Peacemaking and International Order after the First World War 1108830501, 9781108830508

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Peacemaking and International Order after the First World War

The Paris peace settlements following the First World War remain amongst the most controversial treaties in history. Bringing together leading international historians, this volume assesses the extent to which a new international order, combining old and new political forms, emerged from the peace negotiations and settlements after 1918. Taking account of new historiographical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study of international history, it views the peace negotiations and settlements after 1918 as a site of remarkable innovations in the practice of international politics. The contributors address how a wide range of actors set out new ways of thinking about international order, established innovative institutions and revolutionised the conduct of international relations. They illustrate the ways in which these innovations layered upon existing practices, institutions and concepts shaped the emerging international order after 1918. Peter Jackson is Chair in Global Security at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of France and the Nazi Menace (2000), Beyond the Balance of Power (2014) and La France et la menace nazi (2017). He has taught and held fellowships and visiting appointments at Carleton University, Yale University, Aberystwyth University, the Institut d’études politiques (Paris) and the University of Paris PanthéonSorbonne. William Mulligan is Professor of History at University College Dublin. He has written widely about the First World War, including The Origins of the First World War (2017) and The Great War for Peace (2014). He has held visiting fellowships at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Princeton and Berlin. Glenda Sluga researches and teaches at the European University Institute in Florence. She is a fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy and of the Royal Society of New South Wales. Her previous publications include The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon (2021), and Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (2013).

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Peacemaking and International Order after the First World War

Edited by PETER JACKSON University of Glasgow

WILLIAM MULLIGAN University College Dublin

GLENDA SLUGA European University Institute

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge 2 8, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York,  10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05-06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108830508 : 10.1017/9781108907750 © Cambridge University Press & Assessment 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Jackson, Peter, 1964- editor. | Mulligan, William, 1975- editor. | Sluga, Glenda, 1962- editor. : Peacemaking and international order after the First World War / edited by Peter Jackson, University of Glasgow; William Mulligan, University College Dublin; Glenda Sluga, European University Institute. : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. :  2022051410 (print) |  2022051411 (ebook) |  9781108830508 (hardback) |  9781108827348 (paperback) |  9781108907750 (epub) : : World War, 1914-1918–Peace. | Paris Peace Conference (1919-1920) | League of Nations. | International organization–History. | Peace-building–History. | Diplomacy–History. | World politics–1919-1932. :  645 .43 2021 (print) |  645 (ebook) |  940.3/141–23/eng/20221214 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051410 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051411  978-1-108-83050-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of Contributors

page vii

Acknowledgements

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Introduction Peter Jackson, William Mulligan and Glenda Sluga     Vocabularies of Self-Determination in 1919: The CoConstitution of Race and Gender in International Law Sarah C. Dunstan

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Recasting the ‘Fabric of Civilisation’: The Paris Peace Settlement and International Law Marcus M. Payk

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State Sovereignty Leonard V. Smith The Crisis of Power Politics Peter Jackson and William Mulligan

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The Challenge of an Absent Peace in the French and British Empires after 1919 Martin Thomas

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   7

A ‘New Diplomacy’? The Big Four and Peacemaking, 1919

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Alan Sharp

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The League of Nations: The Creation and Legitimisation of International Civil Service Karen Gram-Skjoldager v

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The Treaty of Versailles, German Disarmament and the International Order of the 1920s Andrew Webster 10 Planning for International Financial Order: The Call for Collective Responsibility at the Paris Peace Conference Jennifer Siegel 11 Raw Materials and International Order from the Great War to the Crisis of 1920–21 Jamie Martin

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     12 The Great Conversation: A Discussion on Peace after the First World War Carl Bouchard 13 An Alternative International Relations: Socialists, Socialist Internationalism and the Post-War Order Talbot Imlay

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14 The Paris Peace Conference and the Origins of Global Feminism Mona L. Siegel

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15 Colonial Nationalists and the Making of a New International Order Erez Manela

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   16 The Persistence of Old Diplomacy: The Paris Peace Settlement in Perspective T. G. Otte Afterword: New Histories of International Order Glenda Sluga Index

