The Twenty Years' Crisis

The Twenty Years' Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations was written by E. H. Carr in 1939, with the second edition (ISBN: 0333069137) following it in 1946.

Chapter 1 is an exploration of epistemology of political science. The author's position is that a political science is necessarily a study of both what is and what ought to be. Persuading others about how to think about politics is itself a political act, and in turn influences politics. Still, the author differentiates "infantile", "utopian" theories that describe how things ought to be without regard for how things are, and scientific theories that describe how things are and infer how to make things more like they ought to be.

Author argues that there was no interest in international relations until WW1. At most there was an awareness of/anxiety towards war, and the best remedy to that was professional (not popular) diplomacy.

• Secret treaties were accepted/acceptable.

  • Franco-Russian treaty was secret, and Radicals in 1898 unsuccessfully argued for disclosure.

• Some politicians, esp. Labour, took idealistic stances against war in general.

Author argues that the post WW1 regime was designed based on utopian theories that failed given a couple decades of crisis.

• equation of economic product and virtue
  • utilitarianism
  • If economic product per capita is up, then the population is better off, and this is a virtuous good thing.
• Long-run equilibria in international markets for goods and capital flows. Furthermore, that these long-run equilibria reflect a mutually beneficial division of labor according to comparative advantages.
  • With the above, free trade is virtuous.
  • Nationalism movements and protectionist politics are either greedy and self-defeating (in the moment) or localized expressions of a wider, mutually beneficial market shift that could have been better planned and coordinated (if they have rendered benefits).

    • The evidence: UK thrived for free trade policies.

    • The contrary evidence: U.S. and Germany thrived for protectionist policies.

      • Free trade proponents explain this away as a need for infant industry policies that can be phased out, which utopian proponents gladly accept as further evidence that planning and coordination are needed.
• equation of economic product and popular opinion
  • 'vote your interest'

  • In a Westphalian regime, wherein all of the land powers are monarchial, it can seem like the few democracies are less likely to wage war.

• popular opinion as a binding power, nationally and internationally

Altogether, these theories combined to suggest that free trade, democracy, and world peace are eventualities when the public is simply informed.

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The author also explores the realist critique of this utopian theory, pulling from Machivelli, Bacon, Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza...

• Hegel, Engel, Marx, and Lenin analysed policy through a lens of history. The historic mission is virtuous and a government is virtuous by being a coercive force for that mission.
• UK and US imperialism is founded is self assurance that they are virtuous, and then the world can be made more virtuous by being a coercive force over more of it.
• The virtue of the utopian theory is instead a manifestation of a dominant social class justifying the status quo.
  • Laissez faire favors the rich class that was able to rapidly industrialize in this era.
  • World peace and internationalism must be understood in the context of who is the hegemon.
    • Hitler and Mussolini adopted the same language of peacekeeping in their creation of the Anti Comintern Pact, their arbitrations in Vienna, etc.; and Japan in their creation of the Pan Asian x

The trap of realism, he describes, is determinism. A study of how things are too easily slips into a study justifying the way things are. A causative model that tries to map history, economic interests, or otherwise agents, onto policy outcomes has assumed that policy is deterministic on static parameters. At the same time, the supposition of an eventuality or equilibria that history races towards is a direct violation of the original framework.

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These utopian ideas were baked into the post WW1 regime.

• Wilson designed the League of Nations with no coercive element. Conflict resolution was handled though condemnation and appeals to public opinion.
• the constitutions of Weimar Germany and several of the small, created nations in Europe failed to prevent their decents into authoritarianism

The contemporary failures of this regime were attributed to either "muddled thinking" (irrationality?) (Zimmern, Neutrality and Collective Security) or wickedness (following from the above equation to virtue) (Toynbee).

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The idea that popular opinion was anti war is fundamentally flawed.

• Easy to convince an Englishman in 1918 that war is not profitable.
• Germans blamed the surrender, not the war.
• Japanese and Italians blamed the peace process for their lack of profit.
• Polish and Czechoslovaks owed the existance of their states to war.

Ultimately, the concept of war being bad was quite eurocentric.

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Politics is about power, and war is an intrinsic part of international relations.

The first factor of power is military strength.

Wars are fought to forestall fighting a war with worse odds later.

• Russo Japanese War began effectively with a preempitve torpedo attack against Russia
• WW1 alliances were made and shifted to prevent any one power from emerging dominant
• every state viewed their participation in WW1 as self defense
• British imperialism was partially motivated by preventing France from making the land claims
• Versaillles divided the former German colonies between many powers; all that mattered was preventing Germany from holding the claim

Economic strength is a factor of power, if only for the production of armaments. The policies to consider for increasing power are (1) autarky and (2) economic influence over other states.

The ability to persuade is a factor of power. Men must be convinced to go to war.

• On the surface, democratic governments conform to public opinion rather than persuading anyone, while autocratic governments coerce the public to conform.

Public opinion is in fact dynamic, and any government's ability to coerce is limited, so really persuasion is everywhere.

• Propoganda is the policy for increasing power.

Law is merely the reflection of politics. The only meaningful international laws are the ones that carry the interest of international powers.

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Author predicts that if the League of Nations had sanctioned Italy for the invasion of Abyssinia and removed troops by force, the necessary next step would be occupation of all Italian foreign holdings, which certainly would lead to formal war.