Abstract
In 1912 a debate erupted between Alfred Thayer Mahan and Norman Angell. The debate revolved around what motivates states and what constitutes the fundamental bases of human conduct in relation to war, peace and material interests. The article traces the thrusts and counter thrusts of Angell and Mahan as they lay bare the errors and misconceptions of each other in a heated exchange that marked an important stage in the development of Angell’s thought and a fascinating coda for Mahan’s influential career. The article concludes that revisiting the debate entails a combination of estrangement and familiarity. To read Angell and Mahan’s imperialistic and often racist discourse is jarring and the level of disconnection experienced is evidence some progress has occurred in the field of IR theory. Yet there is also a certain degree to which we continue to live in Angell and Mahan’s world, one of competing theories of civilisational clashes and the supposedly pacific effects of trade and the rule of law.
Introduction
In a recent article, Lucian Ashworth argues that pre-World War One international thought in the UK and USA was dominated by two opposing camps – the ‘warriors’ and the ‘pacifists’. The warriors ‘valorized war and imperial acquisition’ and, according to Ashworth, are often understood to be ‘proto-realist’ in an IR theory sense; the pacifists, on the other hand, were motivated by an interest in political economy, ‘questioned the role of war’ and were ‘often linked to progressive social reform at home’. 1 Ashworth’s focus is on the role that racist ideologies played in the development of both the warrior and the pacifist camps. 2 In this article I make a specific contribution to the historiography of IR by further examining the division between the two sides by reference to a significant debate between a prominent ‘pacifist’, Norman Angell, and the leading exponent of the ‘warrior’ school, Alfred Thayer Mahan, that broke out in 1912 and continued to Mahan’s death in December 1914. 3
The Angell-Mahan dispute is significant historically because it represents the acme of international thought in the era immediately before WWI; an era preceding the establishment of International Relations as an independent academic discipline. 4 Angell and Mahan are worthy of study because they were highly influential figures whose work impacted on the foreign policy elite of a pivotal era in the development of contemporary international society. Angell’s The Great Illusion, for example, was regarded as ‘epoch making’ by the prominent British éminence grise, Viscount Esher, who in turn shared and discussed the book with the Tory party leader, A.J. Balfour. Such was Esher’s zeal for Angell’s evangel that he distributed more than 200 copies to influential figures in the UK and across Europe. 5 Mahan had achieved a prominent role in America as the author of The Influence of Sea Power, a book first published in 1890 that had become by 1910 a touchstone for presidents, statesmen and military strategists alike. 6 The debate is also important in disciplinary history terms as it marks a crucial stage in the development of Norman Angell, one of the most influential writers on IR of the 20th century, and a fascinating coda for Alfred Thayer Mahan, who remains a key figure in geopolitics and strategy. 7
The Angell-Mahan dispute has received some interest in recent literature. James Quirk, for example, employs the Angell-Mahan debate to investigate contemporary issues regarding security, trade and technology in the maritime politics of the 21st century. James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara employ the debate to examine dimensions of Chinese foreign policy, demonstrating the considerable influence Mahan continues to exercise on Chinese strategic thinking. 8 In Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century, Holmes and Yoshihara illustrate the dangerousness of Mahan’s ideas as they persist in contemporary international politics; witnessing at first hand members of the ‘sizable, vocal school of strategic thought’ that ‘explicitly propounds Mahannian ideas today’ at a symposium on sea security, the authors were alarmed that ‘almost without exception, they quoted the most bellicose-sounding of Mahan’s precepts, equating command of the sea to over-bearing power that closes the maritime common to an enemy’s flag’. Holmes and Yoshihara highlight the risk that Chinese strategists influenced by Mahan may follow ‘Mahan’s contemporaries Admiral Tirpitz, Akiyama Saneyuki, and Satō Tetsutarō’ by pursuing an aggressive policy of expansion in order to dominate the seas. 9 Holmes and Yoshihara add that ‘many Chinese followers of Mahan overlook his advocacy of peaceful commerce in favor of his more bloody-minded writings’. 10
These efforts to apply the insights of Angell and Mahan or to understand the persistence of Mahan’s ideas in contemporary global politics have not quite been matched by disciplinary historians. The debate has been referenced widely but it has not been the subject of detailed, critical study. Miller’s Norman Angell and the Futility of War dedicates a scanty two pages to the debate while Ashworth’s A History of International Thought outlines Mahan and Angell’s positions well but does not critically engage with them in detail. Torbjørn Knutsen identifies the ‘bitter exchange’ between Angell and Mahan as a ‘First Great Debate’ ‘between a Realist and a proponent of interdependence theory’ that is significant because it demonstrates ‘that each of the two scholars is self-consciously aware of belonging to a particular tradition of international scholarship. It shows that the two traditions were already established and scholarly “canons” of IR existed before World War I’. 11
Pace Knutsen, I think that given the substantial differences between the warriors and pacifists and Realists and Liberals that Ashworth identifies in his recent article, the debate between Mahan and Angell is perhaps more properly described as the last significant debate about the nature of international politics before IR coalesced into the forms it would assume for the rest of the 20th century. While there is a certain continuity between Angell and contemporary liberal IR scholars such as John Ikenberry and neoliberal institutionalists such as Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye there is little resemblance between the Warriors and the Realists beyond an identification of the centrality of power to international politics (a position shared with most other theories). It is instructive, for example, to contrast Mahan’s crude and unreflective employment of the balance of power with Morgenthau’s critical engagement with what he considered to be an anachronistic and misleading concept that had long been superseded. 12 Mahan’s ideologically driven, crusade-like enthusiasm for the imperialistic expansion of American power was derived from a Providentialist philosophy of history and an idiosyncratic cultural chauvinism/racism that is not consistent with the detached coolness of the atheistic E.H. Carr’s assessments of power relations as a matter of give and take designed to pacify dissatisfied powers by concession rather than militarily opposition. Mahan is still less compatible with Morgenthau’s rejection of the identification of the preferences of one state (be that the USA or the USSR) with universal morality.
Rather than see the Angell-Mahan debate in terms of what came afterwards, I propose that the Angell-Mahan dispute is compelling enough in its own right to merit a detailed study of the type offered in this article because it is in this debate that the ‘bundle of international ideas that acted as the intellectual backbone for much foreign and imperial policy in the twentieth century’ are first articulated, albeit not always in the forms and roles they occupied later. 13 Although at a distant remove from the later concerns of IR as a discipline, nonetheless the DNA of much of IR – especially in the crucial figure of Norman Angell – passes through this exchange and finds itself re-expressed and re-articulated in a different context in the so-called ‘First Great Debate’ and afterwards. Angell mistook Carr for a latter-day Mahan but there is no reason to follow him in this error by reading the American naval officer as akin to Carr.
