Story of International Relations

3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 337

‘domination in central Europe’ and would succeed in this ‘unless the
peace loving nations resolve that shall be stopped, and a return resolutely
made to the maintenance of law and the resistance of force in the settle-
ment of international disputes.’^346
In sharp contrast with this attitude was the attitude displayed by
Carr in defending the Munich Agreement in the first edition of the
The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Therein Carr applauded the agreement as the
‘nearest approach in recent years to the settlement of a major interna-
tional issue by a procedure of peaceful change.’^347 In what respect was
the Munich Agreement a case of peaceful change from Carr’s perspec-
tive? Carr explained his view of peaceful change in relation to Munich as
follows:

If the power relations of Europe in 1938 made it inevitable that Czecho-

Slovakia should lose part of its territory, and eventually her independence,

it was preferable (quite apart from any question of justice or injustice)

that this should come about as the result of discussions round a table in

Munich rather than as the result either of a war between the Great Powers

or of a local war between Germany and Czecho-Slovakia. If we consider

peaceful change merely as a more or less mechanical device, replacing the

alternative device of war, for readjusting the distribution of territory and of

other desirable things to changes in the equilibrium of political forces, it

performs a function whose utility it would be hypocritical to deny.^348

In treating peaceful change as a mechanical device in order to effect
changes to the status quo in light of a new balance of forces and as such
an alternative to the device which is war, Carr seemed to be trying eth-
ically neutralise the policy of peaceful change. This point would appear
to be reinforced by his dismissal of an inquiry into the question whether
or not the intention behind peaceful change should be to ‘establish “jus-
tice”, by remedying “just” grievances”, or to maintain “peace”’ as a
‘rather unprofitable...academic exercise.’^349

(^346) LNU Executive Committee, 1938, quoted in Birn, 154.
(^347) Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the
Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939), 282.
(^348) Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, 278.
(^349) Ibid., 265.