Introduction

When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, a group of professors, diplomats, and activists began to write on the causes of war and the conditions for peace. Among them was the young historian Arnold J. Toynbee, then a classics tutor at Balliol College, Oxford. Toynbee was interested in the general problem of war, especially as it related to nations and nationalism. In August 1914, he expressed his concerns about the current war in a letter to fellow Oxford classicist and public intellectual Gilbert Murray.Footnote ² It was the myth of national pride that had led Europe to war, Toynbee argued. To overcome nationalist antagonism, the belligerents needed a “generous and sensible” settlement, based on a scheme of “international cooperation”. How exactly such a scheme could work, Toynbee described in his book Nationality and the War, published a few months later in 1915.Footnote ³

That year, Toynbee resigned from his fellowship at Balliol and began to devote his life to international relations.Footnote ⁴ He published on current foreign affairs, notably on the Armenian genocide, and in 1917, he joined the intelligence department at the British Foreign Office. Although initially sceptical of diplomatic practice – “they are odd fish at the F.O.”, he confided to MurrayFootnote ⁵ – Toynbee soon established himself as an intellectual authority on foreign policy. He published articles, wrote memos, and corresponded with a range of influential figures, effectively turning his academic life into that of a foreign policy advisor.Footnote ⁶ From 1918 to 1919, he was a member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference where he participated in the diplomatic negotiations, before being appointed professor at King’s College, London, in May 1919.Footnote ⁷

Toynbee’s transition from academia to diplomacy, and back again, was a common trajectory among the first generation of scholars working in International Relations (IR). They saw the war as a civilisational catastrophe that required a radical revision of how international politics was imagined and practised. Like Toynbee, most IR pioneers had some practical connection to international affairs, and an astonishing number of them were involved in the 1919 Peace Conference – including Fannie Fern Andrews, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Philip Noel-Baker, William Rappard, James T. Shotwell, and Alfred Zimmern. Their personal backgrounds varied but they agreed that studying international relations would make the world a more peaceful place. To this end, they began to research, teach, and publish on current affairs. They also used networks for transnational exchange, which fostered a common consciousness among the pioneers of the new discipline. By 1918, IR was becoming “a new science”, as a newspaper article noted.Footnote ⁸

Disciplinary histories have underplayed the wartime origins of IR. Textbooks generally assume that the discipline was founded in 1919 when a number of institutions were established, notably the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth, Wales.Footnote ⁹ By regarding university professorships as definite indicators of disciplinary formation, however, these accounts underestimate the intellectual and practical traditions that gave rise to the study of IR. In particular, the conventional story erroneously portrays IR scholars as followers of the League of Nations, whereas their plans actually preceded its creation. Dating the origins of IR to 1919 also ignores the extensive network of scholars, politicians, and philanthropists who enabled the rapid institutional development at the end of the war. Finally, the traditional narrative mistakenly frames the origins of IR as an interwar school of ‘idealism’ and accuses the founders of naïve trust in international cooperation, whereas in fact the architects of IR were influenced first and foremost by the origins of war, not by the ideals of peace.

The first efforts at studying war and peace, in a reasonably coherent and academic manner, emerged from an international network of liberal intellectuals and pressure groups in 1914. Many of them were not formally academics, such as British author Leonard Woolf or the members of the Central Organisation for a Durable Peace, an alliance of war critics formed in 1915 in The Hague. In a survey of wartime writings on peace, Carl Bouchard found that only 34 out of 139 authors held academic positions, while the majority worked as journalists, bankers, lawyers, or in other professions.Footnote ¹⁰ Women in particular used non-academic platforms since they were largely excluded from senior university positions. Nonetheless they emphasised the importance of education for preventing war because “educated persons [would not] kill each other”, as German feminist-pacifist Lida Gustava Heymann put it.Footnote ¹¹ Many of these actors pursued both academic research and political goals, though some were explicitly devoted to education, such as the Council for the Study of International Relations, founded in 1915 in London. In a few cases, universities showed interest in the study of IR more concretely, although wartime restrictions prevented them from installing new professorships or departments. As early as September 1914, the Master of Balliol College, Arthur Lionel Smith, recognised the debate about the First World War as “a splendid educational opportunity”.Footnote ¹²

What, then, inspired people such as Toynbee to start working on international relations? There were multiple motives, often overlapping, but three main themes stand out. The first idea, pioneered by Norman Angell in his 1910 book The Great Illusion, was that the world had become so economically intertwined that it was no longer profitable to wage war, even for the victorious side.Footnote ¹³ To understand this new world in all its complexities, the British economist and ‘Angellite’ J. A. Hobson argued, one would have to study international relations.Footnote ¹⁴ A second argument was that the Great War had been caused by a flawed system of diplomacy and that foreign policy should be subject to democratic control rather than the secretive dealings of a small elite. This strand of thought was vocally advocated by a transnational campaign of politicians and scholars, including German socialist Eduard Bernstein and British historian Alfred Zimmern.Footnote ¹⁵ Finally, the war inspired debates on a permanent intergovernmental organisation, an idea that attracted countless studies and pamphlets, and which fed into the creation of the League of Nations. In short, early IR was inspired by globalisation, democracy, and international order. All three motives were based on questions about how the political world worked, but also, crucially, about how it should work.

This chapter traces the origins of IR scholarship from the outbreak of the First World War to the making of the peace. It follows a set of pioneering thinkers and pressure groups across Europe and the United States to demonstrate both the intellectual roots and the practical infrastructure of the emerging discipline. The chapter begins by reviewing the state of international affairs on the eve of the war which inspired a set of writings on economic interdependence and world order. The second section shows how the conflict itself prompted authors to reflect on the causes of war and the conditions for peace. The third section examines the intellectual preparation of the post-war order within an emerging community of IR experts. The final section reveals how the founders of IR contributed as government advisors to the Paris Peace Conference and, simultaneously, laid the institutional foundations of the discipline. As a result, this chapter concludes, the origins of IR were deeply intertwined with wartime events and inspired by the making, not just interpreting, of international politics.

The World in July 1914

Writings on international affairs existed, there is no doubt, long before the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁶ But there is little value in citing Thucydides, Machiavelli, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Immanuel Kant, or other ‘great’ thinkers, if their works share no characteristics with what we now call IR. Most philosophers, historians, and geographers who wrote on international affairs before the twentieth century did so from their own isolated perspectives. They were not integrated into a coherent academic community devoted to a common set of questions. Nor did they establish the institutional framework necessary to organise an academic discipline. This does not imply, of course, that their work was not influential. On the contrary, there were important forerunners to modern IR scholarship, both intellectual pioneers, such as the political scientist John. W. Burgess, and institutional models, such as the pacifist movement or the Inter-Parliamentary Union.Footnote ¹⁷ But pre-twentieth-century authors explored only patches of the terrain that IR scholarship covered during the interwar period. They barely constituted a scholarly community and they established none of the institutional pillars of an academic discipline.

What we are really looking for in determining the origins of IR as an academic discipline, then, is a minimum level of academic style and coherent scholarship, fostered by transnational exchange and noticeably distinct from other fields. This moment occurred at some point during the first two decades of the twentieth century, but it can most plausibly be pinned down to 1914, just after the outbreak of the Great War. It was at this point that authors, politicians, and activists began to perceive their work on international politics as a common field. They now collaborated internationally, published in academic style, gathered at conferences and, perhaps most obviously, suggested that the subject should be taught at schools and universities. This was the moment when they began to regard their work as a new field, as contemporary documents show.Footnote ¹⁸

In order to understand the effect of the First World War on international political thought, it is important to remember the state of affairs in July 1914 – a moment that economic historians have described as the first peak of globalisation.Footnote ¹⁹ It was a time of unprecedented levels of international trade and cultural exchange, propelled by nineteenth-century industrialism, imperialism, and technological change. Platforms for political conversation, such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union or the Anglo-German Understanding Conference, were flourishing.Footnote ²⁰ July 1914 was the closest the world had ever been to a global society. At the same time, this meant that local shocks could have wide-ranging consequences, not just through military alliances but because national economies were increasingly dependent on each other.

