The Twenty Years' Crisis

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The Twenty Years 'Crisis (full title: The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939. An Introduction to the Study of International Relations ) is a book by the British historian , diplomat and political scientist Edward Hallett Carr , which was first published in 1939 in London . It is one of the few classics of the political science discipline International Relations IB. With his study, Carr undertook a deep and sustained criticism of what he called the "utopian" way of thinking in Western diplomacy and science after the First World War , and what he disparagingly called " idealism ". With the book, Carr earned a reputation for being one of the founding fathers of realism in international relations .

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The "idealism" criticized by Carr, which was based on liberal assumptions, consisted among other things of the belief in a fundamental harmony of interests between the states, of the trust in reason and rational action as well as the assessment that war is irrational and through enlightenment, diplomacy, the international law and the League of nations was to prevent. Carr argued that it was wrong to assume that the status quo (political and territorial) would be accepted by all major states. That is unlikely in a world with states with different powers. According to Carr, power struggles between states are inevitable. It is a mistake to transfer the legal and legislative processes from nation states to the international system. He considered the “moralism” of the victorious powers in 1918 to be self-deception.

In his opinion, some problems after the First World War could have been prevented with a hard and ruthless analysis of reality. The central and unchangeable characteristic of politics as a whole and thus also international politics is power. That was neglected by the "idealists". That is why all their attempts to reform the anarchy of the international system have failed .

Still, Carr did not rely exclusively on hard and ruthless analysis and wrote that realism without utopianism degenerated into cynical realpolitik. To support this argument, Carr dedicated a chapter of the book to the limits of realism. In it he agreed to the British appeasement policy of the 1930s .

reception

The book has met with great scientific interest to this day, especially because it led to a paradigm shift in the IB for many, from (now so-called) idealism as the dominant school of thought to realism . The Twenty Years' Crisis received an important boost in the United States from the review by Hans Morgenthaus in the first issue of World Politics (1949). Morgenthau praised the book and only complained that Carr had not found a moral solution to the 20-year crisis.

Others commented on the book critically, Norman Angell (in the sense of Carr's "idealist") described it as malicious and nihilistic . Leonard Sidney Woolf (also an "idealist") criticized Carr's inconsistent use of the term "utopianism" and considered it a contradiction that it did not include Neville Chamberlain 's policy of appeasement . The British historian Perry Anderson writes : "After 1945 The Twenty Years' Crisis was given shame because Carr had spoken out in favor of the Munich Agreement (...)."

expenditure

  • The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939. An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. Macmillan, London 1939.
  • The twenty years' crisis, 1919-1939. An introduction to the study of international relations . Macmillan, London 1946.
  • The twenty years' crisis, 1919-1939. An introduction to the study of international relations . Reissued with a new introduction and additional material by Michael Cox , Palgrave, New York 2001, ISBN 0-333-96375-X .
  • The twenty years' crisis, 1919-1939. Reissued with a new preface from Michael Cox . Palgrave Macmillan, London 2016, ISBN 978-1-349-95075-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, all information is based on Arne Niemann: Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, London 1939 . In: Steffen Kailitz (Ed.): Key works of political science . VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2007, ISBN 978-3-531-14005-6 , pp. 80–84.
  2. ↑ Xuewu Gu : Theories of International Relations. Introduction . 3rd, revised and expanded edition, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2018, p. 60.
  3. ↑ Perry Anderson : Hegemony. Conjunctions of a term. Translation by Frank Jakubzik . suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-12724-7 , p. 59.