In choosing a subject for this lecture, my mind turned to two books: both published during the war years, the first in 1941, Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminencel: the second at its very end, Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar The titles of both have been incorporated into the language. The former was not its author's invention; but his use of it as the title of his study of Father Joseph won it a near universality of currency. So Lindemann is still spoken of as Churchill's scientific éminence grise. But the title of Koestler's essay, though less heard to-day, advertises dramatically a very important bifurcation of approach to the problems of human life and society, the one typified by the devotee in his ashram, the other by the commissar, the dedicated ‘social surgeon’ serving the cause of the total transformation of a given human society in the light of the directives of the party to which he belongs. But of course there is an important sense in which in Father Joseph, the subject of Huxley's book (which was incidentally a very well researched piece of work), the two life-styles are to a considerable extent conjoined. Father Joseph is at one and the same time the devoted fanatical Capuchin, the father-founder of the Calvarian order of nuns and the skilled, ruthless agent of Richelieu's purposes. He was no yogi, still less a commissar, but a man whose spiritual teachings rate an admittedly short and critical reference in Bremond's famous history of 17th century French spirituality, and one who played an unquestionably important part in the diplomatic history of a period, wherein diplomacy might well be characterized as war carried on by other means.

There is no better known judgement of Britain's post-war international position than Dean Acheson's view that: “Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role”. Acheson's words have echoed and reechoed through the corridors of Whitehall because they seem so true, capturing not only the uncertainty about Britain's role but the decline in her international status. The judgement has attracted the attention of scholars as well as officials and politicians, as was demonstrated in a recent number of this journal when Christopher Hill wrote about “Britain's Elusive Role in World Politics”. Hill warned against the dangers of seeing foreign policy making in terms of “role”, arguing that it suppressed contradictions in the interests of a predominant image, and encouraged the illusion that a state could plough a lone furrow in pursuit of its particular interests. “Unfortunately”, he argued, “the quest for a unique role, like the pursuit of the Holy Grail, is a fatal distraction to politicians with responsibility”, and later he warned of “role” degenerating into “the medium of limp metaphor and rhetoric”.

The study of modern international relations is carried on, essentially, by two main types of scholars: diplomatic historians, and political scientists. There may be other types, like economists and sociologists, who recognize and take account of the importance of international politics in their own fields of study; but foreign affairs, and the processes that take place within the global system of relations, are not of central concern to them. By contrast, diplomatic historians (by which is meant here, not merely those who research into the rather narrow past actions of diplomats alone, but also those interested in the history of foreign policy and_what has affected it) would simply not exist if there was no perception and acceptance of international relations as a field of study; and this would be equally true of that well-defined sub-division of political science which has as its essential concern the analysis of relations between nation-states and of other ‘actors’ in the world system.

One of the main fields of historical research for the period between the two world wars has been the role of National Socialist Germany in world politics and the character of the British policy of appeasement. A difference of opinion as to the roots and aims of German and British policies in the 1930s continues to exist as a result of disparate interpretations of the decisive factors of these policies. The extent to which such factors as security interests at home and abroad, problems of trade, domestic and foreign policy, economic conditions and social change influence the policy-making process, as well as the impact these elements have on the capability or incapability for reform of the sociopolitical system, remains controversial.

In 1973 the United Nations published an influential study x of the emergence of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and their impact on the world economy in general and less developed countries (LDCs) in particular. The Report was based on a painstaking collection of statistical data and other information on TNCs broadly covering the 1950s and 1960s, The Report's significance, apart from being one of the very few documents containing a large amount of information on the subject, lay in the fact that for the first time an official and authoritative body explicitly recognised that the operations of TNCs can be a source of conflict and in particular that the pursuit of corporate objectives may well be incompatible with the goals of national development in the LDCs. In fact, both the Report and much of the debate that it generated exhibited a sense of urgency reflecting the discovery of existing or impending conflict. Thus, the Group of Eminent Persons, set up to consider certain problems in greater depth and provide recommendations for national and international action, noted.

