E. H. Carr - Biography - Diplomatic Career

Diplomatic Career

Like many of his generation, Carr found World War I to be a shattering experience as it destroyed the world he knew before 1914. Carr was later to write that the pre-1914 world was:

"...solid and stable. Prices did not change. Incomes, if they changed, went up...It was a good place, and it was getting better. This country was leading it by the right direction. There were no doubt, abuses, but they were being, or would be, dealt with".

He joined the British Foreign Office in 1916, resigning in 1936. Carr was excused from military service for medical reasons. Carr was at first assigned to the Contraband Department of the Foreign Office, which sought to enforce the blockade on Germany, and then in 1917 was assigned to the Northern Department, which amongst other areas dealt with relations with Russia. In 1918, Carr was involved in the negotiations to have the British diplomats imprisoned in Petrograd by the Bolsheviks released in exchange for the British releasing the Soviet diplomats imprisoned in London in retaliation. As a diplomat, Carr was later praised by the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax as someone who had "distinguished himself not only by sound learning and political understanding, but also in administrative ability". At first, Carr knew nothing about the Bolsheviks. Carr later recalled:

"I had some vague impression of the revolutionary views of Lenin and Trotsky, but knew nothing of Marxism; I'd probably never heard of Marx".

By 1919, Carr had become convinced that the Bolsheviks were destined to win the Russian Civil War, and approved of the Prime Minister David Lloyd George's opposition to the anti-Bolshevik ideas of the War Secretary Winston Churchill on the grounds of realpolitik. In Carr's opinion, Churchill's support of the White Russian movement was folly as Russia was destined to be a great power once more under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, and it was foolish for Britain to support the losing side of the Russian Civil War. Carr was to later to write that in the spring of 1919 he "was disappointed when he gave way (in part) on the Russian question in order to buy French consent to concessions to Germany on Upper Silesia, Danzig and reparations"

In 1919, Carr was part of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and was involved in the drafting of parts of the Treaty of Versailles relating to the League of Nations. During the peace conference, Carr was much offended at the Allied, especially French, treatment of the Germans, writing that the German delegation at the peace conference were "cheated over the "Fourteen Points", and subjected to every petty humiliation" Beside working on the sections of the Versailles treaty relating to the League of Nations, Carr was also involved in working out the borders between Germany and the newly reborn state of Poland. Initially, Carr favoured Poland, urging in a memo in February 1919 that Britain recognize Poland at once, and that the German city of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) be ceded to Poland In March 1919, Carr fought against the idea of a Minorities Treaty for Poland, arguing that the rights of ethnic and religious minorities in Poland would be best guaranteed by not involving the international community in Polish internal affairs By the spring of 1919, Carr's relations with the Polish delegation had declined to a state of mutual hostility. Carr's tendency to favour the claims of the Germans at the expense of the Poles led the British historian Adam Zamoyski to note that Carr "…held views of the most extraordinary racial arrogance on all of the nations of Eastern Europe". Carr's biographer, Jonathan Haslam wrote in a 2000 essay that Carr grew up in a Germanophile household, in which German culture was deeply appreciated, which in turn always coloured Carr's views towards Germany throughout his life. As a result of his Germanophile and anti-Polish views, Carr supported the territorial claims of the Reich against Poland. In a letter written in 1954 to his friend, Isaac Deutscher, Carr described his attitude to Poland at the time:

"This was the period of Korfanty, Żeligowski and the disputes over Teschen and Eastern Galicia, not mention the campaign of 1920. The picture of Poland that was universal in Eastern Europe right down to 1925 was of a strong and potentially predatory power".

After the peace conference, Carr was stationed at the British Embassy in Paris until 1921, and in 1920 was awarded a CBE. At first, Carr had great faith in the League, which he believed would prevent both another world war and ensure a better post-war world. Carr later recalled:

"In those years, the League was rapidly becoming the focus of everything that mattered in international affairs; and each successive Assembly seemed to mark some progress in what has come to be known as the "organization of peace""

In the 1920s, Carr was assigned to the branch of the British Foreign Office that dealt with the League of Nations before being sent to the British Embassy in Riga, Latvia, where he served as Second Secretary between 1925–29. In 1925, Carr married Anne Ward Howe, by whom he had one son. During his time in Riga (which at that time possessed a substantial Russian émigré community), Carr became increasing fascinated with Russian literature and culture and wrote several works on various aspects of Russian life. Carr's interests in Russia and Russians were further increased by his boredom with life in Riga. Carr described Riga as "...an intellectual desert". Carr learnt Russian during his time in Riga in order to read Russian writers in the original. In 1927, Carr paid his first visit to Moscow. Carr was later to write that reading Alexander Herzen, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the work of other 19th century Russian intellectuals caused him to re-think his liberal views. Carr wrote under the impact of reading various Russian writers he found:

"that the liberal moralistic ideology in which I was brought up was not, as I had always assumed, an Absolute taken for granted by the modern world, but was sharply and convincingly attacked by very intelligent people living outside the charmed circle, who looked at the world through very different eyes...This left me in a very confused state of mind: I reacted more and more sharply against the Western ideology, but still from a point within it".

