Table of ContentsSummaryIntroduction'A Product of Sick Times'The Relevance of the Twenty Year CrisisConclusionSummaryThe question of this essay is whether EH Carr's twenty-year crisis is whether EH Carr's twenty-year crisis is still relevant The crisis is the product of a sick age or it can still function with broader relevance in the modern world. Regarding the first part of the question quote – “product of a sick age” – the crucial element here is asking the extent to which Carr's work was a product of a search for the between the wars tending towards appeasement and a reaction to “utopian thinking”. The flip side of such an argument is whether his work was more a combination of his contextually distinctive "education" as a journalist and historian and his Mannheimian influences. This essay assumes, for the sake of brevity, that the term "sick" refers to historical events such as the arms crisis, the global economic crisis arising from the Great Depression of 1929, and the failure of League of Nations which culminated in support for appeasement. Regarding the second part of the quote – “broader relevance” – the question I want to address is whether Carr's text is still relevant if we move away from the traditional dichotomous debate between realist and idealist, according to the usual interpretation of “manuals”. In this essay, I will argue for the latter point, emphasizing the critical and theoretically diverse elements of The Twenty Year Crisis.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get original essayIntroductionE. H. Carr's The Twenty Year Crisis represents a polemical attack on the liberal internationalism of the 19th century which the author attributes as one of the root causes of the interwar crisis. The text has been considered a founding chapter in the “philosophical orientation” of realism (Donnelly 2000: 57); proponents of the latter largely welcome its depiction of the relationship between power and utopia, as well as the ensuing paradigmatic shift from utopianism to realism. Meanwhile, the supposedly opposing paradigm of utopians/idealists began to appreciate the critical and forward-looking aspects of Carr's work as part of a wave of revisionist scholarship. These aspects include Carr's post-positivism, his counter-hegemonic strategy and his Western Marxist influences. Examples include Booth (1991), Linklater (1997) and Jones (1998), respectively. “A Product of Sick Times” This essay argues that Carr's text is in part a product of sick times. It is important to place Carr in the appropriate historical context. Rather than situating it solely in the context of the aforementioned "sick times", with their various social, political and economic crises of the interwar period, a more nuanced approach would be to consider Carr's work in the context of historically conscious classical scholars such as Weber, Aron, and Polanyi. These academics frequently expounded their thoughts on politics, diplomacy, and international affairs, without necessarily adopting the more rigorous stance of a professional academic as such. In a similar vein to these writers, Carr infuses his work with broader sociopolitical ideas such as the move toward mass societies, the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, and the rise of nationalism and self-determination. I therefore suggest that Carr's text does not propagatesimply a “realistic” view – but rather that its fusion of national and international issues, in combination with the aforementioned socio-political policies, results in a very individual book; a text that stands out slightly from “traditional” realist texts in the canon of the realist/idealist debate. Addressing the context of "sick times", the initial publication of The Twenty Years' Crisis coincided with the year (1939) of peak tension. concerning the culmination of the various interwar crises, as detailed above, as well as the ultimate collapse of the 19th century liberal internationalist order (the outbreak of World War II). One of the most frequently cited elements of Carr's text in relation to these crises is his strong promotion of the policy of appeasement towards Hitler and Nazi Germany. I believe that Carr's support for the policy of appeasement must be contextualized historically in a situation where the memory of the First World War was still very vivid, and where the desire to avoid another war was therefore at the forefront in the Carr's thoughts. This desire was combined with his contempt for nationalism of all kinds, thus rejecting possible countervailing military action. A potential criticism of this argument in terms of the historical context of Carr's policy of appeasement lies in his editorial revisions in the 1946 edition of his work. text. World War II weakened the idea that political hegemony could be redeemed (i.e. appeasement), while it is equally difficult to argue that the annexation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 for greater Lebensraum was a form of "peaceful change". Carr failed to adequately revise his errors (in hindsight) in light of World War II (1946 edition) regarding the appeasement and military buildup of Nazi Germany. He