The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939

Citation

Carr, Edward Hallett. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. Macmillan, 1939. Google Books Link

Excerpts

Page	Quote	Notes
96	Quoting Thomas More: “Everywhere do I perceive a certain conspiracy of the rich men seeking their own advantage over the name and pretext of the commonwealth”. Then, from Manifesto, “The exploitation of one part of society by another is common to all past centuries”.
97	Argument for Political Economy rather than just Economics or Political Science: “the homo politicus who pursues nothing but power is as unreal a myth as the homo economicus who pursues nothing but gain” Argument for also including Ethics: “a political act is a coordination of morality and power”
97	”Utopians who believe that democracy is not based on force refuse to look these unwelcome facts in the face”
136	”the work of the bomb and the shell was reinforced, especially during the last months of the war, by an intense output of printed propaganda.”
150	”The question whether the Belgian Guarantee Treaty of 1839 imposed an obligation on Great Britain to assist Belgium in 1914 […] rested neither personally on Palmerston who signed the treaty […] nor on all individual Englishment alive in 1839, nor on all individual Englishmen alive in 1914, but on that fictitious group-person ‘Great Britain’, which was regarded as capable of […] honouring or dishonouring an obligation.”
166	”One of the chief obstacles to the growth of a common German national consciousness was the difficulty in persuading Prussians, Saxons, and Bavarians to treat the good of Germany as more important than the good of Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria.”
168	”In the national community, appeals to self-sacrifice are constantly and successfully made, even when the sacrifice asked for is the sacrifice of life.”
184	US protest against British blockades in WWI: “belligerents should not interfere with neutral commerce ‘unless such interference is manifestly an imperative necessity to protect their national safety’ […] The British Government gratefully accepted this interpretation, and was thenceforth able to justify its blockade activities on the uncontested ground of an ‘imperative necessity’ whose requirements nobody was as well qualified as itself to assess.”
209	”The problem of ‘peaceful change’ is, in national politics, how to effect necessary and desirable changes without revolution and, in international politics, how to effect such changes without war.”
217	”The grievances of which the Covenant [of the League of Nations] took cognizance were, broadly speaking, the grievances of states strong enough to create a danger of war.”
218	When Bolivia brought its complaint to the League of Nations in 1921, “it was cogently argued that, since the conditions of which Bolivia complained had existed for a long period without endangering peace, there was no case for bringing them before the League. In other words, it would have been necessary, in order to set the procedure of peaceful change in motion, that Bolivia should be strong enough to threaten war against Chile.”

Zotero Metadata

Abstract

Metadata

FirstAuthor:: Carr, Edward Hallett
Title:: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations ShortTitle:: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939 Year:: 1939
Citekey:: carr_twenty_1939
itemType:: book
Publisher:: Macmillan