ABSTRACT
For all that realism has dominated IR theory in the twentieth century, it is in many ways liberal attempts to solve ‘the problem of order’ that have largely set the stage for alternative accounts. If, as Hobsbawm has suggested, we see the twentieth century as ‘short’, as essentially ‘beginning’ with the European suicide of 1914-18, then it is with the peace settlement of 1919 and its associated crises that the century ‘begins’ in terms of world order.1 And, with all its flaws and problems, that settlement helped to create a framework of international institutions more formally committed to central liberal principles, activated and directed by liberal ideas and practices, than ever before. It was against that settlement and on the anvil of those aforementioned ‘flaws and problems’ that political realism in its twentieth-century form was initially hammered out, in explicit opposition to liberal ideas about world order, and against liberal ideas too that many members of the English school continued to rail, though in rather different ways.
