Introduction
History begins when men begin to think of the passages of time in terms not of natural processes … but a series of specific events in which men are consciously involved and which they can consciously influence … Man now seeks to understand, and to act on, not only his environment but himself.Footnote 1
The above passage from E. H. Carr’s What is History can be applied to modern International Relations (IR) theory. Casper Sylvest notes that the ‘history of international thought, broadly understood, is now a fast-growing field’.Footnote 2 IR’s historiographical turn has resulted in a conscious effort to revisit, revise, and deepen our understanding of IR theory and the history of international thought. This has resulted in a questioning of the discipline’s foundational myths, concepts, and categories.Footnote 3 It has also led to a veritable cottage industry challenging tired understandings of canonical, typically realist figures.Footnote 4 Potentially traced to Ashley’s attempt to create a wedge between classical and modern forms of realism,Footnote 5 the movement has sought to chart intellectual and epistemological linkages between classical theorists and contemporary critical theorists. This has involved a greater appreciation of the critique of modernity contained within the classical works; a greater recognition of the influence of Mannheim and the Frankfurt School on the classical works, especially with regard to the conditionality of knowledge; and a desire to point to the misreading of the classical realist works by modern realists.Footnote 6 Although undoubtedly the vast majority of work in this vein has focused on the iconic Hans J. Morgenthau, a significant number of scholars have turned their intellectual spades onto the fertile ground left by Britain’s equally iconic figure, E. H. Carr. Carr’s previously one-dimensional characterisation, in turn, has increasingly been destabilised.Footnote 7
As will be shown in the first section, recent advances in scholarship on Carr have sought to deepen our understanding of his work and his place in the IR discipline by: (i) undertaking a closer and more thorough reading of his most (in)famous work, The Twenty Years’ Crisis; and (ii) developing a broader appreciation of his work as a whole by situating The Twenty Years’ Crisis alongside his other pre- and postwar scholarship. The point of this article is not to challenge this development outright; nor do I wish to suggest that the broadening and deepening of our understanding of Carr is inaccurate. Instead, I use the space below to suggest that the revisionist turn with regards to E. H. Carr is incomplete because it has hitherto overlooked a number of diplomatic histories of the twenty years’ crisis that he produced in the course of his long and productive career. Turning to these, and particularly focusing on the manner that they reflect the Primat der Außenpolitik tradition, I suggest that in his diplomatic histories we find a more conservative and traditional realism and a less critical realism.
Utilising an interpretivist framework that allows for an exploration of the dilemmas that influence a thinker’s traditions of thought, this article accordingly seeks to explore Carr’s evolution from a radical international political theorist into a conservative historian. Focusing on three works on Soviet affairs that he produced at the twilight of his career, the article explores the influence that Ranke’s ‘the primacy of foreign affairs’ tradition had on Carr, if indirectly and implicitly. Although they are traditional histories, which separate Carr from the North American realist tradition, and certainly lacking in critical theorising vis-à-vis his interwar work, it is argued that these works still have contemporary relevance for Carr-specific scholars and IR theory more broadly. In closing, the article reflects on how Carr’s final thoughts regarding the dénouement of the twenty years’ crisis may help us appreciate and understand this tragic figure.
I. Carr’s realism with adjectives
Carr revisionism has challenged realist orthodoxy. It is argued that realists oversimplify Carr’s work in two respects. First, realists undertake a one-dimensional reading of his most (in)famous work, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, which ignores the text’s subtleties and nuances.Footnote 8 Second, realists typically read The Twenty Years’ Crisis in isolation, failing to appreciate it in terms of the wider pre- and postwar literature that Carr produced.Footnote 9 In challenging convention, revisionists have more clearly delineated Carr’s realism with a number of qualifying adjectives.
Utopian realism can be traced to Ken Booth.Footnote 10 Calling Carr a ‘potential utopian realist’, Booth highlighted the positive and normative ideas Carr voiced regarding a more progressive postwar order.Footnote 11 Referring more widely to Carr’s corpus of work, Paul Howe likewise contended that while Carr accepted aspects of realism he was nevertheless ‘confident that time, along with healthy measures of utopianism, would bring about a more peaceful and just international order’.Footnote 12 More recent work by Daniel Kenealy and Konstantinos Kostagiannis, while never using the label, also touches upon these ideas. Charting the principal ideas animating Carr’s pre- and postwar work, they emphasise Carr’s concern with building a new order following the Second World War.Footnote 13 Applying this specifically to Carr’s writing on the state, Carr’s distinctive realism rested in the principle that power had to be directed toward a progressive goal.Footnote 14 Utopian realism reminds us of the way in which Carr’s work was future-orientated, concerned ultimately with a more progressive international order. Critical realism, in contrast, connects Carr’s work to contemporary critical theory. Andrew Linklater, as an example, sought to ‘release Carr from the grip of the Realists and to highlight certain affinities between his writings on the state and critical theories of international relations’.Footnote 15 Linklater’s central point was that Carr’s work was emancipatory given that he was concerned with transnational forms of community and citizenship.Footnote 16 Likewise, Milan Babík emphasises the influence of the Frankfurt School on Carr’s major texts, concluding that ‘the term “realism” simultaneously connoted for Carr many elements nowadays associated with critical theory’.Footnote 17 However, others stress Carr’s historical method and outlook. This can initially be traced to Cox’s emphasis on Carr’s historical materialism.Footnote 18 It is Randall Germain, however, who has made the most extensive case for the qualified historical realist label.Footnote 19 Focusing on The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Nationalism and After, The New Society and What is History, Germain points to Carr’s emphasis on historical change and his balance of determinism and voluntarism to argue that Carr’s ‘approach is “realist” in terms of its practical acceptance of the structural parameters of every life and historical in terms of his method’.Footnote 20
One may think that the growth of interest in Carr’s work has exhausted all that could be known about his work. Such a view would be erroneous. While no doubt accurate, the revisionist literature is currently incomplete. This is because it overlooks the work that Carr produced on Soviet foreign affairs in the twilight of his career. Although historical, and generally seen as relatively minor, they may have much to tell us about Carr’s political thought specifically and his thought toward IR more broadly. If it is true that we can only gain a deeper understanding of Carr’s thought as a whole by engaging with his oeuvre in its entirety, then the neglect of his historical work is an oversight in need of correction.
