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1939: the origins of liberal realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Christopher Hill
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Extract

1939 was neither one thing nor the other. It was not the last golden year of peace at the end of a period of expansion and confidence, as 1914 had seemed to be, and it was not the start of a dramatic new era, as war had been in 1775 and revolution in 1917. Rather, 1939 was the ante-chamber through which the nations of Europe were slowly ushered into war, and its association with reactive and hesistant policy–making has compounded the sense of determinism. This article will challenge such a perspective in two ways: first it will suggest that the events of 1939 are in themselves rather more significant than is sometimes assumed, and second it will see 1939 and the war which then unstoppably unrolled, as having initiated changes which are still being worked out in the nature and quality of international relationships, as well as major particular developments like the rise of American power and the division of Germany.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , October 1989 , pp. 319 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1989

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References

1. For a detailed survey of the literature up to and including the first few years of the post-1967 period, see Watt, Donald, ‘The Historiography of Appeasement’, in Cook, Chris and Sked, Alan (eds.), Crisis and Controversy: Essays in Honour of A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1976).Google Scholar

2. May, Ernest and Neustadt, Richard, in their Thinking in Time: the Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York, 1986)Google Scholar, continue their intelligent campaign against simplistic historical analogies such as ‘appeasement’, which has been distorted perhaps more than any other episode in the history of diplomacy.

3. A. J. P. Taylor has argued that at the time many people in Britain had come to the point of accepting the inevitability of war by 1939, and therefore were paradoxically more relaxed about it than at the time of Munich. See his ‘The British View’ in Douglas, Roy (ed.), 1939: A Retrospect Forty Years After (London, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially pp. 41–5. For the judgement that 1937–38 were the decisive years, leaving little to be salvaged in 1939, see Colvin, Ian, The Chamberlain Cabinet (London, 1971).Google Scholar

4. Bell, P. M. H., in his admirably systematic The Origins of the Second World War in Europe (London, 1986)Google Scholar, considers the whole range of these arguments: that the war really started with the Spanish Civil War in 1936, that local conflicts finally became a continental struggle by 1941, and that the entire period from 1914–45 constitutes, in Churchill's words, ‘another Thirty Years War’. See pp. 3–47, and 296–301.

5. On the impact of this scare, caused by Ivone Kirkpatrick bringing back information from Berlin provided by a German military source, see Dilks, David (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 1938–1945 (London, 1971), pp. 130–132.Google Scholar But Andrew, Christopher, in Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1986), p. 582Google Scholar, plausibly suggests that the information may have been a German plant.

6. That is to say, the period of war-like peace which lasted from November 1938 to April 1940.

7. Pace the contrasting views of Simon Newman, in March 1939: The British Guarantee to Poland. A Study in the Continuity of Foreign Policy (the thesis being evident in the title), and Prazmowska, Anita, in Britain, Poland, and the Eastern Front, 1939 (Cambridge, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who, in the course of demonstrating Britain's inability to control Poland during 1939, tends to downplay the significance of the guarantee.

8. See Ciano's Diary, 1939–43 (London, 1947), pp. 144–145, 152.Google Scholar It should be pointed out that David Irving has called the diaries ‘virtually useless for the purposes of history’, on the grounds that Ciano (and perhaps others) doctored them retrospectively. See Hitler’s War, 1939–42 (London, 1983), p. xx.Google Scholar

9. These were catalogued by the Foreign Office at length in 1941. See C 4216/610/G, ‘Summary of principal peace feelers September 1939–March 1941’, contained in the Public Record Office file PREM 4/100/8.

10. There are some indications that Hitler felt that Germany would not be able to digest the British empire, but he does not seem to have seen it as a serious fall-back position for the British government of 1940. See Irving, op. cit., pp. 135, 143–4, 153.

11. The two in question were Ronald Cross and Hugh Dalton. In early May 1940 Dalton published an article criticizing Cross in The War Weekly and entitled ‘Stop the leaks in our blockade!’ (Dalton papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science, Subject File 17, ‘The War, 1939–40’). He was soon to find that it was not so easy to balance military and political needs. See Pimlott, Ben (ed.), The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45 (London, 1986), pp. 64–65, 79.Google Scholar

12. Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919–39, first edition 1939, this citation from second edition, 1961 printing (London), p. 62.Google Scholar

13. Carr, op. cit., pp. 224–5. Carr's sentences have been slightly rearranged here for stylistic purposes, but the sense has not been affected.

14. For background, see Hinsley, F. H., Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (London, 1963).Google Scholar

15. Buchan, Alistair, in The End ofthe Post-war Era (London, 1974)Google Scholar, tried to draw a line under this period in the early 1970s, but the resurgence of the cold war in 1979 demonstrated the risks of rushing to judgement.

16. The distinction between pacifism and pacificism is taken from Martin Ceadel (and beyond him, A. J. P. Taylor). See Ceadel's, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford, 1987).Google Scholar

17. Banks, Michael, ‘The Evolution of International Relations Theory’, p. 8, in his edited work, Conflict in World Society: A New Perspective on International Relations (Brighton, 1984).Google Scholar

18. Perhaps strictly speaking the adjectives here should be ‘social democratic’ or ‘compensatory liberal’ rather than ‘liberal’ tout court, given the objections of some neo-liberals like Margaret Thatcher to notions of safety-nets or redistribution whether between states or within one. See McKinlay, R. D. and Little, R., Global Problems and World Order (London, 1986), especially pp. 24–53.Google Scholar

19. The term ‘defencism’ is also Martin Ceadel's. See note 16.

20. Carr, op. cit., pp. 222–3.