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Contributors

Carl Bouchard, Université de Montréal Sarah C. Dunstan, University of Glasgow Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Aarhus University Talbot Imlay, Université Laval Peter Jackson, University of Glasgow Erez Manela, Harvard University Jamie Martin, Harvard University William Mulligan, University College Dublin T. G. Otte, University of East Anglia Marcus M. Payk, Helmut-Schmidt-University, Hamburg Alan Sharp, University of Ulster Jennifer Siegel, Duke University Mona L. Siegel, California State University, Sacramento Glenda Sluga, European University Institute Leonard V. Smith, Oberlin College Martin Thomas, University of Exeter Andrew Webster, Bishop’s University

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Acknowledgements

The editors wish to acknowledge the financial support of University College Dublin Seed Funding, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for supporting a range of conferences, workshops and seminar series exploring different aspects of the Paris peace settlements after the First World War. We are particularly grateful to students in Glasgow, Florence, Sydney and Dublin, who have taken our classes on peace-making and histories of international order. We have benefited immensely from the privilege of teaching such dynamic, enthusiastic and perceptive students. The same is true of exchanges with friends and colleagues too numerous to mention, in seminars and at conferences on four continents over the past decade. Finally, this book is the fruit of what we, as editors and contributors, learnt from each other, across the borders of departments, institutions and continents in the times of Covid-zooming, on the threshold of a new international order.

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1 Introduction Peter Jackson, William Mulligan and Glenda Sluga

Paris in 1919 was a site of remarkable innovations in the reinvention of international order. A wide range of actors set out new ways of thinking about international politics, established innovative institutions and transformed the conduct of international relations. We can count among the most notable innovations not only the longmaligned League of Nations, but also the first international disarmament commission, the foundation of the International Labour Organization, and the setting up of a mandate system which, in theory at least, was intended to curtail imperial sovereignty. Then there was the dramatic expansion of public opinion and popular discourse on war and peace during the Great War, legitimising more popular participation in international politics. The politics of peacemaking called into question the organising principles of international politics. Even as sovereign states and material power remained at the core of international politics, ideas about selfdetermination and international law now shaped decision-making in unprecedented ways. So significant were the changes in the new international order that power politics no longer provided a source of legitimacy for international policy and could no longer serve as the fundamental logic for the territorial settlements that emerged from great power negotiations. This was a radical departure from the nineteenth-century practices that shaped the peace settlements of 1815, 1856 and 1871. Despite these innovations, Paris is rarely mentioned in the same conversation as other transformative sites of international order such as

1

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Westphalia, Vienna, Bretton Woods or Bandung.1 The reasons for the absence of Paris from the list are not difficult to fathom – a history of bitter ratification debates, disillusioned participants, and a second global war have long cast the Paris peace settlements as failures. Versailles, the palace in which the Peace Treaty of Paris was signed, remains a derogatory term in the disciplinary lexicon of international relations (IR), where peacemaking in 1919 has become synonymous with failure and contrasted with allegedly more successful moments of peacemaking in 1815 and 1945, which are judged truly transformative moments in the history of international order.2 More recently, historians have recast the 1920s as a post-war era of reconstruction, highlighting the long-term legacies of peacemaking in 1919 as the ‘Wilsonian moment’, or rescuing from opprobrium its major institutional outcome, the League of Nations.3 Nonetheless, the significance of the Paris peace in the scholarship on international order remains obscure.4 It is the work of this volume to underscore the contribution of historians engaging with the distinctive and diverse dimensions of this new international order, not least who got to shape it, and how, while also insisting on the importance of this history for how we understand the fate of the international order through the twentieth century.

     Before examining the specific contexts and implications of the Paris peace settlements, let us first turn to the ‘slippery’ concept of international order.5 The number of scholarly publications with ‘order’ in their title is 1

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Paul Schoeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Glenda Sluga, The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). For nuanced versions of this pervasive narrative see G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). There is a vast literature on these topics, much of which is cited in later footnotes. In his important work on the construction of international orders after major wars, John Ikenberry sees Paris as a failure in After Victory, 117–62. Muthiah Alagappa, ‘The Study of International Order’ in Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 34, cited in Amitav Acharya, Constructing Global Order. Agency and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 4.

