IF the policy of “Appeasement” is inextricably associated in the historical consciousness with the efforts of Neville Chamberlain's government to preserve peace with the dictators in the 1930s, its origins have been recognized by numerous writers as going back many years before the immediate crises concerning the Sudetenland, Prague and the Polish Corridor. Some have traced its roots to the failure to prevent Japanese aggression in 1931 or Italy's attack upon Abyssinia in 1935; others, with more sense of the positive side of “Appeasement", have focused upon the attitude of the British government and public towards Germany during and after the Versailles settlement; while Mr Gilbert, going a little further back in time, has argued that “appeasement was born” at the moment of the British declaration of war in 1914. Few, if any, commentators have suggested that one should seek the beginnings of “Appeasement” before that event, however.

International politics in the 1970s are multi-layered and characterized by fluidity and multipolarity. The decline of security issues as the primary focus in many regions is paralleled by the ascent of welfare issues and the blurring of the line between internal and external policy. These are reflected in the heightened specificity of power, between military capability and the ability to influence, in the prevalence of many simultaneous games in the international system (subsystems of activity) and the relative autonomy of the politics of the region.

“There's Dilke that has done it all”, remarked Wilfrid Scawen Blunt to Lord Blandford as they watched Dilke walk down Piccadilly one day in July 1882.1 The “it” was the British intervention in Egypt which entangled Britain in Egyptian affairs for two generations. More soberly, Louis Mallet, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the India Office, wrote to Evelyn Baring a year later that the Liberal government of William Gladstone had made themselves “the unconscious, and some of them (not all) the unwilling instruments of a policy from which Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury would have shrunk, and which is big with future disaster”. “Dilke and Chamberlain” he wrote, “I consider mainly responsible for the Egyptian war.” In The Trouble Makers, A. J. P. Taylor came to the conclusion, “The occupation of Egypt in 1882 marked Gladstone's decisive breach with Radicalism. Indeed it ruined Radicalism for more than a generation. It began modern British Imperialism…”. How ironic if the ruin of British radicalism was brought about by the two leading radicals of Gladstone's predominantly Whig administration. What do the Dilke and Chamberlain papers among others reveal about the exact role of the two men in the crisis ?

The term “national interest” has been used by statesmen and scholars since the founding of nation-states to describe the aspirations and goals of sovereign entities in the international arena. Today foreign ministers, military strategists and academicians discuss the vital interests of their countries in ways suggesting that everyone understands precisely what they mean and will draw correct inferences from their use of the term. Nothing could be further from reality. In truth, the study of international politics as well as the art of diplomacy suffer from widespread ambiguity about the meaning of national interest, with the result that some scholars have proposed that the concept be abandoned and replaced by some other phrase. To my mind, this would be an abdication of the scholar's responsibility because, whether we like it or not, the term national interest is so deeply ingrained in the literature of international relations and diplomatic language that it is unlikely to be dismissed from our vocabulary simply because some scholars find it useless. Were we to attempt to substitute some new phrase, we would likely find even less consensus and could become engaged in yet another round of jargon-creation. A better alternative, I suggest, is to strive for a more precise definition of national interest and then provide a conceptual framework in which serious discussion of foreign policy and international politics can become more fruitful. That is the purpose of this paper.

The collapse of the British Empire in south-east Asia in the early months of 1942 brought to the fore in Anglo-American relations the different attitudes of the two countries towards colonialism. Surprisingly, their long standing disagreement about the merits of colonialism was not pushed to one side by the need to defeat Japan. On the contrary, Britain's humiliating setbacks in Malaya and Burma reinforced doubts and confirmed prejudices in the United States about the probity of the British Empire – doubts and prejudices that were powerfully articulated throughout 1942 and succeeding years in the American press as well as in private exchanges between members of the Administration and their British counterparts.

The development of new kinds of weapons in the immediate post-war period led to a great increase in academic interest in strategic problems. After occasional forays into the field by thinkers such as Bernard Brodie, the output of literature on strategic matters by academics has grown enormously. Most of the work has been done by Americans and reflects an American perspective of the world. It deals with problems that the United States has faced, and is facing, in strategic policy matters.

The problem of reconciling historical data and scholarship with the concepts and assumptions of political science is a familiar and much-debated one. Whatever the abstract arguments about the exercise, it is a desirable one in the evolution of rigorous and comparative analyses, and one which demands attention in many areas of international studies. It is the aim of this review article to look at the problems entailed in the reconciliation of history and theory, through the particular example of the League of Nations and its experience.