The Story of International Relations, Part Three

Cold-Blooded Idealists

Jo-Anne Pemberton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030318277
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is the third volume in a trilogy that traces the development of the academic subject of International Relations, or what was often referred to in the interwar years as International Studies. This volume explores how International Relations progressed through the 20 th century looking specifically at World War II, from the looming world war to the post-War reconstruction in Europe. This one of a kind project takes on the task of reviewing the development of IR, aptly published in celebration of the discipline's centenary. ?

© The Author(s) 2020

J.-A. PembertonThe Story of International Relations, Part ThreePalgrave Studies in International Relationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31827-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Peaceful Change or War?

Jo-Anne Pemberton¹

(1)

School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Jo-Anne Pemberton

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

A Study of History

Arnold J. Toynbee’s multi-volume work A Study of History, the first three volumes of which appeared in 1934, drew inspiration from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918), a two-volume work which Toynbee had read in 1920 in the course of elaborating a philosophy of history.¹ Yet despite it being a source of inspiration, Toynbee was critical of Spengler’s effort, later observing that while the pages of Decline of the West teemed with ‘firefly flashes of historical insight,’ Spengler’s account of the geneses of civilisations was ‘unilluminatingly dogmatic and deterministic’.² Toynbee observed that for Spengler, civilisations emerge, flourish and then decline ‘in unvarying conformity with a fixed time-table’ and that the latter considered this civilisational trajectory to be simply a law of nature, requiring no further discussion. Yet it was precisely the question of why civilisations rise and fall that Toynbee wished to open up for investigation and in relation to this question he proposed that where the ‘German a priori method drew blank..English empiricism’ might succeed.³

Yet irrespective of the massive amount of historical data on which Toynbee drew in charting the course civilisations, his own approach was hardly in conformity with the approach that one typically associates with the expression ‘English empiricism’. Indeed, Toynbee’s A Study of History was greatly informed by a notion derived from the theory of creative evolution elaborated by the French philosopher and first president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) of the League of Nations (LON) which many of Toynbee’s English peers viewed saw as loose, speculative and even mystical: the élan vital (life-force).⁴ According to Bergson, it is the élan vital which explains the onward rush of life: although life’s particular articulations may become immobile and decay, life itself rushes ever forward. Alongside this forward movement an ‘essential’ feature of the élan vital concerns, as Bergson explained, the ‘unforseeability of the forms that life creates’.⁵

Bergson was fond of saying that the future lies in our hands and more particularly, that our future trajectory greatly depends on our ability ‘to open what was closed’.⁶ Here, it is important to note that for Bergson, it is ‘human individuals and not human societies that “make” human history’.⁷ Bergson stated in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion), that history only takes a forward leap when society ‘allows itself to be convinced’ or ‘shaken’ and that the ‘shake’ which propels society forward must ‘always be given by someone’.⁸ For Bergson, the someone in question concerns the one or several individuals possessed of moral genius: he states that it is ‘only to the thrust of genius’ that the ‘inertia of humanity has ever yielded.’⁹ According to Bergson, society will remain caught in a ‘vicious circle’ until that time when ‘one or several privileged souls, having dilated in themselves the social soul, have broken the circle in drawing society after them.’¹⁰

Toynbee assimilated Bergson’s theory of creative evolution to his civilisational template. What this theory suggested when imported into an account of the history of civilisations is the following: whereas some civilisations fall prey to ‘arrested’ development and ‘perilous immobility’ and then go into decline, other civilisations surge ahead. Impelled by an élan, some civilisation thrust onwards, managing through innovative adaptations to overcome the almost insurmountable obstacles that they find in their path.¹¹ Following Bergson, Toynbee contended that the élan by means of which civilisations grow is conveyed by ‘creative pioneers,’ that is, by ‘superhuman souls that break the vicious cycle of primitive social life’ through bringing about in their social environment the ‘mutation’ which they have realised within themselves. Crucial to this transformative process is the coming into play of what Toynbee referred to as the ‘faculty of sheer mimesis’: creative minorities are imitated by the ‘uncreative rank and file’.¹²