The article is structured in such a way as to reflect the cut and thrust of the protagonists as they made their respective cases. The first section establishes the significance of Mahan and Angell as theorists. The second section details Angell’s charges against Mahan’s militarism and moralism, a toxic combination that makes a decisive contribution to the problem Angell confronts in The Great Illusion, namely that contemporary statesmen were blindly following a set of dangerous, outmoded beliefs inconsistent with the use of proper reason and inimical to the pursuit of true self-interest, which is to be found in cooperation to achieve material prosperity. The third section examines Mahan’s reply, which charges that Angell’s work is historically inaccurate, one-sidedly biased and, with its almost exclusive focus on self-interest, a somewhat sordid and tawdry theory that reduces humanity to its basic appetites. The fourth section examines Angell’s less than convincing defences of his positions and his counter-offensive against what he describes as Mahan’s ‘savage doctrine’. The fifth section deals with Mahan’s restatement of the primacy of interests, the defence of imperialism as a moral mission, and a dismissal of Angell’s profession of faith in international socialism during an era that Mahan was convinced would revolve around a global civilisational conflict between races. The article concludes with a brief section on the afterlife of the debate in Angell’s later texts in which positions represented as Mahan’s consistently recur.
Iconic and problematic: the historical and disciplinary significance of Mahan and Angel
The historical significance of the two parties to the debate is unquestionable. Mahan’s ideas constituted the ‘genesis of the twentieth-century security policy of the United States’ and the basis of its ‘early twentieth-century global strategy’ exercising ‘a profound and at time exhilarating effect on presidents, secretaries of states, legislators, and private citizens’. 14 Mahan’s status grew to the extent that he ‘became the high-priest of expansionism among naval men, diplomats, and scholars; and through the devoted labors of two apostles in particular, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he exerted an influence upon the course of history that was the envy of many statesmen’. 15
Mahan’s impact extended beyond his extraordinary effect on United States foreign policy. Kaiser Wilhelm II and his chief naval officer Admiral Von Tirpitz were deeply affected by Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History. The revolutionary changes subsequently wrought by the Kaiser and Admiral Von Tirpitz reflected in no small part the principles outlined by Mahan. 16 Mahan was to exercise a similar influence in the UK in which he was ‘acclaimed an authority and a genius . . . Mahan’s study became a campaign handbook for British navalists’. 17 Mahan’s greatest effect might have been in Imperial Japan, whose ‘naval and military colleges adopted his first history of sea power as a textbook, and the government placed translations of both histories and of other works by Mahan in all the schools’. 18 In an irony of history, Mahan’s ‘texts were subsequently quoted by certain elements within the Japanese navy to make the case for an attack on Pearl Harbor, a location Mahan had described as not likely to be attacked’. 19
Like Mahan, his adversary, Norman Angell, was a theorist who played a key role in shaping practice, with extensive influence in elite circles in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The success and impact of The Great Illusion resulted in Angell being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. Angell is without doubt a pivotal figure in the emergence of International Relations theory. The Great Illusion, ‘has some claim to have launched International Relations as a self-consciously independent yet sub-consciously liberal discipline’. 20 Angell’s committed activism and writing, including a second notable feud with E.H. Carr following the publication of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, ensured that he remained a part of IR theory as it crystallised into its post-1945 form.
Mahan and Angell on imperialism and race
Inspired by religious fervour, romanticism and a belief in ‘Teutonic’ supremacy, Mahan expressed a racist and militarist doctrine that not only sanctioned the expansion of American power in the Caribbean and Pacific but directly informed the policies of Imperial Germany in the lead up to World War One and Imperial Japan in World War Two. Mahan’s ‘racist siege mentality’ became embedded in American foreign policy discourse, presenting global politics as a struggle between the civilised West and barbarous East. 21 Mahan played a key role in the emergence of what Alexander Barder refers to as the ‘global racial imaginary’ that justified the imperialist violence and expropriation of the 19th century and precipitated the defining conflicts of the 20th. 22 The secret of Mahan’s status as a guru of international politics and strategy is made clear by what underlay his reception in another imperial power, the United Kingdom: ‘Mahan was being lionized not simply for his intense Anglophilia, an Anglophilia that sprung from his belief in the White Man’s Burden, the “Yellow Peril,” and a racial hierarchy with English-speaking Anglo-Saxons at the top’. In short, Mahan became celebrated because he purveyed an ideology that rationalised and justified the practice of empire in racially chauvinistic terms. 23 Mahan’s influence therefore was as problematic as it was extensive in scope.
Angell’s work also does not escape the imperialism and racism of the age. Angell’s work ‘uses racist imagery as a rhetorical device’ and offers a benign presentation of imperialism ‘drawn in great part from settler colonial experience . . . Angell justifies these settler colonial projects as “conquering savages” unable to use their land properly owing to old-fashioned conflictual systems of government or settling in “empty” lands’. 24 Angell also assumes that ‘current levels of development can be roughly determined by the colour of a people’s skin’. 25 Angell’s establishment of ‘an imperial science of political economy’ is also significant in that it reflects a racial hierarchy based on ‘common and universal standards for judging societies, and constructs a universal “we” based on west European norms that places all of humanity within a progressive hierarchy of civilizational accomplishments. This approach ignores specific local conditions and knowledge, situating poorer and colonized societies in earlier stages of development rather than seeing them as contemporary societies in an unequal relationship with the imperial metropoles’. 26 Angell then cannot be distinguished from Mahan on the basis that he had more progressive arguments regarding race and empire; given that Mahan rejected the idea of racial superiority on the basis of skin colour, it might be argued that Mahan was less bigoted than Angell in some respects. 27
Baiting the admiral: Angell’s critical engagement with Mahan in The Great Illusion
The advantage of returning to the debate between Angell and Mahan is that their claims and counterclaims make their positions clearer with each iteration. The purpose of this section is not advocacy of one over the other position, it is simply to work through positions and assess arguments. Judging solely by the ability to construct a logical argument rooted in a genuine engagement with the texts of his opponent, Mahan is the better writer and thinker; this finding is not to state that Mahan’s argument is correct in any sense, just that it is better than that offered by Angell. Angell’s argument is weak because his critique of Mahan is a poorly developed strawman to be knocked down so that Angell can advance his own position. Angell’s misrepresentation of Mahan makes the latter’s task much easier in that he makes lightwork of Angell’s superficial attack, defends and rearticulates his position, while offering a forensic critique of Angell’s arguments. Angell is on the backfoot from the point of Mahan’s first reply and never regains the initiative against his opponent and he finds no effective counter-responses to Mahan.
