Reinventing Peace: David Davies, Alfred Zimmern and Liberal Internationalism in Interwar Britain

Paul Rich, Kings College, London

Abstract
The interwar body of thought known as idealism has largely been read and understood some would say parodied through the work of E.H. Carr in his classic, The Twenty Years Crisis. One of the consequences has been to sideline the contribution of writers such as Norman Angell, Leonard Woolf and Alfred Zimern, opponents of Carr and dedicated liberal internationalists. Zimmern in particular attempted to develop a version of liberal internationalism that emphasized the advancing role of the League of Nations in establishing an international framework of law, as well as the continuing importance of the British Commonwealth in securing a framework of international standards of civilization. His project like that of other liberals after 1919 may have been doomed to failure in the turbulent inter-war period and the years of the Cold War. However, in the post-Cold War era, many of his ideas, developed in another age, seem increasingly relevant. Keywords: Norman Angell, E.H. Carr, Alfred Zimmern, the League of Nations

Introduction The interwar body of idealist thinkers in International Relations have been largely read and understood in terms of the realist-idealist dichotomy developed in E.H. Carrs The Twenty Years Crisis. The term idealism, however, is problematical since it was used by Carr in a pejorative sense as he developed a vehement polemic against the contours of British foreign policy in the interwar years. Idealism covers a wide array of writers and political positions and, in many respects, a far better approach would be to label thinkers such as David Mitrany, David Davies, Leonard Woolf and Alfred Zimmern as liberal internationalists. This is a term that they would themselves have broadly accepted and distinguishes them from other more overtly utopian writers such as H.G. Wells, as well as Marxists who were committed to a very different project in the interwar years of socialist internationalism. Moreover, as a term, liberal internationalism engages with a developed body of European and American political thought that had emerged over the previous century.1 Liberal internationalism emerged in Europe alongside nationalism in the wake of the French revolution at the end of the 18th century; it drew on concepts of peace and developed them as part of a vision of international order that was linked to justice. For the liberals of the 19th century peace per se did not

International Relations Copyright 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 16(1): 117133 [00471178 (200204) 16:1; 117133; 023355]

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necessarily denote the ideal end state if it was promoted through Napoleonic or Bismarckian military conquest. It was far more important to develop an idea of order that was founded on a legal framework that secured individual rights and freedoms as well as the right to national self-determination. In this sense, then, the early liberal internationalists were important for strengthening ideas of peace, (a key invention, as Michael Howard has pointed out, of the European Enlightenment) 2 and linking them to a framework of international law that could progressively permeate inter-state relations and subject the actions of states to structures of legal accountability. The roots of this were by no means new even in the early 19th century. What Suganami has termed the peace through law approach stretches back to before Grotian ideas of a common law of nations in the 17th century and can be found, in a nascent form at least, in parts of 13th-century Europe such as the perpetual league among three forest communities in Switzerland. The advent of the First World War, however, provided a major shock to this tradition which had been mainly concerned up till then with trying to restrain and codify the laws on war at international conferences such as the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. These only regulated war rather than outlawed it and appeared increasingly ineffectual by the time hostilities came to an end in 1918.3 The establishment of the League of Nations thus provided a major stimulus to liberal international thought in the 1920s and early 1930s before the advance of European fascism. It is thus possible to see this period as one in which the idea of peace became effectively reinvented. Peace became seen as a goal to be attained through the development of an international legal framework in which states actions would be progressively regulated and in which any resort to war would be increasingly perceived as both irrational and contrary to the basic precepts of an advancing international civilization rooted in European social and cultural standards. One of the prominent figures involved in this project was Alfred Zimmern, a former classical scholar who became the first ever Professor of International Relations at the University of Aberystwyth in 1919. Zimmern attempted to develop a version of liberal internationalism that emphasized both the advancing role of the League of Nations in establishing an international framework of law, as well as the continuing importance of the British Empire/Commonwealth in securing a framework of international standards of civilization. In this regard, his project was perhaps inevitably doomed by the apparently inevitable drift to world war by the late 1930s, though his role in attempting to instil amongst informed opinion in Britain and the United States the growing importance of an international legal framework to protect individual and national rights is one that is of continuing political significance.

