5 THE POST-WAR DECLINE OF THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES CONFERENCE 479red herring. Citing an observation made by Rappard, Manning asked
the following: by what ‘conceivable process of institutionalised evolution
Manchuria would ever have been detached from China or an end put to
the Abyssinian State?’^169
Manning concluded that the putative failure of the League was
a result of a lack of will to cooperate on the sanctions front due to a
lack of diplomatic vision: an inability to see that there was a common
interest in establishing a precedent in regard to the use of sanctions.
Manning observed that the failure to effectively cooperate in order to
defend the Geneva system was precisely what the ‘felon’ counted on in
hatching his ‘nefarious little plans.’ As Manning explained, ‘[b]efore the
instrument could be “elastic” it must first have been strong.’ It was not
strong because even before the ‘“have-not” powers even seriously began
to smite upon the planks above, the “haves”, whether Allied or merely
Associated, had too effect loosed the props below.’^170
It should be clear that the view that the real failure in respect to
international affairs in the 1930s was the failure to effectively cooperate
to defend the Geneva system was a view that was common to many of
those associated with the ISC and those involved in overlapping organ-
isations such as the New Commonwealth Society during that period.
However, the aim of Fox’s paper was not to accurately depict interwar
discussions. Its aim was to further a trend commenced by American
political scientists such as Earle, Harold Sprout and Nicholas Spykman,
this last having in the 1920s had been associated with Zimmern’s
Geneva School of International Studies: of viewing international rela-
tions through the prism of national security and the national interest.
Another author of this trend was Arnold Wolfers. A member of faculty
at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik before it was nazified, Wolfers
had been among those present at the conference in Berlin which lead
to the foundation of the CISSIR. Wolfers had served as the ISC’s gen-
eral rapporteur, which was an international position, during the period
of its first study cycle and it was thus Wolfers who prepared the record
of proceedings of the ISC’s conferences in Milan in May 1932 and in
London in June 1933, soon after the latter of which he went into exile
(^169) Manning, ‘The “Failure” of the League of Nations,’ 105.
(^170) Ibid., 106.