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formidable and seems to increase daily. Yet most of these studies do not define precisely what is meant by ‘order’. International relations scholars Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit remark on the difficulties inherent in providing a clear definition of this fundamental concept.6 At a minimum, IR scholars understand international order as characterised by predictable and relatively stable patterns of relations between actors in a given international context. When these relations become unpredictable, when the rules and norms that underpin them are no longer observed, the result is ‘disorder’. But the nature of international political order, the conditions under which it emerges, the way it functions and how it ends, are matters of enduring controversy. ‘Realists’ depart from the assumption of an anarchical international system (the absence of an overarching political authority in world politics). States (including empires) compete with one another in an endless competition for security. Order emerges as the product of power-balancing dynamics between states. The balance of power thus provides an underlying logic which should lead states to act in predictable ways.7 For Robert Gilpin, an influential realist theorist, the rules and norms that characterize a given order are a reflection of the distribution of power among its members. The most powerful (usually hegemonic) states create the rules and dictate the prevailing logic of orders in order to protect their interests. The rise and fall of international orders thus reflects the power transitions within the system of states. Orders break down when their chief sponsors no longer possess the material power to enforce them. The result is invariably war and the emergence of a new order fashioned by the victors. The Paris peace settlements, Gilpin argued, were doomed from the outset by the failure to ‘reflect the new realities of the balance of power’.8 Ordering, for Gilpin and for IR realism more generally, is a practice of state power.

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Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit (eds.), Culture and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2020), 25. The most influential proponent of this ‘structural realist’ perspective is Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979); see also John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Randall L. Schweller, ‘The Problem of International Order Revisited’, International Security 26, 1 (2001), 169–73. Robert Gilpin, War & Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 9–49; Robert Gilpin, ‘The Theory of Hegemonic War’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, 4 (1988), 610.

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Another IR approach goes beyond realism to explore the role of shared expectations, rules and institutions in regulating international politics. ‘Liberal institutionalists’ incorporate non-state as well as state actors into their conception of order. This approach attaches great importance to the fact that states often cooperate to mitigate the effects of anarchy. Many of the rules and norms that shape state behaviour promote collaboration rather than conformation. States sometimes go further to create institutions, the most common of which are diplomacy, international law and international organisations, that enable or facilitate consultation and provide structures for cooperation in a given international order. Power remains central to the institutionalist approach. The most powerful states have the most say in shaping institutions and making and altering the rules and laws that give the international order in question its specific character and logic. Members choose to adhere to the rules to benefit from the stability and security on offer and to avoid the costs of nonadherence. And when the most powerful members of the order are no longer willing or able to enforce its rules and laws, the result is virtually always collapse and usually war. Crucially, and in contrast to the realist vision, the operating assumption is that liberal democratic states are more inclined towards restraint and institutionalised cooperation in the interests of peace and stability. Woodrow Wilson’s efforts at the Paris Peace Conference remain a touchstone in much of the institutionalist literature as the first attempt to place democracy and self-determination at the heart of international practices. This first iteration of ‘Wilsonianism’ is characterised as the necessary antecedent to the post-1945 ‘rules-based’ international order.9 The ‘English School’ of IR similarly attributes great importance to rules and institutions – especially diplomacy – in regulating state behaviour and shaping international order. English School scholars conceptualise order as constituting an ‘international society’ that is exclusive and therefore

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Ikenberry, After Victory; see also G. John Ikenberry, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crisis of Global Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020); Tim Dunne and Trine Flockhart, Liberal World Orders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Matthias Schulz, Normen und Praxis: Das Europäische Konzert der Grossmächte als Sicherheitstrat, 1815–1860 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009); for work that does justice to women theorists of order and international relations, see F. M. Stawell, The Growth of International Thought (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929) and Sarah Dunstan, Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler and Kimberly Hutchings (eds.), Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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defined as much by the actors that are ‘inside’ and those that are ‘outside’ the order in question. A minimum level of shared values and understandings is required for an ‘international society’ to constitute order. The Paris peace settlements, according to this school, failed to create a durable international society. The result was a dysfunctional order.10 Sharp distinctions are drawn between the historical existence of ‘international’ orders and the much more formidable challenge of creating a ‘world’ or ‘global’ order (where the survival and prospects of humanity as a whole are the prime motivation for ordering).11 Barry Buzan and Amitav Acharya explore concepts of order across both centuries and civilisations. In a comparative study of Chinese, Indian and Islamic international thought, Buzan and Acharya note that contemporary theorising about international politics within these civilisations draws on cultural traditions that go back hundreds and even thousands of years.12 A key distinction between thinking about order in these three cases and ‘western’ theories of IR is that ‘hierarchy’ is much more important than ‘anarchy’. This is attributed, in part, to the fact that all three civilisations for much of their existence developed as empires with limited regular contact with other polities of similar size and power (and thus limited knowledge of the world beyond their frontiers).13 The result, particularly in the Chinese case, is an intellectual tradition more amenable to ‘relational’ theories of order that emphasise the extent to which actors are to an important extent constituted by their relations with other actors in a given political realm.14 At the same time, Buzan and

