3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 329United States would be much better placed to defend its own interests
and those of China if instead of pursuing a unilateral policy in the region,
it were to collaborate with the Soviet Union whose interests in the Far
East they also considered to be best served by supporting China and
opposing Japanese aggression.^317
tHe reAl nAture of tHe interwAr debAte
The contents Edward Hallett Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939
concerned, not the details of plans for the future organisation of peace,
discussion of which was already well underway by 1939, but rather on
the lessons Carr derived from the experience of the interwar years. On
the face of it, its aim was to debunk a way of thinking that Carr associ-
ated with figures such as Angell, Zimmern and Toynbee and which he
labelled utopian.^318
Such figures stood accused of perpetuating the intellectualist fallacy
that under the guidance of reason a true harmony of interests can be
established in human affairs. According to Carr, these interwar utopi-
ans had entertained the false belief that the LON was an emanation of a
universalising reason and had brought into being a harmony of interests.
Carr rejected outright such a representation of the League, arguing that
it was an institutionalised means of promoting the interests of status quo
powers and as such, it was hardly surprising that powers unhappy with
the status quo would seek to revise prevailing political conditions.
Carr’s characterisation of interwar debate concerning international
affairs as a debate between utopians who had assumed that the creation
LON marked the triumph of reason in international affairs and those
realists who insisted on the abiding nature of power politics became in
later years a widely accepted view of what took place in interwar discus-
sions of international relations. However, it is noteworthy that at the
(^317) Ibid.
(^318) Peter Wilson claims that ‘although the work is generally considered to have had a
devastating effect on the “utopian” thinking of the inter-war period, the “utopians” them-
selves did not feel particularly devastated’ by Carr’s critique. Peter Wilson, ‘The Myth of
the “First Great Debate”,’ in ‘The Eight Year Crisis’ 1919–1999,’ Tim Dunne, Michael
Cox, and Ken Booth, eds., special issue, Review of International Studies 24 (December
1998):1–15, 6.