PDF

International Studies Quarterly (2004) 48, 409432
Interwar Internationalism, the British Labour Party, and the Historiography of International Relations
CASPER SYLVEST University of Cambridge
This article questions two interrelated myths pertaining to the interwar internationalism of the British Labour Party and the theories of socalled idealists in the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). In IR, interwar idealists are (in)famous for a detached and utopian approach to international politics. Conventional historiographical verdicts on the international policy of the Labour Party in the interwar period suggest that the party was the practical mirror of this na ve international outlook. In fact, the two themes are connected, most notably through Labours Advisory Committee on International Questions. This article brings the study of Labours internationalism and the international theories of purported idealists together by focusing on debates on the League of Nations and the use of force. The analysis reveals that conventional historiographical narratives are inadequate and too simplistic for grasping the diversity of Labours internationalism and interwar progressivist ideas about international politics in general.
Todays realism will appear tomorrow as shortsighted blundering. Todays idealism is the realism of the future.FA. J. P. Taylor (1957:18)
In terms of international politics, the interwar years stand out as a time of ux. The Great War of 19141918 dealt a serious blow to any hopes of progress in the 20th century. Among British intellectuals new approaches and ideas mushroomed. A rather amorphous group of thinkers sought different ways to mitigate the international anarchy that was seen invariably to leave only one option open to practitioners: the Balance of Power policy. Their hopes rested on the establishment of an international institution for the prevention of war. For the British Labour Party, which abandoned international solidarity and fought the war along national(ist) lines, the object of ghting soon became to make the world safe for democracy, and at the time most hopes were invested in the establishment of a league of nations to secure this goal. What the British Labour Party and these intellectuals shared, therefore, was a hope of bringing progress to the international domain in face of the setback for civilization that the Great War represented. They were, in short, internationalists.
Authors note: This article is based on research conducted for my M.Phil. thesis (Sylvest, 2002). I would like to thank the following friends for discussing the project, or parts of it, with me: Jens Bartelson, Duncan Bell, Paul Corthorn, Suzette Frovin, Charles Jones, Vibeke Schou Pedersen, Marc Stears, and the participants at Clare Hall Arts and Humanities Seminar, Cambridge University, Lent Term 2002. Also, the article has beneted greatly from the comments and remarks provided by the anonymous reviewers of ISQ. All the usual disclaimers apply.
r 2004 International Studies Association. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
410
Interwar Internationalism
Internationalism is no straightforward concept. Generally, it signies a strategy for transforming (or transcending) the conditions of international politics, which in modern times have been dened by anarchy, due to the central role of sovereign states and the lack of an arbiter between them. Moreover, its underlying logic is modern insofar as it presupposes that politics can be moulded through deliberate reform (Bartelson, 1995). Equally important, internationalism contradicts the dominant, realist view in International Relations (IR), which stresses the difculty (or impossibility) of transforming the basic conditions of international politics (Carr, 1946; Morgenthau, 1948; Waltz, 1959). Crucially, though, the objectives of internationalist transformation, and the means for bringing it about, vary enormously. Theoretically it is useful to distinguish between two variants of internationalism. Some liberal internationalists argue that individuals have inalienable rights that should not be overridden by states. Acknowledging that states indeed have this potential, liberal internationalism softens international anarchy by restricting the sovereignty of states. Another variant of liberal internationalism is premised on an economic argument about the existence and common advantages of an interdependent international order, which is all too often disturbed when romantic and warrior-minded statesmen base their policies on false national interests. Socialist internationalism, on the other hand, has its clearest formulation in The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels argued that working men have no country. However, most socialists have taken a pragmatic view of the (nation) state in order to formulate a more moderate internationalism potentially covering everything from international cooperation to a more idealistic notion of transcending the state (Herz, 1950; Goldmann, 1994). Existing historiography of the British Labour Partys internationalism in the interwar period is dominated by an interpretation established in the 1950s and 1960s. According to this literature, Labour employed a combination of socialist and liberal internationalist ideas to the extent that the party was unable to meet the challenges looming prior to the Second World War. Underlying these accounts is a fatalistic view of the interwar years as a period that was bound to end in disaster and another great war. Correspondingly, unsuccessful attempts to avoid disaster are regarded as na ve fantasies. Yet, if we escape what Buttereld termed a Whig Interpretation of History (1931), a different picture emerges. In the following I contend that the internationalism of the Labour Party and the history of the academic discipline of IR are interlinked. Bringing the two subjectsFand the historiography that has developed on bothFtogether, provides an illuminating perspective on the intellectual history of interwar British progressivist thought about international politics. Specically, it will be argued that Labours internationalism was far from uniform, and that the conventional interpretation of the partys international policy is inadequate because it does not capture the ideas and arguments put forward by a signicant, if not continually inuential, pragmatic wing of the party. It is particularly interesting that important scholars labelled idealists in IR, most notably Leonard Woolf and Norman Angell, are to be found in this pragmatic faction of the party. Through an interpretation of their writings in the context of Labours debates over international policy, it will be argued that in the interwar years these scholars were primarily engaged in an ideological battle to win the support of different factions of the Labour Party. Moreover, existing historiography about idealism in IR and the internationalism of the Labour Party upholds an inaccurate and distorting interpretation of the work of these scholars. The article is divided into ve sections. The rst section surveys the conventional historiographies of Labours internationalism and of IRs so-called idealists, whereas the second section provides a sketch of the intellectual context in which Labours international debates took place. The third section analyzes elements of these debates and argues that a signicant wing of the party, which included some
CASPER SYLVEST
411
of the most notorious idealists of IR, promulgated a pragmatic internationalism, the contours of which have been largely overlooked in existing historiographical accounts. The fourth section revisits idealism in IR in light of this pragmatic internationalism. It is argued that the dominant interpretation of a so-called idealist school or tradition is inadequate. The nal section sums up the ndings of the article.
Conventional Historiography
All intellectual history faces the risk of falling prey to what Buttereld called the pathetic fallacy of whig historiography, namely, abstracting ideas from their historical context and judging them apart from this contextFestimating them and agonizing the historical story by a system of direct reference to the present.1 As it is impossible to write this sort of history neutrally, we should be aware of the consequences they entail. As one scholar has remarked, intellectual history, and especially disciplinary history, tends to resemble ofcial histories in recently established republics, where rival teams of great predecessors may be assembled, ostensibly to proclaim and honour a tradition of surprising antiquity, but in fact to legitimate the claims of current protagonists in the struggle for power (Collini, 1978:47; Dryzek and Leonard, 1988). As I will argue in this section, this is also the case in IR, where the rather amorphous category of idealism has come to serve as a man of straw for realist arguments.2 In order to substantiate this charge, we must turn, rstly, to the historiography of Labours internationalism in the interwar years, and, secondly, to the historiography of IR. The historiography of Labours internationalism in the interwar years generally presents a picture of the party as disastrously na ve and unsuccessful. As one representative of this literature argued, in no eld did the Labour Movement suffer greater defeat and disillusionment than in international relations y British Labour y managed to combine most of the illusions of both socialist and liberal thinking on the subject of peace. The impact of reality was therefore doubly disastrous for Labour (Tucker, 1950:240). Most of these accounts acknowledge the existence of different internationalisms within the party, yet their conclusions all emphasize the general failure of Labours policy when it faced reality (Martin, 1965; Miller, 1967:243). Supposedly, the party regarded conict as unreal, illusory and mistaken and clung to the belief that force was always suspect no matter what the purpose behind its use (Gordon, 1969:43). Accounts of Labours international policy that might be considered better researched have questioned this interpretation (Naylor, 1969; Winkler, 1994). Yet contemporary analyses continue to stress that Labours internationalism was somehow unreal and that it underestimated the role of power in international politics. Most recently, one scholar has maintained that Labours ingrained opposition to reliance on arms and force stemmed from the belief that war was a deeply irrational way of pursuing national objectives, and that with appropriate reforms, the occasion for the use of force would virtually disappear (Keohane, 2000:11). As no interpretations are innocent it seems fair to ask what this particular reading of Labours internationalism entails. In order to answer that question, I will argue, we need to turn to the historiography of IR. Conventionally, the history of IR is narrated through a series of Great Debates, which foster a progression of knowledge about the theoretically informed study of international politics. According to the textbooks, the rst (and constitutive) debate
