5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 435appeal to governments to preserve the IIIC or, if not that, to keep faith
with the ideals which inspired its creation. However, what is of most
interest from the perspective of this study, is the fact that this editorial
offers proof of the slippery manner in which the words realism and ideal-
ism were employed at the time in the context of quasi-theoretical discus-
sions concerning international affairs.
Mayoux addressed the meaning of the concepts of idealism and real-
ism in the context of a discussion of the complex feelings that were
attendant upon the war’s end and of how these feelings conduced to a
determination to close the chapter that was the League experience, how-
ever misrecognised was that experience. In elaborating on contemporary
feelings, Mayoux explained that those charged with building a new world
order did not approach their task lightly. Mayoux observed that this was
not just because so much pain and sadness had been visited upon so
many victims over the previous five years, it was also because they had,
in putting themselves to work, a ‘double sentiment’: they were conscious
of the ‘immense effort’ that was required in order to ‘change everything’
so that the ‘worst’ would not reoccur, while also feeling an ‘overwhelm-
ing doubt’ about the possibility of ‘translating the ideal into reality’. He
maintained that this doubt was felt because people had tried to translate
the ideal into reality after 1918 only ‘to arrive at 1939’.^26
These considerations explain why, according to Mayoux, in the com-
ing out of the ‘savage period’ of the past several years or more, there
was in some quarters ‘praise only for realism’. He stated that at times,
this praise surprised Europeans because for them ‘realism signifies very
bad memories’.^27 In stating this last, Mayoux was alluding to the maxim
that force surpasses right. However, in observing that in the aftermath
of the war there was much praise for realism, Mayoux was most defi-
nitely not alluding to that particular maxim. Rather, he was making the
point that there was abroad in the aftermath of war a certain ‘mistrust’ of
humanity’s ability to achieve social progress. Elaborating on the causes
of this mistrust, which, in his view, was ‘rather justified,’ Mayoux sug-
gested that the sentiment ‘réaliste’ that was abroad in the midst of the
war’s aftermath did not stem from cynicism, but rather stemmed from a
(^27) Ibid., i.
(^26) Jean-Jacques Mayoux, ‘Éditorial,’ numéro spécial, Coopération Intellectuelle
Internatioanle (octobre–novembre 1945): i–vii, i.