J. H. Adam Watson

John Hugh Adam Watson: Professor, center for advanced studies, University of Virginia 1980-2007.

Watson died on August 21 2007 aged 93, and was a pre-eminent figure in the study of international relations; with a career, first as a diplomat and later as an academic. In the late 1950s, Watson was invited to join a group of eminent historians led by Sir Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, known as the English School, which set out to lay the foundations for a modern theory of international relations.

A former diplomat, Watson stressed the importance of diplomacy in international relations, arguing that diplomacy had "reached its full flower as an art" in the European states system from the Italian Renaissance to the end of the First World War.

"He pointed out that professional diplomats were often sceptical of ideology and argued that contemporary diplomacy had four primary tasks. These were: information-gathering abroad; the analysis of such information by foreign ministries at home; developing policy based on that information; and communicating such a policy."<Telegraph (2007) Professor Adam Watson, [1].</ref>

Watson joined the Diplomatic Service in 1937 he was stationed in the Balkans and Egypt during the early part of the Second World War and in Moscow towards its close. In 1950 he served at the British Embassy in Washington before being made head of the African department at the Foreign Office, in which position he had to contend with the Suez Crisis. In 1958 he was appointed CMG.

Watson was ambassador to the Federation of Mali (1960-61) and to Senegal, Mauritania and Togo (1960-62). Watson then went to Cuba (1963-66), and was there at the time of President Kennedy's assassination. He returned to England to serve as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office (1966-68), before leaving to take up a position as diplomatic adviser to British Leyland.

For a brief period in the mid-1970s he worked in Paris as the head of two international charities set up to help publish the work of intellectuals living under oppressive regimes.

Watson's most significant published contributions to the study of international politics were: Diplomacy: the Dialogue between States (1982); The Expansion of International Society (co-edited with Bull, 1984); The Evolution of International Society (1992); The Limits of Independence (1997); and Hegemony and History.

Watson was a member of the founding council of the Institute for the Study of Conflict and when he resigned he went to Paris to run the International Association for Cultural Freedom, the successor to the Congress (but no longer linked to the CIA). Watson was also second in command of the Information Research Department and involved with British Psychological Warfare policy The ISC was filling a role that an increasingly constrained and downsized IRD was no longer able to play. Adam Watson recalled of both organisations:

"Obviously one had a very much feer hand. I think by then it wasn't just a question of getting out certain elementary facts. Indeed, I think one could say not that there was a need for exposing Soviet activities in the world, so much as that in a world where a press values its feedoms and doesn't like to depend on government for its information, it is obvious that there are considerable advantages in a private operation."

Lashmar & Oliver state that not only did a private propaganda organization have the advantage of apparent objectivity and disinterest, but it could also cover areas that state agencies were restrained from, or wary of, covering. One such area was domestic subversion and the activities of the British far left. This was a gap that the ISC was already in the process of filling.

Stonor Saunders' work on the CCF (p412) states that Watson was the CIA SIS liason during his time in Washington in the 1950s and that he co-ordinated the IRD's secret relationship with the CCF.