1 Buttereld (1931:3031). For the remainder of this article I shall refer to the original publishing date of books and articles (placed in square brackets in the bibliography). 2 Other purported traditions in IR, including realism itself, have served similar functions. For a perceptive analysis of the problem of traditions in IR in general and the English School in particular see Bartelson (1996).
412
between realism and idealism was conducted in the interwar period. However, icking through journals and books about international relations from 1919 to 1939 it is hard to nd evidence of this raging debate. In other words, the debate is better seen as retrospectively constructed (Wilson, 1998). A central gure in this invention was the quasi-Marxist historian E.H. Carr, who in his The Twenty Years Crisis, 19191939 (1946 [1939]), invoked the central distinction between utopianism (or idealism) and realism, thereby providing a new vocabulary for International Relations theory (Brown, 2001:28). The strategy behind this invention was basically rhetorical. Discarding both realism and utopianism as incoherent, Carr was able to devise a middle of the road approach, which seemed superior (Carr, 1946; Jones, 1998). Important as Carrs own approach certainly is, this is not how the book has been read in IR. Instead, it has been interpreted as the nal word by which realism, the superior theory, came out on top from the debate with na ve interwar idealism. Symptomatic of disciplinary history in general, in realist texts idealism often amounts to no more than a real or imagined man of straw (Thies, 2002). This approach seems to have made a wider impact in the discipline. The overwhelming majority of historiographical literature in IR has, following this realist trend, ascribed a number of beliefs and presuppositions to these idealist pariahs of IR: belief in progress, reason and the harmony of interest; belief in the primacy of ideas; a belief that human nature is basically good; and a belief that force and power play only marginal roles in international politics.3 The consequence of this caricature is evident: the works of idealists are only interesting insofar as they can teach students of international relations what not to do (and think). Thus, it has not been sufciently recognized that the distinction between realism and idealism is logically a realist one: to say that how the world is arranged is distinct from the way the world actually is, is one thing, but then to infer that how the world ought to be arranged ought to be kept distinct from the way the world actually is, is in itself to give is an advantage over ought (Bartelson, 1995:265). Powerful disciplining is involved in telling the history of IR. Although idealism and utopianism hardly form consistent and clear categories they still pervade IR literature. Whether the First Debate is seen as a battle over contrasting philosophies of history or different conceptions of human nature, scholars are still keen to uphold IRs constitutive distinction (Osiander, 1998; Navon, 2001). Thus, the picture of interwar IR scholarship as na and unrealistic ve is still powerful, but the myth of the First Great DebateFand the dismissal of idealismFis increasingly questioned (Kahler, 1997; Wilson, 1998; Thies, 2002). From a mainly American perspective it has been argued that there never was a coherent group of scholars writing during the interwar period who adhered to something akin to an idealist paradigm (Schmidt, 1998:229230; Boyle, 1999). IR has been an overwhelmingly Anglo-American enterprise, and many of the disciplines rst institutional developments took place in Britain. Recently, a number of scholars have also analyzed the work of British idealists and questioned the conventional interpretation, but these analyses have generally approached the issue from a limited, quasi-biographical perspective (Miller, 1986; Navari, 1989; Long and Wilson, 1995; Long, 1996). While these studies all indicate that idealism is not as straightforward as the textbooks tell us, a more general, British perspective is warranted. A central reason for the necessity of such a perspective is that the clear distinction between academia and politics, to which we have become accustomed, is hard to discern in interwar debates on international politics. Only a few purported idealists,
3 With few exceptions, textbooks in IR open their narratives by depicting idealism in this fashion. For more detailed historiographical accounts see in particular Bull (1972), Taylor (1985), and Smith (1986). See also the comprehensive analysis of historiographical literature on idealism in Wilson (1997).
CASPER SYLVEST
413
for example, Alfred Zimmern and Philip Noel-Baker, held academic positions. Others like Leonard Woolf and Norman Angell did not. Therefore, close connections between intellectuals and political parties in Britain were more common and less controversial than is the case today.4 Although the interwar years witnessed increasing professionalization of the social sciences, most scholars associated with the rise of IR in Britain saw no conict between theory and practice. Rather, the increasing interest in and systematic thinking about international politics in Britain was from the outset seen as a contribution to peace and order; it had a clear ethico-political purpose. For example, H.N. Brailsford argued that
there is no science of foreign policy, and however much it may stand in need of careful and systematic thinking, no department of politics has received less theoretical attention. y The consequence of leaving this department of public affairs to the uncontrolled conduct of a small cast, is not to promote their scientic handling, but rather to give the rein of caprices, rivalries, and personal interests. (1917 [1914]:48)
The Labour Party shared this view of the relationship between the theory and practice of politics as it sought to bring the insights of science to bear on day-to-day questions in all aspects of politics. In 1918, Labour established a quasi-academic forum to scrutinize the partys foreign policy: the Advisory Committee on International Questions (ACIQ). Here the fundamental outlook of the party was debated, and in the committees reports Labour found the impetus for change. As many liberal intellectuals with an interest in international politics turned left after the Great War and joined the committee alongside established socialist intellectuals, it was also in the ACIQ that (British) socialists and liberals developed a common internationalist policy. From 1918 until the end of the second Labour government in 1931 over 150 people participated in its meetings, including guests and MPs. The core of the committee, those who attended meetings consistently during this period, was composed of E. Bentham, C. D. Burns, C. R. Buxton, N. Buxton, W. Gillies, C. P. Trevelyan, G. Young, and, interestingly, a number of the most notorious idealists of IR: Norman Angell, Philip Noel-Baker, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, David Mitrany, and Leonard Woolf, the secretary of the committee.5 If we want to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of what these scholars were arguing and why, we must be sensitive to the practical ideological problems of the day and the context in which they arose. However, there is a further reason for employing a contextual perspective: the two historiographies surveyed above turn out to be interconnected and parasitic. For example, a recentFand otherwise highly valuableFhistory of the British peace movement, which demonstrates the complexity of progressive ideas about international politics, is entitled Semi-detached Idealists, explicitly drawing on Carrs classication. Thus, Labours international policy, along with that of the British peace movement as a whole, is portrayed as a source of disillusionment in the mid or late 1930s, when the realities of the international situation could no longer be ignored (Ceadel, 2000). Furthermore, we need to acknowledge that since Carrs attack on idealismFwhich was informed by a political purpose of defending
4 Recent years have witnessed intense and interesting debates about the proper relationship between academic IR and the political world. For different (British) perspectives see Allott (1995), Wallace (1996), Booth (1997), and Smith (1997). Arguably, there is an important difference between American and European IR in this respect, with American IR being far more policy oriented than many of its European counterparts. The utility and relevance of, mainly American, IR theory is the focus of Lepgold and Nincic (2001). 5 These guresFwhich stem from detailed research of the minutes of ACIQFindicate the nature of the committee. Other prominent members, who consistently attended meetings for shorter periods, were: C. R. Beazley, E. N. Bennett, Henry Noel Brailsford, G. D. H. Cole, Hugh Dalton, Ramsay MacDonald, E. D. Morel, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Toynbee, S. Webb, and Alfred Zimmern.
414
appeasement (Carr, 1936a, 1936b; Haslam, 1999:5780)Fthe term has been associated with institutions and policies that have come to dene the futility of interwar progressivism: the League of Nations, disarmament, and collective security. Politically, these concepts constituted the basis of Labours international policy during the interwar years. Therefore, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Labour Party was the practical mirror of the utopian intellectualsFa verdict that historical works on Labours foreign policy have not substantively challenged. Yet if idealism is not a simple and straightforward category, and if the internationalism of the Labour Party was more complex and pragmatic than the annals of history tell us, perhaps it is time to take a closer look at how and by whom internationalism was formulated and promulgated in the Labour Party between the wars. Specically, we need to analyze what ontologies, assumptions, and conditions of (international) politics different kinds of internationalism presupposed. In short, these ideas deserve to be studied on their own terms and in their proper context.6
The Intellectual Context