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Classic accounts include Martin Wight, Power Politics (London: Leicester University Press, 1978), 200–2; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977); Clark, Legitimacy; Phillips and Reus-Smit, Culture and Order. Bull, Anarchical Society, 8–22 and Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order: Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Barry Buzan and Amitav Acharya, Re-imagining International Relations: World Orders in the Thought and Practice of Indian, Chinese and Islamic Civilisations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Ibid., 113–59. However, as Rebecca Adler-Nissen (among others) argues, the problem may lie with the ‘substantivist’ assumption underpinning most IR theorising that the core object of study must be the individual actor (empires, states, etc.) rather than the relations between actors: Rebecca Adler-Nissen, ‘Relationalism: Why Diplomats Find International Relations Theory Strange’ in Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot and Iver Neumann (eds.), Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 284–308. This is a view with which many diplomatic historians would sympathise.

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Acharya also identify ‘structural similarities of pursuing survival, wealth and power’ when Islamic, Chinese and Indian civilisations encountered actors that posed a challenge to their imperial interests.15 This suggests that competition and conflict are inevitable features of international politics across time, space and civilisational divides. A recent book by Daniel Nexon and Alexander Cooley offers a more schematic framework for thinking about order that distinguishes between the architecture of a given order (the rules, norms and values it is designed to defend and project) and its infrastructure (the practices and relationships that are the lifeblood of the order). Institutions in this conception constitute the sinews of the order and provide sites for contestation as well as cooperation between states and non-state actors. Rather than being either manifestations of the existing distribution of power (realism) or frameworks to enable and promote cooperation (liberal institutionalism), orders are conceptualised as dynamic arenas where actors deploy various forms of power in pursuit of their aims. The establishment of the League of Nations was an important innovation, but the absence of the United States from the League and other fundamental flaws, argued Nexon and Cooley, meant that the Paris peace settlements proved a mere interregnum between two global wars rather than a durable international order.16 Scholars of international law take a different approach. Many are inclined to view law as a necessary precondition for international political order. According to one account, the study of international law is ‘the scientific study of the emergence of order out of chaos’.17 The tendency to understand international law as a core element of peaceful and stable political relations can be traced back to Yuan Dynasty China. The early modern development of legal theory by figures such as Gentili, Grotius and de Vattel laid the foundations for the emergence of international law as a distinct profession and academic discipline in the latter half of the

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Buzan and Acharya, Re-imagining International Relations, 115. Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, Exit from Hegemony: The Unravelling of the American Global Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 31–41. For a set of reflections on international order see David Lake, Lisa L. Martin and Thomas Risse, ‘Challenges to the Liberal Order: Reflections on International Organization’, International Organization 75 (Spring 2021), 248–50. Stephen C. Neff, Justice among Nations: A History of International Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); see also Benedict Kingsbury, ‘The International Legal Order’ in M. Tushnet and P. Cane (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 271–97.

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nineteenth century.18 Even those legal experts who acknowledge that law is but one of several ways to approach the problem of international order tend nonetheless to describe it as ‘a means of governing relations between sovereign states’. ‘Constituting order’ remains the core function of international law.19 The influential jurist and scholar Hermann Mosler argued that ‘legal force’ is the core binding element in international order. ‘[T]he public order of the international community’, according to Mosler, ‘consists of principles and rules the enforcement of which is of such vital importance that any unilateral action or agreement which contravenes these principles can have no legal force.’20 International lawyers differ from one another, however, over big questions such as the sources and nature of international law. Is international law essentially a manifestation of the shared interests of the political actors in a given order? Or does it owe its authority to principles of justice and rights that exist independently of those interests and are applicable ‘regardless of time and space’?21 There are interesting parallels between these debates and those in IR theory. As in IR theory, anarchy is a core structuring concept in international law. International lawyers generally agree that the defining dilemma for law in the international system is the lack of a ‘higher guarantor’ of the rule of law in the international realm (as opposed to the domestic context).22 ‘Realist’ international lawyers argue that the use of law to legitimate empire was inevitable because law depends for its legitimacy and authority on power dynamics in the international realm and in particular the willingness of leading states to enforce it. International law is therefore an instrument for order, but not necessarily for justice. ‘Formalists’, on the other hand, argue that international law is exercised most effectively 18

