February 5, 2002

In a lifetime devoted to the study of international relations no book that I have read has had greater impact on my thinking, let alone my work as a university professor, than E.H. Carr’s The twenty years’ crisis, 1919-1939 (Macmillan, 1939). I have had cause to pick up and read or glance through the book on numerous occasions, and even as I turn to it now, it never fails to impress me for its cogency, its insight, and its sustained value.

Carr’s book was conceived as an analysis of the first two decades following the First World War. More than most scholars of his generation, he tried to analyze the collective mindset of the people responsible for the peace following the Great War. He questioned their failure to adapt to the phenomenal changes wrought by the global conflict and the reluctance to come to grips with the conditions that soon would explode into the Second World War.

Ominous signs were already on the record. Fascism had risen full-blown in Italy. National Socialism and Adolf Hitler had monopolized power in Germany. The Japanese government, although one of the victorious members of the grand alliance, had become the tool of rabid militarists. As Carr was writing the Twenty years’ crisis, the supreme dictatorial and totalitarian systems of the post-First World War era had already demonstrated their desire to rekindle the embers of the First World War.

Aggression had been committed from Central Europe to East Africa, and from the mainland of China to the South Pacific. Only the oblivious could have failed to know what was in the offing. But awareness does not always translate into action. Carr recounts the philosophical as well as the practical problems that paralyzed the victors of the First World War. Intelligence was not the issue. No one could feign surprise at the unfolding of events.

According to Carr, none of the powers charged with maintaining the peace were prepared physically or psychologically to thwart the ambitions of those disturbing the new but shaky equilibrium. It was either gross negligence or the sheer indifference of the United States that led its post-Wilson policy makers to ignore the country’s responsibility in overseeing global security. In spite of its inherent weaknesses, the League of Nations, the only promise of collective security in an age of rampant nationalism, was prevented from doing its work when the United States opted to remain aloof.

Only the League could rally the alliance against the resurgence of aggressive states, and with Washington in denial, the alliance failed to materialize. The League was neither at fault nor ineffective. Dependent on its member states to assert its will, narrow-minded politicians chose isolationism and non-involvement, a more domestically acceptable posture.

It was complicity, timidity, and indifference that prevented France and Britain from playing their roles as responsible parties in sustaining the peace of Versailles. It was imperial avarice that all but suffocated Wilsonian cries for equality and fairness. In other words, the major actors of the immediate post-First World War period saw the horrors that were in the offing, horrors already inflicted on the more helpless members of the human family, but still they preferred the sidelines to active involvement. In doing nothing, they allowed events to overwhelm them.

Put another way, by their remoteness and all-consuming self-interest, they brought on the very conditions they sought to avoid. Believing in the end that they could save themselves from still another orgy of blood by appeasing the aggressors, they assured the making of a human tragedy of immense proportions.

Carr speaks to those describing themselves as utopians but can only rail at their myopia. Failing to see the breakdown in the international harmony of interests, a harmony perpetuated by a doomed imperial system, the complacent, along with the fearful, committed the blunders that plunged the world into a miasma of bloodletting never before experienced.

The time called for realism, for statesmen to address the obvious, to acknowledge that the planet harbours men of evil intent and that only direct and timely action can prevent the worst of human nature from being unleashed. Carr addresses the anatomy of power as well as its manifestations. Power, he insisted, is something to understand, not to eliminate. Power is the energy of life and all things in life are driven by it. Nothing in the universe occurs without power as its source.

Neither nation-states nor civilizations are mere happenstance. Carr does not glorify power, or ignore its abuses. It is necessary, however, to recognize the existence of that which is at the heart of the life function. Those insisting on equating power with evil, with placing power in opposition to morality, in Carr’s view, do great harm to the cause of justice and civility. Carr, through it all, is the eternal optimist however. Believing in world community founded on law and sanctified by treaties that are observed and honoured, he pines for a time when all humanity will find its common identity and begin the process of forging community. Global community will emerge as a consequence of having built a firm foundation.

The balance of power for Carr is not a formula for conflict, nor is it the imposition of the mighty over the weak. Balances are necessary because only when diversity is acknowledged and blended with responsibility can legal structures apply and take root. Cooperative and accommodative systems are not constructed in the clouds. Firmly planted in the soil, deeper integration will occur only when nations and people are in position to transcend their more immediate circumstances.

Nor can wishing make it so. Carr envisioned a recreated Europe, shorn of empires and colonies, melding cultures and histories in epochal transformation. The European Union of the 21st century is illustration enough that Carr’s idea of international relations spoke in more positive tones about Europe’s and possibly the world’s future. The existence of the EU is testimony to the reality of Carr’s quest.

Collective security has become the rule not the exception in regional and global experience. New standards of behaviour have evolved that have raised the human paradigm above that of the state-centred approach. Moreover, there are indications that transcendence from more narrowly defined experiences are occurring across the planet.

Carr speaks to all that ponder his scholarship in this current war on global terrorism. The anarchists of the contemporary age seek not the destruction of the individual states but the decimation of civilization itself. Armed with weapons of mass destruction that E.H. Carr could never have envisaged, the marginalized and alienated remnants of the human family speak to a militancy that is apocalyptic, not totalitarian.

Never has there been more a call to address the subject of power and its purpose. Never has there been greater need for collective response to a common menace. Technological and scientific changes have transformed the physical aspects of earthly experience; but learning to live with the changes they impose on the human condition remains our greatest test.

Lawrence Ziring, Arnold E Schneider professor of political science, Western Michigan University, USA

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