Personalities, War and Diplomacy: Essays in International History.

Neilson, Keith

Personalities, War and Diplomacy: Essays in International History, edited by T.G. Otte and C.A. Pagedas. London, Frank Cass, 1997. xii, 316 pp. $55.00 U.S.

Collections of essays are often bound together by the most tenuous of threads. This fine book is an exception. Thanks in large part to one of its editors, Thomas Otte, it has a clear theme, and serves as a valuable contribution to both the theory and study of international history.

In the introduction to the volume, following in the footsteps of James Joll, D. Cameron Watt, and Zara Steiner, Otte makes a learned and persuasive argument for the importance of the study of individuals, as compared to the use of structural analysis, in understanding international history. For Otte, the weakness of structural analysis is that it cannot elucidate why certain decisions were taken by particular individuals at a specific time. As the determination of this is the essence of international history, explanations based on structural analysis cannot rise above the obvious. On the other hand, far from being merely the examination of what "one clerk said to another," the study of personality provides deep and lasting insights into what Otte calls the "thought-world" of those who made decisions. The eleven essays in Personalities, War and Diplomacy demonstrate, to a greater or lesser degree, the validity of Otte's contention.

The contributions are presented in rough chronological order. The first six deal with matters before the Second World War. Otte himself looks at the "cognitive map" of Eyre Crowe, whose career ended as a Permanent Undersecretary (PUS) at the Foreign Office. John Maurer, of the U.S. Naval War College, evaluates the influence of Field-Marshal Conrad yon Hotzendorf on Austria-Hungary's entry into the First World War. Erik Goldstein, a Reader at the University of Birmingham, outlines the collective view of the United States held by British diplomatists and Foreign Office officials in the inter-war, while Jonathan Wright, of Christ Church, Oxford, examines whether the German foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, was a liberal or a realist. From the L.S.E., Tadashi Kuramatsu, continues his attack on B.J.C. McKercher's interpretation of the Geneva Naval Conference by means of an analysis of the influence of Winston Churchill and Robert Cecil on those proceedings. Completing the pre-war section, Glyn Stone, from the University of the West of England, evaluates the views of Spain of another PUS, Robert Vansittart.

The five post-war chapters mostly deal with men operating at the highest levels. W. Scott Lucas, a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, makes a post-revisionist argument about the style of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, while Pierre-Henri Laurent, professor of European history at Tufts University, argues for the primacy of Paul-Henri Spaak's influence on the unification of western Europe. Sergei Khrushchev confirms what Western analysts have long contended, that his father decided to shrink Soviet military funding out of a desire to improve the economy. On the other side of the Cold War, Kendrick Oliver, of the University of Southampton, shows that John Kennedy's personal desire to balance between his domestic and international constituencies shaped his policy with respect to nuclear testing. Finally, the second editor, Constantine Pagedas, demonstrates the limits of personal influence. Pagedas shows that Harold Macmillan's attempt to utilize his personal touch to bring about an Anglo-French understanding without disturbing Anglo-American relations was doomed to failure as a result of the general circumstances of the situation.

In any such collection, there are personal favourites. While all the contributions are of high quality, two stand out. The first is Otte's piece on Eyre Crowe. In its sophistication and use of sources, this article underlines both what can be done in this genre and how poor is Our Ablest Public Servant (Braunton, 1993), the biography of Crowe written by his daughter Sibyl and E.T. Corp. The second is Glyn Stone's chapter on Vansittart. Of late, there has been an upsurge of interest in "Van," particularly a special issue of Diplomacy & Statecraft in 1995, and Stone's is perhaps the best study of the PUS's role. With his strong expertise in Anglo-Iberian matters, Stone is able to situate Vansittart and his views precisely in the continuum of British views concerning Spain. The result is to deepen our understanding of both the man and British policy.

In short, this is a valuable book. The editors are to be congratulated, both for their own efforts and for assembling a strong cast of contributors. Let us hope that the volume stimulates further work on the impact of personality on policy.

Keith Neilson Royal Military College of Canada