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Shin Kawashima, ‘China’ in Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 452–77; Kingsbury, ‘The International Legal Order’; Louis Renault, Introduction à l’étude du droit international (Paris: L. Larose, 1879); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Anne Orford, ‘Constituting Order’ in James Crawford and Martti Koskenniemi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 271–89. Hermann Mosler, The International Society as a Legal Community (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1980), 32. Martti Koskenniemi, ‘International Law in the World of Ideas’ in Crawford and Koskenniemmi (eds.), Cambridge Companion to International Law, 53. Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12–59.

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through the power and authority of international institutions. According to this school of interpretation, in order to be legitimate, law must be as a source of justice as well as order. Realists offer a ‘thin’ conception of law and order in which international law at best can only ever be a mitigator of anarchy. Formalists, conversely, advocate a ‘thick’ conception in which international law rests on an authoritative regime that exists beyond the state. Over the past three decades scholars have underlined the ways liberal theories of international law provided justification for imperial expansion and colonial subjugation. Non-white peoples were excluded from the ‘law of nations’ in order to provide a cover of legal legitimacy for practices of empire and exploitation. This work has illuminated the ways in which liberal legal practices embedded structural asymmetries in the international political order of the ‘long’ nineteenth century that continue to shape international politics into the twenty-first century.23 Historians have devoted more attention to the origins and ends of international orders as well as their evolution over time. Yet most historical studies of order agree that the ends of major wars represent the most important moments. James Sheehan observes that the means used to win such wars determine the orders that emerge in their aftermath.24 Yet historians disagree on the nature and character of international orders. Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman point to a widespread belief during the eighteenth century that the distribution of power gave political orders a self-regulating character that did not require design. Drawing on the natural sciences, thinkers saw institutions such as the market and balance of power as having a ‘natural dynamic equilibrium’.25 Adam Tooze similarly considers that international orders are fashioned 23

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Quoted in Jennifer Pitts, ‘Law of Nations, World of Empires: The Politics of Law’s Conceptual Frames’ in A. Brett, M. Donaldson and M. Koskenniemi (eds.), History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 206; see also Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and IR scholar Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 12–59. Sheehan, ‘Five Postwar Orders, 1763–1945’ in Ute Planert and James Retallack (eds.), Decades of Reconstruction: Postwar Societies, State-Building and International Relations from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 350; see also Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990: PeaceMaking and Conditions of International Stability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 14. Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 126–27, 246–47.

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Introduction

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fundamentally by the distribution of military and economic power. Dismissing the concept of ‘collective design’, Tooze insists instead that international orders are fashioned by ‘cruder calculations of power and material constraints’. Tooze argues that ‘the remaking of global order’ after 1918 reflected a ‘new order of power’.26 These interpretations are in line with the thesis of Paul Kennedy, that the evolution of international order reflects the rise and fall of great powers. Kennedy argued that the population size and economic base of member powers constitute the structure of a given order. He further submits that the decline of major powers and change in the international order is accelerated by ‘imperial overstretch’ – the tendency of great powers to assume ever more ambitious strategic commitments that eventually become too great for their economic base to support. The decline of a major power leads to instability, war and the overthrow of the existing order. The mismatch between the claims of a liberal world order and underlying realities of power was particularly acute after 1919. Kennedy emphasised the ‘fragile’ structures of post-1919 politics, including colonial nationalists’ challenge to empire, the residual potential of German power, changing commercial and trade structures, and America’s retreat from an active role in regulating the European balance of power.27 Former policy-maker and theorist of realpolitik Henry Kissinger offers a similar view but attaches more importance to rules and norms. Kissinger contends that all ‘systems of order’ are based on two constituent elements. The first is ‘a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action’ and the second is ‘a balance of power that enforces restraint where rules break down’.28 For Kissinger, power underpins order. Some historians attribute greater importance to ideas and beliefs and are more alive to the way international orders are imagined, negotiated and constructed. Among the most influential is Paul Schroeder, who attributes decisive agency to political and policy elites in the creation and evolution of political orders. Schroeder’s conception of order emphasises the fundamental role of ‘shared understandings, assumptions, learned skills and responses, rules, norms and procedures etc., which agents 26

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Adam Tooze, ‘Everything You Know about Global Order Is Wrong’, Foreign Policy, 30 January 2019; Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (London: Penguin, 2015), 6; Sheehan, ‘Five Postwar Orders’, 351. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Vintage, 1989), 355–75. Henry Kissinger, World Order (London: Penguin, 2015), 7–8.

