Power Politics and Appeasement: Political Realism in British International Thought,c. 1935–1955 1

Realism and the ‘Realist Style’

The discussion of political realism requires some preliminary clearing of ground, not least because this article deals with a period prior to the development of a systematic—and later a ‘scientific’—theory of ‘realism’ that occurred in the United States in the 1950s (see Molloy 2003). ⁵ A realist theory, in the sense of an approach to the study of International Relations that aims at being ‘explanatory and predictive’ (Copeland 2003, 427), did not exist in Britain in the late 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s. This does not mean, however, that the term ‘realism’—and the rhetorical style that went with it—cannot be located in the political discourse of the time. Both, I argue in what follows, entered into British debates over International Relations in the mid-1930s, but the meaning of ‘realism’ was contested and the ‘realist style’ was deployed to defend a range of different approaches.

In International Relations, ‘realism’ is usually thought of as a theory or a ‘paradigm’, sometimes as a broader ‘set of beliefs’ (Rosenthal 1991, xviii), but only rarely is it considered as a rhetorical style. Yet the power of ‘realism’, as Robert Hariman has argued (1995), depends in part upon the power of its supposedly anti-rhetorical rhetoric. Those employing the realist style dispense with ‘superficial attractions and ornaments’ (Hariman 1995, 13) and purport to offer an ‘objective’ presentation of the ‘realities’ of the world, making a play of eschewing the sophistry and affectation of alternative rhetorical forms. ⁶ For Hariman, Machiavelli provides the classic example of the use of this style. In the dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici with which The Prince opens, the Florentine claimed that he had:

For Hariman, this ‘simplicity and candour are means for amplifying both the importance of his subject and the extent of his expertise, and it follows that he can best establish his authority by shunning affectation’. In presenting only the objective ‘facts’—not partisan opinions or personal aspirations—the ‘realist’ can, like Machiavelli, disguise ‘the motive of writing for advantage’ (Hariman 1995, 18). ⁷

The success of the realist style is palpable; indeed, one commentator has argued, in the modern era it has come to dominate both academic and practical political discourse, especially in International Relations (Elshtain 1992, 103). It can, of course, be employed to promote a range of policies and positions; after all, as R. N. Berki points out, ‘other things being equal, it is always “good” to be realistic’ (1981, 3). The purpose of this article, however, is to identify those who, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, most consistently called themselves ‘realists’ and employed the ‘realist style’, as well as the doctrines they sought to defend. In other words, it aims to sketch the ‘conventionally recognisable meanings’ (Skinner 1988, 64) of ‘realism’ at that time. In so far as it is possible, I have sought to treat the thinkers and politicians discussed on their own terms. Those who called themselves ‘realists’ or employed the realist style are not excluded if they do not fit what present-day theorists of IR think realists ought to think.

What follows is divided into four parts. The first sketches British international thought in the years immediately before and after the First World War. The second examines how the ‘realist’ moniker and the realist style were adopted by Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and E. H. Carr, amongst others, in defence of appeasement. The article then addresses how their ‘realism’ was perceived by their antebellum and wartime critics, and how the term came to be associated too with the diplomacy of the dictators. The fourth part considers the treatment of ‘realism’ by scholars and politicians in the decade after the Second World War. The conclusion offers a reassessment of the reasons why British thinkers and practitioners rejected ‘realism’, as Haslam and Mearsheimer would have it, after Carr.

Idealism without ‘Realism’

British international thought in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras has only recently begun to be examined. What has rapidly become clear, however, is that it cannot be understood in terms of the categories or doctrines that have been prevalent in International Relations since the 1950s. Thinkers and practitioners of this earlier period described themselves and their intellectual opponents not as ‘realists’ or ‘idealists’ but rather employed a range of different terms: nationalist, internationalist, liberal, imperialist, jingoist, radical, pacifist, militarist and so on. The label ‘realist’ was very rarely employed, either approvingly or disapprovingly, in British discourse.

Internationalist ideas dominated British international thought from the late 19^th century until well into the 1920s. What constituted ‘internationalism’, however, varied considerably. Until the 1890s, Casper Sylvest has argued, ‘it carried a variety of connotations stretching from transnational relations of almost any kind to liberal variants of imperialism’, but rarely did it imply cosmopolitanism, at least in the sense of a project for world government (Sylvest 2005, 265–266). In the two decades before the First World War, internationalist arguments took two main forms, termed ‘moral’ and ‘institutional’ by Sylvest. The first focused on the creation of a ‘new international consciousness’ that would drive the reform of the relations between states and drew upon a rich tradition of thought stretching back to Cobden, Bright, Gladstone and Mill (ibid., 266–267). Institutional internationalists, on the other hand, took ‘a more pessimistic (but not fatalistic) view of human nature’ and aimed ‘at devising political institutions that can induce or … force people to act in ways deemed morally defensible’ (ibid., 268). By 1914, this latter argument had become the more accepted, serving to inform, as it did, the architects of the League of Nations.

