Spotting War from the Ivory Tower

The interwar period, 21 years between World War I's conclusion in 1918 and World War II's onset in 1939, played a foundational role in shaping International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline. As dramatic geopolitical shifts shook the world, scholars forged pathways to understanding the complexities of international politics by deduction and induction. This brought about seminal works of some iconic authors – and it is worth re-reading them today.

Idealism: The Dawn of Multilateralism

Sure, Kant had it all already in his idealistic masterpiece "Perpetual Peace," published in 1795. The 28th American president, Woodrow Wilson, borrowed much from the prototypical German ivory tower scholar who never set foot beyond his beloved Königsberg, today's Kaliningrad. Wilson, a former professor himself and in service as the 13th president of Princeton University, put the idealist guidelines of Kant into a political pamphlet. International politics, from now on, shall be placed on moral foundations. Ethical norms and principles should guide state interactions, thus steering away from aggressive policies and building trust among nations - an attempt to overcome the security dilemma. This is normative theory, stating what should be out there, and not being satisfied with describing what actually IS out there.

Idealists, embedded in the broader field of liberalism, believed in multilateralism, collective security, and international law. Peaceful coexistence based on international law and treaties would prevent conflicts from escalating, and international institutions were meant to work as safeguards for conflict resolution and as a framework for international collaboration. The League of Nations was meant to be the game changer. Nope, it wasn't. It failed considerably, maybe not because the idea was bad, but because the time was not ripe. And, of course, Wilson did not manage to convince the US Congress to join. Without the US, the League was missing muscles. Anyway, revanchism, expansionism, nationalism, and colonialism were unbroken streams that contributed a lot to World War I, and they were bound to continue their destructive endeavor into World War II.

Realism: Power Politics and the Nature of Anarchy

During the interwar period, and responding to the world's changing realities, realism evolved as a counterpoint to Idealism, focusing on power dynamics and state interests. Thucydides and Hobbes paved the way, and authors like E.H. Carr settled on these foundations. Realists contended that the international arena was inherently chaotic in the absence of a global authority, pushing states to be self-reliant and self-preserving. The failure of the League of Nations to frame Mussolini and Hitler showed this dramatically. It seemed unavoidable that states, propelled by national interests, remained the primary actors in international politics, leading to an eternal dance of alliances and rivalries in a zero-sum game. The currency they used was power, and balancing this power was the task of the day. The League of Nations remained a sideshow - or even a cabaret.

E.H. Carr's "The Twenty Years' Crisis," published in 1939, remains an essential reading from this era. Carr made the fragilities of Idealism visible, asserting that power and interests had more significant explanatory value over international actions than moralistic ideals. And he knew what he was talking about. Carr served as a member of the British delegation in the Paris Peace Conference after WWI. He gave a detailed account of interwar events in his book "International Relations Between the Two World Wars," published in 1937. And he was pretty clear in his rejection of utopian Idealism. In "The Twenty Year's Crisis" (p. 75) he states:

"His (the realist's, J.D.) task is to bring down the whole cardboard structure of utopian thought by exposing the hollowness of the material out of which it is built."

This is not a rejection of morality and siding with brute force. Carr continues (pp. 235-236):

"If, however, it is utopian to ignore the element of power, it is an unreal kind of realism which ignores the element of morality in any world order. (…) mankind will in the long run always revolt against naked power."

Carr prepared the ground for authors like Morgenthau or Waltz, who became seminal in realism a few years later.

Marxism and International Relations

Fascism and Marxism were called ideologies of progress in the interwar period because they rejected the current order and proposed overcoming it. They were considered to be "modern." Of the two, only Marxism has a theoretical core pointing to international relations. Marxism is primarily associated with critiques of capitalism and class struggle. Marxist writers in the interwar period focused on the global ramifications of capitalist structures. They argued that the capitalist system wasn't confined to national borders but permeated globally, influencing international relations. Influenced by thinkers like Vladimir Lenin, Marxism emphasized the inherent imperialistic tendencies of capitalism.

Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism," published in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution and building upon Rosa Luxemburg, elaborated on how capitalist nations, seeking new markets and resources, inevitably turned to imperialistic ventures, setting the stage for global conflicts. Unlike Marx, who projected revolution to occur in highly developed capitalist economies, Lenin saw the global periphery as ideal terrain for communist revolution and counterbalancing the capitalist nations. The Comintern (the Third International) was a vehicle to infiltrate those nations with Marxist ideology. Just like Wilson, Lenin was in a position to implement his ideas in practice. The results can still be seen when tackling Putin's infiltration of Africa – quite in Lenin's tradition.

Conclusion: Travelling in Time

The interwar period with permanent turmoil stands as an intellectually fertile era in theorizing on International Relations, tackling pivotal shifts in the machinery of global politics. The original ideas later transformed into "neo's": Neo-Realism and Neo-Marxism, to name a few. Idealism got somewhat incorporated into the many branches of liberalism, such as Neo-institutionalism and Democratic Peace Theory. Those who want to understand the development of international relations theories should not only time-travel back to the shores of ancient Greece or medieval Italy but study the interwar period thoroughly. Here lies the birthplace of modern IR theory.