International Relations

Abstract

Those of us introduced to the Australian study of international relations during the 1950s generally did so via undergraduate courses in diplomatic history, almost all of them highly Eurocentric. At my alma mater, the University of Western Australia, Fred Alexander held sway over a first-class history department, and the history major included a detailed survey of 19th and early 20th-century European diplomacy. These courses were largely narrative, but Alexander’s underlying assumptions were a curious mix of Wilsonian idealism and the more pessimistic realism reflected in E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis (Carr 1945). In 1928 Alexander had published a study of European great power diplomacy in the aftermath of the Great War, From Paris to Locarno, but he had also witnessed the collapse of the League of Nations and the rise of Nazi Germany.