Arnold Toynbee's Foreign Research and Press Service, 1939-43 and its Post-war Plans for South-east Europe

Abstract

Hindsight is the bad habit of historians. Unlike other bad habits, this one is unavoidable, as it is impossible to write history without hindsight. As a result, historians easily delineate past societies' failures and mock their peccadilloes. Through history, they teach moral and political virtues; sometimes even theodicies and secular religions.2 Some see in history movements, trends and even laws, which can be projected into the future. In an interview in 1974, the eminent British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee, acknowledged certain regularities in human nature and history, but remained healthily sceptical about history's predictive capabilities. 'I don't think anyone can apply this past experience,' he stated, 'even if one can accumulate a large number of examples of it, to the future and make predictions on the strength of it. Our knowledge of the variables will never be complete enough.'3 Yet, Toynbee's thirty-three years as Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and his work during the second world war as head of the Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS) between 1939 and 1943, and subsequently in the Foreign Office Research Department, indicated a belief in history's usefulness in rational policy-making. During the second world war, the British and American governments sought advice on post-war plans from learned academics at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) and its American sister institute, the Council of Foreign Relations.4 Prominent experts in international affairs and history, such as Toynbee's team at FRPS in Oxford, were asked to tell policy-makers not only why the past had broken down, but also how to establish a solid post-war peace. As a result, academics and statesmen sat together in some of the longest historical seminars on record, studying the past in order to draw up