Starting in 1929, Carr started to review books relating to all things Russian and Soviet and to international relations in several British literary journals such as the Fortnightly Review, The Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement and later towards the end of his life, the London Review of Books. In particular, Carr emerged as the Times Literary Supplement's Soviet expert in the early 1930s, a position he still held at the time of his death in 1982 Because of his status as a diplomat (until 1936), most of Carr's reviews in the period 1929–36 were published either anonymously or under the pseudonym "John Hallett". Between 1931 and 1937, Carr published many works on many historians and history, works that gave much fledgling discipline of international relations much vigour and discipline. In the summer of 1929, Carr began work on a biography of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, during which the course of researching Dostoevsky's life, Carr befriended Prince D. S. Mirsky, a Russian émigré scholar living at that time in Britain. Beside studies on international relations, Carr's writings in the 1930s included biographies of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1931), Karl Marx (1934), and Mikhail Bakunin (1937). An early sign of Carr's increasing admiration of the Soviet Union was a 1929 review of Baron Pyotr Wrangel's memoirs where Carr wrote:

"It is not longer possible for any sane man to regard the campaigns of Kolchak, Yudenich, Denikin and Wrangel otherwise than as tragic blunders of colossal dimensions. They were monuments of folly in conception and of incompetence in execution; they cost, directly and indirectly, hundreds of thousands of lives; and except in so far as they may have increased the bitterness of the Soviet rulers against the "White" Russians and the Allies who half-heartedly supported them, they did not deflect the course of history by a single hair's breadth".

In an article entitled "Age of Reason" published in the Spectator on April 26, 1930, Carr attacked what he regarded as the prevailing culture of pessimism within the West, which he blamed on the French writer Marcel Proust. Carr wrote:

"It was about the turn of the century that the trouble began. It did not come from the rebels or radicals...It came rather with men like Kipling and Rostand, men loyal to the core to the old traditions, men of genius-and yet who somehow did not quite pull it off...The great days of the glory of man and his achievements were numbered. The vein was petering out; in some strange way it no longer came off. It was, men said, the end of the Victorian Age...It was once the vulgar ambition of mankind to make something out of nothing; Proust brought perfection to the more genteel pastime of resolving everything into nothingness".

In the early 1930s, Carr found the Great Depression to be almost profoundly shocking as the First World War. In an article entitled "England Adrift" published in September 1930, Carr wrote:

"The prevailing state of mind in England to-day is one of defeatism or...skepticism, of disbelief in herself. England has ceased to have ideas, or if, she has them, to believe in the possibility of their fulfillment. Alone among the Great Powers she has ceased to have a mission...The government of the day has so little faith in its capacity to tackle the major problems of our generation that it invites the other parties to assist with their advice (imagine Mr Gladstone invoking the assistance of Lord Beaconsfield!), and the principle opposition party, knowing full well there is no solution, declines the invitation and keeps its hands free to wash them of the consequences...We have no convictions beyond a vague sort of fatalism".

Further increasing Carr's interest in a replacement ideology for liberalism was his reaction to hearing the debates in January 1931 at the General Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, and especially the speeches on the merits of free trade between the Yugoslav Foreign Minister Vojislav Marinkovich and the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson. Carr wrote:

"At Geneva I followed some of the debates about the economic crisis, which seemed to spell the bankruptcy of capitalism. In particular I was stuck by the fact that everyone professed to believe that tariff barriers were a major cause of aggravation of the crisis, but that practically every country was busy erecting them. I happened to hear a speech by some minor delegate (Yugoslav, I think) which for the first time in my experience put the issue clearly and urgently. Free trade was the doctrine of economically powerful states, which flourished without protection, but would be fatal to weak states. This came as a revelation to me (like the revelation at Cambridge of the relativism of historiography), and was doubly significant because of the part played by free trade in my intellectual upbringing. If free trade went, the whole liberal outlook went with it."

It was at this time that Carr started to admire the Soviet Union. Carr wrote in a book review in February 1931:

"They have discovered a new religion of the Kilowatt and the Machine, which may well be the creed for which modern civilization is waiting.... This new religion is growing up on the fringes of a Europe which has lost faith in herself. Contemporary Europe is aimlessly drifting, refusing to face unpalatable facts, and looking for external remedies for her difficulties. The important question for Europe at the present time is... whether the steel production of the Soviet Union will overtake that of Great Britain and France... whether Europe can discover in herself a driving force, an intensity of faith comparable to that now being generated in Russia".