With these internationalist arguments, espoused in a variety of forms by both Liberals and Radicals, went a series of ‘demands for autarky, Imperial unity and renovation of national and Imperial defences’ (Cowling 1975, 6). These came both from Conservative isolationists like Lord Salisbury and from Liberal Unionist ‘new imperialists’ such as Joseph Chamberlain who had left the Liberal party to ally with the Conservatives during the crisis over Irish Home Rule in 1886. Their arguments were informed by notions of race and commercial pragmatism, as in the case of Salisbury and his followers (Bentley 2001, 220–250), and by geopolitical and strategic thought, notably that of Halford Mackinder (see Haslam 2002, 173–176). They were expressed, moreover, in language that ranged from the matter-of-fact—from Salisbury, for instance, who baulked at ‘quasi-sentimental language’ about empire (Bentley 2001, 227)—to the bombastic, as the ‘new imperialist’ Leo Amery demonstrated in 1906:

Neither the advocates nor the critics of any of these ideas called them ‘realism’. Some Radicals, however, did employ the word ‘Machiavellianism’ to describe them, which they saw as an aping of German realpolitik. ⁸ For J. A. Hobson, this doctrine encapsulated all he deplored in the conduct of contemporary international relations. He thought it a product of imperialism, ‘with its natural supports, militarism, oligarchy, bureaucracy, protection, concentration of capital and violent trade fluctuations’ (Hobson 1965 [1902], 360). The ‘scramble’ for Africa in the 1890s had produced ‘for popular consumption’:

This concept of ‘Machiavellianism’ was taken up—and modified—by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in his European Anarchy (1916). Although the doctrine had been ‘given a new lease’ by the ‘spirit of Bismarck’, he argued, its roots went far deeper, stretching back to the creation of the sovereign state (Dickinson 1916, 40, 49). For Dickinson, ‘Machiavellianism’ was ‘the translation into idea of the fact of international anarchy’ (ibid., 40). It was not a creed of a particular cabal, as it was for Hobson; rather it offered the sole guide to the conduct of international relations in a state of anarchy.

The tone and the terms of debate in the aftermath of the First World War were set by these Radical critics. As A. J. P. Taylor observed, the ‘Dissenters’, as he called them, ‘utterly discredited “the system of Versailles” and, with it, all traditional diplomacy—“power politics” as the contemporary term of abuse had it’ (Taylor 1985, 169). The garnering of public support rested upon a parade of ‘idealism’—but its counterpoint remained ‘Machiavellianism’ (see, for example, Stawell 1929, 225), not ‘realism’. There is slight evidence of a shift towards the idea of a ‘realist–idealist’ opposition in the veteran anti-imperialist E. D. Morel's claim that his Union of Democratic Control had ‘never compromised with realities’ (Morel 1924, 10), but it was not until the mid-1930s that the ‘realism’ can be located in the vocabulary of British international thought.

Realism Emergent

In 1934 Harold Nicolson observed a new tendency ‘to react against the unctuous inertia, the flood-lit self-righteousness, the timid imprecision, the appalling amateurishness of democratic diplomacy, in favour of the more efficient and professional methods of the old’ (Nicolson 1934, 40). For Alfred Zimmern, it was the furore that met the publication of the Hoare-Laval pact—the Anglo-French plan to recognise Mussolini's ill-gotten gains in Abyssinia—that exposed latent divisions and revealed a new political terminology:

During the course of 1936, the word ‘realism’ became associated with those who believed that the League was largely incapable of functioning as an effective guarantor of peace and international security—with those, in other words, who believed that the peace of Europe might be secured by alternative methods. In the aftermath of the Abyssinian crisis, one historian has argued, ‘the terms “realism” and “appeasement” were practically synonymous … and the leaders of the National Government took special pride in their claim to be realists’ (N. Thompson 1971, 29–30).

The emergence of this new political language of ‘realism’ did take time. Throughout 1936, the realist rhetorical style could still be employed in the defence of a policy of qualified support for the principles, and sometimes even the institutions, of the League. Indeed, some of the clearest examples of the style come from Anthony Eden, then the minister responsible for League Affairs in Baldwin's cabinet. In the summer of 1936, Eden explained the government's attitude to the League thus: ‘the very fact that the League finds its authority weakened places an obligation upon all its members to examine recent events and to attempt to remedy in a spirit of candid realism the defects which those events have laid bare’ (Eden 1939, 122). In November, he reminded an audience that ‘one cannot conduct foreign affairs as one would, but only as one can’ and outlined the ‘fundamental realities of the present international situation’. One of those ‘realities’, Eden was careful to insist, was that ‘the principles for which the League stands are the best yet devised for the regulation of world affairs’ (ibid., 152).

