“What book had the greatest influence on the way you think about policy?” The question can’t be answered. Not honestly, at any rate. It can only be constructed. For all I know, the greatest influence came from the didacticism in the tales of Hans Christian Andersen or the brothers Grimm”tales read to me at bedside long before I could read myself. The biggest influences, after all, are the ones we internalize. They’re like oil in an engine. We don’t know they’re there”although we soon enough start to cough and sputter if they dry up. We find then that we can’t run. We have nothing to say.

So the answer has to be constructed. It can’t be induced. And the construction itself must be built on memory”usually a memory from youth, not from maturity. The heads of the young are nearly empty, and their minds impressionable. The heads of the old fill up (or shrink, more likely), so it’s harder to get new ideas in. They bounce off (although to be fair to filled-up heads, in the study of politics this is often because the new ideas aren’t really new after all).

As an alleged policy wonk who has made a modest living out of peanut-gallery observations on foreign policy and international affairs”an academic spectator’s sport if ever there was one”I’d have to construct my own answer in favour of Harold Nicolson’s Peacemaking 1919, first published, in two parts, in 1933, and again, with a new introduction, ten years later, when the world was once more at war.

I read it first as an undergraduate student of history at Dalhousie in the late 1950s. Neither of the two world wars had then acquired the place they now hold among the young, who appear to see them in much the same way as I, at their age, saw the Crusades, or the Wars of the Roses”as the barbarous happenings of a dead past, having no relevance, and offering no lessons, for a living present. But for us the two great shooting wars of the 20th century were far from empty abstractions. Our fathers and grandfathers had served in them. As adolescent males, we wondered and debated (and doubted) whether we would have been able to match their courage if challenged as they had been in combat; whether we would have had the strength to keep faith with our comrades if we had been tortured, like captured members of the Resistance, by the Gestapo; whether we would have tried”somehow”to defend and protect the Jews had we been ordinary Germans in Hitler’s time. The world wars, in short, were still very real in the 1950s, and with atomic bombs spreading about, and sabres rattling, and the forces of the Warsaw Pact and the NATO alliance bristling at one another, it was self-evident that such lessons as could be found in them might still be germane. This was a “modern,” not a postmodern age, and we knew it to be dangerous. States mattered. Nations mattered. Beliefs mattered. And they all had a terrible habit of killing.

It was easy to move, when young, from so melodramatic a perspective to a fascination with Nicolson’s melancholy tale, and his own reaction to it. Nicolson was only 33 and a relatively junior British diplomat when he arrived in Paris in January 1919 to take part in the conference that was supposed to bring the peace that was to end all wars. Like many of the young, though perhaps not so many of the old, he had been gripped and inspired 12 months before by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Four Principles and Five Particulars. He “[t]ook it for granted,” as he later reported, “that on them alone would the Treaties of Peace be based.” They were morally compelling. There was general agreement that they would form the basis of negotiation. And he was sure that President Wilson “possessed unlimited physical power to enforce his views.”

But then the real work began, and one by one the principles came tumbling down, or were compromised beyond recognition. Their collapse started with the very first. The “covenants,” the negotiators soon found out, could not be “openly arrived at,” for if the bargaining were truly in the open, the howls of their respective constituency populations would deprive them of the power to make the concessions they knew they had to make. The concessions themselves, moreover, depended on a willingness to violate, one after another, the very points, principles and particulars that the final result was supposed to embody. The diplomatic agenda was cluttered in any case by shadowy deals and self-serving commitments that not long before had been secretly contrived in response to the necessities, or at least to the conveniences, of war. It was all too clear, as the process wound down, that its intended job could not be done. At the end of the stiffly formal ceremony in which the Treaty of Versailles is signed, Nicolson finds a colleague, Headlam Morley, “standing miserably in the littered immensity of the Galerie des Glaces.” They “say nothing to each other. It has all been horrible.” Back at the hotel, after an apparently sombre celebration with “very bad champagne” and a stroll on the boulevards of Paris, the defeated idealist retreats “[t]o bed, sick of life.”

Here was the portrait of a politics whose stakes were not merely power and property, but life and death”a politics that had not only failed, but failed cataclysmically. It was the portrait also of a clash of optimism and idealism with the brutish realities of world affairs. In the contest, the optimism and idealism lost. It was the portrait, further, of an encounter of an elitist diplomacy with vox populi. But as it turned out, there was precious little to be said for the wisdom or perspicacity of either the diplomats themselves or the populations they were there to serve. Small wonder that one of the lessons that Nicolson identified in his fresh introduction to the 1943 edition was that “Peace must be founded on realities rather than on hopes.”

Perhaps it was not the best of lessons to learn. Certainly former Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy would not think so. But it must have seemed the right lesson to draw in 1943, when the cataclysm that had begun with the failure of Versailles was wrecking its havoc around the globe. And it seemed a persuasive enough lesson for an undergraduate to learn in 1959.

There have been more influential expositors of the realist position by far than Harold Nicolson” Thucydides, for example, in ancient times, and Hans J. Morgenthau in a time that I have to recognize as my own. But Nicolson, with his telling combination of historical analysis and daily diary, made the link to the personal. In so doing, he also made his world-view stick.

Denis Stairs is McCulloch Professor in Political Science at Dalhousie University. He is also a member of the IRPP’s Board of Directors.