Prior to the Great War the Labour Party was freely chided by its opponents with being y lamentably incapable of conducting [sic] foreign affairs of a Government (Maddox, 1934:xi). One reason for this verdict was that few radical intellectuals and politicians took a major interest in international politics. In 1914 Labours position was, in principle at least, that workers had no country and were committed to resistance if war broke out. In practice, however, this ideology manifested itself in criticism of the increasing division of Europe into armed coalitions, advocacy of friendly relations with Germany, and demands for openness in foreign affairs. This program mirrored the partys intellectual context including the work of a (small) number of liberal and socialist intellectuals. J. A. Hobson (1902) had already pointed out the connection between capitalism and imperialism that Lenin was later to develop. In The War of Steel and Gold (1917 [1914]), H. N. Brailsford drew up a number of socialist-inspired policy remedies that could correct this capitalistimperialist fait accompli. Moreover, intellectuals gathering round the famous journalist Norman AngellFwho in The Great Illusion had argued that war had lost its economic rationale owing to increasing interdependence among the industrialized countriesFcould nod approvingly in the direction of the Labour Party (Angell, 1910). Labours ability to draw on both socialist and liberal arguments was due to the peculiar character of British politics prior to the Great WarFhere the categories of socialism and liberalism do not conform to the traditional stereotypes that have been handed down to us. From the 1880s onwards confusion over the real meaning of socialism (in the country where Marx wrote The Capital) meant that mainstream British socialism bore little resemblance to continental socialism let alone revolutionary Marxism. On the one hand, the famous (Fabian) gradualism, which inspired Eduard Bernsteins German revisionism, came to dominate British Labour. Although there were revolutionary voices on the British Left throughout the period, for example, in the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party, the overwhelming majority of socialists envisioned the coming of socialism as depending on electoral victory rather than revolution. On the other hand, British Liberalism experienced a retreat from individualism in the decades prior to the war. The New Liberalism, which was promulgated by writers like Hobson and Hobhouse before the Great War, attempted to embrace socialist ideas,
6 The methodology employed here owes much to the contextual approach developed by Quentin Skinner. See especially Skinner (1996, 2001, 2002) and the articles collected in Tully (1988). For recent calls for an import of Skinners approach into IR see Holden (2002) and Bell (2002).
CASPER SYLVEST
415
just like socialists claimed to represent continuity with the valuable aspects of liberalism. Crucially, both socialism and liberalism, in their British variants, saw the state domestically as a central arbiter performing a range of ordering functions (Hobhouse, 1911; Clarke, 1978). Only with wartime experience did the mainstream of British Labour join intellectuals, pluralists, and guild socialists alike, in a tentative search for alternative institutions (Laski, 1919; Runciman, 1997; Stears, 2002). Yet it is important to stress that state-bashing never dominated Labour. This is signicant for the following analysis, as Labours acceptance of the state in domestic politics conditioned what could be argued internationally. The outbreak of the Great War was a catastrophe for Labours internationalism. Although positions within the party were many and complex, the extremity of the situation forced a choice, and in general Labour was seen to choose country over international solidarity. The war also meant internal strife. Debate raged over participation in the war cabinet as well as conscription, which was regarded as a central element in the capitalist militarism that the party opposed. Ramsay MacDonald, who refused to support the war and was attacked as a traitor in the popular press, stepped down as party leader and was succeeded by Arthur Henderson, a former Methodist lay preacher, who in 1916 became Labours representative in the war cabinet. Henderson sought to balance national solidarity with international workers solidarity, but eventually, in 1917, he had to resign. Labours internal discordFand especially the alleged out-and-out pacism of leading Labour politicians like MacDonaldFled to criticism of Labours unpredictability. That the war had shattered all hopes of progress was a widespread belief among radical intellectuals. For some intellectuals the consequence was a mood of withdrawal, which emphasized self-cultivation through personal relations (Arblaster, 1984:299308; Stapleton, 2001:264). Yet not everyone withdrew. War was on everyones lips, which naturally made its prevention the most urgent topic on the intellectual agenda. Organizations preoccupied with the international problem were established during the war, and although their thoughts were avored with polemical fatalism, the credo of this new thinking was not only that the basic conditions of international politics should be changed, but also that they could be changed. A forum that was created within weeks of the outbreak of warFthe Union of Democratic Control (UDC)Fis especially important in this respect. Its purpose was simple: [P]eace as well as war, requires preparation, as Bertrand Russell argued (1915:104). Peace should be negotiated rather than imposed and future foreign policy should be democratically controlled. This program attracted socialist and liberal intellectuals and politicians alike. The secretary of the organization was the polemical E. D. Morel, who, until his early death in 1924, was a very active spokesperson for a peculiar combination of pacism and isolationism. The UDC was rmly rooted in a long-standing radical tradition of British troublemakers criticizing the balance of power principle, which for centuries has made up an important part of British foreign policy (Morel, 1914; Taylor, 1957). In terms of personal as well as intellectual relations, the connection between the UDC and Labour was especially close (Morel, 1914; Labour, 1918; Swartz, 1971). Yet it is important to stress that in the closing years of the Great War the internationalist sentiment was widespread. Organizations like the Bryce Group, The League of Nations Society, and The League of Free Nations Association also called for the establishment of a league of nations.7 The common denominator in the different proposals was the radical spirit and critique of traditional international
7 The latter two later merged in the League of Nations Union, which throughout the interwar years was a powerful voice arguing for a League-oriented foreign policy and with which many Labour intellectuals maintained close contact (Winkler, 1948; Birn, 1974; Ceadel, 2000).
416
politics.8 For example, Leonard Woolf argued that as a result of the existing terrible experience, a war-weary world may presently be willing to construct some new international machinery which can y prevent the nations from again being stampeded into Armageddon (Woolf, 1916:213). Not unlike Norman Angell, Woolf argued that the international system had grown increasingly interdependent during the previous hundred years (Angell, 1921). Demonstrating his Fabian legacy, Woolf also stressed that if proposals for the establishment of an international authority for the prevention of war were to have any chance of convincing stubborn practitioners, it had to be not a Utopia upon the air of clouds of our own imaginations, but a duller and heavier structure placed logically on the foundations of the existing system (Woolf, 1916:8). Thus, the thrust of these arguments for a league of nations was that international institutions could perform vital coordinating functions in a system of sovereign states (Dickinson, 1916). Initially, the league idea was not favorably received in the Labour Party, where it was feared, on socialist grounds, that an institutional superstructure would serve the hidden agenda of imperialist capitalism. However, the increased intellectual interest in international questions and the humanist internationalism of the American president Wilson made an impact on Labour.9 [I]n view of the confusion of opinion as to Foreign Policy, a resolution at the Labour Party Conference in 1917 called for the establishment of an Advisory Committee, whose duty it shall be to specialize upon Diplomatic questions and Foreign Policy y (LPCR, 1917:141). Moreover, the party now wholeheartedly supported the idea of a league (LPCR, 1917:134135). Soon Labor [sic] was easily the most important political force behind the drive for a League of Nations (Winkler, 1948:109). Thus, from 1918 onwards Labour was a central part of the British peace movement, sharing its hopes for a future league: [T]he fundamental purpose of the British Labour Movement in supporting the continuance of the struggle is that the world may henceforth be made safe for democracy (Labour, 1918:319).
The Labour Party and Pragmatic Internationalism