II. Traditions and dilemmas
To more clearly specify the problem: can we relate Carr’s pre- and postwar IR work, which has been depicted in more critical theoretical terms in the revisionist literature, with his more traditional histories of Soviet foreign affairs, which have often been marginalised in the revisionist literature (and indeed among realists)? More broadly, this is a question of how and why a scholar’s thought evolves over time. To address this question, it seems logical to turn to Bevirian interpretivism, outlined initially in The Logic of the History of Ideas and subsequently utilised to interpret inter alia international political thought.Footnote 21
In Logic, Mark Bevir outlined and defended an anti-foundationalist hermeneutic that called for intellectual historians to translate the ‘people of the past to us today’.Footnote 22 Studying the ideas of the past for Bevir meant recovering and reconstructing the meaning of said ideas.Footnote 23 Meaning is thus crucial for interpretivists because they argue that ‘people behave as they do because of their beliefs and theories about how the world works’.Footnote 24 An individual’s beliefs and theories of the world are not sui generis, however. This is because individuals cannot be isolated from society in any meaningful respect. Carr was aware of this notion. He made clear in What is History, ‘[that an individual’s] earliest ideas come … from others’.Footnote 25 To understand this logic, Bevirian interpretivists refer to traditions. Traditions are conceived of as a set of beliefs and understandings that are received by an individual through socialisation processes.Footnote 26 Traditions can be transmitted in a variety of ways, for example, through peers, parents, and forms of political discourse, including texts.Footnote 27 The idealised teacher-pupil relationship, although not necessarily formalised, is often used as a metaphor to explain traditions.Footnote 28 The pupil receives knowledge from their teacher and, in turn, transmits this knowledge to subsequent generations. The idealised teacher-pupil relationship, however, fails to capture how traditions mutate over time. As Bevir explains, ‘As beliefs pass from teacher to pupil, so the pupil modifies and extends the themes, or conceptual connections, that linked [their] beliefs.’Footnote 29 Accordingly, Bevirian interpretivists refer to situated agency: while traditions may initially condition an individual’s beliefs, because individuals have agency to interpret and reinterpret, traditions ultimately do not determine individual beliefs.Footnote 30 To flesh out this logic, Bevirian interpretivists refer to dilemmas. Dilemmas are conceived of as ‘authoritative understandings that put into question … existing webs of belief’.Footnote 31 In accepting new information as true, if said new information conflicts with an individual’s existing web of belief, an individual is compelled to reconsider their understandings of the world. In turn, an individual can ‘retrench, revise, or even reject some or all of [their] inherited knowledge’.Footnote 32 Importantly, individuals engage in this process innovatively and creatively. Carr and Gilbert Murray’s different responses to the Abyssinian crisis evidence this (Carr turned from liberal internationalism toward a realism infused with Marxism while Murray retrenched his liberal internationalist worldview).Footnote 33 In the subsequent sections of this article, traditions and dilemmas are employed to help us chart and understand Carr’s evolution from critic to traditionalist historian. To do so, it is first necessary to outline important traditions of thought that he inherited and the salient dilemmas he faced in the course of his career.
III. Traditions and dilemmas in the thought of E. H. Carr
Trying to unpack the traditions that influenced E. H. Carr is problematic, chiefly because he was exceedingly eclectic in his approach to political thought. Seán Molloy even calls him ‘magpie-like’ in this regard.Footnote 34 His major prewar work, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, was primarily a polemic undertaken to influence British political discourse with regard to Germany.Footnote 35 According to Carr, while ‘it was not exactly a Marxist work, [it] was strongly impregnated with Marxist ways of thinking, applied to international affairs’.Footnote 36 Conditions of Peace, in contrast, was what Carr referred to as his ‘sort of liberal Utopia’.Footnote 37 Although comparatively less analysis of Conditions has been undertaken, it would be reasonable to hypothesise that George Lloyd’s and Edward Wood’s (later Lord Halifax) The Great Opportunity influenced Carr’s more idealist prose.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, those who had a close working relationship with Carr recognise that he was very much influenced by the realist tradition.Footnote 39 Carr struggled with realism, however. His diary entry for 28 December 1938 records that he was ‘Still on realism. Still very odd.’Footnote 40 In turn, Carr’s interpretation of the realist tradition was innovative and creative. This is particularly true with regard The Twenty Years’ Crisis. It actually contained two realisms: a conservative, practical, and pragmatic realism versus a radical, theoretical, and critical realism.Footnote 41 Whereas the former, which was evident most clearly in the text’s second chapter, was influenced by the conservative realist tradition, the latter which was most prominent in the text’s fifth chapter, was influenced more readily by Marxism broadly and Mannheim’s Standortgebundenheit des Denkens more specifically.Footnote 42
The conservative realist tradition includes ideas known commonly as the Primat der Außenpolitik (the primacy of foreign affairs), which can be traced to Leopold von Ranke in terms of philosophy and Otto von Bismarck in terms of practice.Footnote 43 Although Ranke did not explicitly use the term – instead it was coined by Wilhelm Dilthey – the Primat der Außenpolitik is virtually synonymous with the Rankean worldview.Footnote 44 Ranke’s political theory is articulated most prominently in a number of articles he published in Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift, a journal he edited in the 1830s. Important here is ‘A dialogue on politics’, in which Ranke covers significant themes such as the organic state, self-preservation and security, sovereignty, and independence and political necessity.Footnote 45 Crucial here are the supremacy of security, the necessity of alliances, and the subversion of principles to expediency. Ranke saw state security as the first priority. The ‘supreme law of the state’ is to ‘organize all its internal resources for self-preservation’, he argued.