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Alfred Zimmern was born in 1879 of German-Jewish parents in Surbiton, Surrey. He was brought up in an upper-middle-class English milieu and went to Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he took a first in classics in 1902. Here he became drawn towards the ideas of the late 19th-century liberal idealists such as T.H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet and also converted to Christianity. Between 1904 and 1909 he was fellow and tutor at New College before travelling to Greece and writing his important study The Greek Commonwealth which was first published in 1911. The work reflected the emotional attachment that many classicists had in the high noon of British imperialism with the ideals of Hellenic Greece which were seen as providing an ethical yardstick by which to evaluate the civilizing goals of British imperial policy.4 It was an outlook that Zimmern maintained throughout his career as he championed British liberal imperialism as a major civilizing force in international relations as well as providing a model for other international organizations such as the League of Nations to emulate. During his years at Oxford, Zimmern became acquainted with continental idealists such as Benedetto Croce, as well as some of the pioneer work in sociology, though he remained sceptical of the evolutionary sociology of figures like L.T. Hobhouse since progress lies on the knees of the gods, or rather in our own breasts and those of the men around us.5 He developed an interest in working-class education while working in the university settlement movement at Oxford and later lectured for the Workers Education Association (WEA). After leaving Oxford he briefly lectured in sociology at the London School of Economics before taking up, in 1912, a post as an inspector for the Board of Education. Here he stayed until 1915. During these years Zimmern developed links with the members of the Round Table movement, which had been formed by a number of Milner Kindergarten members in South Africa such as Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr in order to popularize the idea of a British Commonwealth of Nations. Zimmern was a prominent advocate of a League of Nations and helped to found the League of Nations Society in 1917. The same year he began working for the Ministry of Reconstruction, which had been recently established by the Lloyd George coalition government. Within a year, however, he moved to the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office under Sir William Tyrrell. Here he worked on economic policy as well as started planning for post-war reconstruction, though the propaganda element of this made him aware of the comparative lack of sophistication of British propaganda compared to that of the Germans.6 Zimmerns championing of the League of Nations brought him to the attention of the government of Lloyd George at a time when it was keen to establish political support for the League amongst informed sections of opinion. During his period at the Foreign Office Intelligence Department he was put in charge of a

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special League of Nations section and he drafted a memorandum outlining the main features of a League of Nations. He developed the idea that the organization should be based on a series of regular conferences of nations while the secretariat of the organization should be held in rotation by the great powers. The fundamental principle of the League, he wrote, would be that it is a meeting of Governments with Governments, each Government preserving its own independence and being responsible to its own people.7 The League, as it was envisaged by Zimmern, would be a kind of executive committee managed by the great powers for the international body of sovereign states. Zimmerns memorandum was later embodied in a document drawn up by Robert Cecil together with the proposals of the Phillimore Committee that had been appointed by Lloyd George, the prime minister, in January 1917 to work out a scheme for a League. This document became known as the Cecil Draft and was taken to Paris and shown to Woodrow Wilsons legal adviser David Hunter Miller along with General Smuts 1918 pamphlet The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion. These proposals did much to weaken some of the idealism in Woodrow Wilsons plan and to limit the Leagues role to one where it was an expansion of the concert of Europe.8 Zimmern was from the start anxious to temper his ideals with political practicalities and an undue focus upon his later enthusiasm for international cooperation through education tends to neglect this basic element of his thought. By 1919 Zimmern had built up a strong enough reputation to enable him to move out of government to become the first holder of the Wilson Professorship in International Relations at the University College of Aberystwyth. However, his return to academic life proved to be short-lived. His marriage to the wife of a colleague at Aberystwyth was not tolerated at the institution and he was forced to resign in 1921. For the next nine years he remained without a stable academic base, though he took a temporary teaching post at Cornell in the USA and later became Deputy Director of the League of Nations Institute for Intellectual Cooperation in Paris. This was an organization concerned to promote international educational contacts, especially among students, and was a fore-runner of UNESCO after the Second World War. Zimmerns work for the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation enabled him to rebuild his reputation in academic circles. In 1930 with the strong support of the classicist Gilbert Murray he was appointed the first Montagu Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford.9 Over the following years Zimmern lectured and wrote on the deteriorating international political situation. He was active in the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House as well as the Round Table up until the outbreak of the Second World War. The advent of war shattered many of his ideals. In 1943 he retired from the Montagu Burton Chair and returned to the Foreign Office where he became deputy director of its research department until the end of the war. The final phase of Zimmerns career proved to be rather rootless. He was appointed the first Secretary General of UNESCO in 1945 but, following an

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illness, was replaced the following year by the biologist and humanist Julian Huxley. Somewhat embittered, Zimmern left Europe for America in 1947 where he became Deputy Director of the Hertford Council for UNESCO at Hertford, Connecticut. Here he remained until his death 10 years later in 1957. He combined his work at Hertford after 1950 with some teaching at the American International College at Springfield Massachusetts.

Zimmerns liberalism and idealism Zimmerns thought on international relations tended to avoid any serious attention to social science and was heavily infused by a late 19th-century liberal Hegelian idealism characteristic of his generation. This philosophical idealism, which shaped his early education as a student at Oxford, was a robust creed, which at that time in Edwardian England functioned as a form of surrogate sociology. It also helped to define an upper-middle-class social conscience concerned with alleviating some of the harsher aspects of industrial capitalism through work in university settlements.10 Sociology did not appear to have yet reached the stage of being a science and Zimmern was mainly concerned with the question of social evolution in an ethical rather than a Darwinian sense. Such a notion of evolution, he wrote to his colleague in classics Gilbert Murray, could act as a sort of Ariadnes thread which leads the enquirer thinking all the stages of history.11 This idealism encouraged Zimmern to criticize some contemporary social Darwinist ideas of imperial expansion. In 1908 he considered the ideas of the political geographer Halford Mackinder as Bismarckian Darwinism of the purest Milnerian water. The notion of survival of the fittest he condemned as a curious and sinister and blinding philosophy appropriate to men and nations on the make.12 Zimmern did not reject ideals of nationalism. His work in the settlement movement and the WEA led him to see education as a powerful instrument for cultural assimilation, whether of an industrial proletariat or of immigrant minorities. He developed, though, a strong opposition to doctrines of Marxist socialism, being more concerned with forging a link between an economic and industrial reconstruction and an idealist faith in the moral improvement of British society. He shared the Round Table ideal of trying to transform the British Empire into a transnational Commonwealth, seeing it as offering up some hope of moral progress on the political plane.13 At the same time, though, Zimmern was wary of condemning outright the whole edifice of European power politics. The task seemed, as he explained to Graham Wallas in early 1915, to be more one whereby Mazzinism needed to be brought up to date to fit our large scale civilisation.14 There was still a need to champion a liberal nationalism that celebrated the rights of small nationalities in opposition to aggressive imperial claims. Zimmern was strongly critical of German militarism for its politicization of culture after the outbreak of the war in