Mahan is not particularly brilliant in these exchanges, but he is clear and coherent in defence of his position and his criticism of Angell’s claims. It is important to recognise that finding Mahan to be the more effective proponent of his position and critic of his opponent is not to agree with his claims, rather it is simply to acknowledge that if the Devil has the best tunes, he might also sometimes be better at arguing his case. 28 Ultimately, Mahan is able to understand Angell better than Angell can understand him. Mahan can engage Angell because the latter is transparent. After his initial mistake of misrepresenting Mahan to advance his own argument, Angell’s fundamental interpretive error is to insist on trying to translate Mahan’s decidedly idiosyncratic theory into Angell’s own idiom and he thereby becomes entangled in philosophical complexities and theological obscurities to which his very rationalistic and utilitarian mind was ill-suited.
Angell’s Initial Salvo: The Critique of Mahan in The Great Illusion
The first shots in the debate were fired not by Alfred T. Mahan, but his adversary, the economist, journalist and sometime cowboy, Norman Angell. In the text that ignited the debate, the 3rd Revised American edition of The Great Illusion (1911), Mahan is mentioned on several occasions as a representative figure of the militarist mentality that, according to Angell, promoted the mistaken notion that wars were to the benefit of the states that won them. 29 Mahan is indicted as one of the sources of the Great Illusion itself, that is, ‘a collectively held, cognitive perspective sustained by an obsolete terminology that prevents statesmen and scholars from seeing the world as it really is’, that is, a world in which economic cooperation is intensifying and in which war can no longer serve any rational end as it would be inimical to the ‘new’ realities of global trade. 30 At the most basic level Mahan is presented through Angell’s characteristic method of listing several passages representative of militarist opinion and laying them out before the reader as if they were exhibits presented by a prosecutor in a court of law. 31 In this manner Angell presents Mahan as linking national security with economic wellbeing and as a proponent of a connection between sea power and prosperity. 32 In this vein also, Mahan is presented along with Theodore Roosevelt, Baron Von Stengel, Marshal Von Moltke, General Lea and members of the Anglican clergy, as an advocate of the proposition that war is linked to national virility and the progress of civilisation. 33
In his more detailed engagements with Mahan, Angell presents him as a thinker ‘who has made the struggle for domination among nations his especial study’. Angell selects a quotation from Mahan’s Retrospect and Prospect in which Mahan professes an almost spiritual understanding of the ‘mission’ of states, presenting them as being dedicated to the achievement of something greater than commercial or financial benefit. That mission, is the ‘extension of national authority over alien communities which is the dominant note in the world politics of to-day’, which according to Mahan, ‘dignifies and enlarges each citizen that enters its fold’. In contrast to Strachey, who argues that human beings will not give up war because of their fundamental baseness, Angell argues that for Mahan, war is the means to better the human condition and it is the nobility of the human spirit that provokes humans to sacrifice their material interests in the service of a higher cause. For Angell, Mahan presents human nature as being ‘so animated by a high ambition for “greater beneficent achievement,” “ministering to worthier contentment than the filling of the pocket,”’ that mankind is ‘never likely to give up war’. 34 Angell does qualify this position by recognising that this psychological cause of war – desire for the “satisfaction of the worthier motive” – is only one among many for Mahan. 35
Mahan’s belief that ‘[s]entiment, imagination, aspiration, the satisfaction of the rational and moral faculties in some object better than bread alone’ is rejected by Angell in the most aggressive passage in The Great Illusion as ‘moonshine, and very mischievous moonshine’. 36 Angell denies as absurd the idea of national expansion as a worthy goal arguing that size does not matter and that no individual citizen benefits from amplification as a result of his state’s size. Angell pitches his rejection of Mahan’s position squarely in terms of the material interest of the individual, who ‘is quite unaffected materially by the extent of his nation’s territory’ but also adds that a citizen of Holland, once conquered by the German empire would remain morally unchanged by this conquest, while the individual Russian is not ‘morally dignified and enlarged’ by any of Russia’s land seizures. ‘Does any one think of paying deference to the Russian moujik because he happens to belong to one of the biggest empires territorially?’ Angell asks rhetorically, ‘Does any one think of despising an Ibsen or a Björnsen, or any educated Scandinavian or Belgian or Hollander, because they happen to belong to the smallest nations in Europe? The thing is absurd, and the notion is simply due to inattention’. The principle ‘that an individual Russian is “dignified and enlarged” each time that Russia conquers some new Asiatic outpost, or Russifies a State like Finland’, Angell continues ‘or that the Norwegian would be “dignified” were his State conquered by Russia . . . is, of course, sheer sentimental fustian of a very mischievous order’. 37
Angell’s final engagement with Mahan in The Great Illusion attempts to turn Mahan’s arguments in relation to sea power against their author. If Mahan is correct that sea power conveys economic and political predominance on the nation that possesses it, Angell argues, why should not Germany, the pre-eminent land power, and a country of 60 million not pursue it and thereby remove itself from English ‘tutelage’, when the English state’s population is merely 40 million? 38 From Angell’s perspective it makes no sense for the Germans to continue to accept the status quo, or for the UK to accept a challenge to its status as the world’s greatest navy, with the two options available to them being an arms race or an agreed disarmament, with Angell’s preference being the latter. Angell is clear that disarmament, however, can only occur when general opinion in both countries is certain that to disarm would be safe and there is no risk to vital interests. 39 In order to achieve this end, Angell suggests the cooperation of the anti-aggressionist parties in the UK and Germany. 40
Mahan’s response: ‘The Place of Force in International Relations’ and a review of ‘The Great Illusion’
Mahan’s outraged handwritten notes on The Great Illusion, reveal that ‘he found Angell to be “shallow,” inclined to “tremendous overstatement,” filled with “bias,” and guilty of “argument ad hominem.” He decided that “this caricature of my words is so gross that it must be noted.”’ 41 In a letter to Joseph Choate dated March 15, 1912, Mahan further identifies a ‘serious’ fallacy in The Great Illusion ‘which seems to have escaped the notice of its numerous admirers’. The fallacy, according to Mahan, is fundamental in that ‘the author presents, as a general current illusion, an attitude of mind, or impression, which in fact does not exist; or, if it exists, has not the motive force attributed to it. In brief, the argument is addressed against a fact which does not exist’. 42 The Great Illusion was, according to Mahan, itself a hallucination – a misapprehension of his and others’ work that was a projection of Angell’s imagination.
