Translator’s Note

Julius Hatschek, Outline of International Law, G. Bell & Sons, 1930, pp v-vi.

Now that Great Britain, by ratifying the ‘Optional’ Clause of the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice, has engaged to accept on legal issues the rulings of an international body of judges whose decisions do not need to be unanimously voted, it may be hoped that the English jurist’s education will come to include a closer study than in the past of the great Continental writers on whose doctrines the majority of those judges will have been trained.

When an English biologist reads the book of a German biologist he is reading German thought on a single subject, namely, biology, in which they will both have served their intellectual apprenticeship. But neither an English nor a German jurist has been trained on law, as such. The former will have cut his professional teeth on English law – the latter on German Recht. Trained in two distinct disciplines, they meet for disputation on a neutral plane, the plane of international law, a plane, that is, on which neither of them has received his fundamental schooling as a thinker. Will it be surprising if sometimes a given problem presents itself to such mutually strange mentalities in somewhat dissimilar guises? For the former it will be a problem not too bafflingly different from some problem of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence with which he is already acquainted. Correspondingly, for the latter, it is from some German problem that light will be expected and obtained.

For the needs of a specialist there can be no adequate substitute for a reading of the French, German, and Italian writers in the original. But not everyone is a specialist or inclined, from the outset, to wrestle with a given foreign tongue. Some are taking soundings before embarking upon any form of intensive specialisation. Others are laymen who can be as content with an impressionistic sketch as with a direct vision of what it portrays. For these two classes of
reader an attempt, in English words, to convey the contours, the atmosphere, the general approach, of a German’s thinking may be of greater value than an effort to isolate the hard kernel of the German thought and to rethink and restate it in a congenially English manner. There may even be some excuse, in such an attempt, for wilfully avoiding a familiar English term, with the irrelevant, because natively English, associations that it must inevitably evoke, in favour of some barbarous corruption coined for the occasion as seeming a
little better calculated to carry into an English mind a necessarily alien idea. If the present translation has at all achieved its purpose an English student will sample it with the feeling that there is something neither English, nor international, about the mental background from which the discussion
proceeds.

The book was first published in Germany, under the title of Völkerrecht im Grundriss, in 1926; hence there are inevitably points of detail in which it is not up-to-date – e.g. the position of the Pope; but I have not undertaken to emend
it or to exercise any editorial responsibility.

I desire to thank the publishers and Miss Gertrude Massé for relieving me of the labour of making the Index in consideration of the many new calls on my time occasioned by my removal from Oxford to London.

C. A. W. M.

Skeleton of Essay on the Causes of the Failure of the League

Unpublished manuscript, Balliol College, Oxford, January 10, 1941.

The purpose of what follows is to provoke discussion concerning an episode which, properly understood, may be found to have in it lessons relevant to the problem of international organization in the future.

Even among specialists there seem to be various interpretations of what essentially happened with the inauguration of the League.

Of the many peace theories reflected in the Covenant, round-table discussion and the collective restraint of over-hasty aggression seem to be the only ones to which unreserved expression is given. The only far-reaching innovation is the coercion obligation in articles 10 and 16. It is the League’s failure as a collective security club that will here be considered.

There was, in the minds, and words, of Wilson and the Phillimore Committee, no vagueness regarding the need for drastic and immediate action, or the prospect of it, as the one reliable way of deterring the would-be aggressor. During the Peace Conference however this idea was in two important respects watered down. Yet, given the participation of the United States, the blockade provided for in paragraph I of article 16, might well have sufficed as a sanction. The Covenant without the United States might, on the other hand, have been likened to ‘a motor without petrol’.

From 1920 onwards British diplomacy tended to represent the League as being essentially a system, not of collective security, but of round-table discussion.

Tried against Italy, sanctions proved a fiasco. Britain made no pretence of wishing to outshine France in her active compliance with article 16, and France made no pretence of wishing to put her duty to Abyssinia above her friendship for Italy. What failed on 1935/36 was, not collective security as envisaged in the Covenant, but a speculative trial of sanctions on a footing of limited liability. What was called in question at the British General Election was not the propriety of the Government’s explicitly limited programme but the sincerity of those who were putting it forward.