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acquire and use in pursuing their individual aims within the framework of a shared practice’.29 Interestingly, Schroeder also embraced a systemic perspective that assumed wars happen not because of the blunders or miscalculations of individual policy-makers or states, but rather because of the nature of the international order itself. While political actors have agency in the shaping of a given order, it is the character of the order they create together that makes conflict more or less likely. Schroeder was unequivocal in proposing that an order based on multilateral institutions and restraint is preferable to an adversarial one based on the balance of power. ‘Any government’, he observed, ‘is restrained better and more safely by friends and allies than by opponents or enemies.’30 Schroeder’s framework for understanding international order has been enormously influential. Recent studies by Patrick Cohrs and Peter Jackson have drawn on Schroeder to understand efforts to construct a ‘transAtlantic order’ after 1918.31 Other historians have attached great importance to the ideological content of international orders. For Arno Mayer, the post-1917 order was characterised above all by the confrontation between Bolshevik advocacy of international revolution, on the one hand, and the liberal capitalist response, on the other.32 Or Rosenboim, meanwhile, interrogates the conceptual underpinnings of liberal visions of order. Still others focus on liberal visions of imperial order founded on race.33

29 30

31

32 33

Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, xii. Paul W. Schroeder, ‘Containment Nineteenth Century Style: How Russia Was Restrained’ in Systems, Stability and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 130. For illuminating discussions of Schroeder’s framework see Hamish Scott, ‘Paul Schroeder’s International System: The View from Vienna’, and Jack Levy, ‘The Theoretical Foundations of Paul W. Schroeder’s International System’, both in International History Review 16, 4 (1994), 663–80 and 715–44. Patrick Cohrs, The New Atlantic Order: The Transformation of International Politics, 1860–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Peter Jackson, ‘La conception transatlantique de sécurité du gouvernement Clemenceau à la Conférence de Paix de Paris 1919’, Histoire, économie & société 38, 4 (2019), 65–87. Arno Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959). Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States. 1939–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.), Competing Visions of World Order, Global Moment and Movements 1880s–1930s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Duncan Bell, ReOrdering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020); John H. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory,

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Glenda Sluga takes a broader view in her study of the early nineteenthcentury origins of the present liberal international order. In doing so, Sluga expands the parameters of the concept to include the interplay between the national and the international levels of politics as well as the impact of public attitudes and perceptions on individual and collective practices. Her approach to understanding order captures the influence of class, gender and racial norms, not only on the worldviews of individual actors but also on the institutions they created to enable consultation, preserve peace and perpetuate the social and political order. Sluga argues that the influence of liberal ideology on ordering after 1814 not only embedded capitalist economic institutions and practices in the international system; it also contributed to the progressive marginalisation of women and non-Europeans in that same system.34 There is, therefore, little consensus on either the nature or the character of international order. There is even debate as to what terminology should be used. Buzan and Acharya argue that the term ‘international order’ is unhelpfully ‘linked to the Westphalian type of interstate order’. It should therefore be abandoned in favour of the broader concept of ‘global order’. This argument is not persuasive. It is based on an ahistorical and outmoded understanding of the ‘Westphalian order’ as having inaugurated an international system constituted by sovereign territorial states.35 The ‘international’, as it is used in this volume, denotes the space beyond domestic politics where political actors of various kinds conduct relations with one another. This usage reflects in part the transformations in the history of international relations over the past three decades. The practice of international history has expanded well beyond the – still important – domain of state-to-state or imperial relations to embrace the roles of

34 35

1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 31–58, 131–81; Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2020). Sluga, Invention of International Order. Buzan and Acharya, Re-imagining International Relations, 8–9, 117–22 and 140, 146. This view, long one of the foundation myths of IR theorising, has been dismantled persuasively by Osiander and comprehensively by Nexon. Both argue that the modern concept of national and state sovereignty is a product of Enlightenment thought and was developed and refined by nineteenth-century political theorists. See Andreas Osiander, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations and the Westphalian Myth’, International Organisation 55, 2 (2001), 251–87; and Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires and International Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 265–88.

