3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 265In consequence of this, Antonescu maintained, it was necessary for
students of international relations, especially at a time when the ‘total-
itarian regimes entrust to one man the government of the country and
therefore also the influence of the country on the whole course of inter-
national life,’ to determine the ‘limits within which each element in the
community of peoples is to operate.’ In this regard, he urged the adop-
tion of the ‘critical method’ which he defined as the adoption of ‘value
judgement, critically dissecting the concrete facts and the social phenom-
ena, with the tendency and the objective of creating a spiritual influence
on international relations.’ As he otherwise expressed it, this method
involved the combining of ‘scientifically organised idealism with the real-
ism of material life.’^84
Sofronie, professor of international law at the University of Cluj,
expressing support for the view that university teaching must be adapted
to the development of life, invoked the words of the celebrated Greek
diplomat Nikolaos Politis (who, in the context of the Disarmament
Conference in 1932, had put forward to much acclaim a particularly
lucid definition of aggression): that ‘international solidarity is a living
reality—the mightiest reality of our time’. Sofronie acknowledged that
the exacerbation in some countries of nationalistic tendencies, an exag-
gerated emphasis on ‘imperatives based on the concept of sovereignty’
and the insistence ‘with or without reason’ on equality of rights, were
giving rise to what another commentator had described as the ‘pulverisa-
tion of the solidarity of States’. This development, Sofronie warned, had
Raw Materials, Colonies, 621; and ‘Antoneso, Mihai (Rumanian), Lecturer in International
Law University of Bucarest [sic] and Académie de Hautes Études Commeriales et
Industrielles,’ ‘List of Participants in the Eleventh Session of the International Studies
Conference,’ in Zimmern, ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 344.
Wojciech Roszkowski and Jan Kofmans record that Mihai Antonescu was the author of the
following work: ‘Organizarea păcii și a Societații Națiunilor (The establishment of a peace-
ful order and the League of Nations, 1929)’. They further record that following a coup in
Romania in August 1944, Antonescu was arrested and spent a period of detention in the
USSR. In May 1946, he was tried and found guilty of war-crimes. He was then ‘executed
by firing squad in the garden of the Jilava prison, along with Marshal Antonescu’ in May
- Wojciech Roszkowski and Jan Kofman, ‘Mihai Antonescu,’ in Wojciech Roszkowski
and Jan Kofman, Biographical Dictionary of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth
Century (London ad New York: Routledge, 2015), 29–30. First published in 2008 by M.
E. Sharpe.
(^84) Antonesco, ‘The University Teaching of International Relations,’ 78–81.