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1914. He saw this as a direct challenge to the ideals of justice embodied in the British Commonwealth.15 The commitment to the British Commonwealth acted as a major break on Zimmern and prevented him from going further down the road of liberal internationalism towards a more ambitious project of global reconstruction after the war. Throughout his life, indeed, he remained highly sceptical of the internationalism of figures such as J.A. Hobson and H.G. Wells and criticized what he termed the misty ideal of a World State governed by a World Law as a solution to the crisis of Europe. He preferred to look to the existing multinational states such as Britain, the United States and also the German and AustroHungarian empires as the basis for a post-war political solution. Zimmern attacked Hobsons book Towards International Government (1915) for failing to consider that world government might involve the sacrifice of political liberties to a body that would contain authoritarian as well as democratic states.16 Similarly, he criticized the proposal of the anti-war Union of Democratic Control for replacing balance of power politics with an international council since he considered that such a body could only be effective as an organ of government if it was already part of an existing structure of world government.17 Zimmern was also strongly critical of the Marxist theory of ascribing wars to the drive for profit and expansion by industrial capitalists. At a conference at Ruskin College Oxford in 1917, he went as far as blaming capitalism for assisting in creating a generally antagonistic and competitive climate that helped lead states into war, but condemned the Marxist theory of the war for failing to acknowledge that manufacturers generally preferred peace to war.18 Zimmern shared the ideal during this period of the German socialist Friedrich Naumann in his book Mitteleuropa (1915) for a central European economic and political bloc stretching from the Baltic states to the Alps and the Adriatic based on Germany and AustriaHungary. Zimmern saw such a body exemplifying the capacity of modern industrial societies to burst through the boundaries of individual nation states and create a larger transnational great society at the regional level of the international system.19 However, there were clearly dangers in the unchecked expansion of regional markets at the expense of small nations, which Zimmern felt passionately had a right to the recognition of their separate cultural identity. While he was at Aberystwyth Zimmern learned Welsh, though he also warned in The Welsh Outlook of the dangers of nationalism drifting into isolationism and he urged small nationalities like the Welsh to seek wider cooperation in order to influence what he termed world policy.20 There were thus many pragmatic aspects to Zimmerns thought which placed him in an intermediary position between the central political establishment in Britain and the more zealous groups of liberal internationalists on the political periphery. Zimmern particularly attacked some of the more naive aspects of interwar liberal idealism and in Europe in Convalescence (1922) pointed out how internationalist doctrines of liberalism had been re-moralized by small, semi

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religious coteries in Britain and the United States during the First World War after a long period between 1871 and 1914 when they had been driven from the mainstream of European thought. This liberalism, though, had assumed too abstract and too exclusively Anglo Saxon character in the thought of such figures as Herbert Asquith and Woodrow Wilson. He saw no panacea in the League of Nations for it was only by courtesy that the Supreme Council of the League could be described as a Concert of Europe. This Concert indeed was a fragile structure, which was visibly giving out as the memory of the great common struggle grows dim. It also suffered from the fact that it was not based on any alliance or written agreement or a clear policy or outlook.21 It was, therefore, little more than a self righteous soporific to preach that the League could be the solution to international conflict.22 Zimmern recognized that the free market liberalism of the Cobdenite School had failed to prevent the outbreak of the First World War. He hoped that educational contacts between the citizens of different states would be able to make up for some of the deficiencies of the classical model by encouraging an international outlook against war. Bills of exchange, he declared in a 1924 lecture are not necessarily harbingers of goodwill, nor are commercial travellers necessarily agents of enlightenment and mutual understanding.23 After leaving Aberystwyth Zimmern worked for the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation in Geneva which was prominent in encouraging international student conferences and summer schools during the interwar years as a means to promote greater international understanding. He hoped that through a process of mutual international understanding the nations of Europe would come to consider the resort to war as unthinkable as the nations of the British Commonwealth.24 He was strongly encouraged in this effort by Arnold Toynbee at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, whose multi-volume A Study of History, began to be published in 1934. Toynbee also emphasized the important historical role of intellectual communication between different civilizations and the impact of the West upon other cultures.25 After he returned to Oxford in 1930, Zimmern continued to see international relations as involved in an ethical project aimed at transforming the moral outlook of the members of nation states. His writings in the 1930s tended to veer more towards idealist propaganda than serious academic concern with the structures and historical evolution of the international system. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford, Zimmerns moral idealism took on some of the trappings of a dogma. Instead of trying to analyse the role of economic forces in international politics he saw them as collectively menacing the civilized standards of inter-state conduct: We find ourselves, through no fault of our own, in a world in which the barbarians, in the shape of the international economic forces which mould our material existence, have assumed the mantle and have become accustomed to exercising it. . . . Our choice is between attempting to civilise the barbarians and abandoning our own city. It is between co-operation and exile from the worlds life: between internationalism and monasticism: between an effort at