When Labours Advisory Committee on International Questions (ACIQ) rst met in May 1918, its purpose was to consider, report and advise upon International Policy and all questions of an international character and to watch and advise upon current international developments (ACIQ, 1918:12). Verdicts on the inuence of the ACIQ, which over the ensuing decades met regularly to discuss Labours international policies, are not unequivocal,10 yet the committee is important because it, through its practical orientation, induced internationalists to reect on the viability of their political ideas. From the early 1920s onwards, the committee was dominated by what I will term pragmatic internationalists. In an alliance with other pragmatists in the party, most notably Arthur Henderson, Hugh Dalton, and, later, trade unionists like Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine, the committee fought ideological battles with other internationalists in Labour. This pragmatic faction of the party recognized that a cleavage between the ideal and the real existed; their ideology was pragmatic in the sense that it sought to balance principles with
For a summary of the proposals for an organization to prevent war see Woolf (1917a). On Wilsons humanismFwhich Angell to some extent inuenced through his acquaintance with a key advisor to the president (Angell, 1951:201213)Fsee MacDougall (1997). 10 To Taylor (1957:154) ACIQ was a sort of rival foreign ofce. Similarly, Maddox (1934:8891) claims that the Party was heavily dependent on ACIQ and that the committee directly formulated policy through its memoranda. However, the secretary of the committee, Leonard Woolf, presented a rather dim view in his autobiography: [We] did occasionally achieve something, though nothing commensurate with the amount of work we did (Woolf, 1967:238). Yet it was also recognized that ACIQ did inuence the Partys policy occasionally in important waysy (Woolf, 1964:228).
9 8
CASPER SYLVEST
417
assessments of their possible realization. Yet it was still internationalist; it still recommended a transformation of international relations.11 The centrality of the concept of internationalism in Labours international debates did not signify that it lacked ambiguity. Rather, internationalism covered a diversity of positions between which an unceasing ideological battle took place. The nexus of the ideological debates in the Labour Party, which provide an advantageous resource for our attempt to revisit interwar progressivist thought on international relations, was the League of Nations and its authority. In terms of the ideological conguration of the Labour Party, the pragmatic internationalists faced three main opponents. Firstly, during the 1920s an uneasy mix of 19th century liberal internationalism and isolationism was a powerful international ideology in the Labour Party. Its leading promulgator was the party leader Ramsay MacDonald. Sceptical of international obligations as well as the use of force in international politics, this kind of internationalism stressed increasing interaction between nations as the road to peace. Secondly, throughout the interwar period the refusal to sanction any kind of force in international politics was a powerful belief in certain sections of the party. This idea is normally associated with pacism. However, until the mid-1930s, when the concept acquired its present-day connotations, pacism referred to the views of members of the various peace societies or of others engaged in the organized effort to prevent war (Bisceglia, 1972:107). Nevertheless, inuential Labourites, like Arthur Ponsonby and George Lansbury, advanced absolute pacist arguments based on either utilitarian or religious reasoning (Ponsonby, 1925). Thirdly, between 1931 and 1935 radically socialist factions of the party were inuential. During the 1920s their views were largely marginalized, yet after the fall of the second Labour government, they experienced a revival. Their socialist internationalism acquired its meaning through opposition to capitalism. While not necessarily sceptical towards the use of force, these ideas emphasized that cooperation with capitalist states should be minimized, and that a capitalist League ought not to be vested with powers to enforce its authority. What held the internationalism of the Labour Party together during these years was the shared objective of disarmament. Whether liberal, socialist, or out-and-out pacist, most Labourites saw armaments as a central ingredient in the militarism that had brought about and constituted the main enemy in Labours support for the Great War. Yet, in the background other questions took shape: was disarmament a precondition of security, or was security a precondition of disarmament? and were the two policies conicting? It was around these questions that international debates within the Labour Party were to revolve until 1935. The remainder of this section briey sketches the main contours of these debates. Two issuesFthe League of Nations and the authority vested in the organizationFare of importance here.
The League of Nations
The League of Nations, which came into being with the conclusion of the Paris Peace Treaties (the rst 26 articles of which constituted the Covenant of the League), was a compromise between the powers that won the Great War. As a result, it was a complex institution that was supposed to handle a wide range of international political problems stretching from questions of security to intellectual
11 Pragmatism is not an ideologically insignicant term. To some, pragmatism signies realism and effectiveness to the extent that it seems the only logical course, while to others it means being unprincipled and immoral. I invoke the term to signify awareness about constraints hampering implementation of ideology and a resulting distance toward perfectionism. Thus, pragmatic internationalism has much in common with what Herz has termed Realist Liberalism, the theory and practice of the realizable ideal. (Herz, 1950:179). As employed here the term has no relation to philosophical pragmatism, although there are obvious afnities between the two (Rorty, 1989, 1999).
418
cooperation and humanitarian work. Although its establishment was in large part a result of the determination of the American president Woodrow Wilson, the United States failed to join the League. Initially, other Great Powers such as the Soviet Union and Germany were also, for different reasons, absent from the League. Consequently, the rst years of the workings of the League were quite unsuccessful, especially as its two leading powers, Britain and France, tried to tailor the organization to their different interests and perceptions of international politics (Wolfers, 1940). Nevertheless, the League came during the latter part of the 1920sFlargely as a result of political developments beyond its connesFto experience its golden era. Although only small progress was made on the prestigious issue of disarmament in these years, the League enjoyed a central standing in international politics. It was only when the crisis of the 1930s deepened that the League was increasingly regarded as a failure, especially in the eld of security. The rst sign of its decay was the Far Eastern Crisis of 19311933 and the denitive nail in the Leagues cofn was its failure to handle the Abyssinian Crisis of 19351936 successfully.12 In the eyes of the present the League stands out as a failure, which served as a source of inspiration and experience for the establishment of the United Nations following the Second World War. Without venturing into the debate about the relative success or failure of the League, it is fair to argue that if we are to appreciate the novelty of the League as well as its place in international politics between the wars, it is necessary to see it in its historical context. The League of Nations was the rst institution of its kind, and by studying how it emerged and worked throughout the interwar years we have drawn valuable lessons about the difculties of cooperation between sovereign states, especially in areas such as disarmament and collective security. The point is, however, that the League was an experiment. It was widely seen as a new way of organizing international politics, and we must approach the attitude of the British Labour Party towards the League with this in mind. The Versailles settlement was not what radicals had hoped for. According to Labour, the original idea of a league of peoples had been abandoned in favor of an inferior league of states, which was only to continue the disastrous policies of prewar Europe. Criticism of the heavy-handed settlement was aired internally as well as in public (ACIQ, 1919a; Henderson, 1919; Angell, 1921), and the establishment of the League of Nations did not diminish Labours disappointment. To MacDonald, who again headed the party, the League was nothing but that latest topical costume in which Imperialism appears at a fancy dress ball. The leader of the party also argued that [t]he wrong kind of League is worse than no League at all. y We ought not to fall into the y mischievous error of being complacent and of accepting the League as something good in itself. It is not that (MacDonald, 1919b:314; 1919a:200). In fact, Labours international outlook was almost purely negative and manifested itself in a rather one-sided critique of a stereotypical militarist imperialism based on a number of crude oppositions.13 Yet in the ACIQ a more pragmatic attitude toward the League of Nations soon developed. In 1920, a memorandum expressed Labours dilemma with regard to the League and argued that it was more practical to improve the existing League than to destroy or weaken this in order to make better y Labour was under increasing pressure as political opponents demanded a clear policy and the party ostensibly could not deliver. Therefore, the memorandum argued, whatever
12 The League of Nations is treated historically in Zimmern (1936) and Dunbabin (1993). Valuable historical sources are collected in Henig (1973). 13 These oppositions, which followed from the master distinction between internationalism and patriotism/ militarism/imperialism, were primarily: democracy vs. aristocracy; people(s)/nation(s) vs. government(s); open covenants vs. secrecy; peace(ful) vs. war(-like); real league/Cooperation vs. sabotaged league/Alliances.
CASPER SYLVEST
419
support the Labour Party gives to the league should not be given on vague grounds because of the hope of the world or the danger of future wars, but because of the urgent necessity of denite international action (ACIQ, 1920:1). Yet many liberal internationalists sceptical of too much involvement in international politics still focused on the hope of the world. According to this logic the solution of the international problem could not be found in institutions and constructions: The League has been not only a poor thing but a tool. It has neither a mind nor a will of its own (MacDonald, 1922:152). Only through reason, trade, and increasing interaction could a true internationalist spirit be developed (MacDonald, 1923b, 1924b). The disappointment over the peace settlement had caused a mechanical rejection of the League of Nations. However, the intellectuals in ACIQ increasingly called for a League Foreign Policy (ACIQ, 1922b). In the aftermath of Versailles Leonard Woolf argued that [t]he Peace is a bad peace and the League is a bad League, yet the League is not quite so bad a League as the peace is a bad peace (quoted in Whittaker, 1989:37). Therefore, a more pragmatic position was necessary. Convincing the rank and le as well as Labour MPs of the potential of the existing League of Nations, however imperfect it appeared in comparison with the ideal League, was now the most important ideological task. In 1922, a memorandum described the existing League as potentially compatible with internationalism and pacism:
The League for which British Labour stands is an instrument of internationalism and pacism. (y) The true test (y) of such a Leagues genuineness, good faith and efciency will be disarmament. (y) The existing League provides a framework which, if certain important defects were amended, might become a powerful instrument of pacic internationalism. (ACIQ, 1922a:1)
By portraying the existing League in more positive terms, the vocabulary of the radicals moved steadily toward that of the foreign policy establishment. The ACIQ member Norman Angell and Arthur Henderson, who was closely associated with the committee (Wilson, 1978:127), furthered this development toward support for the League and its obligations on member states collectively to deter recalcitrant powers (ACIQ, 1919b; Angell, 1921:xvi; Henderson, 1923). In this, they were clearly challenging Labour sentiments. Nevertheless, the existing League was increasingly accepted as the only logical starting point for any attempt to order the international sphere. A contextual precondition of this view succeeding was no doubt Labours increasing acceptance of the state as the sole legitimate vehicle for the (gradual) advance to socialism (Ward, 1998:5) and the obsession with order that the party displayed in domestic politics. The fear of anarchy behind the powerful Fabian idea of the state as the institution to recreate harmony in the face of advanced capitalism was not dissimilar to the disposition that informed arguments for the League (Woolf, 1917b; ACIQ, 1922b; MacDonald, 1924a). It must be noted that individual positions on domestic and international politics were not necessarily consistent,14 but the important point to grasp is that the vocabulary Labour employed in domestic politics conditioned what could be argued in international politics. This development underlines how ideological agents are stimulated to present political programs that are not perceived as incoherent. The fear of anarchy transgressed the boundary between domestic and international politics, and the idea of ordering therefore came to occupy a prominent place in Labours internationalism.