In a 1932 book review of Lancelot Lawton's Economic History of Soviet Russia, Carr dismissed Lawton's claim that the Soviet economy was a failure, and praised the British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb's extremely favourable assessment of the Soviet economy. Carr concluded that "as regards economic development, Professor Dobb is conclusive". Beside writing on Soviet affairs, Carr also commented on other international events. In an essay published in February 1933 in the Fortnightly Review, Carr blamed what he regarded as a putative Versailles treaty for the recent accession to power of Adolf Hitler Carr wrote that in the 1920s, German leaders like Gustav Stresemann were unable to secure sufficient modifications of the Versailles treaty, owing to the intractable attitude of the Western powers, especially France, and now the West had reaped what it had sowed in the form of the Nazi regime. However, despite some concerns about National Socialism, Carr ended his essay by writing that:

"The crucial point about Hitlerism is that its disciples not only believe in themselves, but believe in Germany. For the first time since the war a party appeared outside the narrow circles of the extreme Right which was not afraid to proclaim its pride in being German. It will perhaps one day be recognized as the greatest service of Hitlerism that, in a way quite unprecedented in German politics, it cut across all social distinctions, embracing in its ranks working men, bourgeoisie, intelligentsia and aristocrats. "Germany Awake!" became a living national faith".

Initially, Carr's political outlook was anti-Marxist and liberal. In his 1934 biography of Karl Marx, Carr presented his subject as highly intelligent man and a gifted writer, but one whose talents were devoted entirely for destruction. Carr argued that Marx's sole and only motivation was a mindless class hatred. Carr labelled dialectical materialism gibberish, and the labour theory of value doctrinal and derivative. Carr wrote that:

"The pseudo-Marxist is a pathetic figure. He knows that Marxism is moonshine, but he still nourishes the hope of finding in it a gleam to follow."

Speaking of the differences between the fascist regimes and the Soviet Union, Carr wrote:

"the only difference between the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the dictatorships which prefer to hoist other flags is that the one proclaims its Marxist paternity whereas the others deny it."

Despite his hostile appraisal of Marx, Carr ended his book by writing that recent developments in the Soviet Union meant that Marx had:

"...a claim to be regarded as the most far-seeing genius of the nineteenth century and one of the most successful prophets in history"

Carr went on to write:

"There are now few thinking man who will dismiss with confidence the Marxian assumption that capitalism, developed to its highest point, inevitably encompasses its own destruction."

Likewise, Carr praised Marx for emphasizing the importance of the collective over the individual. Carr wrote that:

"In a sense, Marx is the protagonist and forerunner of the whole twentieth century revolution of thought. The nineteenth century saw the end of the period of humanism which began with the Renaissance-the period which took as its ideal the highest development of the faculties and liberties of the individual...Marx understood that, in the new order, the individual would play a minor part. Individualism implies differentiation; everything that is undifferentiated does not count. The Industrial Revolution would place in power the undifferentiated mass. Not man, but mass-man, not the individual, but the class, not the political man, would be the unit of the coming dispensation. Not only industry, but the whole of civilization, would become a matter of mass-production."

In view of his later conversion to a sort of quasi-Marxism, Carr was to find the passages in Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism criticizing Marx to be highly embarrassing, and refused to allow the book to be republished. Carr was to later call his Marx biography his worst book, and complained that he had written it only because his publisher had made a Marx biography the precondition of publishing the biography of Mikhail Bakunin that he was writing. In his books such as The Romantic Exiles and Dostoevsky, Carr was noted for his highly ironical treatment of his subjects, implying that their lives were of interest but not of great importance. In the mid-1930s, Carr was especially preoccupied with the life and ideas of Bakunin. During this period, Carr started writing a novel about the visit of a Bakunin-type Russian radical to Victorian Britain who proceeded to expose all of Carr regarded as the pretensions and hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. The novel was never finished or published.

As a diplomat in the 1930s, Carr took the view that great division of the world into rival trading blocs caused by the American Smoot Hawley Act of 1930 was the principal cause of German belligerence in foreign policy, as Germany was now unable to export finished goods or import raw materials cheaply. In Carr's opinion, if Germany could be given its own economic zone to dominate in Eastern Europe comparable to the British Imperial preference economic zone, the U.S. dollar zone in the Americas, the French gold bloc zone and the Japanese economic zone, then the peace of the would could be assured. In a memo written on January 30, 1936, Carr wrote:

"Since I think everyone is now agreed that it is dangerous to sit indefinitely on the safety-valve, and that Germany must expand somewhere, I feel that there is an overwhelming case for the view that the direction in which Germany can expand with a minimum of danger or inconvenience to British interests (whether political or economic) is in Central and South-Eastern Europe…"

Carr's views on appeasement caused much tension with his superior, the Permanent Undersecetary Sir Robert Vansittart, and played a role in Carr's resignation from the Foreign Office later in 1936 In an article entitled "An English Nationalist Abroad" published in May 1936 in the Spectator, Carr wrote "The methods of the Tudor sovereigns, when they were making the English nation, invite many comparisons with those of the Nazi regime in Germany" In this way, Carr argued that it was hypocritical for people in Britain to criticize the Nazi regime's human rights record Because of Carr's strong antagonism to the Treaty of Versailles, which he viewed as unjust to Germany, Carr was very supportive of the Nazi regime's efforts to destroy Versailles through moves such as the Remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 Carr later wrote of his views in the 1930s that "No doubt, I was very blind".