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, despite the primacy of sovereignty and independence, Ranke concluded that when threats were great enough alliance formation was a necessity. Writing on the anti-Napoleonic alliance, he wrote: ‘[it was only] the huge danger of a newly risen power, which threatened independence everywhere, [which] finally created, in the face of annihilation as it were, a common defense’.Footnote 47 Lastly, for Ranke, what mattered in terms of international relations was not ideology or opinion but rather interest shaped by political necessity. In discussing the Austrian-Russian alliance and its dissolution, he concluded that there ‘is no trend of opinion, however dominant, which can break the force of political interests’.Footnote 48 Also important is Ranke’s ‘The great powers’, which traced the rise of Prussia under Frederick II, the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars.Footnote 49 Although historically dense, it is possible to draw out a major theme from this text: for Ranke, the internal development of the Prussian state was a product of the international relations it was situated within and subjected to.Footnote 50 This is what Brendan Simms and William Mulligan refer to as the descriptive aspect of the Primat der Außenpolitik, that is, the notion that a state’s internal development is a product of its external relations.Footnote 51 Or, as Theodor von Laue puts it, ‘Foreign affairs, then, were the supreme factor in political life.’Footnote 52 Indeed, in ‘The great powers” Ranke, quoting Heraclitus’ maxim that war is the father of all things, basically contends that to understand the development of the European states and the system they inhabited one has to first appreciate the wars of the period.Footnote 53
Carr was familiar with both Ranke and Bismarck. His 19 August 1938 diary entry records that he read Bismarck.Footnote 54 What is History indicates that he was equally aware of Ranke, particularly in terms of Rankean historiography.Footnote 55 Whether Carr was familiar with Ranke’s Primat der Außenpolitik is debatable. However, Carr was certainly familiar with Meinecke’s interwar work, which is evidenced by the fact that he cited it in The Twenty Years’ Crisis.Footnote 56 Meinecke, particularly prior to the Second World War, was in many respects the heir to the primacy of foreign affairs tradition.Footnote 57 At the least, then, Carr inherited the tradition indirectly with Meinecke acting as a conduit. To bring some clarity so that a consideration of the influence of the primacy of foreign affairs tradition on Carr’s later historical work can be undertaken, following Simms,Footnote 58 I distil the Primat der Außenpolitik to three aspects. First, security is prime because states have to consider their defence, security, and territorial integrity above all else. Second, as a result, internal factors such as inter alia ideology that might preclude a state from seeking security can be overcome if political necessity dictates it. The example here is that ideologically divergent states may ally themselves if circumstances necessitate it. Third, although the external environment (that is, geopolitics and geopolitical events) may condition policy, it does not determine it. Policy outcomes are open, that is, and agency is a historically real factor.
Bevirian interpretivism maintains that dilemmas are crucial to understanding how an individual’s thoughts and ideas evolve over time. Dilemmas may explain, therefore, why Carr turned from a more radical, theoretical realism to a more pragmatic, conservative form of realism. Many dilemmas shaped Carr’s thought over the course of his scholarly career, which in turn influenced how he spun his web of beliefs. Notable was the Manchurian crisis and, as previously mentioned, the Abyssinian crisis. The former led Carr to accept the conclusion ‘that members of the League … were not prepared to resist an act of aggression committed by a powerful and well-armed state’, while the latter caused the realisation that ‘Great Britain was not less firm than France in her resolve not to be drawn into war with Italy’.Footnote 59 The Prague crisis, which evidenced the collapse of the Munich settlement, also saw Carr reorient the meanings he attached to Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.Footnote 60 Indeed, it was perhaps Carr’s advocacy of appeasement that did much to influence his scholarly trajectory. In his autobiographical statement he reflected on his shame of the text’s ‘harsh “realism”’.Footnote 61 In private correspondence to his publishers not long after The Twenty Years’ Crisis was published, he even implied that it was fortunate that bookshops were not stocking – and had not even heard of – the work.Footnote 62 The political climate in addition to the critical reviews of The Twenty Years’ Crisis in particularFootnote 63 seemingly undermined his faith in his academic pursuits. When asked about his future research intentions in 1943, Carr responded that he did not feel ‘sufficiently interested at this time to write anything of a purely historical or analytical character, and anything containing views or proposals about the future would almost inevitable be over-taken by events before it got into print’.Footnote 64 Although he would later publish on nationalism and sovereignty, after the war he was sceptical about analytical and theoretical research. In one particular review of Ernest Woodward’s The Study of International Relations at University, he seemed to suggest that the content of IR was ‘what the academic’ made it. In rejecting Woodward’s view that intellectual dilettantism had resulted in a lack of IR in universities, Carr asked ‘Is it not rather the natural result of the persistent failure to provide facilities in this country for organized modern historical research in the sense in which it was understood and practised in Germany before 1933 and is still understood and practised in the United States?’.Footnote 65 Carr’s thoughts were evidently turning toward history; his empirical work toward the Soviet Union.Footnote 66 While The Twenty Years’ Crisis may have developed as a staple in the developing IR field in the United States at least, the shifting international environment, inter alia, meant that Carr was becoming something of an outcast.Footnote 67 By looking at Carr’s later work on Soviet foreign affairs specifically, the subsequent section seeks to use these dilemmas as a backdrop for charting how Carr’s use of the realist tradition subsequently evolved from the more radical to the more conservative.