At the end of 1936, Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister, decided that the worsening international situation needed to be addressed with greater ‘frankness’, believing that ‘one of the weaknesses of a democracy … is that until it is right up against [a crisis] it will never face the truth’ (quoted in Williamson 1999, 310). His aim was to ‘puncture the basic delusion of public opinion … that dictatorships might respond to the same sentiments as democracies’ (Williamson 1999, 320). The language he began to use was markedly different from before: from a ‘keystone of British policy’ the League became ‘a pawn in the struggle for national power and domination’ (quoted in Williamson 1999, 311, 320). With Neville Chamberlain's succession to the premiership in June 1937 came an even more dramatic shift in the government's foreign policy and the language in which it was presented. In the Commons and elsewhere, supporters of ‘collective security’ were met with accusations that they were ‘living in an unreal world’ (Chamberlain 1939, 61). Chamberlain missed no opportunity to affirm that he and his supporters, in stark contrast to his critics, were ‘practical people’ (ibid., 34).

Like Baldwin before him, Chamberlain sought to impress the public with his honesty and to educate them with a purportedly realistic account of the ‘facts’. Indeed, he was insistent that it was ‘necessary to face facts however unpalatable those facts may be’ (ibid., 183). He made a great play of his openness: ‘at the last Election’, he stated after Eden's resignation from the cabinet in February 1938, ‘it was still possible to hope that the League might afford collective security. I believed it myself. I do not believe it now’ (ibid., 100). The League was ‘mutilated; it is halt and maimed’ (ibid., 114–115). His ire was most often reserved, however, for his political opponents, especially their ‘shams and pretences which everyone sees through’ (ibid., 101). To emphasise his ‘empirical’ approach, he portrayed them as ‘the worst kind of diehards’, for, as he put it, ‘they keep repeating clichés and phrases and tags which once may have had significance but have none today’ (ibid., 100).

As The Times editorial declared in March 1939, Chamberlain was not ‘the type of man to ingratiate himself with the sentimentalists by any parade of idealism’ (6 March 1939, 15). ⁹ His robust approach met with some acclaim. The political theorist Ernest Barker thought the prime minister's speeches had rendered a ‘great psychological service’. Britain has been shaken, he argued, from that ‘easy idealism which, in the view of those who are not our friends, is just a Machiavellian mantle under which we conceal, perhaps from ourselves, our interested designs’. But Barker went on to observe that though Chamberlain adopted a realist mode of speech, his policy of appeasement meant that he could not easily be labelled ‘realist’. It is, he wrote, ‘something of a paradox that the man who is the symbol of an ideal abroad (the common ideal of the masses of every country) [i.e. peace] should also be regarded as the symbol of realism, hard realism, at home’ (The Times, 6 March 1939, 15).

Statements of ‘facts’ or ‘realities’ were commonplace in Chamberlain's speeches, but Barker recognised that they did not necessarily indicate that the prime minister was a thorough-going ‘Machiavellian’. Even if the familiar accusations of credulousness and naïvety levelled at Chamberlain since 1939 are set aside, it is difficult not to see much of his international thought as distinctly ‘un-realist’ as we would now understand the term. Chamberlain had a horror of war that led him to a position far removed from that of most ‘dispositional’ and ‘theoretical’ realists: ‘in war’, he declared, ‘whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers’ (Chamberlain 1939, 238). No tragedian, he even evinced the belief that war need not be a permanent feature of international relations. ‘If you want to secure a peace which can be relied upon to last’, he argued in April 1938, ‘you have got to find out what are the causes of war and remove them’ (ibid., 172). Elements of moral cosmopolitanism may also be located: Britons cannot ‘abrogate’, he declared, ‘our moral responsibilities to our own people or to humanity in general’ (ibid., 113–114).

As Richard Crossman and many later writers have argued, a similar admixture of ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ may be found in Carr's Twenty Years’ Crisis (Crossman 1958, 93). In this notoriously complex work, as Charles Jones has shown, Carr employed a range of rhetorical devices. A series of dichotomies—between determinism and free will, theory and practice, for instance—served to highlight the differences between ‘realism’ and ‘utopianism’ (Jones 1998, 54). Anthropocentric metaphors reinforced Carr's dialectical reasoning: thus ‘utopianism’ was infantile; ‘realism’, senile; the two combined representing ‘maturity’ (Jones 1998, 55).