According to Toynbee, the social dynamic at the heart of the relation between a creative minority and the uncreative majority is what drives the growth of societies, this growth being in the direction of ‘progressive self-determination or self-articulation’.¹³ Societal growth involves a process by which a civilisation becomes less and less concerned with responding to challenges issuing from the ‘external environment’ be it ‘physical or human,’ and more and more concerned by challenges issued ‘by itself to itself’ in its own ‘inner arena’.¹⁴ In respect to civilisational decay, Toynbee cited militarism as the main cause, the origins of which concerned a ‘loss of creative power of creative individuals or minorities’. Due to their loss of creative power, the individuals or minorities in question are increasingly unable to sway the masses. In ‘rage and panic,’ they transform themselves into a ‘dominant minority’: they begin to rule by the whip within their own domain while periodically turning their batteries on their neighbours without.¹⁵ Toynbee stated that militarism

has been by far the greatest cause of the breakdowns of civilizations during the last four or five millennia….Militarism breaks a civilization down by causing the local states in which the society is articulated to collide with one another in destructive fratricidal conflicts. In this suicidal process, the entire social fabric becomes fuel to feed the devouring flame in the brazen bosom of Moloch.¹⁶

Naturally given Europe’s own recent experience of fratricidal conflict, the possibility of European decline was at the forefront of Toynbee’s mind during the time in which he was preparing the first three volumes of A Study of History. This was evidenced by his meditations on the destiny of European culture in a paper he gave at a conference in Copenhagen under the auspices of the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations (CISSIR) in 1931, by which time he had been working on the various volumes of A Study of History for some years.¹⁷ That said, it should be noted that Toynbee did not directly confront the question of the possibility of European decline in the first three volumes of A Study of History. In the case of the fourth volume however, it was a different matter altogether. The preface to this volume was dated March 31, 1939, and therein Toynbee confessed that in light of the ‘catastrophe’ that might descend upon his world at any moment, he had felt at times that in writing the book, the ‘painfully appropriate’ themes of which, he observed, were ‘breakdown’ and ‘disintegration,’ he was ‘tempting Fate’ and ‘wasting effort.’ He openly wondered whether the ‘paroxysm’ of nationalism that had engulfed the Western world in the previous year suggested that ‘our parochial national states might have to pass through further bouts of internecine fratricidal warfare’ before they would ‘enter into an effective social contract or else submit to the terrible alternative of being unified by force’.¹⁸

In contrast with the sense of foreboding conveyed in the preface to the fourth volume of A Study of History, the preface accompanying the first three volumes, which was dated May 16, 1933, saw Toynbee offer a broadly optimistic appraisal of the international situation. He observed therein that whereas in the age now past national communities aspired to be ‘universes in themselves,’ in the so-called ‘new age, the dominant note in the corporate consciousness of communities is a sense of being parts of some larger universe’. Toynbee maintained that this sense of corporate consciousness grew out of the feeling on the part of national communities that they could no longer ‘stand by themselves’ and that because of this feeling, states had adapted their sovereign independence to the LON and to other international instruments such as the Pact of Paris: what was formally known as the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, a treaty which was signed in August 1928 by fifteen countries.¹⁹ As Toynbee’s biographer William H. McNeill argues, if the principal message of A Study of History concerned the ‘demotion’ of Western civilisation to one civilisation amongst many, it was a message that was ‘softened’ by suggestions that this civilisation ‘might yet be saved and that God or His secularized equivalent, élan vital, was still in charge.’²⁰ McNeill further argues that to the extent that A Study of History reflects Toynbee’s concern for the peaceful progress of Western civilisation and the international order of which it was the chief author, it may be seen as a ‘grandiose background argument for the advocacy of collective security.’²¹ Yet at the same time and for the very same reason, A Study of History may be seen as a grandiose background argument for the advocacy of peaceful change, a cause that Toynbee would champion in the years after 1933.²²

Peaceful Change or War? An Address at Chatham House

Toynbee was very disturbed by Italy’s violation of the Covenant of the LON in the form of its ongoing aggression against Ethiopia in the wake of the Walwal incident of December 5, 1934. It was in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Peaceful Change or War?
• 2. Paris, 1937: Colonial Questions and Peace
• 3. Conferences at Prague and Bergen and the Looming War
• 4. Intellectual Cooperation in War-Time and Plans for Reconstruction
• 5. The Post-War Decline of the International Studies Conference
• Back Matter