Week 1 - Interwar Idealists

Question 1

What is idealism?

Answer 1

Idealism is a doctrine that advocates various means of controlling and transcending international anarchy

Wilson, 2005

Question 2

What are humans according to Wilson/Woolf?

Answer 2

Humans are not naturally peaceful, just that they are ‘frustratingly stubborn in their attachment of outmoded ideas’.

Wilson, 2005

Question 3

What does Wilson say about the structure of the international system?

Answer 3

‘It is the structure itself, not bad people that motivate people to act in their own interests’

Wilson, 2005

Question 4

What does E.H Carr think of idealists?

Answer 4

‘They see political theory, not as a reflection of political practise, but as a norm to which political practise ought to conform’

Cited in Andreas Osiander, 1998

Question 5

How is E.H Carr’s understanding of idealism conceptualised?

Answer 5

Faith in reason, belief in a universal standard of morality and the natural harmony of interests between nations brought about by free trade

Cited in Andreas Osiander, 1998

Question 6

Leonard Woolf’s quote on the effects of free trade?

Answer 6

‘We are so linked to our wires of commerce and finance, not to speak of telegraph wires and steel rails that every war threatens to become a world war’

Leonard Wolf, 1916

Question 7

What did Norman Angell argue would happen as countries industrialise?

Answer 7

Angell argues that the ‘combination of advance economies and backward politics makes war even more likely’

Normal Angell, 1913

Question 8

What did Muir say about the discrepancy between economic interdependence and the international system?

Answer 8

‘We have entered a new era, the era of interdependence, and this interdependent world is threatened with chaos because it has not yet learnt how to adjust its institutions to the new conditions’.

Ramsey Muir, 1933

Question 9

What did Angell quote about public opinion?

Answer 9

‘Failure of the public mind to understand the impact of industrialisation on interstate relations’ .

ANGELL, 1918

Question 10

What is Zimmerman’s quote on the inability of the League of Nations?

Answer 10

‘If the democratic people’s were living in the world alone, the policing they would require would be comparatively insignificant’

ZIMMERMAN, 1936

Question 11

How did Zimmerman describe the historical process of idealism?

Answer 11

‘Age of transition’, in which the old books are out of date and the new ones cannot yet be written’

ZIMMERMAN, 1931