The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939

Abstract

For a generation which never really experienced the Cold War, or who came to intellectual maturity long after it had become but a distant memory, it is difficult, if not impossible, to convey what an extraordinary shock it was to nearly all of us to see the certainties of nearly 40 years simply evaporate before our very eyes between 1989 and 1991. Of course, for those who had always preached that there was no rational alternative to the market, the collapse of an old order underpinned as it was by what Ronald Reagan had earlier called an ‘evil empire’ could only be welcomed. Yet others were not so certain. Indeed, one of the more famous doyens of academic International Relations (IR) warned both liberals and triumphalists that the world might soon be missing the Cold War or at least should not be welcoming its passing with such gusto. He was right to sound a note of warning. Indeed, when the demise of Soviet power was followed in turn by the tragic collapse of former Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda, economic catastrophe in ‘reforming’ Russia itself, a horrifying but successful attack on the USA in 9 September 2001, the Iraq war, the great financial crash of 2008, and then, to cap it all, a revolt in North Africa which began with such high expectations but very soon threatened to destroy the state system in the Middle East, then it was palpably obvious that, that much heralded ‘new world order’ announced back in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush was not about to be realized any time soon. Amidst all this change it is perhaps reassuring that a number of more historically minded scholars have returned to look in a more systematic way at some of the early classics of the discipline. Whether this is because they are finding it impossible to make sense of the real world with all the new theories that have been served up on the academic menu over the past two decades, or simply because they believe that the past (and an older) generation of writers has something to tell us, does not really matter much. The fact of the matter is that since the early 1990s, and amidst all the turmoil, there has been a veritable flood of significant work on some of the founding fathers of IR.