NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: MODERN EUROPEAN UNREASON

Neville Chamberlain (1939)

You can lay down all these general principles, but this is not a policy. Surely, if you are to have a policy you must take the particular situations and consider what action or inaction is suitable for those particular situations. That is what I myself mean by a policy, and it is quite clear that as the situations and conditions in foreign affairs continually change from day to day, your policy cannot be stated for once and for all, if it is to be applicable to every situation that arises.¹

ENDNOTES

1. Neville Chamberlain, The Struggle For Peace, Toronto, Allen, 1939, 33.

Remark: In this instance, Chamberlain does not face every situation that arises, — he faces Hitlerite Germany: Neville Chamberlain “reconciles” his ideology with European events, and the result is subjectivism, relativism and irrationalism in the arena of modern British world politics and economics. Neville Chamberlain therefore fails to rationally reconcile the Industrial and French Revolutions in his domestic and foreign political and economic policy precisely because he is the fateful prisoner of 19th century British Kantio–Hegelian nationalism and imperialism.

See: “The intellectual superiority of the Left is seldom in doubt. The Left alone thinks out principles of political action and evolves ideas for statesmen to aim at … morality can only be relative, and not universal … ethics must be interpreted in terms of politics; and the search for an ethical norm outside politics is doomed to frustration.”
Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2nd edition, London, Macmillan, 1962, 20–21–21. [1939]

See finally: “By my definition, a theory of international politics would be a set of generally valid and logically consistent propositions that explain the outcomes of interactions between and among political actors. As such, the theory would contain three kinds of statements: (1) those which identify or take inventory of components and properties of international systems and events, (2) those which identity and describe relationships among the components and properties of the international systems and events, and (3) those which explain or otherwise account for such relationships.”
Donald James Puchala, International Politics Today, New York, Dodd, Mead, 1971, 358.