After having given the matter some thought, we are finally launching The Gaggle Book Club. Every week, we will recommend a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—we will upload a pdf version of it.
One need hardly add that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be one of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.
To kick off The Gaggle Book Club, we recommend E.H. Carr’s "The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations." Published in 1939, Carr’s work is a pithy, often sarcastic, critique of the interwar period’s idealistic approach to international diplomacy.
Carr was the founder of the modern “realist” school within the theory of international relations. He anticipated by several decades many of John Mearsheimer’s insights. Carr detested what he labeled “utopian” or “idealist” approaches to international relations. These approaches, fervently promoted by the liberals of that era, found expression in post-World War I projects such as the League of Nations or the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war.
Carr argued that idealism, with its emphasis on morality, international law and mutual cooperation among states, ignored the realities of power politics.
He took particular issue with the notion that collective security agreements or disarmament treaties could prevent war. International politics, according to him, was a competitive and anarchic blood-sport. He would have ridiculed any suggestion that there existed something called a “rules-based international order,” and would have taken delight in pointing out the dishonesty and hypocrisy of policymakers who would make such a suggestion.
Carr contrasted idealism with “realism,” an approach to international relations that emphasizes power and self-interest as the forces that drive the behavior of states. As he saw it, morality plays only a very minor role in how states comport themselves toward one another.
Written on the eve of World War II, Carr’s book takes many well-deserved potshots at the League of Nations. However, the League of Nations was low-hanging fruit. Most interesting was Carr’s defense of the policy of appeasement that successive British governments, particularly that of Neville Chamberlain, had pursued toward Nazi Germany in the years leading up to World War II.
Carr argued that an effective foreign policy must acknowledge the interests of all major powers, including those of revisionist states such as Nazi Germany. He believed that the Versailles Treaty had imposed unjust and unsustainable conditions on Germany, and had thus contributed to the rise of the Nazi movement. The book was published before the outbreak of World War II, and was thus written in the shadow of the 1938 Munich agreement, which had apparently successfully staved off war among the Great Powers.
During the Cold War, Carr came under frequent attack for his supposed lifelong habit of taking the side of powerful actors while dismissing the grievances of the weak and victimized. In other words, he supposedly loved winners and despised losers. For example, his mammoth history of the early years of the Soviet Union was very sympathetic to the Bolsheviks—who had prevailed over their enemies—and at the same time unconcerned about the plight of the victims of the Bolsheviks who had fallen by the wayside.
As the West became more and more obsessed with “Munich” and “appeasement,” seeing in every nationalist, anti-Western leader the traits of Hitler, and in every cautious Western politician the traits of Neville Chamberlain, Carr’s reputation went into decline.
However, "The Twenty Years’ Crisis" is today considered one of the seminal texts of realism, a dominant school in International Relations theory that focuses on power, national interest, and the inevitability of conflict.