In the first of his published reactions to the ‘gross caricature’ of his position in The Great Illusion, Mahan weaves a pointed response to Angell into a wider restatement of the continued utility of military power as an instrument of policy. 43 Mahan’s wider argument is that the liberal doctrine of the rule of law proposed by Angell does not serve as an effective alternative to the use of diplomacy and force because it ‘cannot be so systematized beforehand as to cover all cases’ that emerge in the unpredictable arena of international politics. Law, because it is slow to evolve ‘often lags behind conditions, and often overlives them . . . the attempt to decide by law would work actual injustice’ in changed political contexts where the forces that underwrote the law in the first place were no longer in operation. 44 This latter point, that law occasionally impedes or denies the possibility of real justice, is complemented by Mahan’s argument that it is political action – often underwritten by the threat of force – that actually sustains rights in international politics. Undercutting the legal argument further, Mahan claims that law itself is ‘in last analysis, simply force regulated’ and in fact ‘only one manifestation of a power which is manifold in its exhibition’. Power, in turn, is what motivates states: ‘the aim of each is to compass for itself – that is, for its people – the utmost preponderance’. 45 This aim accounts for the desire to expand, Mahan argues against Angell, because the greater the size of the state, the more economic potential it possesses.
Despite this desire for power, Mahan claims that states are not moved solely by self-interest, arguing that human nature is not consistent in the conduct of political affairs. The recent historical record, according to Mahan, serves to illustrate his point, and by extension diminishes Angell’s economistic reading of IR, in that self-interest played at most only a small part in the origins and conduct of war. Although calculations of interest were doubtlessly present at the time, Mahan argues that it was sentiment, rather than simple calculation of pecuniary or strategic advantage, that primarily drove the combatants in the American Civil War, Bismarck’s wars of Prussian aggrandisement and German unification, and Russia’s war against Turkey in 1877. 46
It is in his development of this point that Mahan makes his first explicit criticism of Angell’s thesis that states go to war because they think it will be in their financial interests to do so. Angell’s ‘cardinal mistake’ is to believe ‘that nations now go to war, or are preparing to go to war, under the impression that there is financial profit in injuring a neighbor’. 47 War is fought for a mixture of motives, not least, according to Mahan, for the sake of resisting oppression or even for progressive purposes. 48 These purposes could not have been served by law, according to Mahan, because ‘[t]he great objection to law . . . is not merely that it is inadequate, but that in most of the above cases [of recent wars] it is inequitable – perpetuates injustice by sanctioning outworn conditions or inapplicable principles’. 49 By contrast, military force enables states to fight the good fight. Angell’s preferred policy of disarmament would be disastrous for Mahan because it is only by military means that states have ‘the ability to use force in the great conflict with the powers of political evil in the world . . . the disarmament of the energies of force’, writes Mahan, ‘will mean the downfall of that civilization’. 50 ‘Armament is the organization and consecration of force as a factor in the maintenance of justice, order, and peace’, Mahan told an audience in 1913, ‘[i]t is the highest expression of that element in civilization – force – which has created and now upholds society, giving efficacy to the pronouncements or law, whether by the legislature or in the courts’. 51
In response to Angell’s dismissal of his argument regarding there being no advantage gained by increasing the size of a state, Mahan argues that this position ‘appears to me as illusory as to maintain that business on a small capital is as profitable as on a large’. 52 Mahan argues, however, that a war of territorial expansion should not be fought between states in Europe as ‘[s]uch acquisition cannot be so valuable industrially as to compensate for the expense of the conquest’. 53 It is to the undeveloped world and the exploitation of its resources that the European states should direct their energies by colonisation and exploitation of resources, a position with which Angell agrees, according to Mahan. 54
Moving from the general problem of the issue of force in international politics to the more specific problems posed by Angell’s text, Mahan’s review article ‘The Great Illusion’, published in the North American Review in March 1912 is a much more forensic and detailed engagement with Angell’s arguments. 55 Mahan moves with precision to the heart of Angell’s position, that is, that despite the prevalent but mistaken belief to the contrary, there is no connection between military power and economic wellbeing. Angell is incorrect on two grounds, according to Mahan. Firstly, Mahan argues, ‘economic advantage frequently has accompanied the use of military force, and resulted from it’. Mahan argues that British industrial and financial supremacy was ‘due mainly to the predominance of her military sea-power during the eighteenth century to the fall of Napoleon in 1815’ and also points out that advances in German industrial capacity were a result of the seizure of the mineral rich and industrially advanced region of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870. 56 Secondly, Mahan repeats in a different form the primary argument of ‘The Place of Force in International Relations’, that is, that states seek armaments not because they wish to use them to secure economic advantage through their use (although obviously such advantage may be obtained), but rather the ‘object is the assertion of right in doubtful questions which are continually arising, largely from the progressive exploitation of unutilized regions of the world’. 57
At root, Mahan’s argument against Angell is normative and based on his rejection of Angell’s doctrine that ‘the real basis of social morality is self-interest’. 58 In contrast to both Angell and what he claims is the crude moralism of the general populace, who reduce complex matters of statecraft to simplistic ‘right and wrong’ positions, Mahan presents an ethics of custodianship, which he argues should inform the practice of politics at the international level. Dismissing Angell’s economic idea of self-interest, Mahan argues that ‘the inciting causes of war in our day are moral’ and revolve around the assertion of right, not simple economic advantage. America’s war against Spain, for example, could be discussed in terms of its morality or immorality, according to Mahan, but it cannot ‘be seriously maintained to have been inspired by self-interest’ – it was the clamour of public opinion that forced the hand of a government that was itself trying to avoid war. 59 Even when self-interest may be attributed to the hostile parties, ‘it is less the loss endured than the sense of injustice done, or apprehended, that keeps alive the flame’. 60
Where morality and self-interest are both present as motivations for war, Mahan asserts that ‘self-interest, even when recognized, does not possess the impelling power which is supplied by the sympathies, or by the sense of right and wrong’. 61 The narrowness of Angell’s perspective – ‘the author’s prepossession with material interest’ – blinds him to the wider forces at play in international relations to the extent that he cannot understand Mahan’s point in relation to the ethical dimension of statecraft, that is, that which Angell dismisses as ‘mischievous moonshine’. Mahan argues that what Angell does not understand is his identification of ‘national esprit de corps, a moral force, the power of which is everywhere recognized’. 62 Angell’s error, Mahan emphasises, is his monomaniacal fixation on self-interest. Motivations are not singular in nature, as Angell seems to profess, but rather multiple. Angell accuses his opponents of inconsistency due to their employment of self-interest on one occasion and moral impulses on another, this ‘inconsistency’ Mahan argues, however, lies not so much in the argument, ‘but in the complex material dealt with – human nature’, which is inherently multifaceted in its motivations. 63
Angell’s theory of war and conflict, and his solution to it, is bound to fail because it rests on false claims based in a fundamental misreading of history: ‘[t]o regard mankind, in individuals or in states, as so dominated by self-interest that the appeal of other motives – ambition, self-respect, resentment of injustice, sympathy with the oppressed, hatred of oppression – is by it overbalanced and inoperative, is not only to misread history but to ignore it’.