IV. Carr’s diplomatic histories
Carr wrote four diplomatic histories of the twenty years’ crisis: Britain: A Study of Foreign Policy from the Versailles Treaty to the Outbreak of War, German-Soviet Relations between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939 and his two books on Soviet interwar diplomacy, The Twilight of Comintern, 1930–1935 and The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War. Prior to his death in 1982, he also began work on a companion volume to Twilight entitled The Popular Front, 1935–1938. Although the work was never completed or published, a posthumous edition was prepared by Robert W. Davies (who had previously collaborated with Carr on his History).Footnote 68 Britain, which was published in the same year as The Twenty Years’ Crisis, provided an overview of British policy between the wars. Aspects of the work were directed toward defending the policy of appeasement, especially after the Prague crisis in 1939. German-Soviet Relations was published in 1951 and was drawn from lectures Carr gave for the Albert Shaw Lectures in Baltimore. Theoretically ideas found in both Britain and German-Soviet Relations may also reflect the primacy of foreign affairs tradition. However, the subsequent analysis focuses specifically on Carr’s histories of Soviet foreign affairs as a coherent set of ideas produced in a relatively coherent timeframe, that is, in the final years of his life. To attempt to analyse works that span forty years may run the risk of presenting an idealised and timeless portrait of Carr, which would obviously stand in stark contrast to the intepretivist method employed here.
Raison d’état
As outlined above, this refers to the principle that state security is prime because states have to and indeed should consider their defence, security, and territorial integrity above all other matters.Footnote 69 It can be shown that in many respects Carr’s diplomatic histories of Soviet foreign affairs during the twenty years reflect the principle of raison d’état. Take Twilight as an example. Carr begins by charting the principal security threat facing the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. In the wake of the great depression and as the international system edged toward chaos, Moscow’s chief anxiety was that ‘the Western Powers would seek to solve their difficulties, and sink their differences, in combined action against the USSR’.Footnote 70 In turn, this meant that maintaining proper ‘relations with Germany were a matter of supreme importance’ as a hedge against a united capitalist coalition.Footnote 71 Hitler’s ascendancy to power and the rise of a revisionist Japan, however, caused a volte-face in Soviet strategy. By the mid-1930s Germany’s more aggressive foreign policy in particular carried a ‘fresh threat to the USSR’, created ‘increasing tension in Soviet-German relations’ and paved the way for détente between the Soviet Union and the Western capitalist powers (the Soviet Union even joined the League of Nations in late 1934 and signed a mutual defence pact with France in 1935).Footnote 72 For Carr this shift in Soviet policy, coupled with the subversion of the Comintern’s revolutionary agenda to Soviet security interests, was understood in terms of maintaining the defence and security of the Soviet Union vis-à-vis the threat posed by Nazi Germany.Footnote 73 This idea is carried forward in The Spanish Civil War where Carr details the manner in which Soviet strategy, particularly through the Comintern, became increasingly concerned with security and national interest over the promotion of revolution. Indeed, in her introduction to the posthumously published work, Tamara Deutscher noted that for Carr ‘Moscow’s attitude to Spain was dictated less and less by the raison de la révolution and more by the Soviet raison d’état’.Footnote 74 In principle, this meant that despite pressure among ideologues for more support to the republicans and Leftists fighting Franco, this ‘pressure was subjected to the restraint of diplomatic expediency’.Footnote 75 That is, Moscow was determined to ‘keep the foreign policy of the USSR in line with that of France and Britain, its political allies against the menace of the Fascist powers’.Footnote 76 That is not to say that Soviet strategy was completely passive. Arms were supplied, military advisers were provided, and Soviet influence via the Comintern was evident in political machinations that took place in Spanish politics.Footnote 77 But these were undertaken covertly and lessened over time. What Carr referred to as ‘revolutionary ardour’ in Soviet foreign policy gave ‘place to the cool calculations of diplomacy’.Footnote 78 Lurking behind this shift was the Soviet Union’s need to engage in a rapprochement with the Western powers as a counterweight to the threat posed by Nazi Germany in particular.Footnote 79 The threat from Germany, and the necessity of maintaining good relations with the Western powers, was also a crucial ingredient in terms of Soviet strategy in the latter part of the 1930s. Indicative here was the way in which Carr portrayed the Soviet response to Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland. Although Maxim Litvinov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, like his Western counterparts denounced Germany’s actions, ‘he did not separate himself from the temporizing attitude of his British and French colleagues’.Footnote 80 The Soviet Union, at this juncture, was chiefly concerned with pursuing ‘a coalition with bourgeois states in a common front against Fascism’.Footnote 81 For Carr, this explained Litvinov’s apprehension toward the remilitarisation of the Rhineland. Moreover, as with The Spanish Civil War, the Comintern’s revolutionary impulses were superseded by the aims of the popular front (an alliance with bourgeoisie parties in opposition to fascism) as a direct result of the threatening international environment.Footnote 82 Raison d’état was evidently crucial to Carr’s interpretations of Soviet foreign affairs during the 1930s.