It is perhaps wisest to recognise collective security as having been from the first a diplomatic facade.

The wars which wrecked the Geneva system were not of the kind permitted by the so-called ‘gaps’ in the Covenant. Whatever may be thought of the peaceful change machinery of articles 11 and 15, it is difficult to ascribe to their shortcoming the events which occasioned the breakdown of the League.

The direction of so much effort, in Geneva and elsewhere, to the possibly hopeless task of getting the Covenant improved upon, not merely diverted part of the attention of enthusiasts from the work of making generally understood the nature of the system already in being; it may also by implication, have suggested to the undiscerning public an impression that the League, as it stood, was not looked upon as a particularly efficacious affair.

The idea that disarmament was the means to peace was given mere lip-service in the Covenant. How far the hesitancy of the ex-Allies in their approach to the subject of disarmament was a disservice to the League is an obviously controversial point.

It seems possible that Wilson overestimated the disposition of democracies, as such, to cooperate in the manner appropriate to members of the League.

So far as the wording of the Covenant is concerned, there is little to show that it was drawn up by persons sharing the Wilsonian conception of the role public opinion was to play. Nor do Wilson’s anticipations in this regard seem to have been realised in practice.

It would perhaps be a mistake, in assessing the causes of the League’s failure, to leave wholly on one side the question of possible defects in the mechanism of the democratic control of foreign policy. Given that some of the data on which British, like other governments, have to determine their course must necessarily remain confidential, there is something to be said for tht theory of democratic practice which would leave the detail of foreign affairs, particularly in their strategic aspects, to the unharassed [sic] discretion of those who on their general qualifications are able to retain for the time being the confidence of the House of Commons.

If the public in Britain are to retain their general control of the Government’s doings on the international plane, it is desirable that popular instruction in the essentials of international politics be conducted with disinterested efficiency. It was perhaps unfortunate that the League of Nations Union should not have permitted itself to concentrate on the task of acquainting the people with the nature of the existing League, the nature of that international environment into which it had been born, and the nature of Britain’s place in both. It seemingly uncritical receptiveness of almost any continental suggestion for the better definition of Britain’s obligations may have contributed to a vague prejudice, in the minds of the realistic, against anything, including the League itself, on which such a body of ‘visionaries’ were understood to be keen.

Can we be confident that, when victory is once again given to the deomcratic peoples, they can be relied on to make a more propitious use of it?

If the League did indeed presuppose, as some of its admirers have tended to allege, the prevalence in the world of a morality so novel as to make peoples act altruistically, it will surely have been foredoomed to failure. Mr. Streit, in explaining why social cohesion, with support for the rule of law, cannot in his opinion be hoped for among a community whose units are not individuals but states, declares that ‘the change of unit makes all the difference in the world’. Failing federation, or the reasonable hope of attaining it soon, there does seem to be nothing ‘for it’ but to reckon with state nature as it is, and to be content, with Mr. Gathorne Hardy, to build upon ‘the self-interest of incorrigibly nationalistic states’. In few countries are blind isolationists likely, in this ‘shrinking world’, to control the course of policy.

The authors of the Covenant were probably not, as Mr. Streit supposes, attempting to tackle ‘the problem of international government’. On the contrary they were planning an international organization, as the alternative to such a system of government.

The fact that a particular compact system has been a failure is not proof that all compact systems of whatever structure must by their nature break down…

If it is a demerit in the Covenant that it ‘enthrones sovereignty’, the fault lies rather with the system of international law from which the Covenant derives its validity. Similarly, the ineffectiveness of compact, as a basis of order, is due to the imperfect success of such efforts as were made, after the last war, to ‘restore’ the sanctity of international law. There seems to be room for serious reflection on the limits of what can in these times be effectively done to control in advance the behaviour of sovereign states by getting them pledged to do what when the day comes they may not want to do. It may be that the best contribution we could make to restoring the sanctity of treaties would be to discountenance the inclusion in them of promises the punctual performance of which may seem to demand rather much of the promisor.

