here is an extract from his chapter "The Limitations of Realism":

We return therefore to the conclusion that any sound political thought must be based on elements of both utopia and reality.  Where utopianism has become a hollow and intolerable sham, which serves merely as a guise for the interests of the privileged, the realist performs an indispensable service in unmasking it.  But pure realism can offer nothing but a naked struggle for power which makes any kind of international society impossible.  Having demolished the current utopia with the weapons of realism, we still need to build a new utopia of our own, which will one day fall to the same weapons.

This switchback approach to thinking and planning sounds exhausting and perhaps impractical.  But Carr himself showed that he was not a "pure realist" by publishing in 1942 a book entitled Conditions of Peace in which he laid out a scheme for a postwar Europe.  It was tentative and hedged about with qualifications, but something of a utopia nevertheless.  It was a very realistic one, as it foreshadowed a number of things that have happened in Europe since the end of World War II.

Carr's dichotomy between utopianism and realism is mirrored, as The Twenty Years' Crisis proceeds, by other dichotomies between theory and practice, between morality and power, between "the sense of right" and "the strong arm of authority" in inducing obedience to the law, and between law and politics.  All of these are seen in relation to policy-making in international politics.  In each case Carr begins by separating the two concepts.  He then brings them together as he has done with his original two: just as policy requires a blend of utopianism and realism, so it requires both theory and practice to reinforce one another, morality and power to be recognized as not necessarily antagonistic, and law to be seen as the outcome of politics.  Basically, however, everything must be seen against the background of politics: in the international arena, as in the domestic sphere, power will ultimately prevail--provided the powerful wish it to do so.  Carr puts considerable weight on the element of purpose in deciding outcomes.  Purpose alone will not move mountains (this is a utopian fantasy), but power may be affected by purpose, provided the purpose is apposite and realistic.

Along the way Carr deals some hard blows to what he regards as dangerous utopian fallacies.  One of these is the belief, common among creators and supporters of the League of Nations, that public opinion would provide backing for international action against aggressors; another was the belief that states had a common interest in peace; a third that there was a basic harmony of interests between states; a fourth, transferring the third to the economic sphere and closely allied with it, the almost universal view of Anglo-Saxon economists that free trade benefitted everyone; and a fifth that what seemed right to satisfied powers such as the victors of World War I would also seem right to those powers that had been defeated or disappointed.  He also took umbrage at a distinction being made at the time between states that pursued economic advantage and those that sought political power--every state, in his view, pursued both.

Carr was arguing against attitudes and opinions current in Britain as a result of victory in World War I, and affected by the entente with France: that the postwar settlement, in spite of certain defects had been good for the peace of Europe; that regimes such as those of Germany and Italy in the 1930s, which challenged the Versailles settlement, were to be disregarded, especially if they seemed to disturb the notional balance which that settlement had implied.  To what extent these views were wholly or even partially held by the people he attacked--Lord Cecil, Anthony Eden, Gilbert Murray, et al.--was not the point.  He saw these views appearing in a variety of quarters--political, official, academic--and he lashed out accordingly.

Behind this confrontationist approach lay a conviction that the international system rested on power, and that only a realistic appreciation of relative power and the readiness of national leaders to use it could provide a sound basis for policy.  In particular, this meant understanding the importance and the uses made of economic power, and the significance of war as a source of international change.  "If every prospective writer on international affairs in the last twenty years had taken a compulsory course in elementary strategy, reams of nonsense would have remained unwritten," he wrote.  His main complaint against his adversaries was that they had neglected the factor of power, and particularly of military power.

II.

The impact of The Twenty Years' Crisis in 1939 was considerable, though the effect was delayed somewhat by the fact that war had recently broken out.  In the first place it was recognized as a substantial intellectual achievement: nothing on this scale of realist analysis had previously appeared in Britain, and a comparable effort would have been hard to discover in the United States.  The nearest approach was Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, to which Carr acknowledged a debt.  Second, it annoyed those "utopians" whom Carr had stigmatized and who were still alive.  Third, it ran into trouble because of brief statements commending Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement as realistic.  This third element in its impact has haunted the book ever since, in spite of Carr's having removed the offending passage in the second edition, published in 1946.

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.

He saw the interwar period as one in which the "status quo" powers had dictated the peace settlement and were determined to maintain it in the face of resentment and opposition from Germany, Italy, and Japan--the victor powers had had it their own way in the 1920s, but in the 1930s had to meet growing opposition from the others.  Carr improved on Marx, in a sense, by asserting that

the conflict between privileged and under-privileged, between the champions of an existing order and the revolutionaries, which was fought out in the 19th century within the national communities of Western Europe, was transferred by the 20th century to the international community.  The nation became, more than ever before, the supreme unit round which centre human demands for equality and human ambitions for predominance.

