The 1930s, as has long been noted, was a period of “middle opinion” groups. Various public figures of different party affiliations and those of self-consciously independent opinions met in earnest discussion of programs intended to influence the political public and the government. These efforts are usually attributed simply to the scale and complexity of the economic and international problems of the decade, but a further impetus was the existence of the National coalition government and the associated fragmentation and weakness of its critics. It seemed likely either that nonpartisan proposals would be attractive to ministers claiming a special “national” standing or, alternatively, that cross-party manifestos could draw their dispersed critics together into an effective opposition. Among the best known of these gatherings is the Next Five Years Group (NFYG), formed to support a 1935 economic, social, and international program described as “an essay in political agreement.” The NFYG foundered on ministers’ refusal to agree and on efforts by some of their critics to harness it to their own partisan purposes. Nevertheless, for some NFYG organizers the method was obviously congenial, because within a month of its final meeting in November 1937 several of them created a new gathering, a “‘foreign affairs group,” which chiefly met at All Souls’ College, Oxford. The initiative came from the Gladstone Professor of Politics and the University's Independent MP Sir Arthur Salter, and the twenty-one members included seven other fellows of the college, notably Lionel Curtis and the historians A. L. Rowse, G. F. Hudson, and E. L. Woodward. The chairman was again, as with the NFYG, Lord Allen of Hurtwood, and other members were similarly either political exiles or associated with weak parties—Harold Macmillan, Harold Nicolson, Gilbert Murray, Walter Layton, and Norman Angell. Liddell Hart and Arnold Toynbee supplied expertise in military and international studies.

This group has not been wholly unknown, but Sidney Aster has usefully assembled and edited from some ten collections of personal papers the surviving sources on its activities until its final meeting in May 1938 and further associated efforts by some members into early 1939. These sources consist of papers submitted for meetings, the circulated summaries of discussions (unfortunately not identifying the speakers), extracts from correspondence and diaries, drafts of proposed publications, and letters from some individual members to The Times and Manchester Guardian. The effects are to add an interesting dimension to the familiar issue of “appeasement,” to supply some substance and much qualification to Rowse's inflated and perverse 1961 assertions about the public significance of a link between “All Souls and Appeasement,” but mostly to display the disarray and ineffectiveness of broadly Liberal intellectuals when dictatorships seemed to force a choice between liberal principles or total war.

The group began in perplexity and ended in discord. Salter proposed the meetings because he was himself, and found others, in “grave doubt” on which international policy “to support and advocate,” and because he believed discussion among fellow intellectuals would bring mutual clarification (4). Most members had considerable anxieties about the effects of a war of aerial bombing of civilians. For Allen the ultimate problem was “survival for urban mankind” (102), while Salter and Curtis turned such fears to practical effect by helping from April 1938 to form a further group, the Air Raid Defence League—which seems to have escaped previous historians, but its earliest stages can be traced in this edition. The foreign affairs group's main concerns, though, were to define the extent of British power, to identify the challenges, and to consider what public recommendations they could make for meeting these threats. The views that emerged offer some salutary perspectives for the historian. They began in late 1937 by taking it for granted that no U.S. assistance could be expected, that the main threats were Italy and Japan, and that the next world war would begin in the Far East. Nevertheless, discussion quickly centered on German ambitions, on what balance the British government should strike between firmness and conciliation, and on Czechoslovakia as the likely flash point. Curtis expressed an extreme form of British guilt, speaking of “our treatment of Germany” as bringing its dictatorship into existence, and of the militaristic outlook “we have created” (29–30). Salter, with support from some other members, strikingly concluded that Britain could do nothing to help Czechoslovakia short of a European war and that everything east of the “Holland-France line” should be surrendered (77). Instead—and this had wider support, to the extent of an agreed statement being circulated to newspaper editors—he argued that resistance to fascism should be focused on Spain, in the form of the British government facilitating supplies to the republican government. Contrary to a common historical generalization that “appeasement” characterized British policy pretty much from 1933 onward, the group was clear that Chamberlain's speeches in the immediate aftermath of Eden's resignation marked a “radical change” in policy (106), replacing collective security and resistance to aggression with appeasement and avoidance of war. And all these points were made even before the Austrian crisis. After the Anschluss earlier differences within the group hardened. Already Nicolson had argued for an “affirmation of strength” (53) as a means to check Germany, while Allen, who wanted an agreed public statement on the scale of The Next Five Years and began producing drafts, argued for peace at practically any price. As Allen became even more of an appeaser than Chamberlain, Toynbee and Murray led those who wanted resistance, somehow, somewhere, and an agreed public statement became impossible. The group dissolved well before the Czechoslovakian crisis, and what was left was an implicit, internecine battle of letters to newspapers.

It would be easy to regard these meetings and writings as inconsequential. Aster makes no claims for the group's collective impact, indeed no minister or senior politician was affected in the slightest by any of its member's foreign policy statements. Rather, he declares, its effects lay with the individual members themselves: the discussions helped members to clarify their own positions, enabling them to contribute more confidently to public debate. Well, perhaps. For the historian of the late 1930s, the main interest lies in further evidence of just how difficult were the choices facing the liberal mind. (It may be added that the “Nel” [155], unidentified by the editor, must be the businessman Lionel Hichens.)