The most prominent analyst of economic interdependence was the British journalist Norman Angell, best known for his influential book The Great Illusion (1910). Having lived abroad from a young age, Angell became Paris editor of the Daily Mail in 1905 and began to form his ideas, leading to a small book that was first published in 1909 under the title Europe’s Optical Illusion. Angell argued that the web of international economic activity had made it impossible for any government to gain a material advantage by waging war. Conquering a foreign country would harm the opponent’s economic output, trade, and ability to pay creditors. Ultimately, Angell argued, the victorious country would suffer from the weakening of the foreign economy. That insight was fundamentally at odds with the orthodox view – the ‘great illusion’ – that military conquest brought material advantage.Footnote ²¹ Angell therefore suggested that the old warlike approach be replaced by “a policy of some kind” to regulate the use of force, if not to rule it out entirely.Footnote ²²

His idea rapidly gained influence with politicians and intellectuals but also spread among the general public via so-called Norman Angell societies. In 1912, Angell’s work caught the attention of the industrialist Richard Garton who set up a foundation “to promote the study of International Polity”, and helped to publish the journal War and Peace.Footnote ²³ The journal featured articles on current diplomatic affairs by prominent international authors, such as German economist Lujo Brentano and British sociologist Leonard Hobhouse. The intention of War and Peace was, according to the editors, to discuss international relations from a “strictly non-party” point of view.Footnote ²⁴ And indeed the journal even ran critical articles, such as ‘The Fallacy of Norman Angellism’.Footnote ²⁵

The authors publishing in War and Peace soon formed a nucleus of experts on international relations, including the journalist H. N. Brailsford, the Liberal politician Arthur Ponsonby, and the political theorist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. The group also maintained relationships with international authors, such as the German socialist politician Eduard Bernstein or the French law professor Pierre Aubry. Not all of them were ‘Angellites’, as enthusiasts of The Great Illusion became known. Nor were ‘Angellites’ the only authors writing in the field. Many future IR experts were still working in related disciplines, or simply trying to survive the war, such as the German economist Moritz Julius Bonn who had embarked on a research visit to the United States just before the outbreak of hostilities in July 1914.Footnote ²⁶ Gradually, over the course of the war, their publications and correspondence gave rise to a coherent discourse.

One of the groups associated with War and Peace was the Association (later renamed the Civil Union) for the Right Understanding of International Interests. Its director, the businesswoman M. Talmadge, offered study circles to discuss problems raised by Angell’s work.Footnote ²⁷ The Universities of Cambridge and Manchester had “War and Peace Societies”. There were “International Polity Clubs” in Glasgow, Leeds, and York.Footnote ²⁸ Reading circles and study groups mushroomed across Britain. All of these projects implied that it was possible to talk about international politics from a rational point of view, and that ordinary people could study a subject traditionally reserved for aristocratic diplomats. In short, they saw international relations as a science rather than an art. Despite the increasing complexity of the world – or precisely because of it – people now argued that it was important to really understand what was going on.

Against the odds of contemporary gender stereotypes, women worked on international politics from the outset.Footnote ²⁹ One of the most ambitious female pioneers of IR was the German teacher and peace activist Anna B. Eckstein who toured Europe and the United States to lecture on arbitration since the early 1910s.Footnote ³⁰ Inspired by Kantian philosophy and her family’s experience of the Franco-Prussian war, Eckstein became one of the most persevering peace activists during the first half of the twentieth century. After moving to Boston in the 1890s, Eckstein began to write on international affairs and from 1902 she published in journals such as Die Friedens-Warte. She was well connected among the burgeoning American pacifist movement as well as religious internationalists, such as the British Quaker Joseph Allen Baker.Footnote ³¹ Having devised the first version of her manifesto in 1907, she then collaborated with Fannie Fern Andrews to turn the document into an international treaty for security and arbitration, which they called ‘world petition’ (Weltpetition).Footnote ³² It specified that territorial changes required the consent of the local population and that disputes were to be submitted to an arbitration court.Footnote ³³ Eckstein built an impressive transnational network and in 1913 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.Footnote ³⁴ At the end of the First World War, her world petition was re-published along with a preface by the international lawyer Theodor Niemeyer who praised it as a commendable way to promote the ideals of the League of Nations.Footnote ³⁵ Niemeyer was not the only man to acknowledge the work of women in the field. In September 1914, the British author and politician E. D. Morel told the feminist-pacifist preacher Agnes Maude Royden that “[t]here is no reason why the intelligence of women should be less able to cope with questions of foreign policy than the intelligence of men”.Footnote ³⁶

Early twentieth-century experiences of international life raised questions about the political and economic forces that decided over war and peace. These questions, in turn, inspired more detailed writings on international governance, such as Angell’s Foundations of International Polity (1914). In response to the same question, the Scottish writer William Archer offered an optimistic view in his 1912 book The Great Analysis, published anonymously but accompanied by a powerful preface by Gilbert Murray. Archer proposed a thought experiment to show that governing the world did not have to be a utopian dream: He described how social life could be organised on an imaginary globule of the size of Yorkshire. Governing the actual globe, he then argued, was essentially the same challenge, just on a different scale. By using people’s combined intellectual power in a ‘great analysis’, they could master the problem of world order.Footnote ³⁷ Archer’s book was a manifesto for using reason in politics. Its goal was, as Murray summarised, “to find out by organised knowledge what is good for society as a whole”.Footnote ³⁸

It is important at this stage to emphasise the normative component in those works. Authors such as Angell and Archer were interested in how the world ought to be organised, not just how it was organised. They acknowledged the potential conflict between those two modes of inquiry but denied that they were incompatible. In a chapter on ‘moral factors’, Angell criticised the widespread assumption that reason had no effect on the course of international affairs.Footnote ³⁹ He called this the “imaginary gulf between … idealism and reason”.Footnote ⁴⁰ These two motives, the pursuit of the good and the search for a more rational world order, became core features of the emerging discipline of IR. Later, in the 1930s, so-called ‘realist’ IR scholars claimed that the founders of IR had been entirely unaware and naïve about the relationship between morality and power. A closer look at the original documents, however, reveals that many authors were torn between their “moral sense” and “objective standards”, rather than being in denial of either.Footnote ⁴¹

The outbreak of war in July 1914 dramatically changed the picture. It undermined the Angellian logic that warfare would become unattractive because of economic interdependence.Footnote ⁴² The British government did not share Toynbee’s concern that “[i]f we beat Germany our own mills and factories will have been at a standstill”.Footnote ⁴³ Military strategy was more urgent than long-term economic performance or the concerns of dissenting political commentators, many of whom saw the war as both immoral and unreasonable.Footnote ⁴⁴ Within a few weeks, the old continent plunged into barbaric warfare which cost millions of lives, wiped out four empires, and reshuffled the international order. Citizens across the globe witnessed unprecedented levels of violence and destruction. International trade collapsed, national borders were redrawn, and political regimes were replaced. The Great War, as it was known then, was a watershed moment in the way foreign affairs were handled, and thought about. It was a “deluge”, to quote Adam Tooze.Footnote ⁴⁵ For the architects of IR, the war was a crucial experience, as Alfred Zimmern reflected:

Above all, the war revealed the inability of ‘old diplomacy’ to preserve peace. It put an end to the Concert of Europe logic, which had shaped international relations for almost a century since the Congress of Vienna. The congress system had been based on a complex network of bi-lateral and multi-lateral treaties, some open and others secret, which were supposed to maintain a European ‘balance of power’, interpreted in terms of military and territorial strength.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although the congress system had kept nineteenth-century Europe relatively peaceful, war had still been a normal mode of diplomacy. As Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously put it, war was just the “continuation of politics by other means”.Footnote ⁴⁸ The First World War, with casualties rapidly in the hundreds of thousands on the Western front alone, dramatically questioned that approach.