14 Immediately prior to the formation of the rst Labour government, both Henderson and MacDonald saw the state as a harmonizer in domestic politics (MacDonald, 1924a; Wrigley, 1990). Yet, while MacDonald was institutionalist in domestic politics with regard to the state, his international policy employed a more liberal, almost laissez faire, reasoning with regard to the authority of the League.
420
The Use of Force
The increasing acceptance of the League rmly placed the question of its authority on Labours international agenda. If the League could do well after all, how were these League policies to be implemented and, possibly, enforced? In 1923, Henderson bluntly spelled out his policy in Labour Magazine. In an article entitled War Against War Henderson employed a language unfamiliar to the considerable factions of the Labour Party, which were sceptical toward any kind of force in international politics:
Peace can only be secured by encouraging every nation to nd its guarantees of security and freedom in the League of Nations. (y) The League of Nations must be made the supreme independent international authority, and vested with the power to enforce its decisions against recalcitrant Powers. (Henderson, 1923:393)
This logic did not win immediate acceptance. In 1922, a resolution to oppose any warFwhatever the ostensible object of itFhad been adopted at the party conference (LCPR, 1922:200203). Moreover, the party leader regarded the sanctions of the Covenant as a mistake: [T]he Labour Party y raises the real errors that must be met and eradicated before Europe can return to prosperityFreparations, military sanctions, the composition of the League (MacDonald, 1923a:98). Acceptance of the existing League was therefore not without problems. While the pragmatic internationalists in the ACIQ regarded the League as a useful political institution, MacDonald accepted the League as a political arena, which contained a promise of increasing understanding between nations. In face of these diverging international philosophies the ACIQ continued to call for prudence and caution: [c]ertainly it is something to have a policy, but it has to be realised (ACIQ, 1924a:1). In the ensuing years this debate continued. The Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance, which criminalized aggressive wars yet allowed for complementary defense agreements (Toynbee, 1928:1627), brought about the rst confrontation on security in the ACIQ. Initially, the committee was very sceptical. However, after consulting the American professor Shotwell on the matter, opinion slowly changed (ACIQ, 1924b). While the Treaty should still be rejected, an ACIQ memorandum now forged very clearly the link between security and disarmament by stating that [d]isarmament is impracticable without security (ACIQ, 1924c:1). It is also signicant that a proposal was put forward for an acceptance of the Treaty provided that the clauses allowing complementary defense treaties were deleted. According to this logic, if the Treaty can be used to satisfy French demands for security, it will prove a valuable instrument in inducing the French Government to change its general policy and accept a general settlement with Germany. Furthermore, this proposal recognized that the Covenant of the League of Nations already creates an obligation of general mutual military guarantee, which, in turn, would make it illogical to reject the Treaty merely on the ground that it redenes or even extends this guarantee (ACIQ, 1924c:34). Eventually, MacDonald, who headed the First Labour government, rejected the Treaty arguing that certain objections of principle had not been accommodated. In fact, MacDonald drew heavily on the main argument put forward by a minority in the ACIQ: disarmament, not security, had rst priority. The Prime Minister continued to speak the language of the ideal and penetratingly criticized any attempt to accommodate different European conceptions of security. At the 1924 Party Conference, MacDonald even described the Draft Treaty as a great menace to the League of Nations and essentially a war preparation document (LPCR, 1924:108). When the Labour government during the fall of 1924 experienced a major international success with the agreement on the Geneva ProtocolFwhich added a third element, arbitration, to the familiar
CASPER SYLVEST
421
dualism between security and disarmament (Noel-Baker, 1925)Fthis pattern of disagreement repeated itself. In the ensuing years this golden triangle (arbitration, security, disarmament) became a central principle in Labours international policy, not least because the concept of arbitration enabled the party to cover internal differences. Thus, Henderson and the majority of the ACIQFnow including Philip NoelBaker, who became professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics in 1924Fcontinued to fuel the Party with information and arguments in favor of a more balanced policy, which considered security as a precondition of disarmament. The notion underlying these arguments was that peace had to be constructed and maintained. This underlines that progressives on the British Left grappled with the problem of security at a much earlier time than is normally recognized. In fact, the ACIQ seems to have had a considerable inuence on the Partys more moderate international policy during the years of opposition (1925 1929), including Labours eventual acceptance of the Locarno Pact, the thrust of which was security (ACIQ, 1925a, 1925b). Moreover, the ACIQ managed to tie Labours policy rmly to the League of Nations. As Alfred Zimmern later pointed out, for British radicals in the mid-1920s it became almost a religious duty to believe in and support the League (Zimmern, 1936:327). The Advisory Committee played no small part in this transformation. The hypothesis has been put forward that the shift in Labours international philosophy during 19231925 is of minor importance. The Geneva Protocol is of interest because, by accepting its principles, Labour took a big step in the direction of the French thesis of the League and European peace strategy. It has been maintained that the reason behind this change of policy was that Labour regarded sanctions as hypothetical and unimportant (Wolfers, 1940:344345; Tucker, 1950:247). Surely, the pragmatic wing of the party took sanctions, including military sanctions, seriously. As Henderson argued, Britain was solemnly pledged that our forces shall be used to make decisions come effective, if sanity, reason, right and justice fail and these sanctions have to be employed (Henderson, 1924:15). However, for some parts of the PartyFwhether Victorian liberal or radically pacistFsanctions were indeed hypothetical. In 1925 MacDonald notoriously argued that he had never regarded sanctions as being of any importance except in so far as their presence on paper is a harmless drug to soothe the nerves. Rather, [t]he new order of the Protocol will be its own sanction (MacDonald, 1925:533). Similarly, for many absolute pacists the League still embodied a dilemma. It was clearly expressed by C. R. Buxton, who in 1927 instantiated a debate on sanctions in the ACIQ: Many of us would give a great deal to be able, conscientiously, to make a pacist declaration. y We cannot do so because we are supporters of the Covenant y (ACIQ, 1927a:1). (Soon, however, two memoranda, written by Will Arnold-Forster and David Mitrany, countered Buxtons pacist conclusions.)15 Therefore, the argument that Labour regarded sanctions as hypothetical is not completely invalid, but it is, at best, partial. By neglecting the variety of arguments and positions internally in the Labour Party, it is not difcult to see how Labour and some of the intellectuals afliated with the Party have received their utopian verdict. In the mid-1920s pragmatic internationalism dominated the ACIQ. Disarmament was still the most important issue on the international agenda, but without
15 Arnold-Forster argued that causes that make for war still exist. (y) And that being so, we cannot conne our pacic effort to international education, to arbitration treaties, or to the removal of the causes of war: there is another job that must be, will be, tackled by somebody, viz., the dissuading of the would-be aggressor, the assurance of the attacked, and the suppression of the outrage if it begins (ACIQ, 1927b:3). Mitrany, on the other hand, argued that sanctions had to be recast as a normal and absolute condition of international solidarity. However, Mitrany stopped short of compulsory military sanctions, because they were unlikely to be used unless national interests were involved (Mitrany, 1925:158; ACIQ, 1927c:1).
422
security against aggression, disarmament was perceived to be unlikely. Therefore, use of force to deter recalcitrant nations under the condition that this force was legitimate, that is, employed collectively, was accepted. In the attempt to win over sceptics, a distinction between private (or national) war and public (or international) sanctions increasingly became an important rhetorical tool (e.g., informing Labours support for the Kellogg Pact, which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy). Moreover, young politicians in the Party now supported the intellectuals in the ACIQ. Foremost among these was Hugh Dalton, who was later to be instrumental in converting Labour to a pro-sanctions policy. Independence and innovation were not among Daltons strengths, but as propagandist he proved effective. His Towards the Peace of Nations (1928) demonstrates how Labours domestic occupation with order played into arguments for ordering international relations:
[P]laying ostrich is both a dangerous and cowardly game. Some provision for sanctions and coercive action, however discretely these things may be kept in the background and however sparingly they may be used in practice, is a logical requirement of any legal system, and takes human shape in police and judges. We cannot trust solely to mens good nature not to murder their neighbours, nor solely to their public spirit to pay their taxes. To think, as some sentimentalists appear to do, that we can build a new international order without any sanctions whatever, is not to think at all. (Dalton, 1928:211)
By the time this view rose to dominance, Labours philosophy of international affairs had changed radically over a period of only nine years. There was, of course, still scepticism to be found, but its manifestation was silence rather than argument. The logic that won this ideological battle drew heavily on the domestic analogyFan argumentative strategy, which implies that domestic legal and political experiences can be applied to international affairs (Suganami, 1989). By stressing the distinction between war as a national and international policy it became possible to support sanctions and condemn war. National wars were outright evil and in no circumstances justiable, but international or collective wars were viewed as a necessary evil with which the world could not yet dispense.16 Crucially, this argumentative strategy also defended disarmament at a level consistent with the requirements of collective force. Following the relatively successful international policy of the Second Labour government (19291931), which was informed by the ideas of pragmatic internationalists like Henderson, Dalton, and Noel-Baker (Dalton, 1931), the pragmatic wing of the Party ran into great difculties. The defection of Ramsay MacDonald and the formation of a national government proved catastrophic for Labour. In the Party blame fell on gradualism, and the inevitable consequence was a leftward move in all policy areas, including foreign policy. The imperialist and capitalist causes of war moved to the forefront, and at the Party conference in 1933 a resolution against participation in any war was carried (Labour, 1932; LPCR, 1933:185187). Moreover, the newly established Socialist League, which included Stafford Cripps and H. N. Brailsford, mustered some support for its stance against sanctions. These arguments were not pacist; rather it was argued on socialist lines that a capitalist league bolstered with sanctions would be a menace to the world (Corthorn, 2002). The movement from relative optimism to deep despair is, perhaps, best illustrated in three articles that Leonard Woolf wrote in the Political Quarterly in
16 Even ideological adversaries like Brailsford (1928:387) and MacDonald seem to have moved slightly in this direction. Although hardly a participator in debates on security during this period, when MacDonald supported a resolution at the Party Conference in 1928, he argued that Labours support for the Kellogg-Briand Pact was justiable because the sanctions of the League were not to be regarded as war proper (LPCR, 1928:183184).
