Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

Recent foreign policy commentary -- especially lamenting the end of "Liberal Order" -- has a bit of an "idealist" ring to it.

But were there ever "idealists" in international relations?

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Okay, the short answer is "yes, Woodrow Wilson"

And, yes, he was an idealist. I mean just look at the way he describes the "League of Nations" in his 14 points: the key idea of the League was "collective security"

But even this pales in comparison to the idealism of an earlier writer & recipient of the @NobelPrize in Peace, Norman Angell

He's famous for his 1909 book, "Europe's Optical Illusion"

archive.org/details/europe…

...which was then updated to "The Great Illusion" in 1910

google.com/books/edition/…

...and was subsequently updated in 1933

foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsul…

The main idea of this work was "military and political power give a nation no commercial advantage, that it is an economic impossibility for one nation to seize or destroy the wealth of another, or for one nation to enrich itself by subjugating another"

And there were the namesakes of the 1928 Brian-Kellogg pact: US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand

With the goal of the pact being a ban war

The writing of this pact led to immediate critical reactions.

Consider this 1928 piece from @IAJournal_CH (academic.oup.com/ia/article/7/6…)

This piece clearly lays out the two "schools" in existence in 1928: "idealists" and "practical people"

The author of the piece, Philip Kerr (Private secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George during WWI and later British Ambassador to the US during the start of WWII), views himself as in the middle

Who are representative individuals in each camp?

The idealists are those who crafted and supported the 1928 pact

The "practical people" include, well, he doesn't say. He just calls him "practical man"

That description of what "practical man" would say sounds a lot like what E.H. Carr would later call "realists"

He of course did so in his 1939 classic "The Twenty Years Crisis"
google.com/books/edition/…

He referred to the "practical man" as realist and the "idealists" as "utopian thinkers"

Norman Angell was an obvious target of Carr

Angell was not amused.

In wrote a rebuttal in 1940 titled "Who are the Utopians? And who the Realists?" and a book titled "Why Freedom Matters"

And an even more direct in a letter to Noel-Baker, where he labeled the book a "completely mischievous a piece of sophisticated moral nihilism"

Many folks have written about this first "great debate".

While I disagree that this debate was a "myth" (I think above shows that it wasn't), I do recommend Peter Wilson's piece from @RISjnl

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

And there is Lucian M. Ashworth's take on the debate in International Relations

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…

And I highly recommend JJM's entertaining take on the debate when he gave the E.H. Carr lecture at @InterpolAber

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…

@InterpolAber In sum, yes, there were idealists. And, yes, there was a debate b/w them and "practicalists" or "realists".

Which legacy will ultimately "win out"? Well, I'll just say that my own money is not on Angell 😉

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