Chatham House and the Limitation of Nationalism: Empirical Reality of IR Theory in Inter-war Britain

This article explores how the theories and concepts of ‘nationalism’ were incorporated into the newly introduced study of International Relations (IR) in Britain, arguing that scholars’ theoretical attempts to limit the ‘hostility of nationalism’ eventually gave way to the empirical reality of international politics during the inter-war period. It will focus on a report by a research group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), whose official aim was to provide a ‘scientific examination’ of the contemporary developments of nationalism that had dominated Europe since the end of the nineteenth century and were believed to ‘threaten the very future of civilisation’.<br> During the inter-war years, nationalism was heavily criticised as being a regressive political ideology deemed to be a decisive factor of war. Its dramatic growth became a major issue for the IR academics who were studying the bankruptcy of internationalism. They decided to initiate a collective, comprehensive, and scientific study of nationalism within the newly established London think tank. The debate adopted an early modernist and functionalist approach to the concept of nation and national identity with a historical perspective on the stages of nationalism as an account of the economic and social developments of the nation and nationality. At first, the members of the research group sought to provide a theoretical perspective on the limitation of nationalism. As the international situation became increasingly tense, however, they came to accept the concept of nation and nationalism as a fact, no longer assuming that nation states would disappear nor that nationalism should be condemned as the sole cause of discontent and instability.<br> The group’s theoretical studies were highly responsive to the challenges of a deteriorating international environment and theory was gradually reconciled with the empirical reality of international politics. This will defend a historically sensitive approach to the classification of international theories during this period of crisis, avoiding reducing a broader political and social debate to the ahistorical utopian-realism dichotomy of the ‘First Great Debate’. Special attention needs to be paid to a wide variety of institutional settings and collective studies that gave rise to the substantive debates on international affairs in inter-war Britain marking a sharp contrast with the situation in the US where IR debates mainly took place in the academic circles of Political Science.