CASPER SYLVEST
423
1930 and 1933. Writing during the time of the Second Labour government, Woolf displayed a relative optimism toward the international situation: the outstanding fact a decade after Versailles was the unexpected strength and position developed by the League y (Woolf, 1930:191). Three years later, however, Woolf s outlook had changed dramatically. In two articles, he lamented the rapid progress we are making towards the next world war caused by the growth of Hitlerism and the failure of the League with regard to disarmament and Manchuria. Furthermore, he stressed that common action against aggression was necessary and ascribed the failure of the League partly to the fact that pacists in this country have not honestly faced this dilemma (Woolf, 1933c:4142). Norman Angell was still desperately trying to win over pacists (as well as radical socialists) to pragmatic internationalism by arguing that [t]he problem which faces the world at this juncture is to transfer power from the litigants to the law (Angell, 1933:47). Yet, for Woolf time had run out for these measures; patiently explaining the details of good sound architecture to a lunatic engaged in burning down his own house over his head no longer seemed a viable strategy (Woolf, 1933d:518). Therefore, WoolfFechoing an ACIQ memorandum (1933b)Fopenly acknowledged the disunion in the Party since 1931 and repeated his support for the League of Nations. But, crucially, he also opened the door for a more limitedFand perhaps more militantFsubstitute:
A League, purged of militarist and Fascist states, composed of democratic and socialist governments, determined by every means in their power to prevent war, would be a much stronger instrument for peace and civilisation than the halfsham League which we have today. (Woolf, 1933d:523524)
Thus, Woolf came close to advocating an alliance of civilization against barbarism. In this he was now far off from mainstream opinion in the Party, which as in the early 1920s lacked a clear policy. The pacist dilemma was eventually taken on at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton in 1935, where the hardheaded trade unionist Ernest BevinFduring the marathon debate on Abyssinia and sanctions (LPCR, 1935:153193)Fercely attacked the pacist Lansbury, now the leader of the Party. The debate over the recently announced results of the peace ballot, where millions had supported the League of Nations Union and its stance in favor of sanctions, and the support of collective security by Liberals and Conservatives provided the right context for Labours turn to a sanctions policy (Howard, 1978:8794; Ceadel, 2000:310321). The defeat of pacism and radical socialism was the result of an alliance between trade unionists (Bevin), intellectuals in the ACIQ (Woolf, Angell, Noel-Baker), and politicians (Dalton). Memoranda from the Advisory Committee in 1933 as well as weeks before the Brighton conference carried the messages that sanctions were indispensable and that radical pacism and socialism had to be denounced (ACIQ, 1933a, 1933b, 1935). In this section it has been argued that the pragmatic internationalist faction of the Labour Party, which included prominent scholars that have been associated with the academic discipline IR, continuously attempted to convince pacists, isolationists, and socialists of the virtue of the existing League of Nations and the authority vested in the organization. At the risk of anachronism and oversimplication, it is worth trying to sum up these ideological positions and their understanding of international politics in the interwar period. Table 1 delineates the internationalisms prevalent in the British Labour Party between the wars including their notions of international politics and their different policies with regard to the League of Nations and its authority. As such, the typology developed here has a limited range of reference, but some of the divisions and dilemmas that it brings out are undoubtedly discernible in current internationalist debates over, for example, the future of the United Nations and international law.
424
TABLE 1. Internationalisms in the Labour Party between the Wars The international sphere The League of Nations The existing league is useful as a political institution. The existing league is useful. Immediate objective Long-term objective Disarmament, peace
Sanctions
Pragmatic, liberal internationalism (Henderson, Dalton, Woolf, Angell, Bevin) Pacism (i) Religious (Lansbury) (ii) Practical (Ponsonby) Isolationist, liberal internationalism (MacDonald, E.D. Morel) Socialist internationalism (Brailsford, ILP, Cripps)
Anarchy. Composed of righteous and unrighteous states. (Varies)
Security, Yes, if disarmament necessary. Peace must be maintained.
No, force is (i) morally or (ii) practically wrong.
(Unilateral) Disarmament
Disarmament, peace
Composed of peaceful nations. States and statesmen cause disorder. Composed of capitalist states causing disorder.
No Disarmament The existing league is useful (ambivalence) as a political arena.
Disarmament, peace
The existing league is not useful.
Socialism Yes, but not embodied in a capitalist League.
Socialism, disarmament, peace
Revisiting Idealism
In light of the development of Labours internationalism outlined above, this section returns to interwar idealism and especially the writings of Leonard Woolf and Norman Angell. Considering their involvement in Labours debates over international policy on behalf of pragmatic internationalism, their writings deserve closer scrutiny. I will focus on three allegations conventionally directed against interwar idealists: rstly, that they had an overly positive view of human nature; secondly, that they saw history as running in one benecial direction; thirdly, that they conceived of force and power as playing only marginal roles in international politics. It is argued that these allegations are generally inaccurate.17 In IR, idealism, and its responses to a corrupt international system, is portrayed as having a too optimistic view of human nature and a belief in a (potential) harmony of interests between people and nations. By placing themselves between past and futureFwhich they hoped would bring about another system of beliefs and values in international affairsFLabourites clearly made themselves susceptible to the allegation of believing in the essential goodness of man (Clark, 1978). Yet both Norman Angell and Leonard Woolf qualied this belief. Self-conscious of the charge of idealism, Angell opened his book Human Nature and the Peace Problem (1925) with a polemical defense of the internationalist position:
The idealists overlook human nature. Man, after all, is a ghting animal, emotional, passionate, illogical y Precisely; that is why it is so important to
17 A caveat is warranted here. I am deliberately focusing on (some of) the overlapping features of the ideas of Woolf and Angell, but there were important differences between their approaches to international relations. For example, Woolf regarded Angells argument that capitalism was not the cause of war as incomplete. See letter from Leonard Woolf to the New Statesman, February 16, 1935 (Spotts, 1989:397). Pursuing these differences is, however, beyond the scope of this article. See also Miller (1986) and Wilson (1997).
CASPER SYLVEST
establish some international organisation, League of Nations, or other device, for the proper discipline of unruly instincts. If mankind were naturally peaceful, if men had not this innate pugnacity, were instinctively disposed to see the opponents case, always ready to grant others the claims that they made themselves, we should not need these devices; no League of Nations would be necessary, nor, for that matter, would courts of law, legislatures, constitutions. (Angell, 1925:7)
425
From this quite pessimistic view of humansFas pugnacious and egotisticFa conclusion followed, which, Angell was anxious to point out, was different from that of the realpolitiker or the Darwinist. In fact, Angell went to great lengths to distance himself from that whole philosophy of biological necessity, struggle for life among nations, inherent pugnacity of mankind, survival of the t which was invoked on behalf of an old and popular conception of international life and politics. How could internationalists distance themselves from these conclusions if they agreed that men were wicked? Angells answer was simple: there could be very great changes in the ideas which determine mens political and social conduct without any fundamental change in human nature (Angell, 1918:912). The central point of Angells intervention was thus not only to distance the pragmatic internationalist position from realpolitik but also from the various traces of 19thcentury liberalism prevalent inside and outside the connes of the Labour Party. The aim of pragmatic internationalism was to provide the optimal environment in which human nature could be controlled and restricted. Woolf was even more pessimistic. As he argued in his brilliant polemical essay, Fear and Politics. A Debate at the Zoo, a study of human history reveals the fact that politically man is an animal which never learns from experience (Woolf, 1925:20). Thus, both Woolf and Angell argued along lines that deviated from individualist perfectionism and a belief in the harmony of interests. This is not to say that they found the interests of human beings and nations incompatible. Rather, their premise for a potential harmony of interests was reform through reason. But when reason failed, it was quickly realized that the real was a limiting factor in the attempt to approach the ideal. On the other hand, the real should not be hypostatized; Woolf later criticized Carr for assuming that power, violence, and conict are more real elements in society than, e.g., beliefs, law and co-operation for a common end or interests (Woolf, 1940:173174). Woolf s and Angells rather grim view of human nature is important for understanding the ideological developments in the ACIQ and among leading Labour politicians. Of course, some were more positive (and perhaps more or less inuential) than Woolf and Angell, but the disappointmentsFepitomized in the vindictive peace settlementFwhich had been pursuing British radicals since the Great War had weakened faith in progress and its realization. This leads us to the charge most often levied against idealists; that they conceived of history teleologically as inevitably progressing toward peace and freedom. Initially it might be worth asking what belief in progress means. Is the world actually moving toward a certain point or is progress (merely) possible? Did Woolf and Angell see history as necessarily running in one (positive) direction? With regard to their objective of changing the dominant perception of international affairs, Angell recognized that the condition of international anarchy makes true what otherwise need not be true, that the vital interests of nations are conicting (Angell, 1921:70). As a consequence, progress was possible in international affairs. By the same token, neither repetition nor progress was inevitable. In spite of this notion of potentiality in politics (Clark, 1978; Agamben, 1999), the picture seems to stick. Recently, a scholar has argued that these idealists failed to articulate their central assumptions conspicuously, which, in turn, has made it easy for defenders and critics alike to misrepresent them. In particular it has not been realised to what extent their work relies on the notion of historical process (rather than simply
426