It is also possible to detect, in the structure of the book, the influence of Carr's classical education. The Twenty Years’ Crisis is split into five parts (six if one includes the preface) as the Roman oratorical model, described by Cicero and Quintilian, dictates. The preface provides the exordium, designed to gain the reader's sympathy. Chapter One, on the ‘beginnings of a science’, is a narratio, which should be a ‘persuasive exposition of that which either has been done, or is supposed to have been done’ (Quintilian 1921, IV, 61). The next section ought to be, if the model is followed, the ‘division’ or ‘partition’, in which one should set out ‘what matters are agreed upon and what are contested’ (Cicero 1949, I, 123). Chapters Two to Six seem to fit this description: here Carr lays out the alternative positions of ‘utopianism’ and ‘realism’. If the Roman model is followed, these chapters should clarify differences rather than state a final conclusion. What comes next is a confirmatio, where proof should be offered to support the foregoing argument. In the book, Part Three, with its wealth of historical evidence, appears to serve this function, while Part Four—‘Law and Change’—furnishes the refutatio, which should ‘impair, disprove, or weaken’ (Cicero 1949, I, 123) the opponent's arguments. Chapter Fourteen, the conclusion, offers the conquestio, summing up the case and, again, directly appealing to the audience for sympathy (Cicero 1949, I, 147).

It is, of course, impossible to prove that Carr consciously imitated this Roman rhetorical taxis, but this reading of the text does accord with the interpretations of Booth (1991), Howe (1994), Jones (1998), Dunne (2000) and others who argue that ‘the realist critique’ (Chapter 5) should not be seen as a final statement of his position. For them, this account of realism is merely a staging post on the way to a final synthesis of ‘utopianism’ and ‘realism’ in the conclusion. If indeed this chapter may be seen as being located within the ‘division’ or ‘partition’, further weight may be lent to this interpretation—the final statement ought to come, according to the model, not in that section, but in the concluding, brief, exordium, where Carr outlines the ‘prospects for a new international order’ (Carr 1939a, 287–308).

The terminology—as opposed to the structure—of the Twenty Years’ Crisis had more immediate origins. Like Barker, Carr was sympathetic to Chamberlain's policy of appeasement (Wight, The Observer, 21 July 1946, 3) and studied the style in which it was presented as much as the content. In ‘Mr Chamberlain's Struggle: The Realistic Quest for Peace’, he praised the manner in which the prime minister had sought to ‘break through the forest of words and phrases in which British policy has become enveloped and obscured’. Chamberlain, Carr wrote, had ‘destroyed many illusions and incurred many enmities’ (Carr 1939b, 322), but the government had ‘perceived more clearly’ than its critics the international realities and pursued ‘a consistent policy of conciliation and concession … more in accordance with traditional British policy’ (Carr 1939c, 166–167).

Carr's account of ‘realism’ in the Twenty Years’ Crisis derived much—but by no means all—from Chamberlain's presentation of appeasement. To illustrate the realist's aversion to the conduct of policy on the basis of abstract theory, and the compatibility of realism with the political right, Carr quoted a substantial passage from the prime minister's collected speeches, The Struggle for Peace (Carr 1939a, 27). Appeasement was described—in a footnote near the close of the first chapter that was excised from the second edition (see Wight, The Observer, 21 July 1946, 3)— as a ‘reaction of realism against utopianism’. The first substantive account of ‘realism’ runs:

Echoes of Chamberlain's language abound, but Carr was not an unalloyed enthusiast for Chamberlainite realism. ‘Conservative realism’, he argued in a review of Butterfield's Statecraft of Machiavelli, wore ‘an old-fashioned look in an age of dialectical materialism’ (Carr 1940, 868).

Carr favoured instead—though not fully—a ‘modern realism’ that incorporated the ‘eighteenth century belief in progress’ as well as the insights of Hegel and Marx. It yielded, Carr wrote, a ‘dynamic and relativist’ approach (Carr 1939a, 83–84). ‘Modern realism’ could reveal more than just empirical facts, as Chamberlain's version claimed to do; it could ‘reveal, not merely the determinist aspects of the historical process, but [also] the relative and pragmatic character of thought itself’ (ibid., 87). More powerful than conservative realism, it could ‘bring down the whole cardboard structure of post-War utopian thought by exposing the hollowness of the material out of which it was built’ (ibid., 96). Two versions of ‘realism’ may be found in the first half of The Twenty Years’ Crisis: the conservative, practical, prudential ‘realism’ of the national government, and the radical, historicist, theoretical ‘realism’ of ‘The Realist Critique’.

