Intellectual Cooperation and International Relations between the World Wars
About 100 years ago, authors writing on international peace and conflict began to develop the basis of what became known as International Relations (IR). Their goal was not only to create a new university subject, but to advance political education more generally, to create public awareness for foreign policy and to establish international links between students and institutions. At the same time, the intellectual origins of IR are closely linked to efforts in politics and diplomacy, such as the promotion of democratic control of foreign policy, and international cooperation under the League of Nations. The protagonists of this story, including figures such as Alfred Zimmern, James T. Shotwell, and Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, were often simultaneously working in academia and as political advisors. As a result, inter-war IR scholarship, which for a long time has been oversimplified as a ‘First Great Debate’ between so called ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ , offers a much richer interpretation of the discipline’s origins. My study looks at the early intellectual history of IR with a particular emphasis on its international dimension as well as its entanglement in politics and diplomacy. It argues that transnational networks of scholars, politicians, and philanthropists shaped IR research in important ways which are usually lost in national or exclusively intellectual accounts. The study is based on archival research in France, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, drawing both on state and institutional records as well as on private papers and correspondence.