The international legal norms being so relatively weak, there was needed for the vitality of the League, two other elements: a policy of cooperation on the part of the governments, and a psychology of cooperation among the peoples. What the League needed was not so much a cosmopolitan outlook as a sane internationalism. It may be that Mr. Woolf is right in thinking that such a psychology was lacking after the last war and may be realisable only within the limits of Europe after this one.

If the policy of cooperation was to be forthcoming, it was necessary that the League’s value to its masters should be accepted, as beyond question, by policy-moulding circles in the countries concerned. For an understanding of the spirit in which some of the League’s members took their membership in its formative period, it is useful to recall that, in a sense, they were conscript members rather than volunteers.

It seems plain that it is only by other great powers that any one great power can ever be effectively disciplined. It is hard to say that any of the then existing great powers were in 1920 fully dedicated to the business of disciplining whichever one of the others might defy the League in its character as a system of collective secutiry [sic]. Had Britain and France elected to treat ‘Crofu’ as a test case of substantial, whether or not technical, ‘agression’ [sic], it seems likely that a precedent would have been set which, besides having its effect upon other potential disturbers of the peace, must have done much to exorcise the scepticism of realists and reactionaries at home. French and British statesmen were however chiefly preoccupied with relationships with Germany.

Looking back, it is easy to see that, deprived of American backing, the League was likely to survive only if the European atmosphere became and remained such as to place little or no strain on its collective-security framework. On its positive side the preparation of peace required the willing cooperation of at least the principal countries of Europe. As it was, that blindness of heart which, after Wilson had insisted on having a democratic Germany to make peace with, proceeded to treat its representatives as in effect the authors of the war, deprived the none too robust Geneva infant of perhaps its best chance of making a sturdy child.

The architects of any new system of collective security would, if open to the teachings of experience, bear in mind, among other fundamentals: the absence, in politics, of any real substitute for power resolutely employed; the relative insignificance of action taken by small powers save as makeweights in association with great ones; the deceptiveness of any supposed distinction, for purposes of practical policy, between military and other less full-blooded sanctions; the importance of having a formula of cooperation genuinely acceptable to , and freely accepted by, as many of the great powers as possible; the narrowness of the limits within which in vital concerns legal obligations can be relied on as a determinant of state behaviour; the necessity, as a basis of collective security, of a peace of stability rather than of avarice, passion or justice.

The possibilities might be examined of a League based, like the British Commonwealth. on an absence, or a minimum, of formal commitments. If there are to be any obligations, the principle of grading them in accordance with geographical possibilities is, it is suggested, a good one. If the small states will not soon again rely on the great ones to play their part loyally in such a scheme, let them stay out, or let their participation be expressly conditioned on the prior action of the big ones.

It seems to be true, as Streit insists, that it is of little use hoping, anywhere short of federation, to eliminate the rivalries, competition for preponderance, and so on, which marked the traditional system of interstate relationships. If the League is to succeed, it must succeed in spite of the nature of men, the nature of states, and the nature of the society of states. It is doubted, however, if the Geneva League did really need for its success so great a ‘spiritual revolution’ as has been talked of by some.

In whatever conventional form the collective security framework is set up, the policy of cooperation for which it stands will, if full use to be made of the opportunity we hope for, need to be given effect to in all other potential ways. If there is any way by which the several peoples can ever come to be ‘rather mixed up together in some of their common affairs’, it will probably be through that sort of functional inter-relationship of which Dr. Mitrany has told us – expressing itself in continental highways and international public works – rather than by the multiplication of treaty ties between those rational entities, which no one has seen, but which, by the exercise of our imagination, we conceive and invest with ‘personality’, and to which we give augustness, though so added reality, by calling them sovereign.

Could some way be devised for ensuring that the new League, besides functioning as an association of states, represented solely by, or on behalf of their governments, would have, at the same time, the aspect of a fraternity of peoples, represented also in other, complementary, ways, the much to be desired transnational sense of community might be furthered a little.

It is not assumed that the world is likely ever to get absolute security along these suggested lines. But in straining after the shadow of the not yet attained article, we might easily miss the chance of a precious truce, around which to rally and reorganise the forces of peace, and to visualise, not perhaps the ultimate goal, but the possibilities for a next step.

The Teaching of International Relations

Political Studies 3(1), 1954, pp. 75-7. (A reply to an earlier article published in the journal.)

