In choosing a subject for this lecture, my mind turned to two books: both published during the war years, the first in 1941, Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminencel: the second at its very end, Arthur Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar The titles of both have been incorporated into the language. The former was not its author's invention; but his use of it as the title of his study of Father Joseph won it a near universality of currency. So Lindemann is still spoken of as Churchill's scientific éminence grise. But the title of Koestler's essay, though less heard to-day, advertises dramatically a very important bifurcation of approach to the problems of human life and society, the one typified by the devotee in his ashram, the other by the commissar, the dedicated ‘social surgeon’ serving the cause of the total transformation of a given human society in the light of the directives of the party to which he belongs. But of course there is an important sense in which in Father Joseph, the subject of Huxley's book (which was incidentally a very well researched piece of work), the two life-styles are to a considerable extent conjoined. Father Joseph is at one and the same time the devoted fanatical Capuchin, the father-founder of the Calvarian order of nuns and the skilled, ruthless agent of Richelieu's purposes. He was no yogi, still less a commissar, but a man whose spiritual teachings rate an admittedly short and critical reference in Bremond's famous history of 17th century French spirituality, and one who played an unquestionably important part in the diplomatic history of a period, wherein diplomacy might well be characterized as war carried on by other means.

In 1973 the United Nations published an influential study x of the emergence of Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and their impact on the world economy in general and less developed countries (LDCs) in particular. The Report was based on a painstaking collection of statistical data and other information on TNCs broadly covering the 1950s and 1960s, The Report's significance, apart from being one of the very few documents containing a large amount of information on the subject, lay in the fact that for the first time an official and authoritative body explicitly recognised that the operations of TNCs can be a source of conflict and in particular that the pursuit of corporate objectives may well be incompatible with the goals of national development in the LDCs. In fact, both the Report and much of the debate that it generated exhibited a sense of urgency reflecting the discovery of existing or impending conflict. Thus, the Group of Eminent Persons, set up to consider certain problems in greater depth and provide recommendations for national and international action, noted.

Much has been written about the deep fear of aerial bombardment in inter-war Britain. Particular attention has been paid to the Government awareness of that danger during the late 1930s, when the threat of war advanced from the realm of military and academic speculation to the sphere of an immediate political concern. “Air power” and the concomitant possibility of aerial bombardment, to quote Correlli Barnett, then became an “obsession”; it pervaded Cabinet debates and dominated all discussions of rearmament at every level of the British decision-making process.2 Why this should have been so, is not always made clear. The Government's sensitivity to the air danger is more often assumed than explained, and comparatively few attempts have been made to analyse the root causes which were responsible for this fear in official circles. Particularly neglected, in this context, is the impact of public opinion. Broadly speaking, public opinion is considered to have played a generally negative role, retarding the process of rearmament when not obstructing it altogether. The interplay between the public's view of the “air peril” and that of the Government is thereby minimized. This article is designed to redress that balance. It aims to examine the degree to which the British public was itself sensitive to the air danger and the extent to which its fears were communicated to the men who formulated the country's defence policy. In so doing, it will argue that public opinion acted as a catalyst, affecting official views on defence policy and — in general terms — influencing the choice of the form which rearmament was to take.

The League of Nations was a new factor to be considered during the formulation of any country's foreign policy after 1919, even if it was an experiment which has often been dismissed as doomed to failure on account of the desire of the great powers to limit its evolution.1 The refusal to allow the ex-enemy states to join the League immediately, as well as the non-membership of the United States and of Russia, meant that initially Britain and France emerged as the dominant members of the League and as the leading ‘producers’ of security, and thus they have received a large part of the blame for thwarting the League's development. In particular, in the case of Britain, the Conservative Party was regarded as less sympathetic to the League than the Labour Party, and consequently a Conservative government, such as that of Stanley Baldwin from 1924–1929, which rejected the Geneva Protocol, has been interpreted as a restrictive, even harmful, influence upon the League.

The reputation of Haldane as an army reformer has rested largely on his own writings. In his published memoirs, Before the War (London, 1920) and An Autobiography (London, 1929), Haldane, the former Secretary of State for War, argues that the perception of a new strategic purpose had underpinned his reform of the regular army. Meeting Sir Edward Grey a month after assuming office, in January 1906, he was informed that a Franco-German conflict was possible, and that Britain might be requested to assist France. A preliminary investigation by the Army Council was to reveal that it would take two months to mobilize and transport 80,000 men to France. Appalled by this calculation, Haldane claims that he resolved to provide a more prompt and sizeable contribution to the defence of France and the Channel ports. The new strategy depended upon a revision of mobilization planning; it also required the replacement of peacetime formations by an Expeditionary Force, whose size and organization reflected the military requirements of a Continental commitment. That January meeting had been fundamental. Haldane affirms:

I became aware at once that there was a new army problem. It was, how to mobilize and concentrate at a place of assembly to be opposite the Belgian frontier, a force calculated as adequate … to make up for the inadequacy of the French armies….

The books which are the subject of this article1 lie squarely (if a little uneasily on the part of Northedge) in the so-called ‘classical‘ tradition of scholarship in International Relations. This tradition eschews both the attempt to explain international politics by aping the methodology of the natural sciences and any interest in saying something of general import about the process of foreign policy formulation. Rather, it finds its “less ephemeral centre” in the rules and institutions which are shared by states and approaches the study of these rules and institutions in a manner at once philosophical and historical. Furthermore, against the cardboard lances of the ‘transnationalists’ it clutches a sturdy shield to the state, insisting that the state has been in the recent past and will remain for the foreseeable future, the principal “centre of initiative” in world politics. In short, this tradition consists in an overriding concern with the political theory and institutional history of the ‘states-system’.