International relations trump ideology
This is equally true of the notion that political expediencies generated by international relations trump inter alia ideological aims. That is, Carr’s interpretation of Soviet foreign affairs during the 1930s emphasised the manner in which the revolutionary aims of the Soviet Union, and by extension the Comintern, were by necessity diluted. One of the principles put forth by Carr in Twilight, for example, made the case that in the 1930s the ‘world had become too dangerous a place for rash revolutionary adventures’.Footnote 83 Moscow, in other words, gradually came to the view that revolutionary outbreaks would ‘provoke French intervention’ and ‘fan hostility to the USSR’.Footnote 84 Over time, and as a result, the Comintern ‘came round slowly to the opinion that communist parties could profitably collaborate with other Left parties … even with parties which did not accept the revolutionary programme of communism’.Footnote 85 That is not to say that the suspension of ideological conflict was easy or took place evenly. Mutual antagonisms between the socialists and the communists in Germany, even after Hitler’s ascension to power, made political unity problematic.Footnote 86 Nevertheless, by the mid-1930s, particularly owing to the influence of the Comintern’s then leader, Georgi Dimitrov, policy was dictated by the need for collaboration with the bourgeois left. And for Carr, this resulted from the necessities generated by the international relations of the period.Footnote 87 His interpretation of Soviet policy during the Spanish Civil War reflected the same principle. In Spain the popular front was galvanised by the threat from Franco and the support he received from the fascist powers.Footnote 88 In turn, a unity government composed of socialists and communists, although not anarchists, was established in the autumn of 1936.Footnote 89 The conflict in Spain, from Carr’s perspective, also hurried the process he had identified in The Twilight. That is, despite facing stiff resistance from hardliners such as Wilhelm Knorin and Béla Kun, Dimitrov was able to undermine cherished communist doctrine and advance the principles of the popular national front.Footnote 90 For Carr, this development was understood in terms of political necessity. The Spanish Civil War, that is, was evidence of the manner in which ‘leaders in Moscow’ were striving to ‘subordinate the distant prospects of proletarian revolution to the immediate emergency of building a broad basis of resistance to the Fascist danger’.Footnote 91 The historical narrative was carried further forward by Carr in The Popular Front. His chapter on the French experience is indicative here. Unlike the German experience noted above, the French Communist Party was better placed for political cohabitation. ‘France’, wrote Carr, ‘was continuously conscious of the military thrust from Nazi Germany.’ In turn, the French Communist Party could ‘sound a patriotic note and take its stand with parties of a different social complexion on a common platform of national defence against Fascist oppression’.Footnote 92 Political necessity, in other words, meant ideological compromise. In terms of Soviet foreign affairs more specifically, what Carr – perhaps controversially – depicted as the victory of realism over idealism was also crucial to his historical narrative.Footnote 93 ‘In Moscow’, wrote Carr, ‘the building of a firm alliance with the western powers to counter the Fascist threat seemed the supreme and over-riding aim of Soviet foreign policy.’Footnote 94 Stalin had, for Carr at least, refashioned the Comintern – subverted cherished ideology in other words – in the name of political expediency.Footnote 95
Context conditions but does not determine
As others have noted, Carr was not a determinist.Footnote 96 Instead, he tried to find an appropriate balance or synthesis between voluntarism and determinism, structure and agency, or context and conduct.Footnote 97 This outlook is equally evident in his histories of Soviet foreign affairs during the latter half of the twenty years’ crisis. In turn, his historical writing resonated with ideas outlined previously as reflecting the primacy of foreign affairs tradition. This is particularly evident in Twilight where Carr touched upon Stalin’s relatively passive role in Soviet foreign affairs. Particularly in the first half of the 1930s Stalin, according to Carr, was chiefly concerned with economic and political priorities on the domestic front. Rather than exercising control, he left foreign affairs, in terms of both Narkomindel and the Comintern, in the hands of Litvinov.Footnote 98 Stalin’s reluctance or indecision, from Carr’s vantage, ‘prolonged an anomalous situation in which officials of Comintern spoke with different voices, and directives issue to communist parties were conflicting and indecisive’.Footnote 99 Hitler’s ascension to power may have radically transformed the threat to the Soviet Union, but leaders still have to perceive and react to the international context. In that respect, the international context conditioned but did not determine Soviet foreign policy. Carr even noted how Stalin initially saw no threat in Hitler and the Nazis, believing that if they did come to power they would be principally concerned with looking westward.Footnote 100 Similar ideas are evident in The Spanish Civil War. Italian and German intervention in the civil war could have potentially rewritten the European balance of power.Footnote 101 Russian policy toward the conflict, however, was relatively limited – as was the response from France and Britain.Footnote 102 Domestic conditions – notably in Britain the presence of the Conservative government and the privatised armament industry and in France factional disputes among the leadership – influenced the direction of policy.Footnote 103 For the Soviets, Carr believed that it was not simply diplomatic manoeuvring prompted by political necessity that mattered. He also believed that capabilities were an important factor in explaining Soviet policy. Both the ‘Comintern and the Soviet government were concerned to prevent Franco’s victory’, he wrote, ‘yet neither had at their disposal adequate means to achieve this purpose’.Footnote 104 In The Popular Front, Carr also took care to point to the manner in which ideas regarding security and defence policy can be driven by factions. In particular, with regard to the principle of the popular front, Carr identified a ‘covert struggle’ in both communist parties and the Comintern leadership regarding the righteousness of the popular front doctrine.Footnote 105 The international environment certainly provided the context for Soviet foreign affairs in the 1930s, but individuals and institutions – and importantly disputes between them – mediated its effects.Footnote 106
The last point indicates that Carr’s diplomatic histories demonstrate concerns beyond the primacy of foreign affairs in Soviet foreign policy in in the interwar era. One of his major concerns in each of the three works was charting the political and ideological disputes and differences between Moscow, Comintern spokesman, and foreign communist parties.Footnote 107 Like aspects of his monumental History,Footnote 108 the three works on Soviet foreign affairs offered a fine-grained and highly detailed account of the institutions, personalities, and factions involved in Soviet foreign affairs during the twenty years’ crisis. Ranke’s primacy of foreign affairs may have not, therefore, been the defining inspiration behind Carr’s histories of Soviet foreign affairs. Nevertheless, traces of Ranke are evident, even if silent, which is a point I will return to below.