The war was essential to the formation of IR because its effects were more wide-ranging than in previous conflicts. Trench warfare in Western Europe was only the most spectacular pinnacle of the global experience of war.Footnote ⁴⁹ The consequences were felt by soldiers, families, and businesses, whether they were politically interested or not. Many academics, too, were drawn into the war effort and experienced the war first-hand, such as Philip Noel-Baker who served with ambulance units in France or Charles Webster who was in the Army Service Corps.Footnote ⁵⁰ For David Mitrany, who himself enlisted with the British armed forces, the war was a great shock to the international system and it motivated him to become engaged in foreign policy instead of pursuing a career in social work.Footnote ⁵¹ Several institutions for the study of IR were dedicated to the victims of the Great War. David Davies, the benefactor of the IR chair in Aberystwyth, made his endowment in memory of students killed in the war.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, the co-founder and president of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (DHfP) in Berlin, Ernst Jäckh, declared that he “founded the Hochschule in memory of his only son who fell in France as a young boy”.Footnote ⁵³ It is hard to overestimate the impact of the Great War on contemporary political thinkers. In addition to that, its disastrous consequences for the population generated an audience for the study of IR. Citizens no longer took governmental foreign policy for granted.

Women in particular referenced the universal experience of human suffering as a reason to study the problems of war and peace. Swanwick’s critique of ‘Prussianism’ was based precisely on that conviction.Footnote ⁵⁴ Women looked after widows and orphans, treated the wounded, cared for refugees and POWs, all the while replacing men in their regular jobs to earn a sufficient income for the household. In short, British suffragist-pacifist Agnes Maude Royden summarised, “women know the sufferings of war without its glory”.Footnote ⁵⁵ In order to address their concerns, they formed international groups of likeminded women who taught and wrote on international affairs. The most influential one of these groups, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILFP), was founded on the demand to stop the war and to work for a negotiated peace.Footnote ⁵⁶ Their work was largely overlooked by men in positions of power, but it did resonate with a few male scholars. For example, the French economist Edgard Milhaud cited a woman who had lost four of her five sons in the war as a reason to study the organisation of peace.Footnote ⁵⁷ Whether taking gender roles into account or not, there is no doubt that the First World War had an enormous influence on the origins of IR.

Understanding the Causes of War

Why did war break out in July 1914? This was the most immediate question for the architects of IR, who like the general public, were shocked by the horrors of the conflict as well as by the inability of their governments to return to peaceful negotiations. Unsurprisingly, most authors devoted at least some time to this question. One of the first studies was H. N. Brailsford’s The Origins of the Great War (1914) in which the British journalist criticised the system of secret treaties and military rivalry.Footnote ⁵⁸ He also outlined a set of peace terms, including general disarmament and the use of plebiscites to settle border disputes. Other notable works included Paul Fauchille’s document collection La guerre de 1914 (1916), Otto Hoetzsch’s collection of newspaper articles in Der Krieg und die Große Politik (1917), and Helena Swanwick’s essay Women and War (1915). They wrote from different angles and employed different styles but essentially pursued the same research goal – to understand, by rational inquiry, the causes and patterns of the current war. In doing so, they associated themselves with an emerging network of scholars, politicians, journalists, activists, and philanthropists who subsequently set up the first IR institutions. In other words, the war jump-started the development of IR as a new academic field.

The most striking argument in this emerging literature was that the war had been caused by a flawed system of international politics. Until 1914, the critics argued, foreign policy had been in the hands of governments unaccountable to parliamentary control. International treaties had been kept secret and diplomatic services had recruited their officials from a small elite. Virtually all decision-makers were white men. The ruling class regarded war as a “pleasure party” (Lustpartie), to use Immanuel Kant’s words.Footnote ⁵⁹ While the lack of democratic control was obvious in the case of Germany, none of the belligerent governments was particularly open for dissent either. Nor did the dissenters stand much of a chance. The British, for example, imprisoned E. D. Morel for sending pamphlets to French writer Romain Rolland in neutral Switzerland. By loosely referring to France and Britain as “the democracies”, historians have neglected the effects of female disenfranchisement, censorship, and the intimidation of the opposition.Footnote ⁶⁰

If decisions on war and peace were subject to democratic control, so contemporary IR scholars argued, governments would not enter into violent conflict as easily as they did in July 1914. Instead of putting the blame on any particular government, the advocates of democratic control condemned the “manner in which foreign affairs are conducted”.Footnote ⁶¹ They criticised the lack of parliamentary oversight, the secrecy of treaties and agreements, the elitist composition of foreign services, and, crucially, the lack of public education in foreign affairs. Their programme was related to, but not identical with the Wilsonian demand for ‘open covenants, openly arrived at’. Openness was a necessary requirement, but even if government documents were available to the public, people needed to be able to understand them and exercise control over foreign policy decisions. “Ignorance, that is the origin of wars”, as Dickinson put it.Footnote ⁶² The goal therefore was to study international relations as comprehensively as possible.

Members of this campaign came from a variety of backgrounds, including socialist and liberal politicians, pacifists, suffragists, as well as professors of international law and related disciplines. Among the supporters were Fannie Fern Andrews, Eduard Bernstein, French lawyer Lucien Le Foyer, Norwegian internationalist Christian Lous Lange, British liberal politician Arthur Ponsonby, as well as academics such as Dickinson, Walther Schücking, and Alfred Zimmern. Gilbert Murray was sympathetic, too, and signed a petition against entering the war (although he later regretted it).Footnote ⁶³ The campaigners were organised in numerous national and international pressure groups, including socialist parties as well as pacifist and feminist organisations. It is important, however, not to buy too much into these labels. To Belgian lawyer Henri La Fontaine, for example, pacifism did not mean to necessarily reject the use of force but merely to submit it to international law.Footnote ⁶⁴ Unlike bureaucratic elites or national representatives, they tended to adopt policies independent of their own national background.Footnote ⁶⁵ Although there was no formal hierarchy, many were associated with the Central Organisation for a Durable Peace (CODP) which served as a kind of umbrella institution.Footnote ⁶⁶

In April 1915, the CODP held an international conference in The Hague with delegates from ten countries, both neutral and belligerent.Footnote ⁶⁷ It was hosted by the Dutch liberal politician Hendrik Coenraad Dresselhuijs and the pacifist lawyer Benjamin de Jong van Beek en Donk. Among the participants were Dickinson and Andrews as well as the German pacifists Ludwig Quidde and Walther Schücking. By March 1916, the CODP had close to 200 members, including eminent scholars and pacifists, such as Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, Albert Einstein, Henri La Fontaine, J. A. Hobson, Christian Lous Lange, Paul Otlet, Charles M. Trevelyan, and Hans Wehberg.Footnote ⁶⁸ Several pioneers of IR scholarship, such as Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, were associated with the CODP.

Over the course of the conference, the delegates discussed the causes of war and the conditions for peace, and drafted what they called the “minimum programme” for the post-war order.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to the CODP, the principal causes of the war were secret diplomacy, inflated nationalism, imperialism, an overly sensational press, and the private arms industry. In response to these problems, they formulated five key demands as part of the minimum programme: (i) no transfer of territories against the will of the people, (ii) equal access to colonial raw materials, (iii) further development of arbitration and international governance, (iv) disarmament and freedom of the seas, and (v) democratic control of foreign policy.Footnote ⁷⁰ These themes were further elaborated at subsequent meetings in Switzerland and by 1916, the CODP had set up several “permanent committees of research”.Footnote ⁷¹ The primary goal of the CODP was to gather likeminded voices and to discuss their solutions to international conflict. While the CODP never provided any formal education, it sought to “enlighten public opinion” through events and publications.Footnote ⁷² In addition to that, like other early IR institutions, its members were also keen to influence official policy. A November 1917 memo by the American section of the CODP reflected on how they could “assist the government”.Footnote ⁷³

More broadly, their goal was to generate public discourse on foreign affairs. They rejected the idea that international relations were too “difficult to understand”, and launched a campaign to popularise the study and practice of foreign affairs.Footnote ⁷⁴ This underlined the relationship between democracy and education in foreign affairs, a link that continued to shape the field, as David Allen has shown in his study of the Foreign Policy Association.Footnote ⁷⁵ “If the people are to exercise an effective control of foreign affairs”, Leonard Woolf argued in a 1918 letter to Gilbert Murray, “we must have an educated and informed public opinion on these subjects”.Footnote ⁷⁶ In other words, the study of IR was a necessary prerequisite for democratic governance and, in turn, international peace. Or, as Arthur Ponsonby, one of the principal advocates of this argument, put it in his book Democracy and Diplomacy (1915):

