Development of International Relations The ‘realist’ critique of liberal internationalism In 1919 liberal internationalists believed that ‘the people’ had a real interest in and desire for peace and that democratic regimes would, if given the chance, allow these interests and desires to dominate

Development of International Relations The enemy of peace, on this account, was the kind of militarist, authoritarian, autocratic, anti-democratic regime which had, allegedly, dominated Germany, Austria–Hungary and Russia in 1914

Development of International Relations Now, some of the crises of the 1930s were caused by this kind of regime – Japanese militarism in Manchuria and China and ‘Francoism’ in the Spanish Civil War fit the bill quite well – but most were not

Development of International Relations Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were not traditional military autocracies; rather, they were regimes which had come to power by quasi-democratic means and remained in power by the mobilization of popular support

Development of International Relations Gradually, new ideas emerged – or, perhaps more accurately, re-emerged, since many of them would have been familiar to pre-1914 thinkers. Perhaps the deepest thinker on these matters in the 1930s was the radical American realism seemed to offer a more coherent and accurate account of the world than the liberal ideas it critiqued, and it formed the basis for the ‘post-war synthesis

Development of International Relations After 1945, realism became the dominant theory of International Relations, offering a conception of the world which seemed to define the ‘common sense’ of the subject