The theologian Reinhold Neibuhr oftentimes warned that moralists who entered the foreign policy sphere were likely to be more destructive of a nation's ideals than were cynical realists. Evidently he feared that those who lacked a sense of the limits of foreign policy would proceed as if the values and goods which were attainable in the more intimate communities of the family, the locality and the nation were attainable in the international community as well. Whatever Neibuhr's quarrels and debates with classical Greek thought, he was at one with Plato and Aristotle and their present day followers in believing that justice could be more effectively pursued by the smaller communities, such as the city states. He insisted on a recognition of the differences between such communities and the major present day world powers. From World War II until his death, he wrote more about foreign policy than any other aspect of public policy. He wrote scores of articles, some published in less prominent journals, about American foreign policy and its moral basis.

Much has been written about the deep fear of aerial bombardment in inter-war Britain. Particular attention has been paid to the Government awareness of that danger during the late 1930s, when the threat of war advanced from the realm of military and academic speculation to the sphere of an immediate political concern. “Air power” and the concomitant possibility of aerial bombardment, to quote Correlli Barnett, then became an “obsession”; it pervaded Cabinet debates and dominated all discussions of rearmament at every level of the British decision-making process.2 Why this should have been so, is not always made clear. The Government's sensitivity to the air danger is more often assumed than explained, and comparatively few attempts have been made to analyse the root causes which were responsible for this fear in official circles. Particularly neglected, in this context, is the impact of public opinion. Broadly speaking, public opinion is considered to have played a generally negative role, retarding the process of rearmament when not obstructing it altogether. The interplay between the public's view of the “air peril” and that of the Government is thereby minimized. This article is designed to redress that balance. It aims to examine the degree to which the British public was itself sensitive to the air danger and the extent to which its fears were communicated to the men who formulated the country's defence policy. In so doing, it will argue that public opinion acted as a catalyst, affecting official views on defence policy and — in general terms — influencing the choice of the form which rearmament was to take.

The historical interpretations of British diplomacy during the 1930s are difficult to separate from those interpretations that explain the occurrence of the Second World War. Historians often link them by relating the British policy of appeasement to the outbreak of the war. British policy becomes a “permissive” cause of World War II by allowing Hitler to rearm Germany, consolidate western German frontiers, and expand towards the east. First, the British failed to prevent Hitler from occupying the Rhineland in March, 1936, and then merely protested the German annexation of Austria two years later. Within six months after the Anschluss Prime Minister Chamberlain accepted the cessation of the Sudetenland to Germany at Munich. Finally, after Hitler conquered the remainder of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, the British guaranteed the territorial integrity of Poland. When Hitler attacked Poland in September, 1939, the British government, with the French as allies, came to Poland's defence. The British decision to honour this commitment belatedly but irrevocably reversed their earlier appeasement policy, which was to concede Hitler's territorial demands in an attempt to reach a peaceful European settlement with Germany.

Vietnam has been the subject of several studies in our times; yet a need remains for an analysis of the Vietnam experience as an exercise in international peacekeeping. Possibly because interest in peacekeeping has tended to be concentrated on UN exercises, the International Commission for Supervision and Control (ICSC) in Vietnam has escaped serious study. I hope in the course of this paper to partially fill the lacuna. I intend to show the achievements and shortcomings of the ICSC by subjecting its workings to as close a scrutiny as is feasible within the constraints of an article. In the process, I shall be breaking down the Commission into its constituent elements, the three delegations. This procedure allows us both to understand the workings of the Commission as a whole, and to comment upon the coincidence of voting patterns of the delegations with the foreign policies of their respective countries. Polish behaviour, it might be noted, will receive less than equal emphasis. The study is thus simultaneously an examination of ICSC behaviour in Vietnam, and of Canadian and Indian behaviour in the ICSC.

On April 30, 1937 Sir Nevile Henderson arrived in Berlin and assumed charge of the British Embassy as His Majesty's Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. There appeared to be nothing unusual about the appointment which seemed on the surface to reflect the new more active attempts to approach the leaders of the Third Reich by Neville Chamberlain who knew that he would shortly become Prime Minister. What was unusual about the choice was the fact it was made by Sir Robert Vansittart, then Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office and approved by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Both men soon regretted the grave decision and Vansittart, as if to try to rectify his error, spent an enormous amount of energy during the next two and a Jialf years severely critizing Henderson's recommendations, evaluations and actions.

“William, when I went into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich!”

