E. H. Carr - Biography - World War II

World War II

During World War II, Carr's political views took a sharp turn towards the left. Carr spent the Phony War working as a clerk with the propaganda department of the Foreign Office. As Carr did not believe Britain could defeat Germany, the declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939 left him highly depressed.

In March 1940, Carr resigned from the Foreign Office to serve as the writer of leaders (editorials) for The Times. In his second leader published on June 21, 1940 entitled "The German Dream", Carr wrote that Hitler was offering a "Europe united by conquest". Carr went on to write:

"There must and will be a new order in Europe. But this cannot be achieved through the overweening ambition of one man or one country in defiance of the will of the majority of Europeans and of the whole world outside of Europe. To speculate on better ways of building the new order would at the present time be to divert energy from far more urgent tasks. But two conditions must at least be fulfilled. The new European order cannot be achieved through conquest but only through co-operation and it must unite Europe with the non-European world, not divide Europe from it."

In a leader of July 1, 1940 Carr wrote that the first conclusion to drawn from the present war was that "the conception of the small national unit, not strong enough for an active role in international politics, but enjoying all the prerogatives and responsibilities of a sovereignty, has been rendered obsolete by modern armaments and the scope of modern warfare". Carr ended by writing:

"Europe can no longer afford a multiplicity of economic units, each maintaining its independent economic system behind a barbed wire of tariffs, quotas, exchange restrictions and barter agreements...Over the greater part of Western Europe the common values for which we stand are known and prized. We must indeed beware of these values in purely nineteenth-century terms. If we speak of democracy, we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom, we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organization and economic planning. If we speak of equality, we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction we think less of maximum production (through this too will be required) than of equitable distribution".

In a leader during the summer of 1940, Carr defended the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states under the grounds that this was "not merely pressure from Moscow, but sincere recognition that this was a better alternative than absorption into a new Nazi Europe".

Carr served as the assistant editor of The Times from 1941 to 1946, during which time he was well known for the pro-Soviet attitudes that he expressed in his leaders (editorials) he wrote. After June 1941, Carr' s already strong admiration for the Soviet Union was much increased by the Soviet Union's role in defeating Germany.

In one of his first leaders Carr for the Times, he declared:

"The PRIME MINISTER expressed the mood of the nation when he declared that our only present war aim is victory. Nevertheless the British will to victory is still bound up with the conviction that our war aims stand on a different plane from those of the enemy, and that victory for our aims will point the way to a new social and international order in Europe".

Carr called the war aim of "destroying Hitlerism" insufficient, and demanded that the British government express "a definite picture of what we are fighting for, both to hearten our own people at home and to counteract German propaganda abroad" In a leader of December 5, 1940 entitled "The Two Scourges", Carr wrote that only by removing the "scourge" of unemployment could one also remove the "scourge" of war. Such was the popularity of "The Two Scourges" that it was published as a pamphlet in December 1940, during which in its first print run of 10,000 it completely sold out. In a speech given in December 1940, Carr declared his views about the war that in his opinion:

"This is not altogether a national war, it is to a certain extent a social war, a revolutionary war; as a political revolution it is not simply confined to one country but is more or less world-wide".

Carr's left-wing leaders caused some tension with the editor of the Times, Geoffrey Dawson, who felt that Carr was taking the Times in a too radical direction, which led Carr for a time being restricted only to writing on foreign policy. After Dawson's ouster in May 1941 and his replacement with Robert M'Gowan Barrington-Ward, Carr was given a free rein to write on whatever he wished. In turn, Barrington-Ward was to find many of Carr's leaders on foreign affairs to be too radical for his liking. Carr's leaders were noted for their advocacy of a socialist European economy under the control of an international planning board, and for his support for the idea of an Anglo-Soviet alliance as the basis of the post-war international order. In one of his leaders, Carr stated "The new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege, whether the privilege be that of a country, of a class, or of an individual." Carr himself later described his attitude to the Soviets during his stint at the Times:

"In the Times I very quickly began to plug the Russian alliance; and when this was vindictated by Russian endurance and Russian victory, it revived my faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and a historical turning point. It was obvious that the Russia of the Second World War was a very different place from the Russia of the First-terms of people as well of material resources. Looking back on the thirties, I came to feel that my preoccupation with the purges and brutalities of Stalinism had distorted my perspective. The black spots were real enough, but looking exclusively at them destroyed one's vision of what was really happening".

