470 J.-A. PEMBERTON
As he had contended in previous ISC forums, Manning stressed in
his memorandum that international relations is a ‘unitary subject,’ albeit
only in the sense that it had been born of a ‘single need’: the need for
a ‘profounder insight into a specific aspect of community experience’.
As Manning’s view was that the specific aspect of community experience
which is international relations is multiform, he considered that there
is no end to the ‘number and variety’ of angles from which the subject
might be illuminated.^147 Finally in respect to Manning’s memorandum,
it should be noted that although insisting on the intrinsic intellectual
value of the study of international relations, Manning, someone who had
been known to complain of the missionary approach to the subject, did
not hesitate to maintain that had the populations in democratic coun-
tries in the interwar years had a better understanding of their diplo-
matic environment, the ‘troubles’ the world had endured in recent times
might have been avoided. Referring to the political crises of the 1930s,
Manning stated the following:
[T]he evil men, for all their astuteness, could scarcely have accomplished
what they did, were it not for the support they obtained from ill-informed,
simple-minded, suggestible men of good will. That sort of response would
hardly have come from populations better versed in the fundamentals of
international life, less amenable to crude indoctrination, more capable of
weighing for themselves the issues on which they were being lead to take
a stand. It is further perceived that, even with all the domestic backing
which was thus so tamely provided, the enemies of man might yet have
lacked their opportunity, but for that state of confusion and spiritual paral-
ysis which they were able to induce in a portion of the public in the coun-
tries they designed to dominate. Had the democratic peoples had a deeper,
less uncritical, appreciation of their diplomatic environment, the dictators
might have found themselves at a standstill relatively early on.^148(^147) International Studies Conference XIIIth Session: Memorandum on the University
Teaching of International Relations by Professor C. A. W. Manning, 3, AG 1-IICI-K-I-
14.c, UA.
(^148) Ibid., 1–3. See also C. A. W. Manning, ‘The “Failure” of the League of Nations,’
in Carol Ann Cosgrove and Kenneth J. Twitchett eds., The New International Actors:
The United Nations and the European Economic Community (London: Macmillan, 1970),
109–10, 122. Manning’s discussion of the putative failure of the LON was first published
in 1942. See C. A. W. Manning, ‘The “Failure” of the League of Nations,’ Agenda: A
Quarterly Journal of Reconstruction 1, no. 1 (1942): 59–72.