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international institutions, non- and sub-state actors as well as transnational movements and regional dynamics.36 Despite the lack of a widely accepted definition, it is possible to identify three common characteristics of virtually all international orders. The first is the distribution of various types of power. The economic, military and cultural resources of individual actors constitute currencies of power that determine, to a great extent, the positions they occupy within the order and, crucially, their ability to impose their own interests on the functioning of that order. This aspect of order is often understood as hierarchy.37 But thinking about an order as a ‘field’ of action better captures the dynamics at work. States and other types of international organisations occupy specific ‘positions’ within the field that are reflections of their material and cultural resources. Those actors with the greatest resources are best positioned to shape the rules, norms and procedures that determine the functioning of the order.38 A second fundamental characteristic of international orders are the ‘logics’ that condition relations between members and provide the ‘rules of the game’. These logics are often expressed in terms of rules, norms, shared values and common interests. They are internalised by actors to the extent that they often acquire a ‘taken-for-granted’ status and serve as bases for social action.39 A given logic influences, but does not determine, the limits of action available to members of the order in question. The overriding logic of a given order can be consultative (the Concert of Europe) or adversarial (the balance of power). A consultative logic is

36

37 38

39

Patrick Finney, Advances in International History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006); see the discussion in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, ‘Rethinking the History of Internationalisms’ in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870–1919 (New York: Palgrave, 2006); Glenda Sluga, ‘The Transnational History of International Institutions’, introduction to a special forum, Journal of Global History 6, 2 (2011), 219–22; Glenda Sluga and Sunil Amrith, ‘New Histories of the United Nations’, special issue Journal of World History 19, 3 (2008), 251–74. Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). This conceptualisation of order borrows heavily from the social/cultural theory of Pierre Bourdieu, in particular Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linquistiques (Paris: Fayard, 1982) and The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), esp. 74–142; see also Michael C. Williams, Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Transformation of the International Security Order (London: Routledge, 2007). Peter Jackson, ‘Pierre Bourdieu’ in Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams (eds.), Critical Theorists and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2009), 102–13.

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not necessarily normatively preferable to a logic of power balancing. Political orders resting on common interests, rules and institutions can promote diverse international practices from peace and human rights to imperial conquest and colonial domination. The third characteristic of virtually all international orders is the institutions that exist to facilitate and regulate relations between actors. Historically, the most influential institutions have been diplomacy, international law (which embeds the commercial and financial architecture of the order), international organisations and transnational nongovernmental and civil society organisations. These various institutions are the product of negotiation. While they tend for the most part to reflect the interests of the most powerful states within the order, they are also often shaped by norms and values and can constitute vehicles for bringing about international change. This is clear from the nineteenth-century emergence not only of institutions for the regulation of common standards for weights and measurements, telegraphic communications and public health, but also the creation of transnational associations to promote peace, human rights and the rights of minorities and refugees. It is important to recognise that the constituent elements of a given order are neither static nor permanent. They are always to a greater or less extent in flux as the relative power resources of individual actors change and as institutions evolve as a result of the permanent process of negotiation. Together they provide a framework for analysing the inner dynamics that give orders their ‘predictable’ and ‘stable’ effects.

   The Paris peace settlement has often been deemed an exemplary case of the failure to make an international order. With the ink scarcely dry on the Treaty of Versailles. John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace over three months in a sustained rage at what he considered the vindictiveness and short-sightedness of the peace terms. The result was ‘perhaps the most successful published polemic of the twentieth century’ that denounced the Versailles treaty as a ‘Carthaginian Peace’ that had destroyed all prospects for peace and reconciliation in the post-war era.40 More than a century after its 40

J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt Brace, and Howe, 1920), 151; quote from Charles Maier, ‘Economic Consequences of the Peace, Social Consequences of the War’, Contemporanea 12, 1 (2009), 157. See the thoughtful

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publication, The Economic Consequences of the Peace remains a massive presence in the historiographical landscape and continues to shape popular understandings of the peace conference despite the fact that its core arguments have long since been rejected by the great majority of historians working on this period.41 Decades of detailed historical research drawing on newly opened archives, emphasising the constraints under which peacemakers laboured and underlining the achievements of the conference, have had limited impact. A persistent association of the Treaty of Versailles with severity, disorder and discarded ideals also remains prominent in interdisciplinary discussions of the problem of international order. Yet, among historians, critical assessments of the peace settlement began to give way to more nuanced judgements from the late 1970s. Scholars such as Sally Marks, Pierre Miquel, