5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 477his paper, Fox maintained that the ‘analytical model’ of interwar inter-
national relationists ‘was a world commonwealth characterized by per-
manent peace’ with the ‘real world’ being represented ‘in terms of a
deviation from this model.’^165 Fox maintained that the prevalence of the
‘unexamined assumption of an underlying harmony of interest’ meant
that the ‘hard intellectual task of discovering the conditions under which
national interests could be harmonized was rarely undertaken’.^166
Fox maintained that another unexamined assumption of the interwar
internationalists was that ‘everything international was better than any-
thing national’. This assumption, he contended, ‘biased the selection of
research topics’ such that disarmament, collective security and peaceful
change were ‘overstudied,’ while the question of the ‘national interests
which the new international institutions were expected to protect and
the ways by which these values should be protected’ was neglected.^167
Fox claimed that from the time of ‘the invasion of Manchuria to the
signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement,’ students of international
relations with their faith in the Geneva institutions ‘often found them-
selves emotionally and intellectually unprepared for the event.’^168
Fox’s claim that interwar international relationists simply assumed
an underlying harmony of interests is undermined by the fact that the
debates in the 1930s concerning collective security and peaceful change
arose precisely because it was well understood that a harmony of interests
did not exist and that there existed dissatisfied or unruly states. It should
also be noted that whereas Fox appeared to have grouped together advo-
cates of disarmament, collective security and peaceful change, it was far
from being the case that the all the advocates of these three causes were
of the same outlook. First, it should be noted that collective security
advocacy arose because of the belief in some quarters that disarmament
was too dangerous an undertaking in the absence of security guarantees.
(^165) William T. R. Fox, ‘Interwar International Relations Research: The American
Experience,’ World Politics 2, no. 1 (1949): 67–79, 77.
(^166) Ibid., 76.
(^167) Ibid., 71, 74–75. James T. Shotwell and Stanley Hartnoll Bailey were cited by William
T. R. Fox as two examples of scholars whose focus rested on Geneva. On this point see also
Edgar S. Furniss Jr., ‘Theory and Practice in the Teaching of International Relations in the
United States,’ in Goodwin ed., The University Teaching of International Relations, 95.
(^168) Fox, ‘Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,’ 67.