V. The twenty years’ crisis, history, and tragedy
From the preceding discussion it is evident that Carr’s often overlooked histories of Soviet foreign affairs speak in places to the primacy of foreign affairs tradition. This interpretation of his work is certainly of interest to Carr-specific scholars. More importantly, the approach outlined above, that is, the interpretivist framework of traditions and dilemmas, offers a starting point for thinking about the progress and evolution of his scholarly career and thought, particularly from the IR theorist to conservative historian. However, recovering Carr’s histories – or at least recognising their potential significance – has greater implications, especially in terms of the how we think about the realist canon. Lumping together Carr, Morgenthau and Waltz, Ronen Palan and Brook Blair conclude that their respective theories of the state result from the ‘explosion of ideas in the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, which gave to rise to the modern … version of the realist theory of international relations’.Footnote 109 Leaving aside the question of an unbroken and timeless realism stretching from nineteenth-century Germany (if not before) into the interwar period and then Cold War era, the notion of a shared heritage does raise some provocative questions about the relationship between Carr’s diplomatic histories of Soviet foreign affairs and realist work published in a similar era, although in the North American tradition. Richard Lebow calls Ranke ‘a nineteenth-century precursor of Kenneth Waltz’.Footnote 110 There is logic behind this reasoning. Waltz fleshed out his socialisation mechanism (the principle that the competitive nature of the system compels states to act in a similar manner) with reference to the taming of the Soviet Union’s revolutionary aims (interestingly enough by way of a reference to Theodore von Laue).Footnote 111 Walt’s The Origins of Alliance is also indicative here. One of the principal arguments in this monograph was the idea that alliance formation was a product less of shared ideology and more a product of political expediency generated by external threat.Footnote 112 Primed, to borrow from Brent Steele,Footnote 113 for approaching Carr through the revisionist literature, I was puzzled when reading Carr, thinking Walt and hearing Waltz.
This argument has recently been advanced by Joseph Parent and Joshua Baron.Footnote 114 Akin to the revisionist literature identified in footnote six of this article, they argue that contemporary realists – they specifically identify Waltz and Mearsheimer – have misread the classical works of Morgenthau and Carr among others (with regards to Carr they refer specifically to his abridged History). Where they detract from the aforementioned revisionist literature, is that they seek to highlight affinities between ‘classical’ realists (for want of a better word) and those realists commonly identified as neorealists. They argue that the common neorealist charges brought against the mid-twentieth-century writers – specifically that they focused on human nature to the detriment of structure and were theoretically unsophisticated – are overstated. Reviewing the centrality of key concepts across realists in time, notably anarchy and its consequences, they conclude that ‘the classics are tightly allied with structural analysis and extremely consistent with neorealism’.Footnote 115 Moreover, they contend that there is a lot more theory in the classical works than is generally recognised. Turning again to Carr specifically, and quoting liberally from What is History, they point to his focus on cause as evidence of his concern with theory, if from a historical explanatory basis.Footnote 116 Overall, this allows them to make the case that ‘classical realists escape charges of human nature realism and theoretical incompetence’ by ‘explaining the same patterns with essentially the same concepts and logic as neorealists’.Footnote 117 From this vantage, part of the glue binding neorealists and classical realists is the shared intellectual inheritance from the nineteenth-century German realists, Meinecke in particular and by extension Ranke.Footnote 118
One could argue that the commensurability thesis is overdone. While Carr’s diplomatic histories of Soviet foreign affairs during the interwar era may share an intellectual inheritance with the North American realist tradition, there are evident differences, especially in terms of incommensurate underlying understandings of history. This is the basis of the interpretivist claim, and its strength in terms of analysing intellectual thought. Traditions are ‘a starting point’; they do not determine how an individual incorporates ideas into their existing web of beliefs.Footnote 119 Carr and notable neorealists may have been influenced by the Rankean tradition of foreign affairs, either directly or indirectly, but their respective use, understanding, and development of said tradition are ultimately unique and based on creative agency. In particular, there is an evident divergence in terms of philosophy of history. While neorealists typically work within a history without historicism tradition, Carr, at least in his histories of Soviet foreign affairs, worked from a traditional, even Rankean, approach to history.Footnote 120 History without historicism is typically concerned with the general over the particular. The historical record is seen as a testing ground for deductive theoretical propositions and hypotheses. As John Hobson and George Lawson state, neorealists generally use history, chiefly secondary sources, to verify, refine, and refute their theoretical propositions.Footnote 121 Traditional history, in contrast, is typically atheoretical (at least outwardly so);Footnote 122 is concerned chiefly with (if not fetishises) primary, archival sources (is based on historical fact in other words); and seeks to construct accurate causal accounts of historical events.Footnote 123 Ironically given Carr’s criticism of Rankean historiography in What is History, there are evident traces of this traditional approach in his histories of Soviet foreign affairs.Footnote 124 His diplomatic histories are filled with what Jonathan Haslam refers to as Carr’s ‘“needlework”’ – that is, ‘detailed empirical research and writing’.Footnote 125 Consequently they reflect the traditional history approach just outlined. Carr’s preface to Twilight clearly indicates that he sought to ‘narrate what happened in Moscow and what happened in the parties [of the Comintern]’.Footnote 126 The works are based on archival research, with a specific focus on memoirs, typically bypassing his earlier reflective comments on this method.Footnote 127 Moreover, his three works on Soviet foreign affairs were largely atheoretical. Although it is possible to detect a Rankean sensibility in them, in terms of the primacy of foreign affairs, Carr made no explicit use or attested to a concern with theory here. His works on Soviet foreign affairs, in other words, contained a realism that never spoke its name.