continued to wrongly characterize various recognized forms of military expansion as examples of peaceful change and national self-determination. Therefore, the failure of The Twenty Years' Crisis to adequately analyze the various practical implications of the politics of appeasement (in both its first and second editions) does not bode well for the text's wider relevance in as a source of explanatory and prescriptive theory. The Twenty Year Crisis While Carr himself attributes the failure to transplant 19th century liberal internationalism into the 20th century as an underlying cause of the various interwar crises, I argue that the relevance of the twenty-year crisis extends beyond the so-called “first great debate.” Waves of revisionist scholarship in the 20th century shed light on the myth of such debate, generally asserting that there was no single body of thought recognized as "idealism", while there were also many important internal realist-realist debates. A survey of relevant studies reveals that even many political realists shared the same concerns as the “idealists”; Morgenthau's (1948–1949) critique revolved around the philosophical implications of Carr's work, namely "the untenable equation of utopia, theory and morality". Meanwhile, idealists such as Wight (1946:3) failed to observe a sufficiently “fruitful tension” between utopia and reality. Having dispelled the argument that Carr's book is only relevant to the "First Great Debate", I will offer three points in relation to the "broader relevance" of The Twenty Year Crisis. First, I view Carr's text as fundamentally an intellectual weapon. This corresponds to Carr's tendency to give his founding texts acontroversy. For example, Nationalism and After (1945) attacked the propagators of national self-determination, while New Society (1951) attacked laissez-faire capitalism and What Is History? (1961) took a critical look at the “English historical establishment”. In the case of The Twenty Years' Crisis, this weapon was directed against 19th century liberal internationalism, but it was not a specific approach as such. Carr's weapon was created to attack any universalized theory of international relations that evolved dynamically from the historical process. This approach draws on Carr's critical theoretical tendencies (which I will explore in more detail in this essay). I will illustrate this characteristic of Carr's text by demonstrating the capacity of his "weapon" to "critique, historicize and relativize" one of the main IRs. theories of the late 20th/early 21st century: neoliberalism and the subfield of complex interdependence (Babik 2013: 501). In short, Keohane (1984) argues that the presence of either an international hegemony or an international institution is beneficial to the development of cooperation. Hegemony can replace the need for institutions, but Keohane's argument is that the global political economy does not contain hegemony. Hegemony provides the same mechanisms of enforcement and inspection that institutions do through their power. However, there is no hegemony within the international system due to the existence of interdependent states that have different powers over a number of different issues. Institutions therefore constitute the only means of firmly anchoring cooperation in the international political economy. Institutions will only succeed in achieving this objective with non-myopic States. Just as Carr (1964: 82) rejects the idea that there is a morally privileged notion of peace – “international peace becomes a special interest of a predominant power”. » – the weakening of cooperation suggests that the existence of institutions is therefore not a given. These violations are often due to problems of effective enforcement by powerful states; for example, World Trade Organization (WTO) enforcement issues regarding the US-China trade wars. Powerful states would either be the creators and main representatives of the Washington Consensus (e.g. the United States), or newly industrialized countries like China, whose military and economic weight continues to grow. Instead, institutions function as tools used by the powerful to maintain their share of global power – there is no morally privileged notion of beneficial cooperation for the common good. Second, the twenty-year crisis manifested critical tendencies long before the fuller development of critical politics. theory in the 1980s (cf. Cox 1981, 1986). Carr's notion of fundamental emancipation for the purposes of progress draws on his Western Marxist influences. In this case, he was referring to the emancipation of the theory and practice of international politics from pre-existing or outdated ideas, such as 19th-century liberal internationalism (Babik 2013: 507). Carr's conception of history as developmental and progressive draws on his Mannheim influences, stemming from the latter's influential 1936 Ideology and Utopia on the relationist sociology of knowledge. Carr himself argued that realism acted as a “dialectical catalyst for social and political progress” when historically necessary (Babik 2013: 502). His emancipatory and progressive writings were used..