There are those, Professor Wheare among them, from whom an invitation is, for me, a command. The opportunity he gives me for elucidating, so far as may be, at certain points, the tabloid wording of my UNESCO report is one which it would therefore be difficult to decline. Besides, there are incidentally some things that I would rather like to say!

On the definition of international relations Professor Wheare and I seem to be partly in accord and partly not. That it has a unitary subject-matter, complicated, varied, interesting, and important enough to be studied on its own – on this we are agreed. For him, however, if I mistake not, the selfsame individual might by one and the same token be a teacher both of international relations and of history – the former by virtue of his subject-matter, the latter by virtue of his approach. Nor is the historian’s, for Professor Wheare, the only distinctive ‘approach’ to the subject. So that, if the historian is to style himself, alternatively, a professor of international relations, why not, similarly, one might ask, the social psychologist, the statistician, and the rest? We are all professors of international relations, now! Or are we? I do not wish to quibble: but surely the question is not whether we shall view with relative disesteem a given approach to the study of a given subject-matter; but rather whether we shall treat as if essentially interchangeable some sorts of teaching which are not. I at all events do find it pertinent to differentiate between international relations and international history, in much the same way as between economics and economic history, or between criminology and the history of crime.

The main thing, however, is that, while tending to include among students of international relations the exponents of various specialized methods of approach, Professor Wheare is confessedly alive to the value of the synoptic vision of the subject as a whole. By contrast with the statistician and the historian, the purveyor of this synoptic vision is less, he hints, a specialist than a general practitioner. And he points to Sir Alfred Zimmern, whose lectures himself when young did eagerly frequent. Not everyone, he remarks, can be a Zimmern. True. Nor a Maitland, either. Yet the study and teaching of constitutional history are attempted even now. And Professor Wheare himself does not doubt that the general practitioner, whether potentially a Zimmern or not, can be and should be produced.

The question is, Is he wanted? In the recognition of new subjects, no less than in the attachment of labels whether old or new the universities still enjoy, very rightly, a certam liberty to do as they choose. Why, in a given institution, should not a chair titularly of classics be entrusted to one whose single topic was Jane Austen? Why for that matter should not a vacancy as gamesmaster be filled with one whose only proficiency was in chess? When, therefore, I am in effect invited to concede, regarding International Relations, that, distinct discipline’ though I deem it, the holding of professorships in this subject by the ‘mere’ historian, or the ‘mere’ economist, is not improper, it behoves me to select my words with care.

I might, it is true, take evasive action with the protest that the ‘mere’ economist, or ‘mere’ historian, is to me but a mental construct, since no such type, in fleshly form, has ever been met by me. But l know, I think, what Professor Wheare means, and must not shirk the issue. If by his, I hope strictly hypothetical, ‘mere’ historian, he would have me understand someone wholly innocent of economics, or by his ‘mere’ economist a person ignorant altogether of law, then, in that case, I would say, it all depends on what the term ‘international relations’ has locally been taken to mean. But, assuming that, by international relations, in the given milieu, there has hitherto been understood the non-lop-sided study of international relations, then the ‘mere’ this or that, if having mirabile dictu been given such a chair, would presumably make it his concern to rid himself, as soon as might be, of the ‘mere‘. For, between the extremes, of the ‘mere’ what have you on the one hand and the exhibitionist polymath on the other, there is the ‘de-specialized specialist’ – to use a Zimmern expression – who, relatively expert in some single restricted domain, has also an adult familiarity with a wider range of issues. He is not unlike the man who joins a good command of his mother tongue with a reading awareness of languages other than his own.

For there are, I fancy, two further distinctions to which I might attach more importance than Professor Wheare. They are (a) that between International Relations, as a discipline in itself, and various other ‘international’ studies; and (b) that between International Relations and the various other subjects, whether ‘international’ or not, whose presence should commend itself, as ‘underpinners’, in the programme of the specializer in International Relations as such. International history, international law, international economics. are obvious international studies, demanding each its own specialized approach; comparative government. political and economic geography, political ideas, are also among the more important of the underpinners. Meanwhile the focal subject of International Relations proper includes in particular its philosophical, its psychological, its sociological, its strategic and geographical aspects – all of them parts, essentially, of the subject itself, and unlikely, by a Zimmern, to be left unexplored. For without them the presentation of International Relations must itself be lop-sided, and the ‘feel’ of the general practitioner for what everything is all about could never be very effectively fostered in the young.