Realism Assailed

As the Second World War drew closer, Chamberlain's purported ‘realism’ became the object of satire. In one contemporary cartoon David Low lampooned what he saw as the muddled logic of the prime minister's diplomacy, his anti-hero Colonel Blimp summing up the problem in his characteristically pithy style:

This apparent gap between ‘realism’ and reality was not lost on other observers. In his Survey of International Affairs, Arnold Toynbee castigated a ‘Governing Class’ that claimed to be realists, but which was actually ‘losing sight of … political realities’. Keeping these in view, he added, was the ‘true touchstone of political “realism”’, and that meant ‘almost the only indubitable political “realist” of the time was Mr Winston Churchill’ (Toynbee 1938, 24). R. W. Seton-Watson also re-appropriated elements of the realist style, but combined them with a clear moral vision. Principle demanded that dictators be confronted, not conciliated, he argued, but to do this the British must clear ‘our minds of the claptrap, fallacies and illusions that are so rampant in our midst’ (Seton-Watson 1938, 39). Those ‘who describe “déintéressement” as “realism”’, he believed, ‘are simply inventing a synonym for “funk”’ (ibid., 433).

Neither Toynbee nor Seton-Watson wished to challenge what they thought the self-evident desirability of a grasp of the ‘facts’. Their objections were to other aspects of Chamberlain's ‘realism’, especially his willingness to renege, as they saw it, on Britain's obligations to the League and ignore ‘certain broad and enduring principles of policy’ that had served Britain well in the past (Seton-Watson 1938, 6), For Anthony Eden, now out of government, the problem was more deep-seated:

The fatal flaw in Chamberlain's realism, Eden argued, was its intrinsic determinism: convinced that he had to accept the facts he could not change, he had abdicated responsibility for those that he could.

With the outbreak of war, such reasoned arguments were overtaken by cruder attacks on Chamberlain's ‘realism’. The pseudonymous authors of Guilty Men (1940), for instance, ridiculed his version of ‘common sense’, portraying him as an egomaniacal fantasist with no sense of the ‘real world’ (‘Cato’ 1998 [1940], 43). The Munich agreement, they argued, had been an ‘act of faith’ perpetrated by a prime minister who believed that a ‘change of heart’ could be brought about in Hitler by the ‘power of a glance from his magnetic eye’ (ibid., 95). Chamberlain, they asserted, echoing the criticisms of post-war realists like Morgenthau (Morgenthau 1993, 6), had little grasp of ‘human nature’. Most damningly of all, they thought him a prisoner of his own illusions, blind to anything he did not wish to see, not least the might of Hitler's military machine and his aggressive intentions.

The disasters of 1940 that swept Chamberlain from office, however, turned attention from his ‘realism’ to the ‘power politics’ of the enemy. The florid, bombastic, moralistic, and distinctly un-realist rhetoric of Winston Churchill concentrated minds on the iniquities of the Nazis rather than the failings of the previous government (see Berlin 1980). His tribute to Chamberlain, who died in November of that year, was characteristic of his style and illustrative of the shift in focus:

In this new atmosphere, the émigré Georg Schwarzenberger called upon British scholars to look beyond the ‘battles between realists and idealists in the field of international relations’ and to see the virtues of a ‘primarily empirical approach’. This approach meant both an intellectual engagement with ‘power politics’ and the recognition, as he put it, that ‘no statesmen more ruthlessly apply these principles to inter-State affairs than the dictators’. In the 1930s, he argued, it was they who had thrown ‘overboard even that minimum of decency, Christian traditions and legal conventions that checked in the past the unlimited play of ruse and force between Leviathans’. It was, however, a ‘mistake’ to make the ‘perverse assumption that international relations must be subject to the rule of force and cannot be organised in a community spirit and founded in the rule of law’ (Schwarzenberger 1941, 5).

Despite Schwarzenberger's plea, many persisted in attacking the ‘realists’ and in running ‘realism’ and ‘power politics’ together. Realism, George Orwell observed, ‘used to be called dishonesty’, but had now become ‘part of the general political atmosphere of our time’. He lambasted the ‘clumsy way’ in which Chamberlain had played ‘the game of Machiavelli, of “political realism”’ during the pre-war years, noting the ‘cynical abandonment of one ally after another, the imbecile optimism of the Tory press, the flat refusal to believe that the Dictators meant war’ (Orwell 2001a, 208). He feared that, despite all that had happened, realism continued to appeal to politicians and pundits alike, for ‘the mere fact that it throws ordinary decency overboard will be accepted as part of its grown-upness and consequently of its efficacy’ (Orwell 2001b, 224). Yet the record of realism, Orwell had come to believe by 1944, was hardly one of success:

‘If there is a way’, Orwell wrote, ‘out of the moral pig-sty that we are living in, the first step towards it is probably to grasp that “realism” does not pay, and that to sell your friends and sit rubbing your hands while they are destroyed is not the last word in political wisdom’ (ibid., 209).