64
By way of contrast, Mahan’s logic of international conflict may be summarised thus:
Nations are under no illusion as to the unprofitableness of war in itself; but they recognize that different views of right and wrong in international transactions may provoke collision, against which the only safeguard is armament. Unarmed, or inadequately armed, the nation is exposed to the perils of commercial disintegration and consequent popular suffering . . . No one imagines that fire-insurance and the police are otherwise than unremunerative expenses, unless fire or breaches of the peace occur.
65
To illustrate this point, Mahan argues that the American Civil War, ‘stands as a perpetual beacon against disarmament’ because it was the very fact that ‘[n]ever were two antagonists less armed’ and the lack of a ‘preponderance of armament on one side or the other’ that allowed the war to escalate. The tragedy of the war was that if ‘the material superiority of the North [had] been organized in armies and navies, there could have been no four years of war’. 66
The rigidity of Angell’s claims regarding self-interest blind him to history and to cases in which his thesis is disproven. This is particularly obvious, according to Mahan, in the case of industrial and financial benefits that accrued from the use of military power in the case of Britain’s domination of the oceans and colonies and conquests of territory in the case of Germany’s Prussia-led unification. Angell also simply cannot allow that Germany, which lacked capital due to its relative financial backwardness, eventually benefited from the capital injection it gained by exacting indemnities from France. Angell’s fact-blindness also forces him to ignore the economic benefits of German and American unification and integration, that is, that the expansion of states leads, ceteris paribus, to the expansion of trade and wealth – ‘both these political measures conduced to great economic advantage, and both were enlargements of territory. The same is true of the unification of Italy; a first period of great distress followed by sustained progress’. 67 For Mahan, Angell’s historical illiteracy is due to his assumption that the new conditions of international politics had rendered the past irrelevant: ‘[m]uch of the argument of The Great Illusion turns upon the allegation that the past is in many respects so wholly past that arguments based upon its experiences are no longer valid’. 68
If Angell is a weak historian, he is also incapable of understanding the strategic subtleties of the balance of power. Small, prosperous states such as Belgium and Switzerland may indeed be more prosperous than their larger, more militaristic neighbours, but this prosperity is a by-product of the maintenance of the balance of power that the great powers keep among themselves. In this sense, (at least in 1912, if not in 1914) Belgium and other small prosperous countries benefit from the determination of their neighbours to secure the peace. Mahan extends his earlier metaphor by arguing ‘[t]heir fire insurance, or war risk, is paid by other states’. 69
Angell’s economic arguments are also undermined by Mahan. Angell’s analysis of the relative economic performances of Norway, Belgium and France, all of whom outperformed Germany according to certain measures of economic productivity, is superficial and partial. Angell’s weakness in relation to facts leads to his misinformed comparison of ‘greater’ Belgian economic productivity to that of Germany, ignoring the fact that ‘the modern prosperity of Belgium antedates by nearly two generations (1815-1870) the constitution of the German Empire, with which began the great industrial advance of Germany’. 70 German economic and social difficulties identified by Angell were caused not so much by the indemnity of a billion dollars taken from France, but rather by the strains of a shift from an agrarian to industrial economy. German integration (albeit under Prussian power) led to its ‘[c]onsolidation into a great community [and] gave internal peace and industrial development; but for the accumulations which constitute capital time is needed for nations as well as for an individual’. 71 Angell’s comparison of Norwegian and UK prosperity based on volume of trade is also slipshod and partial: Norway’s merchant shipping may be three times that of Britain by head of population as Angell claims, ‘but it is not noted that, in the same proportion, the total tonnage entered and cleared with cargoes in the United Kingdom is double that of Norway. That is, in proportion to population, there is double the commercial movement’. 72
Mahan’s conclusions are damning. Angell’s argument ‘appears vitiated by failure to appreciate . . . qualifications which make against his thesis’ and his work is marked by ‘superciliousness of tone’. The entire project of The Great Illusion is undermined by Angell’s ‘fundamental error’ of viewing the causes of war in terms of ‘speedy returns of dollars and cents’. The book is mistaken from top to bottom because ‘the entire conception of the work itself is itself an illusion based upon a profound misreading of human action. To regard the world as governed by self-interest only is to live in a non-existent world, an ideal world, a world possessed by an idea much less worthy than those which mankind, to do it bare justice, persistently entertains . . . It matters little what the arguments are by which such a theory is advocated, when the concrete facts of history are against it’. 73
‘A Doctrine of Savagery’: Angell’s reply to Mahan
Angell’s reply to Mahan was published in the June 1912 issue of the North American Review. Angell’s response is significant not so much because of the quality of his replies to Mahan, which are at best patchy in terms of dealing with criticisms, but because they reveal important aspects of his own approach to the study of IR. What emerges quite clearly is the extent to which Angell is wedded to a utilitarian worldview. 74 Angell cannot quite grasp Mahan’s criticism because it emanates from a perspective so different from his own that he cannot understand the bases of the criticism. This tendency is most evident in Angell’s attempts to defend The Great Illusion from Mahan’s identification of its singular focus on self-interest. Angell avers that his approach cannot be limited to self-interest, but despite this he goes on to restate his case almost exclusively in those terms.
