Contemporaries who witnessed the fall of the Bastille did not doubt that an event of shocking significance had occurred. On 19 July 1789 the Ambassador of Saxony reported that so important and extraordinary a revolution ‘cannot fail to bring about a considerable change in the political system of France’. The Portuguese Ambassador wrote that if he had not witnessed it himself ‘he would not dare to describe it, for fear the truth should be considered a fable… A king of France in an army coach, surrounded by the bayonets and muskets of a large crowd, finally forced to display on his head the cockade of liberty.’ If it was not immediately clear that this attack on the legitimacy of the ancien régime would also involve an attack on the diplomatic practices and conventions of the European states-system, it quickly became so.

‘The characteristic feature of the crisis of the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 was the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a Utopia which took little account of reality to a reality from which every element of Utopia was rigorously excluded… The Utopia of 1919 was hollow and without substance,’ So wrote E. H. Carr in the conclusion to his Twenty Years Crisis, which he sent to the press in the middle of July 1939. Fifty years later one cannot but agree with him that the peace settlement of 1919 ‘failed’: Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin wiped it off the map of Europe. But though the Second World War created a very different ‘realistic’ world, some of the ‘Utopian’ ideals of 1919, so brusquely dismissed by Carr, re-surfaced irrepressibly after 1945, and some of their practical applications returned to the agenda of international politics.

1939 was neither one thing nor the other. It was not the last golden year of peace at the end of a period of expansion and confidence, as 1914 had seemed to be, and it was not the start of a dramatic new era, as war had been in 1775 and revolution in 1917. Rather, 1939 was the ante-chamber through which the nations of Europe were slowly ushered into war, and its association with reactive and hesistant policy–making has compounded the sense of determinism. This article will challenge such a perspective in two ways: first it will suggest that the events of 1939 are in themselves rather more significant than is sometimes assumed, and second it will see 1939 and the war which then unstoppably unrolled, as having initiated changes which are still being worked out in the nature and quality of international relationships, as well as major particular developments like the rise of American power and the division of Germany.

Determinist views are prevalent in human thinking. King Solomon's reflection that ‘What has been is what will be done and what has been done is what will be done and there is nothing new under the sun’ seems as valid today as it was three thousand years, ago. The international arena, overrun by scenes of bloody, wars, acute crises and protracted conflicts is a constant reminder of the truthfulness of this pessimistic view.

Norman Angell is a theorist of whom everyone has heard and few take seriously. In the years before the First World War, he had published The Great Illusion, the famous argument which outlined the disutility of war and which appeared to imply that governments would henceforth be restrained in the use of force. It was widely acclaimed and promoted with fervour by proponents of the peace movement. A few months before the outbreak of the First War, Angell had published another major tract predicting that future wars would be less ferocious than past wars. When these predictions proved less than accurate, the luckless theorist became a target for the realist criticism of ‘idealism’; indeed, he became a constant reference point in their defence of the realist position. The label was sufficient to assure that, while frequently referred to, his own ideas should receive scarcely any critical attention.

I am flattered that Professor L. S. Pressnell and Sheila V. Hopkins took the time to write a commentary on my ‘Economic Diplomacy at the Atlantic Conference’, which was published in the Review of International Studies in 1984, and am grateful to them for pointing out a number of errors which I made.

So far from eliminating the deficiencies of his original paper, Dobson compounds them. His defamatory thesis is that Churchill sought to cheat his Cabinet. Dispassionate checking showed his documentation to be flawed, his thesis unproven. His Reply offers special pleading and further blunders. He fails to recognize that, if the basis he explicitly constructs for his suppositions collapses, it cannot support those suppositions.

It is a pity that Pressnell and Hopkins do not make a more detailed rejoinder to the large number of points which I made in my original reply to them. They do indicate that the Cabinet did not include the specific phrase cheap labour in Abbey 35, but I also made that clear in my original article by quoting it at length. What the Cabinet did say was that they wanted ‘…to prevent our markets from being undercut by countries with a low standard of living like Japan’. The two authors may have scored a point here, but only at the cost of the issue. It seems to me much more plausible to suggest that Churchill's response in which he mentions cheap labour was prompted by the above phrase from Abbey 35 than to suggest, as the two authors dos that it is just as likely that it was prompted by point 5 of the Charter, concerning general welfare provisions, contained in Abbey 31.

Suddenly, in the summer of 1988, the United Nations was in the news. Positively. The process had got under way earlier in the year with the little-noticed (at the time) provision of UN military observers to watch over the Afghan-Pakistani agreements and the associated withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Then it was discovered that, after a ten-year hiatus, the UN might soon be called upon to implement the plan for its involvement in the accession to independence of Namibia, as South Africa seemed to be preparing to leave. There had been too many false all-clears on this particular front for it to be confidently assumed that the South Africans would in fact go.