If Carr’s histories of Soviet foreign affairs during the twenty years’ crisis are traditional histories, then this surely puts them at odds with his earlier work. From the interpretivist perspective, this is not problematic. In the course of a scholarly career an intellectual may come to exhibit or espouse thought that is radically different from traditions that they had previously imbibed from. As Bevir explains, ‘[an individual may] even reject [a tradition] in a way that might make it anything but constitutive of the web of beliefs that they [later] come to hold’.Footnote 128 We can see this through a brief illustrative contrast between Carr’s diplomatic histories and The Twenty Years’ Crisis (and indeed his other interwar work), with the latter exhibiting a more critical-theoretical edge.Footnote 129 The Twenty Years’ Crisis speaks more strongly to the radical, theoretical, and critical tradition of Mannheim as opposed to the Primat der Außenpolitik tradition of Ranke. Drawing from Mannheim, and applying it to the work of Morgenthau, Hartmut Behr and Amelia Heath suggest that Standortgebunden means ‘nothing more than the theoretical acknowledgement of the socio-politically contingent character of history, and the practical recognition of a certain, if temporary, historical condition and subsequent way of acting under these conditions’.Footnote 130 These ideas are certainly evident in The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Indeed, Graham Evans over thirty years ago in this very journal concluded that uniting Carr’s interwar oeuvre was the ‘notion that the principles of one age cannot without great danger be carried over to another where the problems and the context are different’.Footnote 131 One passage from The Twenty Years’ Crisis can illuminate on this:
In a limited number of countries, nineteenth-century liberal democracy had been a brilliant success. It was a success because its presuppositions coincided with the stage of development reached by the countries concerned … But the view that nineteenth-century liberal democracy was based, not on a balance of forces peculiar to the economic development of the period and the countries concerned, but on certain a priori rational principles which had only to be applied in other contexts to produce similar results, was essentially utopian.Footnote 132
Carr’s interwar work more broadly was concerned with progressive change. Progressiveness, according to Peter Wilson, is the ‘belief that the world does not have to look the way that it does, and that through reason, courage, imagination and determination it is possible to arrive at a better way of being and living’.Footnote 133 Incorporated into Carr’s better-known work in the interwar era are hopes for and imaginations of a new and more stable political order. This is evident in his discussion of peaceful change, the prospect of postnational sovereignty and the elimination of the profit motive from foreign policy. It is also apparent in Nationalism and After where Carr ruminates on the prospects of a more peaceful postwar order based on individual rights, functional intergovernmental institutions, and common moral principles. Carr’s call for the ‘revolution [to] begin at home’ in The Conditions of Peace and his subsequent outline of a postwar social democratic welfare coupled with centralised planning also illustrate his progressiveness.Footnote 134
This critical edge is not evident in Carr’s diplomatic histories; the dilemmas Carr experienced (previously outlined) potentially explain this shift from radical theoretician to conservative historian. His diplomatic histories as a story of what was are emptied of the progressive aspects of his other analytical work that focused on what could be. It should be clear that Carr’s explanatory accounts of the twenty years’ crisis fall outside the current disciplinary trend of reading the classics as critical theory (or at least looking for critical theory insights in the classical works). Morgenthau’s American Foreign Policy does likewise, and could be equally mined for the Primat der Außenpolitik tradition.Footnote 135 Thus, while it may be true that Carr (and indeed Morgenthau) drew from traditions of thought not typically associated with contemporary realist theorising, that is, the Frankfurt School and Marx,Footnote 136 they equally drew from traditions of thought, that is, the Primat der Außenpolitik, not typically associated with critical theory.
