In the summer of 1920 Arnold Toynbee's old friend and contemporary at Balliol, L. B. Namier, a historian of a very different school, brought him a book which had been published 18 months earlier, the first volume of Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes, The Decline of the West. ‘As read these pages teeming with firefly flashes of historical insight,’ Toynbee recalled some years later, ‘I wondered at first whether my whole enquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape in my own mind.’ He decided nevertheless to go on with his own equally ambitious account of the rise and fall of civilizations. From the start, therefore, Toynbee's vast life-work, the 12 volumes, over three million words, of A Study of History, has been coupled with and compared to the two volumes, a mere 400 thousand words, of Spengler's Decline of the West. Both were best-sellers: the original German edition of The Decline of the West sold 100,000 copies in its first eight years; the abridged edition of A Study of History sold over 300,000 and even the ten volume edition (the two subsequent volumes were an atlas and a volume of second thoughts entitled Reconsiderations) sold 7,000 complete sets within a year of the publication of the final volume. Both are, if not forgotten (Spengler at least turns up in unlikely places, such as President Nixon's desk, placed there by Dr Kissinger) certainly largely unread. Yet each is interesting because of the great gifts of their very different authors and because of what they tell us not just about the past but about the twentieth century and the sense of crisis with which we have lived for the last 70 years.

In recent years the collapse of détente and the general deterioration in East-West relations have heightened fears that human evolution will terminate abruptly in a nuclear catastrophe. This foreboding is manifested in many facets of Western life: in the speeches of politicians; in popular culture; in mass movements; and in the working practices and consciousness of academics. At such times I believe that those of us who are specialists in areas outside strategic studies become inclined to take an interest in ‘the great debate’. In some respects this may be in order to seek reassurance. After all, if the ‘experts’ seem calm in these inauspicious times perhaps we can all relax again and put the ‘nuclear genie back in the bottle’. Unfortunately, even if we discovered the psychological solace we had been seeking it would not be satisfactory to hand the nuclear debate back to the ‘experts’. There are solid academic, as well as practical reasons why strategic studies should not remain the exclusive concern of the specialist strategic studies community.

The Cold War remains, despite the proliferation of studies of the subject, one of the most enigmatic and elusive international conflicts of modern times. Like all complex international conflicts, it does not have a single cause. Rather, it is the end result of a concatenation of a number of problems which, by their interaction, made it so intractable. Of these problems, none was more central or pervasive than the German problem. This was central to the outbreak of the Cold War, central to its continuation and central to its decline. So close, in fact, is the inter-connection between the German problem and the Cold War that it becomes difficult to distinguish cause and effect. Clearly, the problems of what to do with Germany contributed to the breakdown of relations between the wartime allies, just as the growing conflict between those allies affected the course of German history. By drawing on the documents relating to United States policy towards Germany during the early post-war period, the present article seeks to shed some new light on the process by which Germany came to be divided and to place the developments in Germany in the broader context of the struggle between East and West. In a nutshell, the argument to be advanced here is that there was never any real possibility of avoiding the partition of Germany given the bipolarity which characterized the international system after 1945, If this was indeed the case, then it follows that the arguments of the traditionalist historians who view the Soviet Union as exclusively responsible for the partition of Germany and the arguments of the revisionist historians who lay the blame entirely at America's door, must be rejected as equally unconvincing. To put it another way, the search for a solution to the problem of Germany which would safeguard the security of Europe and satisfy the basic security needs of both superpowers, represented an attempt to square the circle. The failure to do so contributed in a crucial and decisive way to the emergence of a global conflict between East and West which we call the Cold War.

In the April 1984 issue of this journal, Mark Imber resurrected Mitranian functionalism. His well-reasoned elucidation of David Mitrany's writings and of the writings of Mitrany's major critics ended in five propositions for further research. Unfortunately, one cannot be sure that these five propositions represent Mitranian functionalism or a new species of functionalism, Imberian functionalism. In any case, the five propositions hardly advance our knowledge of functionalism, even if they are only intended to show the possibility of functionalism's existence.

Robert McLaren is to be commended for his stimulating response to my article ‘Re-Reading Mitrany’ (Review of International Studies, 10, 2, 1984). He suggests that my discussion constituted the creation of ‘…an interpretive subset of Mitranian functionalism’. I would like to disclaim the attribution and attempt to demonstrate that the set of propositions derived from my discussion are: (a) genuinely attributable to the thrust of Mitrany's original formulation; and (b) sustainable as a prescription for the reduction of interstate violence in the international political system, I would not suggest that any inevitability may be attached to the possibility of a ‘working peace system’, but McLaren's commitment to the impossibility of functionalism invites a response:

Somebody reading these books in rough chronological order of subject matter without previous knowledge of Japan might well end up bemused and sceptical. In the early part of the story we have a militarized and expansionist power, colonizer of Korea and Taiwan, creator of the puppet state of Manchukuo, extending Its control over large tracts of China, competing In military might and especially naval tonnage with the great powers of Europe and North America, then destroying the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and carving out a huge empire stretching from the Gilbert and Ellice islands to the borders of the Soviet Union, from Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians to Java and Sumatra in the far south.