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This call for a moral crusade disguised a failure to explain why these economic forces in the international system were so menacing. He recognized that interdependence was the rule of modern life27 but could only hope that this would in time modify and eventually supersede the power interests of nation states. He was described by his wife as being broadly grateful for the economic depression in the early 1930s since this would enable action to be taken to prevent the whole machine from going straight to its doom.28 But he failed to develop a more coherent vision in the 1930s of reform of the international economic system. Zimmern continued to look more to attempts at trying to improve the Concert of Europe such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. He felt this would increase the forces acting against war, especially through the power of public opinion when it was placed in the hands of statesmen with moral authority.29 Many of his lectures in this period reveal an alarming naivety concerning the potential power of states. He doggedly placed great faith in the restraining influences of educated opinion and the work of voluntary international movements that could act as the building blocks for an eventual system of international government. His thought echoed the more optimistic belief in reason of the era before 1914, failing to recognize the influence of modern propaganda in the mobilization of state power and the close linkage between political propaganda and the mobilization of political power.30 By the late 1930s Zimmern became increasingly despondent about the capacity of the Versailles peace settlement to create a new international order. He recognized that there would not be any early transition from the old order to a new one and a generation or more of education in international relations was going to be required to create it even among the more politically mature peoples.31 He lamented a decline of international standards since the three main agencies which he had believed would act to promote better standards, namely Christianity, international law and our own English standard of behaviour, were no longer really effective.32 Zimmerns emphasis upon the need for a long-term project of international reeducation failed to explain why the apparatus of collective security established by the League had broken down in 1939. It was this glaring omission which E.H. Carr seized upon in The Twenty Years Crisis when he pointed out that Zimmerns explanation was mainly in terms of an innate conservatism and limited intelligence of the individual political leaders operating the international order rather than the principles upon which it was based.33 This attack linked Zimmern with Norman Angell and Arnold Toynbee and the utopianism that Carr saw as responsible for the break up of the collective security system established at Versailles. The accusation was to a considerable degree true, though it also failed to acknowledge Zimmerns reservations about the capacities of the League to enforce peace and his efforts to base its work on the previous political pattern of the Concert of Europe.

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Zimmern considered Carrs realist attack on interwar utopianism fair to the extent that it revealed the blinkered and often naive approach to international politics of leaders like Woodrow Wilson. However, he thought the book was basically flawed by its moral relativism. Even though Carr recognized the need for a moral utopia of some sort, he argued that this in time would fall prey to the weapons of realist criticism. To Zimmern this denial of any form of absolute values in politics was disturbing and liable to leave students of international relations with a sense of blank frustration. Zimmerns career in education had taught him that the teaching of a subject had to be done from some ethical standpoint and this could not be done by running away from the notion of good because it is liable to misuse by the ignorant, the muddle-headed and the illintentioned or by refusing to admit that one foreign policy of one nation or one political cause can be better than another.34 From the start of the Second World War Zimmern felt that Europe would remain a politically backward continent and he began to project his idealism on to the United States.35 This loss of faith in the possibilities of at least European collective security meant that he did not take any active part in the debate that began in the late 1930s on Anglo-American and European Federal union. He became a member of the Study Group on World Order under the chairmanship of Lord Astor at Chatham House, but avoided the deliberations of the World Order Regulatory Group convened by Lionel Curtis in July 1939 to debate the proposals of the American journalist Clarence Streit in Union Now for a federation of English-speaking peoples in Britain and the United States.36 From this time onwards, Zimmerns interest in European international politics began to decline and, after the brief term at UNESCO, he moved to the United States in 1947. In the latter phase of his career Zimmern tried to inject some of the idealism from the interwar years into United States political debate during a period of rising super-power tension in the Cold War. Zimmern hoped that the emerging American global power after the Second World War could be infused with the similar moral ideals to those he had previously seen embodied in the British Commonwealth. In the middle of 1947 Zimmern established contact again with a former student Dean Rusk, who had been in the 1930s a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.37 Rusk was now Director of the Office of UN Affairs in the State Department in the Truman administration. With some 200 personnel it dwarfed other foreign offices concerned with the United Nations in its formative period; there appeared to be the potential for using American power in the pursuit of what Rusk termed civilizing goals and the entrenchment of law and liberty in the international system.38 Zimmern discerned a newer variant of the idealism of the Woodrow Wilson era. In an unpublished manuscript Political Science and Atomic Energy in 1947 he began to explore the concept of an international society, an idea that became central to a number of international relations theorists, such as Hedley Bull, in the 1960s and 1970s. The essential point in the development of such a society was the beneficial use of power which, as in the case of its correct use in the unit of the family, could exercise a civilising influence on the community as a whole.39