The extent to which Angell’s utilitarianism blinds him to the nature of Mahan’s criticism is demonstrated by the defence he undertakes of his ethical position. Angell begins with a rejection of what he describes as Mahan’s separation of interest from morality. According to Angell, it is ‘because right and morality postulate the protection and promotion of the general interest’ that the self-interest of the community is recast as a moral agenda:
We mean – and in such a discussion as this mean nothing else – better conditions for the great mass of the people; the fullest possible lives; the abolition or attenuation of poverty and destitution; not merely that the millions shall be better housed and clothed and fed, capable of provision for sickness and old age, with lives prolonged and cheered; not merely this, but also that they shall be better educated, with character disciplined steady labor and a better use of leisure, a general social atmosphere which shall make possible family affection, individual dignity and courtesy and the graces of life, not alone among the few, but among the many).
75
This soaring rhetoric, however, merely emphasises that Angell misunderstood Mahan’s critique. Firstly, Angell’s reply applies to the domestic level of a state or a community, it does not address what Mahan sees as the defining moral problem of statecraft, that is, that states have separate and opposing ideas as to what constitutes their rights in any given situation, and what might constitute ethical behaviour in the shifting context of international relations. Mahan’s critique of Angell’s position does not address the domestic situation at all, thus Angell’s linkage of social reform and economic self-interest at that level is irrelevant to Mahan’s criticism, which is directed squarely at Angell’s claim that statesmen are operating under an illusory framework wherein they do not understand their interests correctly when they wage war. Angell’s claim that ‘there is a distinct narrowing of the gulf which is supposed to separate ideal aims and those of self-interest’, is interesting, but still fails to address Mahan’s point, that is, that at the international level states have differing ideas as to what constitutes a just solution to any given political or ethical situation. Rather than dealing with the ethical problem posed by Mahan, Angell prefers to stress the utilitarian calculus he applies to war and all political arrangements, that is, ‘Does it or does it not make for the widest interests of the mass of the people involved?’ This is commendable, but at the level at which Mahan is operating there is more than one mass of people involved, and how these masses calculate their interests may vary. Angell’s position here is revealing as it suggests he believes that each ‘mass’ possesses the same kind of reason and that they are in effect functionally and situationally identical.
Angell’s next move in response to Mahan is interesting in that it anticipates the concept of transnationalism. Where Mahan pitches his argument at the level of statecraft and the decisions taken by governments, Angell argues that ‘the moral divisions of men’ do not coincide ‘with their political divisions’. Economic interdependence, argues Angell, has effectively ended the economic unity of states. Angell makes the (not very convincing) claim that Lancashire is ‘economically far more a part of Louisiana, a section of a foreign State, than it is of Dorsetshire, a section of the same State’. 76 Angell here seems to be confusing trade (presumably in cotton) with the wider category of the economy and also seems oblivious to the persistence of the state – Lancashire taxes contributed directly to the coffers of the United Kingdom, not Louisiana. As in the economic sphere, according to Angell, so in the intellectual and moral spheres: ‘nations are no longer moral and intellectual units’. This concept leads Angell to the radical, and unsubstantiated, conclusion that ‘national armies can no longer embody the moral rivalries’ of opposing states. 77
Angell further misconstrues Mahan’s critique by arguing that to the extent that the English have any legitimate criticism of Germany ‘it is in some way connected with English ideals of personal freedom and parliamentary government; but it would be impossible to advance those ideals by warfare’. 78 Any English attempt to impose its values on Germany would be counterproductive because even Germans sympathetic to those ideals would patriotically resist the English invader of the Fatherland. While doubtlessly correct, again this was not Mahan’s point, which was to state that Germany and England have differing views in relation to their rights at the international level, for example, in relation to colonies, the exploitation of natural resources, etc.
Angell seems to tacitly agree with Mahan’s charge that he dismisses the important insights to be gained from history: the present, according to Angell, is so utterly different to the past that the conditions that applied then no longer applied in 1912. Angell argues that the fact that politicians acted as they did on the contemporary scene ‘shows nothing at all except that political opinion in Europe is still dominated by the old conceptions’, without ever pausing to consider why these old conceptions still exercise such a hold over the statesmen of Europe. Instead of critically assessing the wider strategic dimensions at stake in the high politics of European diplomacy, Angell once again reduces the issues to the level of the poor yields to be gained from colonies, that is, a calculation of financial self-interest. Revolutions in communications and transport have reduced the need for colonies, according to Angell, and on a cost/benefit basis Germany derives more benefit from trading with other state’s colonies, for example, Canada, than it would if it ‘owned’ Canada as a colony of its own and had to pay for its administration, etc. Angell is on slightly firmer ground when he argues that any German direct action against France would have a detrimental effect on the German economy, but while this is a valid point it is irrelevant to the case raised by Mahan, which is concerned with colonial and commercial rivalry in ‘undeveloped’ parts of the world and not with a direct confrontation between Germany and France (although Mahan does argue a war in Europe is probable at some point, it will not in his opinion be a classic war of territorial conquest). Angell is, in effect, surreptitiously trying to shift the debate onto terrain where his argument, at least in 1912, had more logical power.
If Angell’s defence of his position is not entirely convincing, his critique of Mahan’s ‘The Place of Force in International Relations’, – dismissed as a ‘savage doctrine’, albeit one couched in sophistry and eloquence – is similarly problematic. Angell’s first point of engagement is Mahan’s argument that it was British sea power that provided the security umbrella behind which British industry and trade could prosper. Angell states that this position is ‘fallacious’, arguing that ‘it is not military force which gave her the advantage, but the fact that she was able to prevent the employment of military force against her’. Angell does not seem to realise that the capacity to stop others using military force is directly proportional to the extent to which Britain possessed the power to dissuade opposition. Angell thereupon embarks on a series of counterfactual haymakers, the most remarkable of which concerns a complete reimagining of European history:
If the general tradition of Europe had been against the employment of force, and such tradition had dominated its policy, not only would the security of England and her freedom in industrial and commercial development have been greater even than it was, and the like security of her neighbors greater, but the whole European race, instead of being weakened by the destruction of some three million of its best selected lives, leaving stock to be perpetuated by its worst elements, would have been infinitely better than it is, with a greater capacity for improvement . . . The world would have been a better place, inhabited by a racially better people.