From the political right, the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield had reached the same conclusion. Before the war, he had favoured appeasement, believing that Britain has lacked the power and the will to act against Hitler. ‘A country relatively disarmed’, he tried to explain later, ‘must not expect its diplomacy to be effective’ (Butterfield 1942, 215). The war, however, had made Butterfield deeply critical of the methods and assumptions of ‘power politics’. As he observed in 1940: ‘The only true portrait of Machiavellism is a Napoleon Bonaparte. And he is the clearest commentary on the system’ (Butterfield 1960 [1940], 120). Political virtuosity was not enough; the usurper could apply the lessons of the Florentine's realist ‘science of politics’ and for a while it might work, but success at the outset would eventually culminate in abject failure. Machiavelli's politics were for Butterfield too ‘rigid’, ‘inflexible’ and ‘doctrinaire’ (ibid., 115). The dictators’ defeat was inevitable, brought upon them by the very methods that had brought them to power.

Others were less sure. Harold Laski, for one, displayed a tortured and ambiguous attitude to realism and ‘power politics’. At Munich, he wrote in 1941, Chamberlain had ‘wrecked collective security’, abandoned moral and legal obligations and sought to play ‘the historic game of power politics’ with disastrous effects (Laski 1941, 33). Yet at the same time he considered that the British and French had ‘shuffled and evaded realism in negotiation’ and missed their opportunity to play their ‘main trump card—Germany's fear of a war on two fronts’ (ibid., 30). They had, he suggested somewhat paradoxically, employed power politics with insufficient realism. Britain and France had missed the ‘simple fact that the Fascist leaders were outlaws, not statesmen’ (ibid., 69) and failed to appreciate that ‘you can only deal with an outlaw by force; as he seeks to break your will, so you must seek to break his … The defeat must be decisive; his collapse must be an abject one’ (ibid., 78). This blend of moralism and realism was uncomfortable, but it prefigured arguments to come.

Realism Rejected?

Three American realist classics were published during the war: Nicholas Spykman's America's Strategy in World Politics (1942), Walter Lippman's US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943) and Reinhold Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944). The years that followed brought forth Hans Morgenthau's triptych Scientific Man versus Power Politics (1965 [1946]), Politics among Nations (1956 [1948]) and In Defense of the National Interest (1951), as well as George Kennan's American Diplomacy (1950). All of these works were self-consciously realist in style; they emphasised, to use Lippmann's words, the ‘cold calculation’ required to ‘organize and regulate the politics of power’ (Lippmann 1943, 101). Their authors were unflattering about human nature, sceptical about historical progress and hostile to universalistic ethics—although often they overstated these positions for rhetorical effect and were more moderate in their policy recommendations (see Craig 2003). They were also informed by a particular reading of appeasement, which they regarded not as ‘realism’, but rather as a ‘corrupted policy of compromise’ wholly incapable of dealing with Nazi ‘imperialism’ (Morgenthau 1956 [1948], 64).

Some British thinkers—John Wheeler-Bennett, Lewis Namier and Winston Churchill himself—drew some similar conclusions. These men led the assault upon ‘appeasement’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s, amplifying the earlier arguments of ‘Cato’, Laski and the other wartime critics. They ridiculed the claim of the ‘French and British appeasers’ to have practised ‘moral and realistic statesmanship’ (Namier 1948, xi). They promoted the view that the Second World War had been, to use Churchill's phrase, ‘the Unnecessary War’ (Churchill 1951, x). Like the American realists, they argued that if Britain had followed her supposedly traditional policy of maintaining the continental balance of power, Hitler would have been deterred from his bid for European hegemony (Wheeler-Bennett 1948, 7–8). At the same time, however, they continued to be critical of those who professed to be ‘realists’.