progress), on the perception of a world-historical tendency towards ever greater integration of the various subdivisions of humanity (Osiander, 1998:429). Notably, this claim is supported by textual evidence derived from Alfred Zimmern, David Mitrany, and, in one instance, Leonard Woolf. With regard to Woolf, the postulate from International Government (1916:143) that there is a natural tendency of the world towards International Government is quoted. Surely, this is a sweeping statement, but we have to be careful to ascribe too much signicance to it. Firstly, International Government was written during the rst year of the Great War, when Woolf s optimism was largely intact. Secondly, the statement is derived from the core of the books argument that increasing interdependence since 1815 had led to the increase of international non-state cooperation (one aspect of Woolf s rather amorphous concept of government). Thirdly, we have to consult Woolf s other writings to see if he displayed this sense of historical process. Woolf was a prolic writer, and he often inquired into metaphysical questions. In a short essay on Erasmus, Woolf writes: [m]any people appear to believe, that the history of spiritual and intellectual civilization grows in a steady curve of upward progress. This is a delusion (Woolf, 1927:149). In fact, the contingency of history became an increasingly salient theme as the crisis of internationalism deepened in the 1930s. [I]t is just as easy for the currents of history to drift or its wheels to turn in one direction as another, Woolf argued in 1933. Only if all forces in favor of peaceFpacists or internationalists, statesmen or citizensFdemonstrated political will could the wheels of history be turned in the direction of peace (Woolf, 1933c:43). Thus, it is clear that Woolf (like Angell) did not regard the coming of peace and freedom as preordained. On the other hand, their optimism with regard to the future, which out of rhetorical necessity relied on the pessimism of the present, is always to be found in their writings. This optimism, however, was mostly the optimism of the ideologue, not of the theorist, and it should not be conated with a philosophy of history. Ideas about the inevitability of war and a balance of power policy were widespread during the interwar years, even if they did not amount to a full-edged theory. By countering these beliefs, with an alternative vision developed on the pillars of what they perceived to be the reality of international affairs, pragmatic internationalists performed a crucial innovative function in international political thought. In some sense, the whole point of internationalist interventions was to convince progressive followers and conservative opponents alike that their visions of the inevitability of history were fundamentally awed. Let us, nally, turn to the question whether Woolf or Angell underestimated the role of power in international politics. On the one hand, they both, as central pragmatic internationalists in Labour during the interwar years, argued for the necessity of vesting the League of Nations with the power to use sanctions against recalcitrant powers. This clearly suggests that they conceived of the interwar international political order as too precarious to be left without any means of coercion. This was not least due to the central role they both attributed to the consequences of anarchyFa concept derived from their mutual friend G. L. Dickinson (Dickinson, 1916, 1923; Woolf, 1933a; Angell, 1933). On the other hand, their approach to international politicsFalong with that of most interwar internationalists Fwas, arguably, based on a awed notion of politics. Carr certainly identied a basic problem in interwar internationalism when he argued that the determined efforts to perfect the machinery, to standardise the procedure, to close the gaps in the Covenant by an absolute veto on all war, and to make the applications of sanctions automatic all proved to be milestones on the dangerous path to rationalisation (Carr, 1946:2930). This aw is arguably a result of the rationalist spell under which it was conceived. In true liberal fashion internationalists attempted to close down and forever seal political disagreements
CASPER SYLVEST
427
through the pervasive rationalism that dominated political thinking at the time (Toulmin, 1990:169171). There is no refuge but in truth, Angell argued (1921:259). In similar fashion, Woolf claimed that to gain admittance to the debate on an international institution to prevent war, you must go to a booking ofce grimly labelled logic and reason, and take a rst-class ticket (Woolf, 1917b:910, 1933a, 1933b). Both Angell and Woolf had, like their critic Carr, lost faith in the old laissez faire liberalism of the 19th century, but they had certainly not lost faith in rationality. Although a peace without sanctions was too precarious at the time, they thought it possible to construct the perfectly rational peace. For example, in tying sanctions to arbitration, Labourites presumed that all conicts were objectively, judicially decidable. Thus, there is a striking essentialism of truth below the surface of their arguments, which is potentially disastrous for attempts to order world politics as it limits our appreciation of differences, whether political or cultural.
Conclusion
Analyzing Labours internationalism in its ideological context has allowed us to reach a more sophisticated understanding of the ontologies, assumptions and conditions of (international) politics underlying the different positions shaping international debates in the Party during the interwar years. As I have argued, Labours internationalism was far from a uniform ideology; nor was it marked by continuity as has been claimed by scholars and Labour politicians alike (Henderson, 1933; Windrich, 1952). Against this background, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the conventional interpretation of Labours internationalism between the wars as utopian, pacist fantasy is inadequate. As we have seen, pragmatic internationalists in the Labour Party argued against what they perceived to be unrealistic, and in a certain period, roughly from 1926 to 1931, their ideas dominated. This section of the Party can hardly be accused of ignoring power or reality in international affairs. They often based their policiesFsecurity, disarmament, and arbitrationFon what they thought was a grave international situation in which the menaces of vulgar nationalism and war were very much alive. A logic of the realizable ideal informed their arguments: starting with anarchy as a fundamental premise, they attempted to order the international with a view to domestic experiences. This strategy entailed support for the League of Nations and sanctions against aggressors; both measures that (re)organized international politics by circumscribingFthough not abandoningFthe sovereignty of states. By stressing that sanctions were not to be regarded as war proper, these internationalists were largely successful in converting a majority of the (leadership of the) Party to a more pragmatic policy, which never lost sight of either the political objective of disarmament or the internationalist aim of transforming the international domain. On the political level, E. H. Carrs critique of idealism and the conventional historiography of Labours internationalism have been able to uphold an inadequate portrait of interwar progressivist policy and theory. This is paradoxical as Carrs radicalism was quite close to pragmatic internationalism. Carr believed in progress as conscious reform and he was not in principle an opponent of the League, but his aim of inuencing the policy of the Conservative government in the late 1930s may have led him to disassociate himself from the utopian left- wing intellectuals (Jones, 1998). Writing after the League had failed, Carr could condently assert that any scheme by which nations should bind themselves to go to war with other nations for the preservation of peace is not only impracticable, but retrograde (Carr, 1936b:861). With the benet of hindsight, Carr effectively legitimated a policy of appeasement as the only reasonable position in international politics. Yet today hardly any policy in international affairs is more discredited than appeasement. Conversely, central elements in the pragmatic internationalism of
428
parts of the interwar Labour Party, e.g., the regulation of anarchy and collective security, quickly became second nature to us (Thomson, Meyer, and Briggs, 1945:1318, 142). Therefore, it is not without irony that the Labour movement has acquired a general utopian reputation. Studying the history of international political thought in the interwar years, one is bound to realize that there is no unambiguous tale of victories to be written. Against this background, it is understandable why both Woolf and Angell found Carrs criticism of utopianism ill conceived (Angell, 1940; Woolf, 1940). In particular, Woolf lamented Carrs tendency to supply g leaves, theories, and philosophies, to comfort the dead, the dying, the disappointed, and the crucied with the assurance that nothing could possibly have happened except in the way in which it did happen y (Woolf, 1940:170). According to Woolf the League did not fail because it was bound to failFany such argument neglected the essentially openended character of politics. Turning to IR, it is clear that the dominant interpretation of idealism does not escape this whiggish tendency. The concepts of idealism and utopianism are rather fuzzy, but they are usually employed to capture political thought that presupposed a number of overtly optimistic beliefs about progress and human nature, yet underestimated the role of force and power in international politics. As we have seen, the so-called idealists of IR that dominated the ACIQ hardly t this description. Neither Angell nor Woolf believed in history as running (continuously) in one positive direction, in the essential goodness of man, or in the harmony of interests. They appreciated the anarchic quality of international politics; yet it was here that they found the impetus for an attempt to order this domain along lines familiar from domestic experience. As with many other categories handed down to us from scholarly attempts to ridicule or legitimize particular theories, idealism emerges as an amorphous and distorting label. Analytical tools designed to introduce and analyze international political theory are inescapable, but it is important that they are historically sensitive and that they can accommodate diversity. A new historiography of IR in general and interwar British progressivist thought in particular, would do well to realize that we can never fully encapsulate persons in paradigms. When we try, ideal-types turn to stereotypes.
References
ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL QUESTIONS, THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY (1918) Untitled memorandum [Decision to establish the ACIQ]. No. 2, Labour History Archive and Study Center, Manchester [LHA]. ACIQ (1919a) The Peace Terms. No. 61, May 1919, Norman Angell. ACIQ (1919b) Labour and the Proposed Alliance. Interview with Mr Arthur Henderson. No 114, [LHA]. ACIQ (1920) Notes on the League. No. 143, June 1920, by C. D. Burns, [LHA]. ACIQ (1922a) Draft Report for the International Socialist Conference. The League of Nations and Disarmament. No. 251a, [LHA]. ACIQ (1922b) Labour and the League of Nations. The Need for a League Foreign Policy. No. 287, June 1922, [LHA]. ACIQ (1924a) Labour, the League and Reparations. No. 310, February 1924, [LHA]. ACIQ (1924b) Memorandum on the League and Disarmament. No. 322, March 1924, by Prof. Shotwell, [LHA]. ACIQ (1924c) Draft Memorandum Prepared by the Special Sub-Committee on the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance. No. 323, March 1924, [LHA]. ACIQ (1925a) Memorandum on Security Pact. No. 339, June 1925, [LHA]. ACIQ (1925b) Report of Sub-Committee on Security Pact. No. 339a, July 1925, [LHA]. ACIQ (1927a) Sanctions in the Covenant and the Protocol. No. 358, March 1927, by C. R. Buxton, [LHA]. ACIQ (1927b) Sanctions (commentary on Mr. Buxtons Paper). No. 365, May 1927, by Will Arnold-Forster, [LHA]. ACIQ (1927c) A Labour Policy on Sanctions. No. 366, May 1927, by David Mitrany, [LHA].
[ACIQ]
CASPER SYLVEST
429
ACIQ (1933a) The Labour Partys Policy with Regard to the League and Sanctions. No. 431a, March 1933, [LHA]. ACIQ (1933b) The Labour Partys Policy Regarding the League of Nations. No. 433, April 1933, [LHA]. ACIQ (1935) The Sanctions of the Covenant. No. 459a, September 1935, [LHA]. AGAMBEN, G. (1999) Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ALLOTT, P. (1995) Kant or Wont: Theory and Moral Responsibility. The BISA Lecture, December 1995. Review of International Studies 23:339357. ANGELL, N. (1910) The Great Illusion. A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage. London: William Heinemann. ANGELL, N. (1918) The Political Conditions of Allied Success. New York: G. P. Putnam. ANGELL, N. (1921) The Fruits of Victory. A Sequel to the Great Illusion. London: Collins. ANGELL, N. (1925) Human Nature and the Peace Problem. London: Collins. ANGELL, N. (1933) The International Anarchy. In The Intelligent Mans Way to Prevent War, edited by Leonard Woolf, pp. 1966. London: Victor Gollanz. ANGELL, N. (1940) Who are the Utopians? and Who the Realists? Headway 2:45. ANGELL, N. (1951) After All: The Autobiography of Norman Angell. London: Hamish Hamilton. ARBLASTER, A. (1984) The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism. London: Basil Blackwell. BARTELSON, J. (1995) The Trial of Judgment: A Note on Kant and the Paradoxes of Internationalism. International Studies Quarterly 39:255279. BARTELSON, J. (1996) Short Circuits: Society and Tradition in International Relations Theory. Review of International Studies 22:339360. BELL, D. S. A. (2002) Language, Legitimacy and the Project of Critique. Alternatives 27:327350. BIRN, D. S. (1974) The League of Nations Union and Collective Security. Journal of Contemporary History 9:131159. BISCEGLIA, L. R. (1972) Norman Angell and the Pacist Muddle. Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 45:104121. BOOTH, K. (1997) Discussion: A Reply to Wallace. Review of International Studies 23:371377. BOYLE, F. A. (1999) Foundations of World Order. The Legalist Approach to International Relations (1898 1922). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. BRAILSFORD, H. N. (1998 [1917]) The War of Steel and Gold. A Study of the Armed Peace. London: Routledge. BRAILSFORD, H. N. (1928) Olives of Endless Age. London: Harper & Brothers. BROWN, C. (2001) Understanding International Relations, 2nd ed. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave. BULL, H. (1995 [1972]) The Theory of International Politics, 19191969. Reprinted in International Theory: Critical Investigations, edited by J. Der Derian, pp. 181211. London: Macmillan. BUTTERFIELD, H. (1965 [1931]) The Whig Interpretation of History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. CARR, E. H. (1936a) The Future of the League I. Idealism or Reality? Fortnightly 140 (new series):385396. CARR, E. H. (1936b) Public Opinion as a Safeguard of Peace. International Affairs (November/ December):846862. CARR, E. H. (1964 [1946]) The Twenty Years Crisis, 19191939, 2nd ed. New York: Harper Row. CEADEL, M. (2000) Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CLARK, I. (1978) World Order Reform and Utopian Thought: A Contemporary Watershed. Review of Politics 41:96120. CLARKE, P. (1978) Liberals and Social Democrats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. COLLINI, S. (1978) Sociology and Idealism in Britain 18801920. Archives Europennes de Sociologie 19: 350. CORTHORN, P. (2002) The Labour Party and the League of Nations: The Socialist Leagues Role in the Sanctions Crisis of 1935. Twentieth Century British History 13:6285. DALTON, H. (1928) Towards the Peace of Nations: A Study in International Politics. London: George Routledge & Sons. DALTON, H. (1931) British Foreign Policy, 192931. Political Quarterly 2:485505. DICKINSON, G. L. (1916) The European Anarchy. London: Allen & Unwin. DICKINSON, G. L. (1923) War, Its Nature, Cause and Cure. London: Allen & Unwin. DRYZEK, J. S., AND S. T. LEONARD (1988) History and Discipline in Political Science. American Political Science Review 82:12451260. DUNBABIN, J. P. (1993) The League of Nations Place in the International System. History 78:421442. GOLDMANN, K. (1994) The Logic of Internationalism. London: Routledge. GORDON, M. R. (1969) Conict and Consensus in Labours Foreign Policy 19141969. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