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In international society there had to be safeguards against the intrusion of arbitrary power which meant that treaties and agreements had to gradually lose their original character and law in the true sense can take root and begin to grow.40 Zimmern placed less emphasis upon the continuing use of adroit diplomacy in fostering international security than the development of treaties. These he saw as progressively growing into a form of international statute law with increasing moral legitimacy rooted in Kantian notions of natural law. It would be by such means that there could be a progressive erosion of power politics in favour of responsibility politics anchored in both the Security Council of the United Nations and the Great powers acting collectively with a common sense of their responsibility to provide the world with a framework of law.41 Zimmern hoped that the United States would be able to develop a specifically American Programme at the United Nations in the furtherance of such ideals, though Rusk cautioned him against the early realization of such an ideal since any issue in which we are involved appears to move so quickly into at least an appearance of USUSSR controversy that it is hard to convince people that we are interested only in the pacification of the situation along the Greek frontier, in the early establishment of an independent frontier, in the liberalisation of voting in the Security Council.42 His ideas appear to have had little direct effect on thinking in the State Department as the Cold War progressively intensified. From a longerterm standpoint his more pragmatically inclined realist idealism accorded with the aspirations of Dean Rusk as Secretary of State under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s. To many of Zimmerns contemporaries, the immediate period after the Second World War appeared to offer up the hope for a profound transformation in the nature of international relations. Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1946 that we are in one of those critical lines of transition in human society.43 Zimmern had rather lost his earlier faith in the work of informal and cultural bodies in being able to transcend power politics and reduce international tensions. He looked to the United States to further liberal ideals as it had now come out of its pre-war isolation and had emerged as a global power that he hoped would be of a qualitatively different nature to the great powers of the past. These ideals were embodied in Zimmerns last book The American Road to World Peace in 1953 written as a product of the seminars at Springfield.44 The work reflected some of the benign optimism of many American liberals in the era before involvement in counter-insurgency war in South East Asia. It embodied many of the hopes that Zimmern had long held about the United States since he had first gone to teach at American universities in the early 1920s. As far back as the 1920s the United States had appeared to him to have a nationalism that had come of age, while American university students had impressed him by their receptiveness to new ideas.45 He hoped that there would be a closer pattern of understanding between Europe and the United States that would move away from the rather narrower and racially based view of a union of Anglo-Saxon peoples upheld by an earlier generation of Victorian empire builders.46

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This enthusiasm for promoting closer relations with the United States embarrassed some sections of the British establishment. Zimmern however placed considerable faith in the more open diplomacy of the United States, which he felt derived from a society where people were citizens rather than subjects as in the British Commonwealth.47 Moreover, the United States represented a new type of power in international politics in that it was not a sovereign state in the traditional sense but a union of 48 self-governing communities which made it a body social rather than a body politic. As such, the American citizenry could feel that the history of freedom lies before them and not behind them.48 Zimmerns somewhat romantic view of the working of the United States constitution failed to understand the enormous growth of the Federal Government and an imperial presidency in the course of the 20th century and now looks embarrassingly anachronistic to a post-Watergate generation. His hopes for the subordination of US foreign policy to ethical goals did find a number of warm admirers. The master of University College Oxford, Arthur Goodhart, considered The American Road to World Peace should be required reading in every university.49 His stress on open diplomacy, though, embarrassed some British diplomats; Harold Nicholson considered that this could best be achieved by private and more informal contacts.50 The emphasis in the book on the need to enhance the powers of the UN to outlaw the military use of atomic energy also gained a number of supporters in an era when many liberals still held out high hopes for the organization. This line of argument, as Hedley Bull later pointed out, reinforced the emphasis in political science on the study of international institutions such as UNO and the workings of international law compared to the study of the international society of states and their political relations.51 Zimmern was aware of the significance of the latter but his general predilection for legal solutions weakened any interest in developing it. He was in many ways a prisoner of a generation that had little belief in the potentialities of social science analysis. Furthermore, he was writing in an era before the decline of the great European empires and it was hard to envisage a world society of states emerging outside colonial control.

Zimmerns contribution to international theory Zimmern was generally cautious in his hopes for international politics. As the previous section has suggested, he avoided becoming too strongly attached to liberal ideals per se and was concerned to link them to existing structures of the international system. This emerges in two key areas of his thought, that of the organization of the League of Nations after the First World War and the structure of the British Commonwealth. These two themes will be dealt with in the last section of this article. His cautious idealism became particularly evident in his thinking on the Commonwealth. From relatively early on in the 1920s he became critical of the