Ponsonby was a leading member of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), a progressive, anti-militarist pressure group that opposed the British war policy. Specifically, the UDC demanded that no treaty or international arrangement should enter into force without the consent of parliament.Footnote ⁷⁸ The UDC published a journal called Foreign Affairs: A Journal of International Understanding from June 1919, three years before the Council on Foreign Relations launched the now-famous journal under the same name.Footnote ⁷⁹ The UDC’s objectives were shared by likeminded groups abroad, including the Dutch Anti-War Council, the Swiss Committee for the Study of the Foundations of Durable Peace as well as the German and Austro-Hungarian Socialists.Footnote ⁸⁰ Despite the war, they collaborated across borders and met at international conferences, such as the 1915 CODP meeting in The Hague and the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation in Stockholm in 1916.Footnote ⁸¹

An important venue for this cause was the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a long-time champion of international arbitration and parliamentary cooperation. Founded in 1899 by the Franco-British pacifist politicians Frédéric Passy and Randal Cremer, the Inter-Parliamentary Union offered a forum for parliamentarians and circulated their work, such as that of French diplomat Paul d’Estournelles de Constant who directed the French section on arbitration.Footnote ⁸² By the eve of the Great War, the Union brought together hundreds of likeminded representatives from across the globe, including non-European countries such as Japan and Russia. In their 1915 report, the members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union adopted, for the first time, the control of foreign policy as a particular field of parliamentary practice, arguing that public supervision was the only guarantee against the mistakes of the governments.Footnote ⁸³

Women were among the first and most outspoken advocates of democratic control. To them the war seemed particularly unjust since none of the European powers had introduced the female suffrage by 1914. In the August edition of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance’s (IWSA) magazine Jus Suffragii, the Hungarian feminist Rosika Schwimmer described the Great War as the “bankruptcy of the man-made world”, invoking Bertha von Suttner’s argument that without political rights women were unable to change the laws and conditions that led to violent conflict.Footnote ⁸⁴ By September 1914, women from belligerent and neutral countries were collaborating on a programme for peace.Footnote ⁸⁵ Helena Swanwick, for example, demanded gradual disarmament, open diplomacy, democratic control of foreign policy, respect for national minorities, and the liberation and education of women.Footnote ⁸⁶ The British educationalist and suffragist Millicent Fawcett wrote on what would now be called democratic peace theory, citing thinkers from Grotius to Rousseau and Kant, as well as on the need for an international congress at the end of the war.Footnote ⁸⁷

In the spring of 1915, several hundred women from a dozen countries met in The Hague to discuss problems of war and peace. They formed what became known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).Footnote ⁸⁸ Organised by the Dutch physician and suffragist Aletta Jacobs, the 1915 meeting gathered prominent feminist-pacifists, including Helena Swanwick, Jane Addams, and Rosika Schwimmer. Observing the war from the perspective of women, they adopted a distinctly feminist approach to the problem of peace, emphasising the rights of women and children in war, humanitarian concerns, the value of education, and the democratic control of foreign policy. Some argued that women were inherently more peaceful than men and that, had they been included in foreign policy decisions, the war would never have broken out.Footnote ⁸⁹ The American economist Emily Greene Balch, herself a WILPF member, criticised the practice of secret diplomacy by “gentlemen’s agreement”.Footnote ⁹⁰

Building on these considerations, WILPF compiled a peace programme, not dissimilar from the CODP, including both feminist points as well as general ones: (i) no transfer of territory without approval by the men and women concerned, (ii) governments to settle disputes by arbitration and imposition of social, moral, and economic sanctions if necessary, (iii) democratic control of foreign policy, (iv) equal political rights for women, (v) disarmament and control of arms traffic, (vi) free and equal trade, and (vii) abolishment of secret treaties.Footnote ⁹¹ The women who assembled in The Hague in the spring of 1915 stressed that they did not demand an immediate peace but wanted to study the conditions for permanent peace to be considered when hostilities had ended.Footnote ⁹²

Women were also involved in educational activities in the field of IR. The British section of WILPF argued in 1916 that “teaching and liberating” the minds of the new generations was key to the goal of international peace.Footnote ⁹³ The social worker Mary Sheepshanks called upon fellow feminist-pacifists to “use their brains”, not just their hands, in the struggle for peace.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1917, WILPF demanded that education programmes be adapted to the “higher ideals that are necessary for successful reconstruction after the war”.Footnote ⁹⁵ While devising these programmes, women stressed that international politics had to be taught to a wide audience, such as Margaret Hills argued in Foreign Policy and the People (1917).Footnote ⁹⁶ Wartime membership of WILPF increased to several thousand women from 23 countries – by 1918, the British section alone counted 3,687 members.Footnote ⁹⁷ The collaboration of women on questions of IR during the Great War was a significant contribution to the formation of the discipline, soon complemented by more formal projects, including summer schools, lectures, and publications.Footnote ⁹⁸

Perhaps the most obvious indicator of the ‘birth’ of IR during the mid-1910s was the creation of the Council for the Study of International Relations (CSIR) in London. It was founded in 1915 by the historian A. J. Grant, the economist and Labour politician Arthur Greenwood, the lawyer J. D. I. Hughes, the Balliol historian F. F. Urquhart, and the Round Table editor Philip Kerr.Footnote ⁹⁹ James Bryce, the lawyer, diplomat, and Liberal politician, acted as president. The goal of the CSIR was “to encourage and assist the study of international relations from all points of view”.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In doing so the CSIR responded to the increasing demand by “men and women” to study IR.Footnote ¹⁰¹ CSIR associates published a series of foreign policy articles as well as so-called ‘aids to study’. They also helped to form study circles using CSIR material – including pamphlets titled International Relations: A Scheme of Study, Outline Syllabuses of Some Problems of the War, and The Causes of the War: What to Read. In 1916 the CSIR published the discipline’s first textbook named An Introduction to the Study of International Relations which was complemented by an Introductory Atlas of International Relations, covering contemporary IR issues such as economic relations, international law, imperialism, and European unity.Footnote ¹⁰²

The CSIR’s mission was echoed by a wide range of interest groups, including the League of Nations Societies in various countries; women’s societies, such as WILPF or the International Council of Women (ICW); pacifist societies, such as the Bureau international de la paix or the World Peace Foundation; religious groups, especially the Society of Friends (Quakers); legal associations, such as the Institut de Droit International; philanthropists, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP); as well as groups devoted to the study of a new international order, notably the CODP.Footnote ¹⁰³ In Britain, many of the key figures were associated with the Round Table Movement, a group of imperial reformers organised by Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr, and inspired by Alfred Milner.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These bodies did not work in national isolation but collaborated, from the outset, across borders and often across political or religious groups. The British League of Nations Union, for example, sought to make their campaign more effective by drawing on “a body of enlightened opinion in all countries”, and collaborated with likeminded actors in France, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, and Germany.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But international political thought was not just exported from Anglo-American actors to the rest of the world. French pacifists were considering Wilsonian policies long before the American president arrived in Paris.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The former prime minister of France, Léon Bourgeois, chaired a research committee on a future league of nations in 1917.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ German lawyers, too, were working on the legal fundament of the League of Nations even though they were not asked to participate.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The mutual transnational exchange between these actors underscored the ethos of early IR scholarship – that people from any background could engage in the study of international politics.

In the United States, interest in the war increased considerably in 1917 when President Wilson decided to join the Entente powers. That spring, the American Academy of Political and Social Science held a special meeting devoted to questions of war and peace. The president of the Academy L. S. Rose thought that the war “made the obligation all the more clear to consider in a scientific and non-partisan spirit” the problems arising from the war.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Contributions came from well-known professors and politicians, including Balch, Franklin Henry Giddings, and Walter L. Fisher. Their papers covered all of the familiar problems from self-determination to a future intergovernmental organisation. Most notably, perhaps, they regarded the war as a civilisational catastrophe that required countries of a similar kind, political as well as cultural (and sometimes racial), to cooperate in a league of democracies, rather than to build a universal alliance. But, as with most other conferences of this kind, it was mostly a venue to exchange ideas.

The war helped to organise these ideas, and gave rise to the first coherent body of IR literature. It challenged Angell’s logic of economic interdependence, it delegitimised authoritarian foreign policy, and it initiated a debate on the principles of international governance. As Zimmern noted in 1916, “the war is being waged about ideas, and the settlement at its close will be determined by ideas”.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The architects of IR shaped these debates and built institutional homes for them. They were convinced that international politics should, once and for all, become part of the public realm, open for investigation, public debate, and academic investigation. Toynbee’s goal was “converting public opinion”.Footnote ¹¹¹ Studying the causes of war presupposed that there were causal mechanisms or patterns in international conflicts that could be rationally understood. At the same time, the architects of IR believed strongly in the political and moral value of their research. They pursued both academic and political goals, a delicate combination that continued to shape the emerging discipline as scholars turned from the causes of war to the conditions for peace.

Towards a New International Order

Soon after the outbreak of the war, the focus shifted from trying to understand its causes to finding solutions for peace. The goal was to normalise international relations in a web of new institutions. One of the first proposals for “an organisation to secure peace” was worked out by Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and his entourage of liberal political thinkers.Footnote ¹¹² In his manifesto After the War (1915) he described how a future “league of peace” would require governments to settle their dispute by peaceful means. The league would operate an arbitration court as well as a conciliatory council. It would impose sanctions and exercise economic pressure where necessary. Staffed with temporary clerks from the various member states, the league would represent an independent, truly international authority. By organising international trade, tourism, cultural affairs, and scientific cooperation, the league would foster the sense of an international community, Dickinson envisioned. He explicitly invited the United States to form part of the league, and he warned against humiliating Germany. Crucially, he incorporated the idea of democratic control into his vision for the league. “The improbability of war”, he argued, “would be increased in proportion as the issues of foreign policy should be known to and controlled by public opinion”.Footnote ¹¹³

The ideas put forward in After the War were shared by a range of individuals and organisations, from scholars and journalists to independent writers and pacifist activists. It is hard to categorise them in retrospect because they often changed opinions themselves or simply refused to be associated with any particular camp. Perhaps it was in their very nature as dissenters to defy harmonious organisation.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet as internationalists they agreed that there were important problems best solved beyond the level of national polities. It was from this pool of thinkers that some of the most important contributions to early IR scholarship emerged. The British Liberal politician Charles Roden Buxton edited a 1915 volume called Towards a Lasting Settlement with contributions on nationalism, trade, the women’s movement, democratic control, and the peace settlement by a range of prominent authors, including H. N. Brailsford, Dickinson, J. A. Hobson, and Agnes Maude Royden.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In 1916, the American writer Randolph Bourne edited a compilation of peace proposals called Towards an Enduring Peace which featured works by a range of international intellectuals, including Jane Addams, Norman Angell, Eduard Bernstein, Brailsford, Nicholas Murray Butler, Buxton, John Bates Clark, Dickinson, Hobson, Walter Lippmann, Romain Rolland, Ludwig Quidde, Toynbee, and Zimmern.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The compendium also listed groups and institutions working on a new international order, such as the CODP and the International Congress of Women. But the idea of the League of Nations also developed in private conversations, such as those of Theodore Marburg, secretary of the League to Enforce Peace, who corresponded with leading politicians throughout the war.Footnote ¹¹⁷

In France, the idea of the League of Nations was promoted by a set of lawyers, pacifists, and socialist politicians, including Léon Bourgeois, Gustave-Adolphe Hubbard, and Pierre Laval, who expanded on the work of Théodore Ruyssen and his Association de la paix par le droit.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Despite government censorship, they were able to build a network of sympathisers and established a series of internationalist pressure groups, beginning with the Ligue du droit des peuples pour la constituante mondiale in December 1916. With the support of Belgian peace activist Paul Otlet, they put up a series of meetings at the École des hautes études sociales in the spring of 1917, attended by up to 400 interested citizens. Among the speakers were the politician Jean Hennessy and the feminist-pacifist writer Marcelle Capy.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Ligue and its successor organisations maintained the dual function of political propaganda and scientific inquiry, although they were not solely comprised of members of the intellectual elite.Footnote ¹²⁰ Like their Anglo-American counterparts, although somewhat more hesitantly, they entertained transnational contacts during the war.

One notable figure was Edgard Milhaud, a French socialist and economics professor.Footnote ¹²¹ Educated widely in philosophy, sociology, and economics, Milhaud spent several years in Germany to conduct research for a book on socialist democracy. He then served as an economic advisor in the French ministry of commerce and eventually, in 1902, was appointed professor of political economy in Geneva. During the First World War, he wrote several books on the organisation of peace and the future League of Nations.Footnote ¹²² Once the governments had settled the peace terms, Milhaud argued, the power had to return to the parliaments and, eventually, to the people themselves. He also pressed for a strong interpretation of international sanctions to give the new organisation enough authority.Footnote ¹²³ From the vantage point of Geneva, he was able to build a network of likeminded authors, including the socialists Léon Blum, Hubert Bourgin, and Albert Thomas who became the first director of the International Labour Office in 1919 and who invited Milhaud to do further work on social and economic problems in the 1920s.

The work of these individuals and various international groups covered essentially all major questions of early IR scholarship from collective security to economic cooperation, from imperial reform to international organisations. Notable works included George H. Blakeslee’s The Problems and Lessons of the War (1916), Charles W. Eliot’s, The Road Toward Peace (1915), C. Ernest Fayle’s The Great Settlement (1915), Alfred Hermann Fried’s, Europäische Wiederherstellung [European Reconstruction] (1915), J. A. Hobson’s Towards International Government (1915), Oliver Lodge’s The War and After (1915), A. Lawrence Lowell’s League to Enforce Peace (1915), Henri La Fontaine’s The Great Solution: Magnissima Charta (1916), E. D. Morel’s Truth and the War (1916), Raymond Unwin’s, The War and What After (1915), J. J. Ruedorffer’s Grundzüge der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart [Basics of Contemporary World Politics] (1914), Leonard Woolf’s International Government (1916), F. von Wrangel’s Internationale Anarchie oder Verfassung? [International Anarchy or Constitution?] (1915), and Alfred Zimmern’s Nationality & Government (1918).

These were no longer isolated publications but formed a distinct body of scholarship. Authors referenced each other’s publications and often shared drafts for comments, thus creating a sense of disciplinary unity.Footnote ¹²⁴ Despite the ongoing conflict, they collaborated across borders by cross-publishing, forming alliances, and meeting up where possible.Footnote ¹²⁵ While the war prohibited the establishment of any formal, university-based institutions, the architects of IR saw the need for political education and called for reforms. In 1917, the German orientalist and politician Carl Heinrich Becker argued that the study of IR (Auslandsstudien) was “a practical requirement of the state”.Footnote ¹²⁶ Becker saw the need for well-trained state officials but also wanted to educate the population at large. After the war, Becker’s plans inspired the creation of several institutions for the study of IR as well as the new school subject ‘citizen education’ (Staatsbürgerkunde).

Although the authors varied widely in professional background and style of writing, they agreed on their role in reforming the international order as a whole. They unequivocally rejected the system of foreign relations that had, so they argued, brought about the First World War – in the words of James Bryce, “getting rid of what is called the Old Diplomacy”.Footnote ¹²⁷ That system, the critics claimed, rested on secret treaties, militarist societies, and authoritarian governments. It was operated by a small elite of ministers, generals, and diplomats at the cost of soldiers, women, and the population at large. In fact, the general public was so uninformed about foreign affairs that, as Labour politician Philip Snowden once remarked, if war had broken out during the Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911 not more than 100 people would have understood why.Footnote ¹²⁸

New diplomacy, therefore, was designed to make international relations more open, democratic, and peaceful.Footnote ¹²⁹ International treaties and agreements were to be public. Armaments were to be kept at an absolute minimum. International affairs were to be governed democratically and, in cases of dispute, to be dealt with peacefully at an arbitration court. Women were to be given the vote and to participate in political life. Public offices, especially the diplomatic services, were to be made more accessible to represent more accurately the interests of society. Finally, the image of international affairs as an incomprehensible art was to be demystified and instead to be taught in schools and universities.

This programme was not just a collection of vague ideas, it was supplemented by detailed studies on every aspect of the new order. With regard to democratic control of foreign policy, for example, the Swiss author and politician Joseph Scherrer-Füllemann proposed to install parliamentary committees as a venue for foreign policy debates.Footnote ¹³⁰ Important decisions, such as declarations of war or international treaties, were to be discussed in public and sanctioned by parliament. In a 1917 essay, the Swedish socialist politician Carl Lindhagen specified that there should be two separate parliamentary committees of certain minimum sizes to avoid party coterie.Footnote ¹³¹ These reforms would encourage political parties to devote more room to foreign policy in their programmes and help to generate public debate. Scherrer-Füllemann also suggested using the Inter-Parliamentary Union as a mediator between rival governments. A similar proposal, to “bundle the powers of parliaments”, was presented by Norwegian historian and internationalist Christian Lous Lange.Footnote ¹³² Other CODP associates went into even more detail and published in academic journals, including The American Political Science Review.Footnote ¹³³

The most obvious novelty about new diplomacy, however, was the concept of an intergovernmental organisation – the future League of Nations. Plans for such an authority had been floated for decades, perhaps as far back as Kant’s Perpetual Peace (1795). But it was during the First World War that the debate on a permanent body regulating all aspects of international life really took off. The League differed from nineteenth-century diplomacy in that it was an “organised” concert of powers, as Zimmern put it.Footnote ¹³⁴ Others, such as Woolf, envisioned a more advanced “supernational authority”, featuring a court, a council, and a secretariat.Footnote ¹³⁵ Most experts agreed that some sort of international institution would help to prevent future conflict, but there were open questions. Who would be allowed to join? How would the League be governed? Which policy instruments would it be able to employ?

The architects of IR were at the centre of these debates.Footnote ¹³⁶ They believed that a well-organised international organisation, based on reason and the rule of law, would make the world a more peaceful place. The advantage of a permanent institution over intermittent conferences was that national representatives would grow accustomed to one another, leading to “a better understanding” between the various nations, so Zimmern argued.Footnote ¹³⁷ Zimmern was one of the principal advocates of this rational notion of international affairs which implied that good analysis would lead to good solutions. At the height of the war, in November 1915, Zimmern claimed there was “no more important duty … than the close and searching analysis of political ideas”.Footnote ¹³⁸ However, he did not assume that a fixed legal apparatus would do the job. It would have to be an active political union, comprising as many countries as possible, and informed by recurring deliberations.Footnote ¹³⁹ He was especially concerned about how it could be “reconciled with the democratic control of foreign policy”.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

For Toynbee, too, the future international order would have to be based on reason and open debate. To him, internationalism was the logical conclusion from the increasing interdependence of states and a matter of civilisational progress.Footnote ¹⁴¹ He called it “a co-ordination of knowledge on a large scale”.Footnote ¹⁴² Toynbee’s research on nations and nationality, published in Nationality and the War (1915), did exactly that. In encyclopaedic detail, he studied the history and geography of rivalling nations in order to develop a scheme for European reconstruction and permanent peace. While he had no illusions about the prospect of his endeavour – “in the last resort there must always be minorities that suffer” – Toynbee believed that rational investigation was the way to a more peaceful world.Footnote ¹⁴³ Like Zimmern, he rejected a legalistic version of international cooperation as ‘lifeless contracts’, and preferred strong executive powers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Both Toynbee and Zimmern were convinced that the level of political negotiation had to be international. They agreed on the “bankruptcy of the national state” and the inadequacies of old diplomacy.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The nature of modern international relations had become so complex and the scope of violence so destructive that solutions had to be found on the international stage. It was no longer plausible to pursue a strategy of unilateral military preponderance or “peace by preparedness”, as their American colleague George H. Blakeslee argued in 1915.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ To prevent another war, and the enormous costs associated with it, governments had to find a mechanism of conflict resolution. It was an experiment of a new kind of diplomacy. Zimmern regarded it as an “instrument of cooperation”, the effectiveness of which, he readily admitted, depended on the willingness of its members to support its mission.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Their German colleague Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, an international lawyer with connections to leading politicians, agreed on the basic outlines of the League of Nations.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ He was sympathetic to a strong international authority for arbitration and, if necessary, sanctions. In an article for the German League of Nations Union (Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund), he particularly welcomed the concept of “international cooperation (gemeinschaftliche Weltarbeit)”.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Although coming from a legal background, he did not advocate a court-based international order but stressed the role of active political institutions. “The alliance system has lost the war, the league system has won it”, he summarised.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ However, Mendelssohn Bartholdy also criticised certain aspects of the emerging Covenant, such as the unanimity rule in the Council or the possibility for individuals to appeal to the court. He was particularly vocal about self-determination and the protection of minorities.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Mendelssohn Bartholdy did not keep those ideas to himself. He corresponded with high-ranking politicians and published in a wide range of media outlets. His drafts for the League were read, amongst others, by Prussian Finance Minister Albert Südekum and interim Chancellor Max von Baden.Footnote ¹⁵² In January 1919, the head of the legal department at the German foreign office Walter Simons asked Mendelssohn Bartholdy to study certain legal aspects of the Covenant and to accompany the German delegation to Paris.Footnote ¹⁵³ Along with historian Hans Delbrück and sociologist Max Weber, Mendelssohn Bartholdy advised the German government on the peace treaty. There is no evidence that he had any influence on German policy, but his private papers are testimony to his ambitions.

Mendelssohn Bartholdy belonged to the foreign policy group Heidelberger Vereinigung, which included von Baden, the banker Carl Melchior, and the army general Max Montgelas. They were critical of the peace terms and promoted research on a German-friendly settlement. On their pressure, the German foreign office commissioned an extended version of Karl Kautsky’s Die Deutschen Dokumente zum Kriegsausbruch 1914 (1921) and asked Mendelssohn Bartholdy to contribute the first volume – the second and third were covered by Walther Schücking and Mongelas, respectively.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ After the end of the war, members of the Heidelberger Vereinigung, with financial support from banker Max Warburg, established the Institut für Auswärtige Politik in Hamburg – Germany’s first research institute exclusively devoted to IR – and appointed Mendelssohn Bartholdy its inaugural director.

These networks between professors, politicians, and philanthropists provided an ideal environment for devising the new international institutions, and for establishing a new academic discipline. Interaction with high-ranking politicians was routine practice for the architects of IR. In August 1918, Alfred Zimmern was appointed a temporary clerk at the foreign office.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In October, he presented his ideas on the League to an audience of politicians, presided by the former prime minister and then leader of the opposition Herbert Asquith.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Shortly thereafter Zimmern was sent to Paris on behalf of the British government. Whenever not present in Paris himself, he was regularly updated by his friends in the Foreign Office, such as the diplomat and politician Eustace Percy, who assured him that their draft was in good shape against the “pretty sterile” American and “terribly legalistic” French drafts.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In May 1919, Zimmern resigned from his position at the foreign office and took up the Woodrow Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth, Wales, to become the first IR professor in history.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Zimmern’s professional biography, like those of others, makes it impossible to isolate his intellectual output from his practical experiences and the general political context.

At the Peace Conference

When the governments assembled in Paris in January 1919 they were assisted by an entourage of academic advisors, many of whom were involved in the formation of IR.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ They wrote memoranda, studied historical treaties, gathered demographic data, and prepared official negotiations. Among the advisors were Fannie Fern Andrews, E. H. Carr, Archibald Coolidge, Lionel Curtis, Albert Geouffre de Lapradelle, Ferdinand Larnaude, Paul Mantoux, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Philip Noel-Baker, William Rappard, Walther Schücking, James T. Shotwell, Arnold Toynbee, Charles Webster, and Alfred Zimmern. The conference gave them an ideal opportunity to exchange ideas and to partake in the making of international relations. Within the history of IR, this was a crucial moment since it manifested the relationship between scholars and practitioners of foreign policy.

The political agenda was daunting. After four years of warfare on an unprecedented scale, the leaders of Britain, France, and the United States effectively decided on the fate of people across the globe. Other governments, nationalist activists, and various interest groups were submitting their petitions to the conference. Meanwhile, it is worth remembering, some regions of the world were still at war after 1918, notably Soviet Russia, the former Ottoman Empire, and Ireland.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Amidst this chaotic context, the peacemakers had to decide on territorial changes, military restrictions, economic reparations, colonial revisions, humanitarian provisions, and the creation of the world’s first intergovernmental organisation. How could a new international order satisfy all those interests? Who was to make the decisions? And which role did IR scholars have to play in all this?

Drawing on their wartime experiences, the architects of IR threw themselves into the work. “No method of study can equal a first hand acquaintance”, as one of their reports explained.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Although some of them were lawyers, the majority came from other backgrounds and their conversations went beyond legal analysis. Crucially, they did not just provide expertise when asked to, but they sought to actively shape the conference outcomes. In December 1918, Dickinson urged Murray – both were members of the British League of Nations Union (LNU) – that “the Union is to get in contact with the peace conference, and try to influence it”.Footnote ¹⁶² WILPF sent a delegation to Paris led by Jane Addams to convey their programme for peace and to protest the exclusion of women in the negotiations.Footnote ¹⁶³ The American historian James Shotwell tried to convince British delegates of the need to publish diplomatic records for the sake of open diplomacy.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Their work went far beyond professorial duties. Not only did they make normative claims in written work, but they intervened in foreign policy in the most immediate way possible.

For many, the most interesting project at Paris was the drafting of the League of Nations Covenant – affectionately called the world’s ‘declaration of interdependence’. Scholars such as Toynbee put their hopes on a strong international institution that would overcome the problem of nationalism.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The League incorporated all the fundamental ideas that motivated the study of IR. Starting from the assumption that the world was growing together economically and that war was the result of a flawed system of international relations, the architects of the League argued that an intergovernmental organisation could help to control those increasingly complex relationships on the basis of law and democracy. It was the logical conclusion from the horrors of the war and the course of world history. The various pro-League pressure groups, such as the LNU, helped to gather these sentiments.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ For Philip Noel-Baker, a prominent member of the LNU, the League was a “necessary result of the development of human society”.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ It was to organise the world not just from a geopolitical point of view but as a holistic institution solving the various economic, legal, cultural, and humanitarian problems of the time.

It is difficult to trace the contributions of individual IR scholars to the final text of the Covenant, or to measure the influence that they had on the League as it took shape. But there is evidence that their efforts did not go unnoticed. Perhaps the most prominent example was Zimmern’s December 1918 draft of the League Covenant which Lord Cecil took to Paris.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The French equivalent, a study commission directed by Léon Bourgeois (and including among others Paul d’Estournelles de Constant), was less successful in convincing their government to adopt an internationalist position and to put arbitration at the heart of the new organisation.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ But there were other important individuals. The historian James Headlam-Morley “played a major part in the drafting of the minorities protection treaties”, as Zara Steiner pointed out.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ He also pressed for the covenant to incorporate a mechanism for the modification of treaties.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Fannie Fern Andrews, the American educator, supplied Colonel House with studies on the freedom of the seas.Footnote ¹⁷² Philip Noel-Baker advised Lord Cecil on disarmament and legal questions, before taking up a position at the League of Nations Secretariat.Footnote ¹⁷³ Minutes of the Peace Conference show that both Shotwell and Toynbee attended meetings of the ‘big three’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Whatever their actual impact on the final treaty, IR scholars were overwhelmingly supportive of the League and saw it as a chance to advance their own work.

Besides the League of Nations, IR scholars were most interested in the peace terms for Germany. Several authors voiced their concern with the Versailles Treaty, arguing that it was unfair towards Germany and that it would not serve international peace in the long run. “I think the country ought to be told in planer language”, wrote Zimmern to Toynbee in August 1919, “that the break of the armistice agreement of Nov. 5 1918 is as great a crime against the Law of nations as the break of the Belgian Treaty, and far less excusable”.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Toynbee agreed. He suggested admitting Germany to the League of Nations straight away – “I think we shall get Germany in pretty soon” – and he was willing to widen the break with Russia and Hungary for this cause.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Part of their reasoning was that they regarded Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism, but their pro-German attitude also derived from their vision for an inclusive post-war system of international cooperation. This approach was related to John Maynard Keynes’s critique of the peace terms as well as to the common notion that “the Allied Governments have proposed such terms as no nation would accept”.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Many IR scholars in the allied countries believed that not the entire German people should be held accountable for the poor decisions made by the Kaiser and a handful of generals. Consequently, they began in August 1919 to reach out to German scholars, for example via the Oxford Society for Promoting International Understanding and Friendship.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

More significant for the development of IR as a discipline than the peace terms and the Covenant, however, was the atmosphere in Paris from which they emerged. President Wilson’s historic decision to sail to Europe was widely received as a signal for the importance he assigned to international reconciliation, and it stimulated hope for liberal reforms of the international order in many parts of the world.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Wilson’s own delegation was accompanied by his legendary group of advisors, ‘The Inquiry’, which was composed of more than one hundred professors and experts. It was a summit of “leaders of thought and action”, as one report described it.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ During the entire conference, the French, British, and American League of Nations interest groups occupied a common office located conveniently close to the plenipotentiaries at the Palais d’Orsay.Footnote ¹⁸¹ These encounters gave rise to an optimistic atmosphere and bolstered the conviction that international peace could be mastered.Footnote ¹⁸² The format of the conference served as a showcase for how world governance might work, but it also provided a chance for all kinds of activists, experts, and scholars to sound out potential collaborators. This impression of the peace conference is well captured in the report of a group of IR experts who met in Paris:

It was these transnational, primarily transatlantic, encounters that gave rise to two influential think tanks – the British Institute of International Affairs in London and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The idea arose during several unofficial meetings dating back to February 1919 at which members of the British and US delegations, including Lionel Curtis, Philip Noel-Baker, and Alfred Zimmern, floated the idea of turning the Parisian atmosphere into a more permanent institution.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The decisive meeting took place on 30 May 1919.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ It was attended by the American historians George Louis Beer and James Shotwell, the lawyer James Brown Scott, the diplomat Stanley Hornbeck, General Tasker Bliss, as well as the British statesmen and diplomats Lord Cecil, Lionel Curtis, Eyre Crowe, Eustace Percy, and the historians James Headlam-Morley and Harold Temperley.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Their goal was “to keep its members in touch with the international situation and enable them to study the relation between national policies and the interests of society as a whole”.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

The Anglo-American initiative inspired a whole range of IR research institutes across Europe. Several members of the German delegation – including the sociologist Max Weber, the soon-to-be foreign minister Walter Simons, the banker Carl Melchior, and the international lawyer Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy – helped to establish the Institut für Auswärtige Politik in Hamburg. French statesmen Léon Bourgeois and Raymond Poincaré became members of the honorary council of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Paris. The founders of the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, the Swiss diplomat William Rappard and the French historian Paul Mantoux, both attended the Paris Peace Conference. Having participated in active diplomacy themselves, they shared the idea that international affairs should be subject to scholarly investigation.

Despite tireless campaigning, women were largely excluded from the conference. Since 1915, they had been insisting that “an international meeting of women shall be held in the same place and at the same time” as the Peace Conference.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ While they were denied access to official negotiations in Paris, they met up in Zurich and worked on the various aspects of the peace settlement in parallel to their male colleagues. Their key demands were to grant membership of the League of Nations to all nations, to consistently apply the principle of self-determination, to make provisions for treaty revisions, to avoid military force when imposing blockades, to reduce armaments immediately, to internationalise colonial territories, and to allow free access to raw materials. They also demanded full equality for women, amnesty for political prisoners as well as freedom of communication and travel.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Finally, they called for educational reforms. Helena Swanwick, a WILPF member and prolific writer on international affairs, argued that the League had to be popularised through education and public debate. “The peoples in any country in the world want to study foreign affairs”, she wrote in August 1919.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

Apart from these elite-level networks, the Peace Conference also attracted popular attention to the conduct of foreign affairs. “Diplomacy was coming down among the people”, as David Mitrany put it.Footnote ¹⁹¹ President Wilson’s case for open diplomacy – “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” – suggested that it was the right of the people to be adequately informed about foreign affairs. Now there was a viable chance that people might be better informed about the causes for war and the making of peace. Zimmern actually favoured the “representation of peoples rather than governments” at the Peace Conference.Footnote ¹⁹² Female IR writers, though not invited to Paris, were the most progressive advocates of popular involvement in international affairs. In a 1919 essay entitled Democracy and the League of Nations, Swanwick explained the goal of WILPF was “to rouse the great mass of people in every country to take an interest in these great matters”.Footnote ¹⁹³ Democratic control of foreign policy required appropriate forms of information and education, motives that were propelled by the Peace Conference.