A favourite target for the post-war critics was Chamberlain's oft-professed clearsightedness in the face of ‘unpalatable’ facts (Chamberlain 1939, 183). Wheeler-Bennett's Munich was presented as a ‘case-history in the disease of political myopia which afflicted the leaders … of the world in the years between the wars’, littered with references to Chamberlain's ‘blind confidence in his political intuition’ and his occlusion in the face of ‘the signs and portents about him’ (Wheeler-Bennett 1948, 437, 181, 320). Lewis Namier was keen too to draw contrasts between those with a ‘clear-sighted’ view of Nazi intentions and capabilities and those Chamber-lainites mired in the ‘mists of wishful thinking’ (Namier 1948, 330). His pre-war heroes, like Robert Coulondre, French ambassador to Moscow (1936–1938) and Berlin (1938–1939), were praised for having ‘no illusions’ as to the nature of dictatorship, whilst the villains, especially Chamberlain, were castigated for their ‘rigid, narrow, doctrinaire self-certainty’ (Namier 1952, 169 and 1950, 166).

Though they mocked Chamberlain's ‘realism’, most of his British critics—unlike the Americans—did not assume the title ‘realist’ for themselves. The exception was Namier. In 1940 he had followed Carr—whose Twenty Years’ Crisis he called that ‘brilliant book’—in attacking the supporters of the League for their ‘faith, facile optimism and comfortable illusions of mid-nineteenth century “utilitarian” believers in democracy’ (Namier 1942, 28). Namier alone amongst academic commentators used ‘realist’ as a term of praise—in his review of Coulondre's De Staline à Hitler, for instance, entitled ‘Memoirs of a Realist’ (Namier 1952, 168–181). Elsewhere he declared his admiration for the ‘shrewd realist perception’ of the Soviets and condemned Herman Göring's attempt to produce, in the late 1930s, ‘a counterfeit of Conservatism, devoid of realism, dignity or tradition’ (Namier 1948, 145, 141). In neither Wheeler-Bennett's Munich nor Churchill's Gathering Storm is it possible to find comparable statements. Indeed, what is marked about these works is their moralistic tone.

In Munich, Wheeler-Bennett blended high sentiment with elements of what his American contemporaries called ‘realism’. The ‘far-sighted and practical’ were praised, the ‘imperfections of human nature’ and the ‘tragic ironies’ of history lamented (Wheeler-Bennett 1948, 29, 5–6). This bitter melancholic pill, however, was sweetened by a dose of high-flown moralism:

This is far from Machiavellian in its rhetorical style. Churchill's rhetoric, in the Gathering Storm as in his wartime speeches, was similar: frank statements of ‘facts’ jostled with ‘righteous convictions’ and ‘wicked’ foes (Churchill 1951, 21, xiv). Churchill distanced himself from the ‘realism’ of his predecessor in substance too, warning that ‘the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger’ and that ‘the middle course adopted from desires of safety and a quiet life may be found to lead directly to the bull's-eye of disaster’ (ibid., 32).

This rejection of the realist moniker and the realist style is significant. Whilst the American Churchillians—Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson among them ¹⁰ — were relatively content with the use of ‘realism’ to describe their position, British scholars spurned the label. The continued association with appeasement in memoirs, in contemporary histories and probably in the mind of the interested, reading public, militated against the use of the term and the style that went with it. Despite the best efforts of Carr, who expunged from the second edition of his Twenty Years’ Crisis sentences that linked realism and appeasement, other surviving ‘appeasers’ and their critics did much to keep the association alive. In Nine Troubled Years (1954), Viscount Templewood (Samuel Hoare) reprised Chamberlain's earlier criticisms of Eden in markedly realist terms, observing his ‘sensitive temperament’ and contrasting it with Chamberlain's ‘clear-cut mind and concrete outlook’, pragmatism, and belief that ‘piecemeal modification’ was preferable to statements of ‘general principles’ (Templewood 1954, 257, 276).

In the post-war years, moreover, realism conjured in British minds images of darker forms of international politics than appeasement. Martin Wight, echoing Friedrich Hayek (see Hayek 1944, 135–163), continued to link ‘realism’ to appeasement and the methods of the dictators. In his lectures at the London School of Economics, he described Carr's ‘realism’ as ‘the theology of appeasement (in which conciliation was a key-word)’ (Wight 1952–1953, 19d). In Power Politics, he observed:

While Wight acknowledged that ‘it would be foolish to assume that international relations are governed exclusively by force’, he observed that in ‘modern history’ they have been ‘always inexorably approximating towards “power politics” in the immoral sense’ (ibid., 11). The apotheosis of this tendency, he made clear, came in the 1930s and 1940s. In an essay on Nazi Germany, Wight recalled the ‘terrible combination of realism and fanaticism’ that was to be found in Hitler. The Führer, he observed, had made ‘power politics the object of his study; he understood the theory of it; and he left dicta thereon as penetrating and enduring as Machiavelli's’ (Wight 1952, 317). Though ‘the periphery of his lens was always liable to be fogged by nonsense’ and his ‘discernment … hampered by his creed and temperament’, Hitler had succeeded in producing a ‘landmark in political philosophy’, Mein Kampf, ‘at the point where the justification of authority was superseded by the assertion of power’ (ibid., 319–320).