Still – what sort of chair can ‘properly’ be held by what sort of person is a delicate theme, in any treatment of which there is risk of getting misconstrued. Is it so much a question of propriety as of propitiousness’? And of this what shall be the test? Suppose we assume that here, too, the customer is always right, who exactly in this case is the customer? Is it the university, from whose funds the professor is paid? Is it the taxpayer, from whose pocket…? Or the electorate? Or is it perhaps the student. whose needs the chair may presumably have been meant to serve? Professor Wheare does not directly suggest that every approach, however intrinsically legitimate, to international relations is of equal relevance to the student’s need, or that the teaching he himself received from Sir Alfred might equally have been given him by a statistician, say, or a ‘mere’ expert in economics or law. Can it then for him be a matter of indifference whether others, the youth of tomorrow, are to have set before them the synoptic vision, or ‘merely’ the limited approach? To be interested for one’s own part in some aspect only of a subject-matter may be proper enough, and proper enough for the aspect to be taught. It may likewise be proper enough, if sanctioned by local usage, to put the label ‘international relations’ on the teaching of this or that. But what is not per se improper is not for that reason necessarily to be recommended, and the question is not so much whether statistics. or history, or economics is itself an excellent thing but whether the synoptic vision can, with complacency, be spared. Professor Wheare, I surmise, is not unthankful that, in his undergraduate days, it was not. Call two forms of teaching by the same name if you care to, but does it thenceforth cease to matter which you get?

Then, too, the point about departmental organization. Given that International Relations is seen as proper to be studied on its own, does this amount to saying that it should have a department to itself? Not, certainly, in an administrative set-up where separate subjects do not, in general, have departments to themselves. But, where they do, why not? It is on this point that Professor Wheare, in a manner which had puzzled me a bit, brings in the question of the team method. It is on the team method of teaching that I have come, tentatively, to set so much store. And it is with this matter of teaching that the UNESCO report is concerned. What Professor Wheare, however, discusses is teamwork in the matter of ‘study’: and he sees, I would gather, no reason why, when the problem requires it, a study-team should not include workers from two departments or more. Neither, need I say it, do I. For I would doubt if departmental organization need affect, or be affected either one way or another by, the requirements of co-operative research. And even supposing I assume that, in talking here of study, it is team teaching that Professor Wheare has actually in mind – and this in an establishment where, for balance and completeness, the teaching team in International Relations must look to some help from outside: would this necessarily not be forthcoming? Need interdepartmental divisions be so ‘watertight’ as that? Only I must say I would think it better that those teaching International Relations should have this as their staple concern, and belong as well in form as in daily practice within the department whose specific business it is.

Since he thus does not, in fact, discuss teaching, Professor Wheare naturally does not expressly consider what teaching – either in general or, in particular, of international relations – is for. Nor does he, between the lines, disclose any presuppositions on the point, unless perhaps by his non-alignment on what the booklet rather tends to assume – namely, that the purpose, presumably, in instituting posts in International Relations is not to. reinforce existing teaching strength in other excellent subjects but rather to enable more undergraduates in more universities to get at least some semblance of that holistic vision of the subject-matter of international relations which in his own day he himself so understandably enjoyed. That the international relations specialist (or perhaps general practitioner) could and should be produced Professor Wheare does not allow himself to doubt: but he says nothing further on the point. Yet the matter is one on which in its conclusions the UNESCO booklet laid a certain stress. If by a Zimmern what we mean is one who sees the need that Zimmern saw, who feels the call he felt, and, given the chance, would choose the course he followed – are there no potential Zimmerns, as so defined, among the abler young graduates of today? If some should not even try to be Zimmerns, some should. And their colleagues should, I submit, be glad to see them try.

The Teaching of International Relations

The Listener, May 27th 1954, pp. 486-7.