Prima facie, then, Carr’s diplomatic histories of Soviet foreign affairs during the twenty years’ crisis may offer little for contemporary IR theory. They are, after all, history (and a traditional history at that). However, such a view would be inaccurate. Reading the final chapter, ‘The descent into chaos’, from his final unpublished work, The Popular Front, it is possible to interpret in Carr a Lebowean sensibility. Tracing the tragedy genre and concept to fifth-century Athens, Toni Erskine and Richard Lebow, drawing from Aristotle, point to the importance of hamartia, peripeteia, and anagnorisis.Footnote 137 Hamartia refers to an error of judgement on the protagonist’s part. Peripeteia refers to the reversal of fortune that results from the protagonist’s hamartia. Anagnorisis is the cathartic revelation and transformation of self that results from the realisation of the initial error of judgement. Tragedy as a narrative device is concerned with inter alia highlighting human limitations and fallibility, particularly in terms of deliberation and decision-making in terms of competing ethical and moral commitments.Footnote 138 The ‘core insight of tragedy’ is therefore the process of learning it engenders, specifically in terms of knowing ‘one’s own limits’.Footnote 139 Utilising the works of Thucydides, Clausewitz and Morgenthau, the Lebowean sensibility depicts the bonds between community, cooperation, justice, ethics, and honour, and, among other things criticises the expediency of realpolitik in terms of its self-defeating consequences.Footnote 140 This sensibility allows us to recognise, as Lebow writes, ‘that communal bonds are fragile and easily undermined by the unrestrained pursuit of unilateral advantage … When this happens, time-honored mechanisms of conflict management … may not only fail to preserve the peace but may make domestic and international violence more likely’.Footnote 141
These concepts can illuminate upon Carr’s thoughts, especially with regard to the appeasement of Nazi Germany and Munich in particular. Following the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, which Carr identified as a turning point in his view of Germany,Footnote 142 increased tensions and insecurity cast a shadow over European politics. Czechoslovakia was widely seen as Hitler’s next target. The Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty and the Soviet-Czech mutual assistance treaty meant that the Soviet Union was obliged to assist Czechoslovakia in a conflict, but only if France did. In The Popular Front Carr portrays Soviet leaders, particularly Vladimir Potemkin and Maxim Litvinov, in the run up to Munich as adhering firmly to the principles of collective security and collective action against an aggressor.Footnote 143 In France, in contrast, Carr noted that the ‘forces driving France into accommodation with Germany were gathering strength’.Footnote 144 Likewise, the resignation of the British Foreign Secretary indicated that Britain too sought ‘a closer relationship with Germany’.Footnote 145 This bewildered the Soviets who saw collective action as the most effective means to confront Nazi aggression.Footnote 146 The result of French and British prevarication toward Hitler, and in pressing the Czechoslovakian government into appeasing Germany, meant that the Soviet Union was able to escape from the crisis without ‘public disgrace’.Footnote 147 In ensuring no ‘loss of credit’, the Soviet Union ensured its honour; Britain and France on the other hand ‘[betrayed], not only their obligations, but … their interests’.Footnote 148
This narrative of honour/honourless actions in terms of the Munich crisis is important for a number of reasons. Broadly it illustrates the importance that Carr attached to cooperative or collective action over self-interested or unilateral action in his final interpretation of the dénouement of the twenty years’ crisis. Had Britain and France adhered to their obligation – acted honourably in other words – then the Soviet Union too would have been forced into defending Czechoslovakia against naked German aggression.Footnote 149 It also illustrates the manner in which Carr interpreted – or perhaps even reinterpreted – realpolitik at this juncture. It was consequential in that it directly led to Soviet mistrust and the eventual tilt to Nazi Germany and, not least, the Second World War.Footnote 150 For Carr specifically, given his earlier advocacy and then defence of appeasement (in terms of expediency), it serves to frame his hamartia (his advocacy), his peripeteia (his irrelevance to IR), and anagnorisis (his realisation of his error in judgement).Footnote 151 The tragic can therefore not just help us conceptualise world politics but can also help us come to grips with particular theorists who, in the words of Morgenthau, ‘showed their faces above the crowd’.Footnote 152
VI. Conclusion
Significant research has sought to challenge tired depictions of classical figures in our discipline. Long viewed – and still viewed in some quarters – as a realpolitiker par excellence, to borrow from Deutscher,Footnote 153 Carr’s thought has increasingly been revisited and revised. Where once textbook caricatures littered the landscape, the subtleties and nuances of Carr’s international thought now dominate, and quite rightfully so. Not seeking to challenge this movement, this article has nevertheless demonstrated a significant gap in terms of the general neglect of Carr’s later work. Carr’s writing career spanned from the 1930s until his death in 1982. To neglect his later work is anomalous. Although his two published monographs and his unpublished and unfinished symphony on Soviet foreign affairs may be historical, they are nevertheless still concerned with interstate diplomacy. Employing an interpretivist framework, this article has made a first-cut at understanding the relationship between the Carr of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, among other interwar and postwar texts, and Carr the traditional Soviet historian. Locating the scholarly dilemmas that he faced following the Second World War, this article has charted Carr’s movement from a radical and progressive realism to a more conservative and traditional realism (interestingly the two realisms that are found, if implicitly, in The Twenty Years’ Crisis). Contained within his historical works on Soviet foreign affairs, if in silence, are traces of the Primat der Außenpolitik tradition.
Although works of history, Twilight, The Spanish Civil War, and The Popular Front are nevertheless still relevant today. Not least, they depict international relations at a time of crisis. The ideological struggles and conflict between left and left and between left and right contained within may be of a radically different era; but one cannot help think that 2016 marked a turning point in international politics. If so, Carr in his totality may be more relevant than he ever was. More specifically, however, Carr’s histories of Soviet foreign affairs may serve to illuminate upon the tragedy of his scholarly work. The Popular Front, in particular, can be best thought of as the final stage in his movement from advocate of Munich, to defender of Munich to critic of Munich. The tragedy framework and a Lebowean sensibility, it is posited here, help us understand and appreciate Carr’s intellectual journey. Embedded within his histories of Soviet affairs, especially in terms of the dénouement of the twenty years’ crisis, is a lived critique of realpolitik, which tragically the discipline has hitherto overlooked. Perhaps Carr’s lived experience of realpolitik explains why the realism in his diplomatic histories did not speak its name.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the reviewers who commented on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks must also be extended to Professor Ian Hall who provided very helpful and useful comments on a previous iteration of this project. I would also like to acknowledge the support from colleagues at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde who pushed me forward when I needed it.
