IndexAbstractIntroduction'A Product of Sick Times'The Importance of the Twenty Year CrisisConclusionAbstractThe question of this essay is whether The Twenty Year Crisis he years of EH Carr Crisis is the product of sick times or can still operate with a significant degree of wider relevance in the modern world. As for the first part of the quote in the question – “product of sick times” – the crucial element here calls into question the extent to which Carr's work was a product of interwar studies tending towards pacification and reaction to “utopian thinking”. The converse 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 "sick" refers to historical events such as the armaments crisis, the global economic crisis resulting from the Great Depression of 1929, and the failure of the League of Nations culminating in support for appeasement. As for the second part of the quote – “broader relevance” – the question I wish to address is whether Carr's text is still relevant if we move away from the traditional realist/idealist dichotomous debate, according to the usual “textbook” interpretation . In this essay I will argue for this last point, highlighting 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Introduction E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis represents a polemical attack on the 19th century liberal internationalism that the author attributes as the main cause of the interwar crisis. The text has been considered a fundamental chapter in the “philosophical orientation” of realism (Donnelly 2000:57); supporters of the latter widely appreciate his representation of the relationship between power and utopia, and the resulting paradigmatic shift from utopianism to realism. Meanwhile, the supposedly opposite paradigm of utopians/idealists began to appreciate the forward-looking critical aspects of Carr's work as part of a wave of revisionist scholarship. Such aspects include Carr's post-positivism, counterhegemonic strategy, and his Western Marxist influences. Examples of these include Booth (1991), Linklater (1997), and Jones (1998), respectively. “A Product of Sick Times” This essay argues that Carr's text is partly a product of sick times. It is important that Carr is placed in the appropriate historical context. Rather than situate it exclusively 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 see Carr's work in the context of historically conscious classical scholars such as Weber, Aron and Polanyi. These scholars often expounded their thoughts on politics, diplomacy, and international affairs, without necessarily taking the more rigorous stance of a professional academic as such. Similar to these writers, Carr infuses his work with grander sociopolitical ideas such as the evolution towards mass society, the industrial revolution and its aftermath, and the rise of nationalism and self-determination. I therefore suggest that Carr's text does not simply propagate a “realist” perspective – rather, his fusion of national and international issues, in combination with the aforementioned socio-political policies, results in a highly individual book; one that stands out slightly from “traditional” realist texts within the canon ofrealist/idealist debate. Addressing the context of the "sick times", the initial publication of The Twenty Years' Crisis coincided with the year (1939) of maximum tension regarding the culmination of the various interwar crises, as described above, as well as the final collapse of the the liberal internationalist order of the 19th century (the outbreak of the Second World War). One of the elements of Carr's text most commonly cited 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 should be contextualized historically in a situation in which the memory of the First World War was still very much alive, and therefore the desire to avoid another war was at the forefront of Carr's thoughts. This willingness combined with his contempt for any kind of nationalism, thus rejecting potential countervailing military action. One potential criticism of this argument in terms of the historical context of Carr's appeasement policy lies in his editorial revisions in the 1946 edition of his text. The Second World War undermined the idea that political hegemony could be bought (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 review his mistakes (in hindsight) in light of the Second World War (1946 edition) regarding the pacification and military buildup of Nazi Germany. He continued erroneously to refer to various recognized forms of military expansion as examples of peaceful change and national self-determination. Thus the failure of The Twenty Years' Crisis to adequately analyze the diverse practical implications of peacemaking politics (in both its first and second editions) does not bode well for the text's broader relevance as a source of explanatory and prescriptive theory . The Twenty Year Crisis While Carr himself attributes the failure of the transplantation of 19th century liberal internationalism into the 20th century as the underlying cause of the various interwar crises, I argue that the relevance of the Twenty Year Crisis goes beyond the supposed "First Great Debate". The 20th century waves of revisionist scholarship highlighted the myth of such a debate, generally arguing that there was no single body of thought recognized as "idealism", while there were also many significant internal debates between realists and realists. A snapshot of relevant scholarship reveals that many political realists also shared similar concerns to those of the "idealists"; Morgenthau's (1948-9) 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 an adequate “fruitful tension” between utopia and reality. Having debunked the thesis that Carr's book is only relevant to the “First Great Debate,” I will propose three points in relation to the “broader relevance” of the Twenty Year Crisis. First, I consider Carr's text an intellectual weapon in its essence. This is in line with Carr's tendency to imbue his seminal texts with a polemical character. For example, Nationalism and After (1945) attacked propagators of national self-determination, while New Society (1951) attacked laissez-faire capitalism and What Is History? (1961) turned his critical lens on the “English historical establishment”. In the case of the Twenty Year Crisis, this weapon was directed against the liberal internationalism of the 19th century, but it was not a specific move assuch. Carr's weapon was created to attack whatever universalized theory of international relations was dynamically evolving from the historical process. This move builds on Carr's critical theory tendencies (which I will explore further in this essay). I will illustrate this feature of Carr's text by demonstrating the ability of his "weapon" to "critique, historicize and relativize" one of the main IR concepts. theories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: neoliberalism and the complex interdependence subfield(Babik 2013:501). In short, Keohane (1984) argues that the presence of an international hegemon or international institution is beneficial for the development of cooperation. Hegemony may replace the need for institutions, but Keohane's thesis is that the global political economy does not contain a hegemon. Hegemony provides the same mechanisms of enforcement and inspection that institutions implement through their power. However, no hegemony exists within the international system due to the existence of interdependent states that have different powers over a number of different issues. Therefore, institutions are the only way to safely integrate cooperation within international economic policy. The institutions will achieve this objective only by starting from non-shortsighted states. In the same way that Carr (1964:82) rejects the idea that there is a morally privileged notion of peace – “international peace becomes a special vested interest of the predominant power”. ” – the weakening of cooperation suggests that the existence of institutions is therefore not a given. Such weakening often occurs due to problems of effective enforcement by powerful states; for example, World Trade Organization (WTO) implementation issues regarding trade wars between the United States and China. The powerful states would be the creators and main exponents of the Washington Consensus (for example the United States), or the newly industrialized countries such as China with its continuously growing military and economic weight. 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 greater good. Second, the twenty-year crisis showed critical trends significantly before the full development of critical policies. theory in the 1980s (see Cox 1981, 1986). Carr's notion of emancipation as fundamental to progress drew from his Western Marxist influences. In this case, he referred to the emancipation of the theory and practice of international politics from pre-existing or obsolete ideas, such as 19th-century liberal internationalism (Babik 2013:507). Carr's conception of history as evolutionary and progressive drew on his Mannheim influences, stemming from the latter's influential 1936 Ideology and Utopia on the relational 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 writing has been utilized and further explored by Booth (1991) writing about an anarchist “global community of communities” with respect to security. The dynamic and historical nature of the Twenty Year Crisis is particularly relevant in the 21st century, as international relations continue to be shaped by historical events; they create an international context and serve as points of reference. For example, there was the turning point of the network in light of increasing globalization, as well as the turning point of practice following the Libyan intervention in 2011. Third,.