Unlike many of his contemporaries in war-time Britain, Carr was against a Carthaginian peace with Germany, and argued for a post-war reconstruction of Germany along socialist lines. In Carr's opinion, National Socialism was not the natural result of Deutschtum (Germanism), but rather of capitalism. Carr claimed that once capitalism was removed from German society, the social forces that gave birth to fascism would wither away and die. On his leaders on foreign affairs, Carr was very consistent (and correct) in arguing after 1941 that once the war ended, it was the fate of Eastern Europe to come into the Soviet sphere of influence, and claimed that any effort to the contrary was both vain and immoral. In a leader of August 1941 entitled "Peace and Power", Carr wrote that power in Eastern Europe:

"...can fall only to Germany or to Russia. Neither Great Britain nor the United States can exercise, or will agree to exercise, any predominant role in these regions...There can be no doubt that British and Russian-and it may be added, American-interests alike demand that Russian influence in Eastern Europe should not be eclipsed by that of Germany."

In December 1941, Carr wrote "...in Europe, Great Britain and Soviet Russia must become the main bulwarks of a peace which can be preserved, and can be made real, only through their joint endeavour." In a memo sent to the British diplomat Frank Roberts (who had criticized Carr's views about the Baltic states) on January 16, 1942 Carr wrote:

"After the collapse of Russia and Germany the Baltic States enjoyed an almost accidental independence during the twenty years interregnum from 1919 to 1939. Apart from this interval in history it was always true that they would have fallen within the orbit either of Russia or Germany, and it is now more certain than ever in an age which has exposed the illusions of neutrality in Europe. The winning of the war means that they will fall within the orbit of Russia".

Between 1942–45, Carr was the Chairman of a study group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs concerned with Anglo-Soviet relations. Carr's study group concluded that Stalin had largely abandoned Communist ideology in favour of Russian nationalism, that the Soviet economy would provide a higher standard of living in the Soviet Union after the war, and it was both possible and desirable for Britain to reach a friendly understanding with the Soviets once the war had ended. In 1942, Carr published Conditions of Peace followed by Nationalism and After in 1945, in which he outlined his ideas about the post-war world should look like. In his books, and his Times leaders, Carr urged for the post-war world, the creation of a socialist European federation anchored by an Anglo-German partnership that would be aligned with, but not subordinated to the Soviet Union against the country that Carr saw as the principal post-war danger to world peace, namely the United States.

In his 1942 book Conditions of Peace, Carr argued that it was a flawed economic system that had caused World War II and that the only way of preventing another world war was for the Western powers to fundamentally change the economic basis of their societies by adopting socialism. Carr argued that the post-war world required a European Planning Authority and a Bank of Europe that would control the currencies, trade, and investment of all the European economies. One of the main sources for ideas in Conditions of Peace was the 1940 book Dynamics of War and Revolution by the American Lawrence Dennis In a review of Conditions of Peace, the British writer Rebecca West criticised Carr for using Dennis as a source, commenting "It is as odd for a serious English writer to quote Sir Oswald Mosley" In a speech on June 2, 1942 in the House of Lords, Viscount Elibank attacked Carr as an "active danger" for his views in Conditions of Peace about a magnanimous peace with Germany and for suggesting that Britain turn over all of her colonies to an international commission after the war.

In a leader of March 10, 1943 Carr wrote that:

"There can be no security in Western Europe unless there is also security in Eastern Europe, and security in Eastern Europe is unattainable unless it is buttressed by the military power of Russia. A case so clear and cogent for close co-operation between Britain and Russia after the war cannot fail to carry conviction to any open and imprartial mind."