IR as a university discipline owes a lot to the Peace Conference. The negotiations showed the need for experts at the intersection of international law, history, economics, and political science. While coming from different disciplinary and national backgrounds, the architects of IR agreed on the benefits of a new, common subject, the name of which remained uncertain for the time being. The participants realised that none of their academic disciplines sufficiently covered what was now at stake, and so their work at Paris created a sense of disciplinary identity.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Paris also suggested that there would be plenty of professional opportunities for students of the new discipline, both at the national level and as at the League of Nations. The Peace Conference stirred the hope that international relations would become more rational, and thus more suitable for academic research.

The shortcomings of new diplomacy, however, became apparent almost immediately when the victorious governments blatantly disregarded the principles of self-determination and open diplomacy. In March, Toynbee wrote to Murray that his colleagues at the Foreign Office were beginning to feel “very depressed” about the prospects of the peace. “The Conference”, Toynbee reported, “has rather suddenly passed from an overwhelming sense of its own power to a probably equally exaggerated sense of helplessness”.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ The project of the League of Nations seemed to lose its momentum before it was formally established. By July, Toynbee admitted being “more afraid of its going wrong”.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ French sociologist Célestin Bouglé, too, was disappointed about the “pale and imperfect” outcome of the negotiations.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

Although the conference was formally international, it largely excluded non-Western actors, women, and nationals of those countries that were politically out of favour. World politics were firmly in the hands of “white men in white men’s countries”.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ In the end, most decisions were taken by the ‘big three’, rather than an open council of parliamentary representatives. In addition to political pressure, the conference operated under the constraints of time and resources. Only a few delegates actually possessed a detailed grasp of the final documents. So great was the disappointment among some of the IR pioneers that by May 1919, Toynbee described it as “a soul-destroying affair”.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Zimmern, too, felt “disgusted and depressed”.Footnote ²⁰⁰ In many respects, 1919 did not mark the ‘birth of IR’, as disciplinary histories usually claim, but it concluded the first episode of IR scholarship, a period that defined the political context and intellectual challenges ahead. Did the architects of IR fail to see the risks and problems of their endeavour?

Whatever the flaws and failures of the peace, it did raise expectations among the peoples of the world by introducing new normative principles of international politics beyond Versailles.Footnote ²⁰¹ In particular, it gave rise to a new body of thought which assumed that foreign politics could be controlled by democratic institutions and studied by academics. “There is nothing that I am so anxious to devote my time to as the enlightenment of public opinion about the League”, declared Conservative politician and educationalist Eustace Percy in May 1919.Footnote ²⁰² This attitude should not be misinterpreted as ‘idealism’, however. There were ‘doubts’ about the League as early as 1919.Footnote ²⁰³ They wanted “to speak of the League of Nations not as an ideal or a dream”, Gilbert Murray declared in November 1918, “but as a piece of practical political business”.Footnote ²⁰⁴ The pioneers of IR never believed that an institution alone could secure world peace.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Instead, what they underestimated was that foreign affairs remained first and foremost political affairs, and that partisan interests torpedoed the idea of ‘objective’ international conditions. There were no unbiased conclusions to be drawn, no scientific laws to be discovered, and no objective truths to be found. For IR as a social science, the Peace Conference was an instructive experience, albeit a problematic one. From a historical point of view, the conference was just as discouraging. The American withdrawal from Europe in March 1920 terminated their wartime alliance with France and Britain. US isolationism as well as the exclusion of Japan, Soviet Russia, and Germany put an end to the vision of global governance, and as such to IR as a global discipline.

Conclusion

“How many of Toynbee’s tales or anecdotes start in the wartime foreign office or at the peace conference of 1919”, The Economist remembered in 1967 looking back on the historian’s career.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Over the course of five years, the classics tutor Arnold J. Toynbee had metamorphosed into a government advisor and an expert on international affairs. He had published articles and books, worked for the Foreign Office, and built a network of likeminded intellectuals and politicians. The resulting ideas and institutions that formed the discipline of IR were irrevocably linked to the experiences between July 1914 and June 1919 – the horrors of the war and the efforts for lasting peace. It was this episode that inspired the study of IR and made it, as Toynbee later put it, “the master problem of the present age”.Footnote ²⁰⁷

The First World War was a disruptive moment for the existing world order as much as for the ideas underlying it. Empires collapsed, monarchs were dethroned, and borders were redrawn. Old diplomatic practices were put into question by the advocates of self-determination, open treaties, and democratic control of foreign policy. The architects of IR were at the forefront of these reforms. Despite ongoing hostilities, and in opposition to the political establishment, they seized a moment of turmoil to criticise the existing foreign policy system and to draw up proposals for a new world order. Specifically, they demanded a negotiated peace, the publication of secret treaties, disarmament, more parliamentary control over foreign policy, universal franchise, national self-determination, free trade, and the establishment of a league of nations. Their goal was a global order based on international law and institutions, democratic standards, and open markets which, so they claimed, would lead to a more peaceful world.

This was an ambitious agenda. Yet, as this chapter has shown, the intellectual roots of IR cannot be reduced to ‘idealist’ post-war planning. Devising plans for the League of Nations was not in itself ‘idealist’, a label that the architects of IR vehemently rejected.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Quite the contrary, they were well aware of the implications of military power and nationalist sentiments. Toynbee, for one, readily admitted that national identity had to be built into the foundations of an internationalist order.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Zimmern viewed the League of Nations as nothing but “an adaptation” of the previous system – “an organised concert of the powers”.Footnote ²¹⁰ Mendelssohn Bartholdy devoted an entire essay to the concept of ‘power’.Footnote ²¹¹ These studies were perplexingly eclectic and by no means fit into a well-defined school of ‘idealism’. It is true therefore, as Brian C. Schmidt and other disciplinary historians have argued, that early IR scholarship was by no means as trivially ‘idealist’ or ‘utopian’ as E. H. Carr later asserted.Footnote ²¹² Even during the formative phase of IR, the supposed seedbed of ‘idealism’, there were elements of ‘realism’ in their work. Toynbee, for example, regarded the League of Nations as an instrument to balance power relations in continental Europe.Footnote ²¹³

Subsequent interpretations of early IR scholarship have mistaken its normative character either for naïve ‘idealism’ or for manifestations of some other general theory. In fact, these works were the result of the political interests pursued by its authors. The crucial impulse for the formation of IR was not an uncritical belief in the League of Nations as a guarantor of world peace. Nor was it the rise of economic interdependence, or the need for imperial reform, which brought about the new discipline, although all of these issues played a role. The principal motivation sprang from the practical efforts to bring about a new international order. The architects of IR used this new order as an intellectual playground. They pursued political goals while claiming to apply academic standards, although they rarely acknowledged, let alone discussed the political nature of their work.

In particular, the protagonists of IR believed that issues of war and peace could and should be subject to rational investigation. They argued that education in IR was essential in order to make foreign politics more accountable and, as a result, the world more peaceful. This argument was motivated by the experience of the war and the growing public interest in foreign affairs. It was tied to the women’s campaign for universal suffrage as well as to the more general wave of democratisation in the wake of the war. The study of IR was rooted in the idea of democracy and it relied on democratic practices. In order to study international affairs properly scholars needed access to diplomatic documents. In order to have meaningful debates about foreign policy choices there had to be legislative procedures to bring about change. Without those prerequisites the study of IR would be speculation at best, propaganda at worst.

The tension between academic rigour and political ambition was apparent even before IR became a formal university discipline, before the first professor was appointed, and before the first degrees were awarded. Conflicting motivations continued to shape the institutional formation of the discipline, which the next chapter will address in more detail. Wartime conditions had made it impossible to establish IR at the university level. Yet, as this chapter has shown, the foundations of the discipline were laid during the First World War and the founders were intellectually inspired by the war. In the absence of formal institutions, the architects of IR relied on personal networks and advocacy groups, small publications, and impromptu conferences. This environment turned out to be decisive for the formation of the discipline.