79
Whatever about the dubious eugenics-based argument with which Angell concludes this phase of his argument, it proves his determination to sacrifice politics on the altar of a certain kind of economic rationality. Angell’s devotion to his economic creed explains his dismissal or tactical deployment of historical fact: when his ideological position is incompatible with the historical record the history is sidelined. It is only when Angell steps out of the historical record and instead posits the idea of a European community that ‘can only exist by virtue of the units composing it surrendering the use of force the one as against the other’ that he offers a coherent argument in favour of cooperation over conflict. 80 All too soon, however, Angell returns to misrepresenting both Mahan and the historical record. Angell conflates the important distinction between force and war that Mahan makes to identify the benefits of possessing military power sufficient to achieve one’s aims without having to use it. 81 Finally, Angell also misrepresents the historical record by deliberately ignoring that Napoleon’s fall was due in no small part to the military power employed by the states allied against the Empire.
Perhaps Angell’s enduring relevance lies in the extent to which he refuses to give up hope in the prospect of a moral and social reformation based in the idea of cooperation. Angell’s essentially voluntarist take on international politics is perhaps best expressed in his rejection of that which exists: ‘What exists depends on us – upon the action of each individual. What exists in this matter is not something fixed outside our acts and our volition, it is the reflection of those acts, and without those individual acts there can be no salvation’. 82
Mahan’s last word
Mahan once again replied to Angell in an extended version of his review article in the book of essays Armaments and Arbitration. 83 The additional elements of this essay constitute a response to Angell’s reply to Mahan’s initial critique. Defending himself from Angell’s allegation of inconsistency in relation to the importance of self-interest, Mahan clarifies that the ‘policy of governments, now as always . . . must be dictated by the interests of the nation’. 84 This insistence on the pursuit of the national interest is distinct, however, from Angell’s reduction of the aims of foreign policy to ‘a supposed economical advantage, either by deliberate aggression upon the possessions of another state or from fear of such aggression on the part of a rival’. Mahan also rebuts Angell’s accusation that his economic examples are outdated by pointing to the fact that the ‘years from 1870 to the present can scarcely be called the early part of the nineteenth century’ as Angell presented them in an attempt to discredit Mahan’s argument. 85
On a more important note, Mahan rejects Angell’s thesis that revolutions in communications and transport have fundamentally altered the nature of international relations. Force continues to play a major role according to Mahan, because the very capacity to explore unoccupied (or occupied by what Mahan – who embodied the thoroughgoing racism of the era – regarded as ‘unworthy’ or ‘unproductive’ natives) territory would necessarily result in competing claims to this territory. 86 In a related vein, Angell’s dogmatism and his tendency to ignore any evidence contrary to his dogma, leads to a selective understanding of colonialism. Mahan allows that Tunis may be an economic drain on France as Angell alleges in his reply, but Mahan points out that Algeria, which is ‘not even mentioned by him’, had experienced an economic boom and benefited from the construction of 2000 miles of good road built by the French. Surely, if the facts were as self-evident as Angell suggests, the French would have realised their folly and abandoned their African Empire? That they did not, Mahan argues, reveals that they had something more in mind, namely ‘the ambition to bear a racial and national share in the shaping of the world’s advance’, that is, the fulfilment of a ‘moral’ mission greater than pecuniary gain was the source of French conduct towards its colonies.
Angell’s invocation of socialism and the consequent erosion of nationalism in his reply is also addressed by Mahan. This ‘tendency’ may be present, concedes Mahan, but its results are not as immediately imminent as Angell suggests. The project of nationalism, ‘hard won through centuries’ has not concluded according to Mahan, and ‘will not be dropped as outworn’ any time soon. The ‘doubtless true’ effort of post-national ideologies to replace national identity with class affiliation is also fraught with potential difficulties and, if it happens at all, will, Mahan argues, come at a high cost of social disorder and the weakening of national bonds at a time when, predating Samuel Huntington by 80 years, Mahan anticipates a ‘clash of civilizations’ between European-American and Asian cultures. 87
The afterlife of a debate: Angell’s persistent return to Mahan
Mahan’s death in December 1914 brought an end to the debate. Angell, however, would return to his dispute with the American admiral for decades. Angell marked the occasion of Mahan’s death by acknowledging that he had ‘the honour of having brought home to the world the real meaning of sea power’ before identifying his teaching as ‘one of the causes, and not the least potent’ of the First World War. In this vein, Angell draws on ‘a story which I have been unable to verify’ that the deeply religious Mahan was ‘profoundly affected by the realisation that his doctrines had played so large a part in stimulating German naval ambitions and so in producing the war’. 88 Apart from his specific responsibility for starting the First World War, Mahan is identified by Angell as a prime exponent of the traditional theory of statecraft that assumed ‘almost as an axiom’ that the ‘contest for territory is in fact the “struggle for life” among nations; that changes of frontier are not of the nature of other political changes’. Traditional statecraft assumes that ‘such things’ could never ‘be a matter of normal political discussion and readjustment, maintaining by such means, more or less, the required equilibrium’. 89
The core theme of Angell’s engagement with Mahan from the death of the latter onwards is the repeatedly levelled charge that Mahan never ‘asked himself clearly the fundamental question: “What in the end is it all for?”’ 90 As a consequence, Mahan ‘swings violently in absolute self-contradiction’ in his ‘opinion on the most important fact of all about war – its ultimate purpose, and the reasons which justify or provoke it’. 91 At the base of Angell’s allegation that Mahan was mired in self-contradiction lies the issue of interest. Angell claims that at various points in his career Mahan attributed the cause of war to competing states pursuing clashing interests while at other times he rejects interest. Angell often accompanies this charge of self-contradiction with a complaint that Mahan and others accused him of sordidness for making an argument rooted in self-interested profitability.