In the same leader Carr argued for:

"ungrudging and unqualified agreement on the supposition that "If Britain's frontier is on the Rhine", it might just as pertinently be said-though it has not in fact been said-that Russia's frontier is on the Oder, and in the same sense."

The leader of March 10, 1943 led to a protest from the Polish Ambassador, Count Edward Raczyński, who wrote in response that he "knew what Carr's idea of Eastern Europe was, but it is not the idea of the Poles, and they knew well what Russia would mean by friendly governments".

The next month, Carr's relations with the Polish government were further worsted by the storm caused by the discovery of the Katyn Forest massacre committed by the NKVD in 1940. In a leader entitled "Russia and Poland" on April 28, 1943, Carr blasted the Polish government for accusing the Soviets of committing the Katyn Forest massacre, and for asking the Red Cross to investigate Carr wrote that:

"Every Polish statesmen and every Polish student of history knows his country imperatively needs the friendship of at least one of her greater neighbours, east and west. No Pole today can contemplate the deliberate co-operation of Germany...Yet the action of the Polish government ten days ago beyond a doubt played, in fact though not in intention, directly into German hands ...Any Polish quarrel with Russia, whatever its origin, necessarily injures the cause of both Poland and of the United Nations."

In 1943, the Classicist Gilbert Murray wrote a letter to Carr, who was still the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Relations at Aberystwyth complaining on behalf of Lord Davies that:

"The Chair is a "Wilson Chair" and was certainly intended to be a Chair for the Exposition of the League of Nations idea, and the founder has a right to be rather upset when he finds his professor carrying on a sort of anti-Wilson and anti-League campaign. It is not as if you merely criticised the League and wanted it changed and developed; you consider it fundamentally wrong and Wilson's principles as self-contradictory".

In reply to Murray, Carr wrote:

"May I suggest a closer parallel than yours? Would a Newton Professor of Physics be precluded from arguing that Einstein had demonstrated the inadequacy and over-simplification of Newton's laws".

Lord Davies who had been extremely unhappy with Carr almost from the moment that Carr had assumed the Wilson Chair in 1936 launched a major campaign in 1943 to have Carr fired, being particularly upset that through Carr had not taught since 1939, he was still drawing his professor's salary Lord Davies's efforts to have Carr fired failed when the majority of the Aberystwyth staff supported by the powerful Welsh political fixer Thomas Jones sided with Carr.

In December 1944, when fighting broke out in Athens, Greece between the Greek Communist front organization ELAS and the British Army, Carr in a Times leader sided with the Greek Communists, leading to Winston Churchill to condemn him in a speech to the House of Commons. Churchill called Carr's leader defending E.L.A.S "a melancholy document" that in his opinion reflected the decline of British journalism. Carr claimed (correctly) that the Greek EAM was the "largest organised party or group of parties in Greece" that "appeared to exercise almost unchallengeable authority" and called for Britain to recognize the EAM as the legal Greek government. The Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest accused Carr of hypocrisy in supporting the EAM/ELAS, noting Carr was violating his own "Might is Right" precepts of international power politics, in which the stronger power was always in the right, regardless of the facts of the case. Since Britain was a much stronger power in the world than the Greek Communists, Conquest argued that Carr by his own standards should have been on the British side during the fighting in Athens in December 1944.

In contrast to his support for E.A.M/E.L.A.S, Carr was strongly critical of the legitimate Polish government in exile and its Armia Krajowa (Home Army) resistance organization. In his leaders of 1944 on Poland, Carr urged that Britain break diplomatic relations with the London government and recognize the Soviet sponsored Lublin government as the lawful government of Poland. In a Times leader of February 10, 1945, Carr questioned whatever the Polish government in exile even had the right to speak on behalf of Poland Carr wrote that it was extremely doubtful about whatever the London government had "an exclusive title to speak for the people of Poland and a liberum veto on any move towards a settlement of Polish affairs" Carr went to argue that "The legal credentials of this Government are certainly not beyond challenge if it were relevant to examine them: the obscure and tenuous thread of continuity leads back at best to a constitution deriving from a quasi-Fascist coup d'état" Carr ended his leader with the claim that "What Marshal Stalin desires to see in Warsaw is not a puppet government acting under Russian orders, but a friendly government which fully conscious of the supreme impotence of Russo-Polish concord, will frame its independent policies in that context."