430
HASLAM, J. (1999) The Vices of Integrity. E. H. Carr 18921982. London: Verso. HENDERSON, A. (1919) The Peace Terms. London: Labour Party. HENDERSON, A. (1923) War Against War. Labour Magazine 1:392393. HENDERSON, A. (1924) The New Peace Plan. Labours Work at the League of Nations Assembly. London: Labour Publications Department. HENDERSON, A. (1933) Labours Foreign Policy. London: Labour Party. HENIG, R. B. (1973) The League of Nations. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. HERZ, J. H. (1950) Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma. World Politics 2:157180. HOBHOUSE, L. T. (1994 [1911]) Liberalism. Reprinted in Liberalism and Other Writings, edited by James Meadowcroft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HOBSON, J. A. (1902) Imperialism. London: James Nisbet & Co. HOLDEN, G. (2002) Who Contextualizes the Contextualizers? Disciplinary History and the Discourse About IR Discourse. Review of International Studies 28:253270. HOWARD, M. (1978) War and the Liberal Conscience. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. JONES, C. (1998) E. H. Carr and International Relations. A Duty to Lie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. KAHLER, M. (1997) Inventing International Relations: International Relations Theory After 1945 In New Thinking in International Relations Theory, edited by M. W. Doyle and J. Ikenberry, pp. 2053. Oxford: Westview Press. KEOHANE, D. (2000) Security in British Politics, 19451999. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan. [LPCR] Labour Party Conference Report. 19161935. London: Labour Party. LABOUR PARTY (1969 [1918]) Statement of War Aims of Labour. Reprinted in The Left and War, edited by P. Stansky, pp. 318326. London: Oxford University Press. LABOUR PARTY (1932) War and Socialism. London: Labour Party. LASKI, H. (1975 [1919]) The Pluralistic State. Reprinted in The Pluralist State, edited by D. Nicholls, pp. 144157. London: Macmillan. LEPGOLD, J., AND M. NINCIC (2001) Beyond the Ivory Tower: International Relations Theory and the Issue of Policy Relevance. New York: Columbia University Press. LONG, D. (1996) Towards a New Liberal Internationalism. The International Theory of J. A. Hobson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LONG, D., AND P. WILSON, eds. (1995) Thinkers of the Twenty Years Crisis. Interwar-Idealism Reassessed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MACDONALD, R. (1919a) Socialist Review Outlook. Socialist Review 17:193212. MACDONALD, R. (1919b) Socialist Review Outlook. Socialist Review 17:305329. MACDONALD, R. (1922) The Outlook. Socialist Review 20 145 ff. MACDONALD, R. (1923a) The Outlook. Socialist Review 21 97 ff. rtige Politik der Englischen Arbeiterpartei. Herausgegeben und MACDONALD, R. (1924 [1923b]) Die Auswa eingeleitet von Egon Wertherimer. Hamburg: Verlag der Hamburger Buchdruckerei und Verlagsanstalt Auer & Co. [Labours Foreign Policy. London: Labour Party] MACDONALD, R. (1924a) Socialism: Critical and Constructive. London: Cassell. MACDONALD, R. (1924b) Continuity in Foreign Policy. The Spectator 133:872873. MACDONALD, R. (1925) Protocol and Pact. Labour Magazine 3:531534. MACDOUGALL, W. A. (1997) Promised Land, Crusader State. The American Encounter with the World Since 1776. New York: Mariner Books, Houghton Mifin. MADDOX, W. P. (1934) Foreign Relations in British Labour Politics. A Study of the Formation of Party Attitudes on Foreign Affairs, and the Application of Political Pressure Designed to Inuence Government Policy, 19001924. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MARTIN, D. A. (1998 [1965]) Pacism. London: Routledge. MILLER, J. D. B. (1986) Norman Angell and the Futility of War. London: Macmillan. MILLER, K. E. (1967) Socialism and Foreign Policy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. MITRANY, D. (1925) The Problem of International Sanctions. London: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press. MOREL, E. D. (1914) The Morrow of War. Reprinted in The Left and War, edited by P. Stansky, pp. 88103. London: Oxford University Press. MORGENTHAU, H. J. (1977 [1948]) Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. New York: A. Knopf. NAVARI, C. (1989) The Great Illusion Revisited: The International Theory of Norman Angell. Review of International Studies 15:341358. NAVON, E. (2001) The Third Debate Revisited. Review of International Studies 27:611627.
CASPER SYLVEST
431
NAYLOR, J. F. (1969) Labours International Policy. The Labour Party in the 1930s. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. NOEL-BAKER, P. L. (1925) The Geneva Protocol for the Pacic Settlement of International Disputes. London: P. S. King & Son. OSIANDER, A. (1998) Rereading Early Twentieth-Century IR Theory: Idealism Revisited. International Studies Quarterly 42:409432. PONSONBY, A. (1925) Now Is the Time: An Appeal for Peace. London: Leonard Parsons. RORTY, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RORTY, R. (1999) Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. RUNCIMAN, D. (1997) Pluralism and the Personality of the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RUSSELL, B. (1915) War The Offspring of Fear. Reprinted in The Left and War, edited by P. Stansky, pp. 103112. London: Oxford University Press. SCHMIDT, B. C. (1998) The Political Discourse of Anarchy. New York: SUNY Press. SKINNER, Q. (1996) From Humes intentions to Deconstruction and Back. Journal of Political Philosophy 4:142154. SKINNER, Q. (2001) The Rise of, Challenge to and Prospects for a Collingwoodian Approach to the History of Political Thought. In The History of Political Thought in National Context, edited by D. Castiglione and I. Hamspher-Monk, pp. 175188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SKINNER, Q. (2002) Visions of Politics, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SMITH, M. J. (1986) Realist Thought from Kissinger to Weber. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. SMITH, S. (1997) Power and Truth: A Reply to William Wallace. Review of International Studies 23: 507516. SPOTTS, F., ed. (1989) Letters of Leonard Woolf. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. STAPLETON, J. (2001) Political Thought and National Identity in Britain 18501950. In History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 17501950, edited by S. Collini, R. Whatmore, and B. Young, pp. 245269. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. STEARS, M. (2002) Progressives, Pluralists and the Problems of the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SUGANAMI, H. (1989) The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SWARTZ, M. (1971) The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War. Oxford: Clarendon Press. SYLVEST, C. (2002) The Internationalism of the Labour Party Between the Wars and the Historiography of International Relations. M.Phil. thesis, Cambridge University. TAYLOR, A. P. J. (1957) The Trouble Makers. Dissent Over Foreign Policy 17921939. London: Hamish Hamilton. TAYLOR, T. (1985) Utopianism. In International Relations: British and American Perspectives, edited by S. Smith, pp. 92107. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. THIES, C. G. (2002) Progress, History and Identity in International Relations Theory: The Case of the IdealistRealist Debate. European Journal of International Relations 8:147185. THOMSON, D., E. MEYER, AND A. BRIGGS (1998 [1945]) Patterns of Peacemaking. London: Routledge. TOULMIN, S. (1990) Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. TOYNBEE, A. (1928) Survey of International Affairs 1924. Oxford: Oxford University Press. TUCKER, W. R. (1950) The Attitude of the British Labour Party Towards European and Collective Security ` Problems 19201939, These presente a lUniversite de Geneve pour lobtention du grade de docteur es sciences politiques. Institut Universitaire de Haute Etudes Internationales. Geneve: Imprimere Du Journal Politiques. TULLY, J., ed. (1988) Meaning and Context Quentin Skinner and His Critics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. WALLACE, W. (1996) Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats: Theory and Practice in International Relations. Review of International Studies 22:301321. WALTZ, K. N. (1959) Man, the State and War. New York: Columbia University Press. WARD, P. (1998) Red Flag and Union Jack. Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left 18811924. Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press. WHITTAKER, D. J. (1989) Fighter for Peace: Philip Noel-Baker. York, England: W. Sesson. WILSON, D. (1978) Leonard Woolf. A Political Biography. London: Hogarth Press. WILSON, P. (1997) The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: An Exposition, Analysis, and Assessment in the Light of His Reputation as a Utopian. D.Phil. thesis, London School of Economics (University of London). WILSON, P. (1998) The Myth of the First Great Debate. Review of International Studies 24:117. WINDRICH, E. (1952) British Labours Foreign Policy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
432
WINKLER, H. R. (1948) The Development of the League of Nations Idea in Great Britain, 19141919. Journal of Modern History 20:95112. WINKLER, H. R. (1994) Paths Not Taken. British Labour and International Policy in the 1920s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. WOLFERS, A. (1962 [1940]) Britain and France Between Two Wars. Conicting Strategies of Peace from Versailles to World War II. New York: W. W. Norton. WOOLF, L. (1916) International Government. Two reports by L. S. Woolf prepared for the Fabian Research Department, Together with a Project by a Fabian Committee for a Supernational Authority that will Prevent War. London: George Allen & Unwin. WOOLF, L., ed. (1917a) The Framework of a Lasting Peace. London: George Allen & Unwin. WOOLF, L. (1917b) Introduction to The Framework of a Lasting Peace, edited by L. Woolf, pp. 958. London: George Allen & Unwin. WOOLF, L. (1925) Fear and Politics. A Debate at the Zoo. London: Hogarth Press. WOOLF, L. (1927) A Civilized Man. In Essays on Literature, History, Politics, etc., pp. 149152. London: Hogarth Press. WOOLF, L. (1930) From Sarajevo to Geneva. Political Quarterly 1:186206. WOOLF, L., ed. (1933a) The Intelligent Mans Way to Prevent War. London: Victor Gollanz. WOOLF, L. (1933b) Introduction to The Intelligent Mans Way to Prevent War, edited by L. Woolf, pp. 718. London: Victor Gollanz. WOOLF, L. (1933c) From Geneva to the Next War. Political Quarterly 4:3043. WOOLF, L. (1933d) Labours Foreign Policy. Political Quarterly 4:504524. WOOLF, L. (1940) Utopia and Reality. Political Quarterly 11:167182. WOOLF, L. (1964) Beginning Again. An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1919. London: Hogarth Press. WOOLF, L. (1967) Downhill All the Way. An Autobiography of the Years 19191939. London: Hogarth Press. WRIGLEY, C. J. (1990) Arthur Henderson. Cardiff, England: GPC Books. ZIMMERN, A. (1936) The League of Nations and the Rule of Law. London: Macmillan.

PDF

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

PDF

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

International Studies Quarterly (2004) 48, 409432

The Intellectual Context

The Labour Party and Pragmatic Internationalism

Anarchy. Composed of righteous and unrighteous states. (Varies)

Security, Yes, if disarmament necessary. Peace must be maintained.

No, force is (i) morally or (ii) practically wrong.

No Disarmament The existing league is useful (ambivalence) as a political arena.

The existing league is not useful.

Socialism Yes, but not embodied in a capitalist League.

Socialism, disarmament, peace

Você também pode gostar