Angell offers two explanations for what he regards as a damning contradiction: in The Fruits of Victory (1921), the cause is attributed to Mahan’s ‘desire to justify the great profession of arms, to one side of which he had devoted his life and . . . to defend from some imputation of futility one of the most ancient of man’s activities that calls for some at least of the sublimest of human qualities’. Mahan’s militarism forced his mind into contradiction because ‘[i]f a widened idealism clearly discredited that ancient institution, he was prepared to show that an ineradicable conflict of national interests rendered it inevitable. If it was shown that war was irrelevant to those conflicts, or ineffective as a means of protecting the interests concerned, he was prepared to show that the motives pushing to war were not those of interest at all’. 92 In The Great Illusion – Now (1938), Angell claims that ‘[p]erhaps the true explanation of Admiral Mahan’s emphatic contradiction of himself is that none of us knows really just what motive he is obeying. The whole tendency of modern psychological research would seem to show that we do something because we want to, and then try to find reasons for making it appear reasonable’. 93
An investigation of Angell’s allegation that Mahan’s project fails in self-contradiction is revealing because it demonstrates the extent of the variance of worldviews between the two. From Mahan’s perspective, as outlined in his 1907 memoir From Sail to Steam, there is no contradiction between on the one hand taking opportunities to fulfil ‘the primary duty of a government to its own people and to their prosperity’ and ‘other duties which must be accepted, even though they entail national sacrifice’. The United States should not ‘desert a charge on the poor plea of economy; or so far distrust its fate, as to turn its back upon a duty because dangerous or troublesome’. Mahan’s paternalistic imperialism imparts duties of care and responsibility, for example, to provide ‘safeguards of personal freedom to the private Philippine Islander’, that cannot ‘be abandoned without national discredit’. In addition to the pursuit of their interests, ‘not only for the sake of its own citizens, but for the world at large, each country should diligently watch and weigh current external occurrences; not necessarily to meddle, still less to forsake its proper sphere, but because convinced that failure to act when occasion demands may be as injurious as mistaken action’. States must act rather than do nothing when confronted with a moral dilemma because failure to act ‘indicates a more dangerous condition, in that moral inadequacy means ultimately material decline’. 94
Ultimately, Angell – a bourgeois, utilitarian rationalist to the core – was ill-equipped to understand Mahan’s baroque fusion of Romanticism and Christian providentialism. Mahan’s combination into a ‘single philosophical, theological, cosmological, and historical system conceptions that presented a Christian view of just war, pusillanimous peace, and Good Samaritan “imperialism”’ within a ‘cosmos filled with dialectical conflict, a history in which God continuously intervened, and an earth inhabited by inherently combative men and nation states’ was incomprehensible to Angell, for whom international politics ultimately reduced to the bourgeois principles of the pursuit of economic interest and the preservation and extension of certain rights. 95 Ultimately the two theorists were in effect living in different worlds and speaking different languages: Mahan (‘an intensely devout High Church Episcopalian’) professed the faith of an early 19th century Christian, taking his cues (albeit idiosyncratically) from the City of God and the Earthly City, while Angell thought within a late 19th century/early 20th century liberal framework that simply could not allow him to relate effectively to a theory that was not conducible with rationalism or utilitarianism.
Conclusion
Cornelia Navari claims that The Great Illusion ‘represents a major development in the tradition of liberal internationalism. In losing touch with it, international relations has lost touch with an important part of its own historical and theoretical development’. 96 The same could be said for Angell’s debate with Mahan. By revisiting the debate IR can regain insights into its historical and theoretical development from the composition of The Great Illusion to The Twenty Years’ Crisis. In this light, reacquaintance with the warrior-pacifist dispute between Angell and Mahan is a curious admixture of the strange and the familiar.
The discipline is – thankfully – estranged from many aspects of the worldviews of both Angell and Mahan. IR no longer operates under the ‘racist siege mentality’ of Mahan or the racism which made up such a regrettable part of Angell’s theoretical work. 97 The experience of reading fairly sophisticated geopolitical theory and political economy that takes imperialism for granted, and its preservation and extension as desirable, is a jarring experience for the current generation of IR theory in a manner it simply was not for the generations of The Influence of Sea Power and The Great Illusion. For all that IR likes to berate itself about its lack of theoretical progress, the distance travelled between the era of Angell and Mahan is undeniable and undeniably welcome. Progress may be glacially slow, but it has occurred.
The estrangement of contemporary and past IR theory, however, is not complete. ‘Angell wrote half a theory and it is a theory which needs completing. But it is not an irrelevant or unimportant half’, writes Navari in her sympathetic reading of Angell’s influence. 98 Many of the ideas of Angell and Mahan remain familiar and intelligible as their influence has percolated through successive generations of IR theory and practice in a discipline that remains sub-consciously liberal. Angell’s development of the concept of interdependence influenced Deutsch and through him the whole liberal institutionalist literature of which Keohane and Nye’s Power and Interdependence is the most notable example. 99 Ikenberry’s liberal project is also not without its parallels to Angell’s arguments from the first decade of the last century. Apart from his continued influence in strategy, Mahan is echoed in discourses within IR that stress power maximisation such as offensive Realism and the antagonism of large social groupings such as Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations.
The dual experience of estrangement and familiarity is itself a warning to be mindful of the legacy and continued persistence of the past in the present. If the past is a foreign country in which things are done differently it makes sense to be familiar with the lay of the land there. In the intellectual exchanges between the two Mahan was more convincing: his arguments are more cogent and coherent than Angell’s scattergun responses to his criticism. 100 Angell’s problematic, but occasionally insightful volume continues, however, to exercise a fascination on a discipline that is slowly beginning to embrace its history (and historiography) to achieve some reflexivity about how IR may be thought. If anything, and ironically given the extent to which Mahan exposes its flaws, The Great Illusion and Angell have a greater presence in IR theory (if not practice, where the roles are reversed) than Mahan’s own work. As successors to Angell and Mahan, the current generation of IR theorists has the benefit of hindsight in that from the cotemporary perspective it is clear where and when they went wrong in the development of their theories. This debate from 1912 therefore serves to unlock some of the deeper ideological frameworks with which liberal and conservative thinkers engage the international without being encumbered by the disciplinary baggage of the decades, allowing us to – at least partially – reconstitute how we think about International Relations by reference to those who thought about it before the concepts which we employ became set in stone. As theoretical maps are drawn and redrawn over generations, to go back to the previous articulations of what is at stake in IR and to examine the twists and turns as these thoughts develop, combine, separate and recombine over time is a useful task as comparison of development permits the identification of pitfalls and also the prospect of new developmental paths. While the DNA of IR is more complex than a simple equivalence of warrior and realist, pacifist and liberal, nonetheless it is traceable – and at the root of many of its strands lies this peculiar but highly significant debate between Angell and Mahan.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Lucian M. Ashworth for inviting him to present an earlier version of this article at the 2014 International Studies Association annual conference in Toronto and for many conversations about Norman Angell and Alfred Mahan over the years. The author would also like to thank the other participants and the audience at the panel.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