After receiving her honorary doctorate at Leeds the other day, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother spoke of the task of the universities – with its bearing on the future of national life – as ‘a tremendous trust’. And so we shall all agree, it surely is. And a part of that trust, I for one would myself suggest, consists in recognising the advent of new disciplines, and finding room for those that by their importance are deserving of place. I believe international relations to be just such a discipline: m ~act, I believe· it _to be-in our propaganda-permeated bomb- bewildered age-of an importance hard indeed to overdo.

For the recent Unesco survey it fell to me to analyse eight national reports, each reflecting a viewpoint of its own. Broadly, what did emerge was that scarcely anywhere as yet was the subject of inter- national relations, seen as a discipline intrinsically distinct, being taught at all: though light in plenty is thrown, if only obliquely, on its subject matter by much that is traditionally taught-by history and so on. Yet international relationships are a multi-dimensional complex of subtly interrelated phenomena about which we all might do well to know more. ·

The Need for ‘Coaching’
Any evening now, from the train, one may see little boys· teaching themselves to bat. Batting takes time to learn; and a little early coaching, given whether by specialists, or by others as a sideline, pays dividends all the way. And, similarly, if a history, or a politics, professor perceives in his students a subsidiary need for coaching in international elementals, and no one locally is specialising in these, he may himself take to presenting them, so to say, on the side. In the United States, especially, university departments of history, of sociology, and above all of political science, have thus, often with great proficiency, gone in for some form of teaching announced as ‘international relations’. It is perhaps natural enough, with these sideline methods, that those who from such divers angles have had the vision and enterprise, and public spirit, to undertake it should tend to suppose that theirs must be the only way in which it can sensibly be attempted.

In London, I ought to explain, the teaching of international relations has throughout been in the specialising hands of persons, themselves in this respect mainly self-taught, who have seen their subject as existing in its own right. But the man whose book of beasts did not include the kangaroo was not able to allow its possibility, even when he met one face to face. And those whose list of disciplines is strictly medieval seem apt to be similarly affected by the subject of international relations. Is it not, they ask, just a part of this or that? What, they ask, ·makes international relations a unitary discipline in itself? To which I would, in part, reply: ‘It exists to serve a single distinctive need: the need we all have to understand the social universe as a whole, and relationships within it, as they are ‘.

For success in social living man’s foremost necessity, I suppose, is judgement. And this takes time to ripen. It appears to best advantage when the situation to be appreciated presents itself to a well-trained mind within a serviceable frame of reference. All merely human minds, let us face.it, are always more or less immature. Each of us carries around with him his own apparatus of preconceptions, unique as a fingerprint and private as a dream, but capable of adaptation to new discoveries from day to day. A relevant frame of reference, a practised judgement – these are among the possible fruits of education. To exclude the teaching of international relations is to leave to fortune a part of the frame.

Perhaps you yourself may understand it all already. But you did not always. Like anyone else’s, your personal picture of the over-all institutional set-up was at first a thing of fantasy and fog. We got our bearings in our world only bit by bit – in the cradle first, the nursery next, the home. Yet always there remained a wider context lying out beyond, a matter for the imagination rather than the eye. Most of us get safely to the stage of feeling at home within a .country: but how many are equally familiar with that form of social living which obtains in the notional society of sovereign states? It is, I submit, to the structure of that international society that the student might early be encouraged – but so seldom is – to address his maturing mind.

For is this wider world-awareness not something to be wished for? If it is, then should it not be striven for, and even provided for? We believe in teaching young people what the world is like in a physical sense. They study it early, on a global scale – with globes. But how commonly do we get round to teaching them about the world in the sense of its social arrangements – its omnipresent outfit of artificial forms, its ancient system of diplomacy, with all its invisible frills, its doctrinal implications?

Within the nation, most of us are well enough at home. We are used to government, as a fact of local life. Not so many people however are comparably able to think in terms not of government but of non-government – of influence merely – the terms in which diplomatic affairs must be understood. Our transition to this plane of thinking may not require a superhuman mental leap; but it does mean moving forward, as it were, into a different kind of country, with a change of conventional gears. And in this new country we shall hardly feel fully at home if still relatively illiterate in the structure of international society – first steps, that is, in the study of international relations.

