The most striking feature of the British Cabinet's decision for war on 2 August 1914 is the absence of any attempt by the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, to convince his colleagues of the necessity for intervention on the grounds of British interests. According to the fullest contemporary source, the diary kept by L A. Pease, President of the Board of Education, Grey simply presented the Cabinet with the alternative of his resignation. In so doing, he made the decision a matter of politics rather than policy. At no stage did he place before his colleagues the considerations that had convinced him of the necessity for the step on which he insisted. Although Britain's treaty obligations were examined on 29 July, British interests, as such, were not spelled out. Even on the morning of 3 August, by which time the decision had effectively been taken, Grey was urged merely to ‘allude’ to unspecified British interests in his forthcoming meeting with the French ambassador.

Burke did not count himself a theorist. Metaphysics, abstraction, was stuff for professor So If the speculation of the classroom was brought too close to the life of politics the result was unsettling, dangerous, revolutionary. Politicians should be people of practice not theory, attending to circumstance before principle, working within a tradition not innovating, reforming before countenancing revolution. They should be concerned with the whole of human nature and not just with human reason, with feeling as well as with thought.

The founding fathers of Marxism provided an analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society and an indication of the means by which its revolutionary overthrow might be accomplished. They had less to say, however, about the colonial world into which the capitalist society of their day was rapidly expanding, and in their scattered writings on the subject they leave the clear impression that they shared the views of most of their socialist contemporaries that the colonies were the objects rather than the subjects of history, and that their destiny would be determined by the success or failure of the revolutionary movement in the major metropolitan countrieSo1 Marx and Engels were generally unsentimental about the nature of imperialist rule in the colonies, and they drew attention to the plunder, corruption and destruction by which it had usually been accompanied. They had little sympathy, however, for the ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life’ in which most of the colonial peoples were believed to dwell, and they followed Hegel and much of Victorian social theory in regarding its displacement by the way of life of the major metropolitan countries as both inevitable and in accordance with a general scheme of social evolution by which ‘all, even the most barbarian nations are drawn into civilisation’, as the Communist Manifesto put it.

The central but ambiguous position of the state in international relations retains its fascination for theorists of the subject. Is the state a permanent feature of the political landscape or a transitional stage in the evolution of political life? Does it protect or endanger basic human values? What parallels are there between politics within states and politics between states? What forms of union can states embark upon without sacrificing their identity as states? It is to such questions as these that the three books under review address themselves.

These two books should be welcomed enthusiastically by the international relations community. They describe economically the work done in two important and related fields with which scholars of international relations, no matter what their speciality, should be acquainted. This judgement may not, of course, be accepted by everyone, but I hope this review article will provide reasons in support of it. For even if one concludes (as I do not) that the approaches of these books are wrong, they are interestingly wrong.

In a recent issue of the Review John Baylis discussed wartime thinking in Great Britain about a post-war European security group. Baylis's contribution is of great importance to the historiography of wartime and post-war British foreign and security policy, filling a void in our knowledge of these crucial years. However, we would like to make some critical comments on his treatment of the Post-Hostilities Planning Staff report ‘Security in Western Europe and the North Atlantic’, which is such a central feature in his contribution. According to Baylis this particular study by the PHPS (an interdepartmental study group created by the British War Cabinet) laid down ‘a reasonably coherent set of attitudes’ regarding post-war European co-operation. The PHPS, collecting together much of the current thinking in both Foreign Office and military circles, advocated the formation of a Western European-Group as a kind of insurance against a rearmed Germany ors if the world organization failed to materialize, against a potentially hostile USSR. The report marked the formation of a ‘consensus’ among Foreign Office and military officials involved in post-war planning.

I am greatly obliged to Cees Wiebes and Bert Zeeman for their illuminating comments on my treatment of the Post-Hostilities Report ‘Security in Western Europe and the North Atlantic’. Although my assessment of the report was not, as they suggest, ‘a central feature of my article’ (two out of fifteen pages) the points they make are nevertheless very valuable.