Mussolini had called Italy a proletarian nation and Carr allotted this once-Marxist notion to the other "have-not states," or "anti-status quo states," of the 1930s.

At the same time as he declared this renewed status of the nation-state to be significant, Carr saw a decline in that status at least as far as minor states were concerned.  In The Twenty Years' Crisis as originally written, he saw "a trend towards the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of six or seven highly organised units, round which lesser satellites [revolve] without any appreciable independent motion of their own."  In his Preface to the second edition he reiterated the point: "The small independent nation-state is obsolete or obsolescent, and no workable international organization can be built on a multiplicity of nation-states"--a line he had previously taken in a small book entitled Nationalism and After.  It can be argued that this was another manifestation of his preoccupation with power in the short term: he did not anticipate the massive increase in the number of sovereign states after World War II (having rather naively assumed that colonies were a source of wealth to colonial powers, and would presumably be held onto), or the convoluted politics which would result at the United Nations and elsewhere.

The Twenty Years' Crisis was Carr's most successful book, because it was the most original.  The others are interesting, readable, and often acute, but they add little to what he had said in his major work.  There is a good deal of repetition.

IV.

How does the book stand up now?  I am inclined to think that there can be more than one answer to the question.  If one were to submit it to some of the eager young practitioners of the International Relations discipline, it would probably be answered in terms such as these: it is a terribly old-fashioned work, with hardly a statistic in it and no mathematics, with lots of references to Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages, with polemics directed against people whom nobody remembers, with an almost totally Eurocentric viewpoint, with no foreshadowing of the Cold War, with labored rhetoric about what does and does not constitute morality between states, and with a whole lot of stuff about the League of Nations which nobody wants to read.  It is discursive and not at all rigorous in its approach to theory.

An older scholar might recognize some of these grievous faults but add that one ought to see the book against its background, and especially against the disregard of power and the tendency toward ideal solutions of the so-called utopians. (He might add that Carr named the British utopians but forbore to name the American ones, though he hinted at them.)  He might also say that Carr shared with the utopians a powerful desire to avoid a second world war, which caused him to be at odds with those of them, like Norman Angell, who were pressing for some form of the collective security which in the last resort meant going to war.  Carr's approach had a good deal of validity at the time, though he went wrong in thinking that Hitler could be treated like any other national leader.  He might add that Carr's preference for diplomacy over war differed markedly from those opinions common among many writers of recent times, to whom the Cold War, the presence of nuclear weapons, and the Vietnam War have all been acceptable aspects of policy.  Carr knew that war meant change and that sometimes it was the only means of achieving change.  But he also knew that the change was rarely of the sort that had been intended and that no one could foresee how much damage would be caused.  While fully conscious of the importance of military power, he did not want it used until all possible negotiations had occurred and all possible concessions been made; he would not have believed in pre-emptive strikes.  He would have been in favor of arms control negotiations, provided they were carried on realistically, but he would not have been surprised if they had been the object of propaganda.  The older commentator would conclude by repeating that Carr should be seen against the circumstances of his time.

Even so, it seems to me, there is much to be said for him in terms of any time.  It is still necessary to remind people that the harmony of interests is a fiction, except in highly unusual situations, just as it is necessary to recognize that a common interest in peace is rare.  International action of any consequence is still more likely to reflect the interests of dominant powers than any consensus of states at large.  There are still "status quo" and "non-status quo" states.  There is no such thing as "international opinion" and very little of an "international society."  The Anglo-Saxons, so-called, are still likely to think that the rest of the world agrees with them when they indulge in a fit of morality.

All these attitudes, roundly condemned by Carr, continue to be put forward by politicians as they were in the different circumstances of the 1930s.  Rhetoric about international affairs does not change much; it still reflects dominant interests on a national basis.  The utopian propositions of academics do not change much either; plans for a world state or for elaborate regional federations or for a revived United Nations or for a universal Pax Americana have much in common with the constructs that Carr condemned as unrealistic.  He expected rivalry between major states to continue, and he was not wrong.

Carr's realism--tempered, where possible, by the prudent utopianism that he saw as a necessary corrective--is needed as we confront the ostensibly different world of today, which is so often similar to the one about which he wrote.

J.D.B. Miller recently retired as executive director of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, having previously been professor of International Relations at the Australian National University.