Life is at all levels a series of situations. The power to appraise and, at need to re-appraise, a situation: that is the aptitude which it would, I suggest, be irresponsible to bury in a napkin. For if in future world affairs Britain is to play her proper role, it must be by virtue not of her wealth but of her wisdom. And this can no longer be the wisdom of a blue-blooded, or a broad-acred, ruling few. Sanity, humour, phlegm – assume if you like that these remain. Sanity unsustained by schooled insight is not going to be enough.

‘A Certain Culture‘
A silly story is told of how some foreigner after a day at cricket confessed his wonder at the frequency with which the bowler had managed to hit the moving bat. For the due understanding, a French-woman once coldly informed me, of the finer points of her assessment of Picasso, I required ‘une certaine culture ‘. I bore it – I hope so – like a man, and was not ungrateful for the phrase. One required a certain culture. How true, equally, of cricket. And, of matters inter- national, how true.

In the long story of a people, the generations are like relay runners on a track Those of today have no possibility of ensuring that they of tomorrow shall win. But this they can do: they can make it pretty certain that they shall not. What more salutary service could a community offer to its sons than to help them to disembarrass themselves of their basic misconceptions about the social cosmos, and to identify and so perhaps to nullify their cruder gullibilities? Education in these matters is not conferred once for all like a christening mug. It is a lifelong treatment, and much of it must be self-supplied. But the thing is to get it started on the right assumptions. For not until one has tried one’s hand at teaching ‘structure’, does one really know, believe me, the nature of the need. And when with our students we discuss current issues, the object of the exercise is not that they may pontificate the more glibly upon the issues of today; rather is it that they may come to judge the less unsoundly the issues of tomorrow. Our concern is not with their information but with their minds.

The mind may be likened to a processing plant. The teacher’s job is not to build an informational stockpile, but to help the student to establish beneath his hat the kind of plant which, in years to come, will be the better qualified to cope with what goes in. If it is peace we want, we must think on these things; and create for younger minds; at least the opportunity so to prepare themselves that in due time they may give their thought to the problem of social living in its global dimension more successfully than we.

How comes it, you may well now be asking, that, in this second post-war-query-pre-war age, Britain’s universities have still not established the teaching of international relations in a truly worthy manner? The answer, could it be discovered and written up, would form, I believe not so much a ‘ whodunit ‘ story or even a ‘ whoshouldadunit ‘ story as a ‘whocouldadunit ‘ story – a chapter in the history of social institutions. To me, and to the bee 1n my bonnet, it is, I am afraid, rather as though there were a known, palatable, inexpensive vitamin for reducing appreciably a person’s susceptibility to almost every sort of ill; and it just happened to be nobody’s business in particular to put it within the reach of all. Some of those well-loved societies, the habitations of so many famous and merciful men furnished with ability, erudition and esteem, seem hardly any better able to change their ivy-mantled syllabuses than a cettain pretty animal his spots. As well might one counsel Mr. Dulles to alter the American Constitution. Of a truth, one might be tempted to think, man is everywhere in chains. But is he?

But to come back to the Stationery Office and the Unesco booklet.* The rapporteur for India foresaw some development there in the .teaching of international relations-which is good news. But he rejoiced to think that the lessons of experience learned in Britain and America might be applied in India. Which lessons, I wonder? Even in America, where the international relations specialist has been in general production for quite a time, the American rapporteur himself had misgivings about the conditions in which this was being accomplished. My conviction is that in this field British universities could still lead the world. It is, of course, a newish idea. Newish, I mean, compared with some of the universities. But I am not even tempted to believe that, in this country, even the oldest of them are quite so old as to have lost all control of their faculties.

Besides, there are – praise Heaven – the schools. Let them but discover what they would choose to do, and· this will not be finally forbidden. In France, the top forms go in extensively for what they term ‘philosophie ‘. In it, the fundamentals of social cosmology, of ‘structure’, may not as yet have found explicitly a place. But they might! And, at the risk of a reprimand from the headmaster for talking out of my tum, I venture to surmise that such a thing might happen here. Let England-young England, and those who care about young England’s future-but expect..

* Teaching in the Social Sciences: University Teaching of Social Sciences International Relations. Stationery Office, 4s.