In a May 1945 leader, Carr blasted those who felt that an Anglo-American "special relationship' would be the principal bulwark of peace, writing that:

"It would be the height of unwisdom to assume that an alliance of the English-speaking world, even it were to find favour with American opinion could form by itself the all-sufficient pillar of world security and render superfluous any other foundation for British policy in Europe."

As a result of Carr's leaders, the Times became popularly known during World War II as the three pence Daily Worker (the price of the Daily Worker was one penny). Commenting on Carr's pro-Soviet leaders, the British writer George Orwell wrote in 1942 that:

"all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin".

Reflecting his disgust with Carr's leaders in the Times, the British civil servant Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office wrote in his diary: "I hope someone will tie Barrington-Ward and Ted Carr together and throw them into the Thames." Carr was to elaborate on these ideas he had first advocated in Conditions of Peace in his 1945 book Nationalism and After. In that book, Carr wrote "The driving force behind any future international order must be a belief...in the value of individual human beings irrespective of national affinities or allegiance." Carr argued that just as the military was under civilian control, that likewise so should "the holders of economic power...be responsible to, and take their orders from, the community in exactly the same way". Carr claimed it was necessary to create "maximum social and economic opportunity" for all, and argued that this would be achieved via an international planning authority that would control the world economy, and provide for "increased consumption for social stability and equitable distribution for maximum production". Carr described his views at the time as:

"Like a lot of other people, I took refuge in Utopian visions of a new world order after the war; after all, it was on the basis of such visions that a lot of real constructive work was done, and Churchill lost sympathy by being openly impatient of them. I began to be a bit ashamed of the harsh "realism" of The Twenty Years' Crisis and in 1940–41 wrote the highly Utopian Conditions of Peace -a sort of liberal Utopia, mixed with a little socialism but very little Marxism. It was my most popular book to date because it caught the current mood. But it was pretty feeble."

In 1945 during a lecture series entitled The Soviet Impact on the Western World, which were published as a book in 1946, Carr argued that "The trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable", that Marxism was the by far the most successful type of totalitarianism as proved by Soviet industrial growth and the Red Army's role in defeating Germany and that only the "blind and incurable ignored these trends". During the same lectures, Carr called democracy in the Western world a sham, which permitted a capitalist ruling class to exploit the majority, and praised the Soviet Union as offering real democracy. Carr claimed that Soviet social policies were far more progressive than Western social policies, and argued democracy was more about social equality than political rights. During the same series of lectures, Carr argued that:

"It was Marshal Stalin who, consciously or unconsciously usurping Woodrow Wilson's role in the previous war, once more placed democracy in the forefront of Allied war aims."

Carr went on to argue that:

"The degree of moral favour for the social purposes of Soviet policy which is, according to all observers, generated among the citizens of the Soviet Union is an answer to those critics who used to argue that Marxism could never be successful because it lacked moral appeal."

Finally, Carr claimed that:

"The social and economic system of the Soviet Union, offering-as it does-almost unlimited possibilities of internal development, is hardly subject to those specific stimuli which dictated expansionist policies to capitalist Britain in the 19th century...there is nothing in Soviet policy so far to suggest that the east-west movement is likely to take the form of armed aggression or military conquest. The peaceful penetration of the Western world by ideas emanating from the Soviet Union has been, and seems likely to remain, a far important and conspicuous symptom of the new East-West movement. Ex Oriente Lux."

One of Carr's leading associates, the British historian R.W Davies was later to write that Carr's view of the Soviet Union as expressed in The Soviet Impact on the Western World was a rather glossy, idealized picture that owed much to war-time propaganda about "our gallant Russian ally", and to Carr's very considerable faith in the Soviet Union as offering a superior social system to the West.

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