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  In his Preface to the second edition he reiterated the point: "The small independent nation-state is obsolete or obsolescent, and no workable international organization can be built on a multiplicity of nation-states"--a line he had previously taken in a small book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.

Essay Types: Book Review