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, Act I

Fortunes magically and mysteriously made on vast continents overseas have tempted western entrepreneurs for generations, much as Uncle Ben tempted Willie Loman. But these exploits also involve machinations which appear sinister to a general public increasingly disturbed by the control giant corporations have over our daily lives. As long ago as 1900, John Hobson developed the theory that modern imperial expansion was the product of the manipulation of national foreign policies by the “Rand lords” and similar overseas financial operators. This idea was used by Lenin, Hilferding and others in their elaborations of the Marxist explanation of the nexus between economic forces and the political behaviour of states. Imperialism in tropical Africa was always seen as a key issue in this context. With the onset of decolonization and the struggle for development, questions of the history and the progress of imperialism have remained cogent subjects of intellectual controversy. The historical “scramble for Africa” and the process of colonization which followed created the basis for the modern political map of Africa and modern African political society. To what extent were these developments triggered or determined by the activities of private entrepeneurs? What relevance might the answer have for the contemporary study of international politics? This article seeks to explore these questions in the light of theories of transnational politics. At the same time, the problem of European expansion in Africa provides an important test for the transnational approach, as it relates to the overseas political activity of international business firms.

The League of Nations was a new factor to be considered during the formulation of any country's foreign policy after 1919, even if it was an experiment which has often been dismissed as doomed to failure on account of the desire of the great powers to limit its evolution.1 The refusal to allow the ex-enemy states to join the League immediately, as well as the non-membership of the United States and of Russia, meant that initially Britain and France emerged as the dominant members of the League and as the leading ‘producers’ of security, and thus they have received a large part of the blame for thwarting the League's development. In particular, in the case of Britain, the Conservative Party was regarded as less sympathetic to the League than the Labour Party, and consequently a Conservative government, such as that of Stanley Baldwin from 1924–1929, which rejected the Geneva Protocol, has been interpreted as a restrictive, even harmful, influence upon the League.

It is now twenty years since Richard Snyder and two associates published a monograph presenting their “framework” for studying international relations as foreign policy decision-making. The basic assumptions of this approach have become an indispensable part of the study of international relations. No-one would now think of ignoring the important processes by which groups of leaders formulate and choose among policy alternatives. Yet the approach itself has been relegated to subsections of surveys of the field, or dismissive footnotes. Although James Rosenau's influential anthology, International Relations and Foreign Policy, still retains three “decision-making” selections in its most recent edition, Rosenau himself pronounced a respectful epitaph for this approach some years ago. Glenn Paige's initial, massive study of the United States' intervention in Korea has had no successors.

The reputation of Haldane as an army reformer has rested largely on his own writings. In his published memoirs, Before the War (London, 1920) and An Autobiography (London, 1929), Haldane, the former Secretary of State for War, argues that the perception of a new strategic purpose had underpinned his reform of the regular army. Meeting Sir Edward Grey a month after assuming office, in January 1906, he was informed that a Franco-German conflict was possible, and that Britain might be requested to assist France. A preliminary investigation by the Army Council was to reveal that it would take two months to mobilize and transport 80,000 men to France. Appalled by this calculation, Haldane claims that he resolved to provide a more prompt and sizeable contribution to the defence of France and the Channel ports. The new strategy depended upon a revision of mobilization planning; it also required the replacement of peacetime formations by an Expeditionary Force, whose size and organization reflected the military requirements of a Continental commitment. That January meeting had been fundamental. Haldane affirms:

I became aware at once that there was a new army problem. It was, how to mobilize and concentrate at a place of assembly to be opposite the Belgian frontier, a force calculated as adequate … to make up for the inadequacy of the French armies….

The books which are the subject of this article1 lie squarely (if a little uneasily on the part of Northedge) in the so-called ‘classical‘ tradition of scholarship in International Relations. This tradition eschews both the attempt to explain international politics by aping the methodology of the natural sciences and any interest in saying something of general import about the process of foreign policy formulation. Rather, it finds its “less ephemeral centre” in the rules and institutions which are shared by states and approaches the study of these rules and institutions in a manner at once philosophical and historical. Furthermore, against the cardboard lances of the ‘transnationalists’ it clutches a sturdy shield to the state, insisting that the state has been in the recent past and will remain for the foreseeable future, the principal “centre of initiative” in world politics. In short, this tradition consists in an overriding concern with the political theory and institutional history of the ‘states-system’.