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intense Atlanticism of the Round Table group, whose ideals he had begun to support before 1914. Philip Kerr, for example, began to despair of the European powers resolving their political conflicts and urged British policy to cooperate with the United States rather than getting involved in the witches cauldron of Europe.52 Zimmern felt that the Round Table needed to examine more carefully what it stood for and hoped he could persuade it to look more towards European affairs rather than maintain its standpoint of imperial isolationism.53 In a lecture at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1925 he contrasted what he saw as the continental tradition of legal arbitration between states with the British tradition of idealist internationalism rooted in ethics and religion. He berated the British government in 1925 for refusing to sign the Geneva Protocol outlawing war since the British Navy could now be used as an instrument for enforcing collective security in Europe. He also attacked those whom he saw as isolationists in British politics since Europe appeared to be rapidly drawing together into a single system based upon an economic unity which would in turn lead to political unity.54 It was no longer possible to see what he termed the centre of the British empire as an island since it had now become part of Europe and its more general problems of military and political security. There would also be growing difficulties in maintaining the unity of the Commonwealth since there were no special common interests that united the different parts of the empire.55 Zimmern was sceptical of ideals of closer imperial unity after the war and recognized that there was an increasing trend towards political autonomy in the Dominions that was eventually symbolized by the Statute of Westminster in 1931. Zimmern continued to be a strong enthusiast for the multinational ideals of the Commonwealth, which he hoped would be based upon a common set of principles rather than a result of some bargain.56 Some radical critics, such as Harold Laski, accused him of confusing institutions which are necessary with institutions to which you are accustomed and failing to acknowledge the element of economic struggle in political life.57 Zimmern, however, saw the main role for the Commonwealth by the end of the First World War as one of moralizing rather than trying to supersede the existing nation state system.58 The work at the Paris Institute tended in fact to drive him further from the liberal internationalism of such figures as Norman Angell, who tirelessly campaigned for a new international order centred on the League that would guarantee collective security and ultimately supersede the nation state.59 Zimmern became progressively despondent by the 1930s in the ability of the League to resolve inter-state disputes. The 1931 Manchurian crisis left him feeling that the League stood revealed as a free masonry of the Great Powers60 though he continued to maintain a faith in the idea of collective security. In a memorandum to Chatham House in 1934 he upheld the British Commonwealth as having the greatest interest in stable peace as a status quo power.61 He attacked what he called the monastic view of Lord Lothian since he saw this leading to Britain standing apart from European conflict in order for a stable regional system to emerge there while the British Commonwealth pursued a policy of active

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cooperation with the United States in the interests of peace at the level of the world system.62 Zimmern considered that there could be no clear break between the two systems since the League was more than just a European regional system and contained elements of a world system.63 In the third edition of his book The Third British Empire (1934) he developed the idea that the Commonwealth was a pioneer of the League in its ability to contain three of the most potent causes of modern war, namely inter-racial relations, economic relations and nationality. Furthermore, it had become in many ways the surest bulwark against war than the League itself. This was due, he argued, not so much in virtue of what it does or of the physical force that it can muster at need, as in virtue of what it is a multi-national association of peoples in five continents.64 The argument, as J.D.B. Miller has pointed out, is only partially convincing since the Commonwealth was not unchecked in its handling of inter-racial relations, particularly on questions of Asian immigration into Australia or South Africa. Furthermore Commonwealth preference hardly made it, as an economic institution, a force for world peace. Only possibly in the area of multinational relations did his argument have some credibility,65 though, here too, Zimmern had too ready a tendency to interpret European national antagonisms in terms of the Commonwealth model. After a short visit between 21 May and 5 June 1938 to Czechoslovakia, Zimmern presented a paper at Chatham House that revealed a marked failure to recognize the forces and motives behind German policy towards Central Europe. He focused on the issue of the German ethnic minority in Czechoslovakia and acknowledged that the disaffection of the Germans under their leader Henlein had only recently become crystallized around the idea of them being Sudeten Germans. However he considered that the conflict exemplified the general inapplicability of the nation state theory to the complex ethnic mosaic of Central Europe. There seemed to be a good case here for a multinational state on the lines of Switzerland or the British Commonwealth. In any case, the whole conflict might have been avoided altogether if power had been taken away from the Czech political parties at the centre in Prague and greater attention paid to familiarise both sections of the population with the methods of local government, as practiced under the best conditions.66 The approach exemplified to a startling degree Zimmerns inability to understand the impact of mass nationalist ideology and its link with modern propaganda. The paper also illustrated a failure to think through the wider political implications of championing the rights of a national minority when this minority is buttressed by the expansionist designs of a major European state. Since December 1937 German military planning had been changed to give priority to an invasion of Czechoslovakia while in February 1938 Hitlers appointment of Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister removed the remaining element of independence among the German diplomatic corps.67 Policy in Berlin had no intention by this stage of a diplomatic solution involving the dispersal of power to ethnic minorities at the local level, though admittedly this was not a fact that Zimmern at the time

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could have been expected to know. Equally, it was not until March 1939 that Hitlers foreign policy moved into the phase of imperial expansion with the first annexation of non-German speaking territory in the form of the rest of Czechoslovakia. The paper, though, provided a rather fitting example of a failure of imagination amongst at least some liberal internationalists by the latter part of the 1930s, when faced with the prospect of global war.

