ABSTRACT
The campaign of liberal internationalists during the inter-war period was instrumental in, and spurred on by, occasional bouts of American intervention in world affairs, of which the Kellogg-Briand pact and the Washington Conference of 1921 were among the most successful. The founding event of the realist-dominated Anglo-American subject of International Relations (IR) was the realist-idealist' debate, that was believed to have taken place in the 1930's. The re-articulation of the realist-'idealist' Great Debate is important, because it demonstrates that Norman Angell's ideas, and by implication the ideas of the liberal internationalist paradigm leading up to Mitrany, were not the victims of a superior realism. The conventional wisdom in IR has it that 'idealism’ was beaten in a Great Debate with realist thinkers such as E. H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr. Similarly, Michael Banks regards realism as the victor in a 1930's debate with idealism–the Great Debate.
