ABSTRACT
To many of those who set out to construct the peace to follow World War I, public opinion was ‘the great weapon [to] rely upon’.1 The League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson explained at Mount Vernon in 1918, would safeguard peace and security by ‘affording a definite tribunal of opinion to which all must submit and by which every international readjustment that cannot be amicably agreed upon by the people directly concerned shall be sanctioned’ (Ambrosius 1987:43). The dictatorships of the 1930s, World War II in the 1940s, and the Cold War in the 1950s convinced many that this had been an illusion. Power politics or imperialist expansionism seemed more likely to be fuelled by popular sentiments than to be kept in check by international opinion. ‘Modern history’, Morgenthau wrote in Politics among Nations, ‘has not recorded an instance of a government having been deterred from some foreign policy by the spontaneous reaction of a supranational public opinion’ (Morgenthau 1961:261).