Conclusion The extensive writings of Alfred Zimmern can be considered of major importance in the development of the academic study of international relations.68 In some respects, Zimmerns generally cautious liberal internationalism has perhaps a greater resonance now, in the post Cold War era, than even 10 or 20 years ago. Zimmerns early thought after 1918 was developed in the context of a growing optimism concerning the outlawing of war and the apparent feasibility of enforcing in Europe a system of collective security. The goals of political idealism looked like being fulfilled until at least the early 1930s when a progressive disillusion set in with the League of Nations. Zimmern was careful not to neglect the role of power in international politics and he envisioned the League as being an extension of the old Concert of Europe. In addition he continued to look to the British Commonwealth as a political model that could transcend the problems of national self-determination by defusing power to the local level. Zimmerns championing of the ethical goals of Commonwealth contributed in some respects to what Ronald Robinson has termed the moral disarmament of empire in that it established a set of moral standards that could not be maintained in political practice.69 By the time the British abandonment of the imperial Commonwealth began with the independence of India in 1947, Zimmern had departed for the United States. The last part of his career across the Atlantic was significant for his attempts to reformulate political idealism in the era of the emergence of the United States as a super-power. This effort became eclipsed by the emergence of political realism in the era of the Cold War, which attached little or no significance to intentionality in international politics, since it was the actual reality of state power that really mattered. It is better to treat power in itself as an object of science, wrote Herbert Butterfield in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1951, than to rely, as a matter of sentimentality, on any giants good intentions.70 For a new generation that is starting to come of age in an era of the demise of the Cold War in Europe, this detachment of power from the pursuit of ethical goals appears increasingly limited. Zimmerns cautious liberal internationalism is of considerable relevance in the rediscovery of the intellectual roots of modern international relations thinking.

REINVENTING PEACE Notes

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

See for example Micheline R. Ishay (1995) Internationalism and its Betrayal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Michael Howard (2001) The Invention of Peace. London: Profile Books. H. Suganami, The Peace through Law Approach: A Critical Examination of its Ideas in Trevor Taylor (ed) (1978) Approaches and Theory in International Relations, pp10020. London and New York: Longman. Richard Jenkyns (1980) The Victorians and Ancient Greece, pp33146. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gilbert Murray Papers (1911) Bodleian Library, Oxford. A.E. Zimmern to G. Murray, 8 April. Graham Wallas Collection (1918) I feel like a pygmy faced with giants, British Library of Political and Economic Science, 1/61 Zimmern to Wallas, 3 March. Alfred Zimmern (1936) The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, p203. London: Macmillan. See also Henry R. Winkler (1967) The League of Nations Movement in Great Britain, 19141919, pp2478. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Reprint Corp. Winkler op. cit., pp2534. See also George Curry (1961) Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts and the Versailles Settlement, The American Historical Review LXVI(4): 96886. MSS Gilbert Murray (1929) Bodleian Library, Oxford. G. Murray to A.E. Zimmern, 4 November. Stefan Collini (1978) Sociology and Idealism in Britain, 18801920, European Journal of Sociology 19: 350; Wolf Lepenies (1985) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, esp. pp15595. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MSS Gilbert Murray (1911) A.E. Zimmern to G. Murray 8 April. Graham Wallas Collection, British Library of Political and Economic Science, 1/36 A.E. Zimmern to G. Wallas. MSS Zimmern (1914) Bodleian Library, Oxford, 14, L. Hichens to A.E. Zimmern, 7 January; E. Grigg to A.E. Zimmern, 14 February; L. Curtis to A.E. Zimmern, 14 February; C817 notes (in Zimmerns handwriting) as basis for discussion 2 July. For the activities and work of the Round Table movement see Richard Symonds (1986) Oxford and Empire, pp6279. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan; Paul B. Rich (1986) Race and Empire in British Politics, pp5466. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; John Kendle (1975) The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Graham Wallas Collection (1915) 1/56 A.E. Zimmern to G. Wallas, 1 January. Alfred E. Zimmern, German Culture and the British Commonwealth, in R.W. Seton Watson et al. (1915) The War and Democracy, pp34882. London: Macmillan. Alfred Zimmern (1916) Nationality and Government, Sociological Review (Jan.) repr. in (1918) Nationality and Government, pp3945. London: Chatto and Windus. See also J.A. Hobson (1915) Towards International Government. London: Allen and Unwin. Zimmern (see note 16). Alfred Zimmern Capitalism and International Relations in Ruskin College (1917) Some Economic Aspects of International Relations, p64. Oxford: Ruskin College. Friedrich Naumann (1916) Central Europe. London: P.S. King. Walter Lippmann remained unsure how to judge Naumanns importance, MSS Zimmern (1919) 72, W. Lippmann to A.E. Zimmern, January. Alfred E. Zimmern (1919) The International Settlement and Small Nationalities, The Welsh Outlook (July): 173. Alfred E. Zimmern (1922) Europe in Convalescence, p49. London: Mills and Boon. See also Robert Jervis (1985) From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation, World Politics XXXV111 (Oct): pp5879. Ibid., p141. Alfred Zimmern (1924) Education and International Goodwill, Sixth Earl Grey Memorial Lecture, 26 April, p7. London: Oxford University Press, repr. in The Prospects of Democracy (1929). MSS Zimmern (1928) 21, A.E. Zimmern to J. Ramsay Macdonald, 30 November. MSS Zimmern (1926) 19, A. Toynbee to A.E. Zimmern, 3 May. Alfred Zimmern (1931) The Study of International Relations, p19. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Graham Wallas Collection (n.d. [1916]) 1/82 A.E. Zimmern to G. Wallas. Graham Wallas Collection (1920) 1/61 A.E. Zimmern to G. Wallas, 11 June. Man is a co-operative animal and a