This identification of realism with the diplomacy of the dictators led some British scholars to an obvious conclusion. For the historian Charles Webster, Britain's principled pragmatism, its ‘traditional’ policy of defending ‘constitutionalism’ whilst upholding the European balance of power, had won out (see Hall (forthcoming)). And ‘nothing’, G. L. Arnold put it in 1949, was ‘clearer than that Realpolitik has failed’ (1949, 415). Wight, like Orwell and Butterfield, took heart from this failure: pure realism, he concluded, for all its seductive appeal and promises of victory, brought only ephemeral, pyrrhic success. In Power Politics, he looked to ‘a richer conception of politics, which made power an instrument and not an end, and subordinated national interest to public justice’. This was the kind of politics practised by William Gladstone or Franklin Roosevelt, ‘who had a moral ascendancy and a power over the public opinion of the world, evoking a trust and loyalty far beyond his own country’. ‘Moral insight and political judgement’, he implied, would triumph, but it required a redefined ‘realism’, one that meant the ‘absence of optimism’, not an absence of morality (Wight 1946, 65–66). In such a form, Wight concluded, ‘realism can be a very good thing: it all depends on whether it means the abandonment of high ideals or of foolish expectations’ (ibid., 68).

Conclusion

Under suspicion in academic circles, realism nevertheless crept back into British political discourse with the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s. The post-war Labour government, Cornelia Navari has shown, was not averse to couching its foreign policy in realist language (Navari 1996, 132–133). As Clement Attlee declared, in an address to the party conference in 1945, ‘we are all in this movement idealists, but we are realists too’. ‘Let us be realists about Japan and Germany’, he went on, ‘we cannot afford to give these people another opportunity of destroying civilisation’ (Attlee 1947, 140–141). The young Denis Healey, then international secretary of the party, was particularly adept at the use of realist rhetoric (Navari 1996, 132). Some explanation for the tone and content of these works may be found, as Navari had noted, in Healey's recollection that he had been ‘much influenced by the American realists like Hans Morgenthau and William Fox, and by Christian pessimists like Reinhold Niebuhr and Herbert Butterfield’ (Healey 1989, 99). It is significant that only one of these—the last—was British.

It is difficult to assess whether the return of the realist style to political—as opposed to academic—discourse represented the wider acceptance of ideas that International Relations has since come to call ‘realist’. Some contemporaries did complain that, despite victory and the United Nations, the public mood was more pessimistic in the years after the Second World War than it had been before. Certain ‘utterly repugnant’ views, Gilbert Murray complained in 1948, had gained widespread currency: ‘moral ideals were out of place in politics; liberalism an out-dated luxury, collective security a will-o’-the-wisp; small nations militarily negligible and bound of necessity to obey their betters; and the politics of power the only reality’ (Murray 1948, 7). The only evidence Murray could offer for this contention, however, was the publication of Carr's Conditions of Peace (1942).

‘Realism’ found few British academic defenders until well into the 1950s, and even then it was left to incomers, like the Australian Hedley Bull, to assert those ‘truths of realism that each generation must learn afresh’ (quoted in Alderson and Hurrell 2000, 21). Many British thinkers appear to have agreed with Isaiah Berlin's observation that, alongside the common-sense understanding of the term, ‘realism’ had a ‘sinister’ sense. For him, it recalled Hegel's ‘unflinching vision of “reality”’ and the ‘more apocalyptic versions of this German creed’ (Berlin 1954, 774); for A. L. Rowse, the ‘empiricism carried beyond rhyme or reason’ that had led Carr to his endorsement of appeasement (Rowse 1961, 83, 113). That Carr had compounded his sin by advocating, during the war and immediately after, the appeasement of the Soviet Union, did not help his cause (Haslam 1999, 101–110; Jones 1998, 131).

The failure of ‘realism’ to attract an academic following in the decade after the Second World War had, this article has sought to show, more contingent causes than Carr and Haslam have suggested. Britain's diminished status in international politics, it has been argued, was less important than the adoption of the term ‘realism’ to describe the policy of appeasement and its subsequent association, in the British mind, with totalitarian diplomacy. To scholars in the immediate postwar years, ‘realism’ implied both lack of principle and failure—the failure of appeasement to provide security for Britain and the failure of the Nazis to win the war. This is not to say, of course, that the experience of the 1930s and 1940s did not impress upon British thinkers the importance of power in international politics; rather, it was evident to them that a via media between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ was required.