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reasoning animal, Zimmern later wrote in connection with the idea of developing education for world citizenship, but he still remains bound by the limitations of his inherited nature, Alfred Zimmern, The Problem of Collective Security in Quincy Wright (ed) (1936) Neutrality and Collective Security, p19. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. MSS Zimmern (1932) 27, Lady Zimmern to R. Buell, 8 January. Alfred Zimmern (1931) Public Opinion and International Affairs, p6. Manchester: Manchester Cooperative Union. E.H. Carr (1939) Propaganda in International Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Alfred Zimmern (1939) Spiritual Values in World Affairs, p70. London: Oxford University Press. Sir Alfred Zimmern (1938) The Decline of International Standards, International Affairs, XV11(1): 331. E.H. Carr (1939) The Twenty Years Crisis, pp3940. London: Macmillan. Alfred Zimmern (1939) A Realist in Search of Utopia, The Listener (24 Nov.). Zimmerns attack was perhaps rather politer than other idealists of his generation. Norman Angell, for example, was particularly disturbed by Carrs apparent moral nihilism which appeared to lead to a policy of do-nothingism and over-caution on the part of those who have offended from an excess of their tendencies. MSS Zimmern (1939) 45, Norman Angell to A.E. Zimmern, October. See also Norman Angell (1940) Why Freedom Matters. London: Penguin. Zimmern, p128 (see note 31). Lionel Curtis MSS, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 110 World Order. See also Andrea Bosco (1988) Lothian, Curtis, Kimber and the Federal Union Movement (193840), Journal of Contemporary History 23: 465502; National Sovereignty and Peace: Lord Lothians Federal Thought in Turner op. cit., pp108123 and Ira Strauss, Lothian and the AngloAmerican Problematic in ibid pp124136. Dean Rusk to the author 19 March 1990. MSS Zimmern (1947) 52, Dean Rusk to A.E. Zimmern, 6 June. MSS Zimmern (1947) 129, Alfred Zimmern Political Science and Atomic Energy, unpub. ms, Hartford College, June, p70. Ibid., p179. Ibid. MSS Zimmern (1947) 53, Dean Rusk to A.E. Zimmern, 15 October. MSS Zimmern (1946) 50, A. Toynbee to A.E. Zimmern, 6 May. Alfred Zimmern (1953) The American Road to World Peace. New York: E.P. Dutton. Alfred Zimmern, American Universities in The Prospects of Democracy, p149. Nationalism and Internationalism, in Zimmern (1953), p82 (see note 44). For the impact of racial AngloSaxonism in Britain and the United States see Rich (1986), pp1226 (see note 13); Reginald Horsman (1981) Race and Manifest Destiny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zimmern (1953), p26 (see note 44). Ibid. MSS Zimmern (1953) 52, A. Goodhart to A.E. Zimmern, 15 July. MSS Zimmern (1948) 55, H. Nicholson to A.E. Zimmern, 23 July. For a guide to Hedley Bull see Kai Alderson and Andrew Hurrell (eds) (2000) Hedley Bull on International Society. Basingstoke: Macmillan (now Palgrave Press). Philip Kerr (1923) The Political Situation in the United States, Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs (July): 148. See also Philip Kerr and Lionel Curtis (1923) The Prevention of War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. For a more detailed examination of Kerrs thought see John Turner (ed) (1988) The Larger Idea: Lord Lothian and the Problem of National Sovereignty. London: The Historical Press, MSS Zimmern (1922) 17, A.E. Zimmern to L. Curtis, December. Alfred Zimmern (1926) The British Commonwealth in the Post War World, pp1718. London: Oxford University Press. Ibid., p23. Alfred Zimmern (1924) The British Empire in 1924, The Nation (26 June). MSS Zimmern (1918) 15, H. Laski to A.E. Zimmern, 20 September and 15 October. Alfred Zimmern (1918) Some Principles and Problems of the Peace Conference, Round Table (Dec.), repr. in Alfred Zimmern (1929) The Prospects of Democracy, p167. J.D.B. Miller (1986) Norman Angell and the Fatility of War, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. MSS Zimmern (1932) 27, A.E. Zimmern to S. Duggan, 16 February.

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

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Alfred Zimmern (1934) unpublished memo, The Commonwealth and the Collective Security System, p4, Chatham House, 28 July. MSS Zimmern (1934) 97, Alfred Zimmern unpublished memo, The British Commonwealth and the Collective System: Part 1, p5, Chatham House, 27 October. See also Lord Lothian (1934) The Place of Britain in the Collective System, International Affairs X111(5) : 62250. Zimmern (1934), p9 (see note 62). Ibid., p7. J.D.B. Miller (197980) The Commonwealth and World Order: The Zimmern Vision and After, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8: p162. Alfred Zimmern (1938) Czechoslovakia Today, International Affairs XVII(4): 47884. Graham Ross (1983) The Great Powers and the Decline of the European States System, 19141945, p99. London and New York: Longman. D.J. Markwell (1986) Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited: Fifty Years On, Review of International Studies 12: 27992. Ronald Robinson (1979) The Moral Disarmament of African Empire, 19191947, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History VIII(1): 86104. Herbert Butterfield (1951) The Scientific Versus the Moralistic Approach in International Politics, Foreign Affairs XXVII (July): 412.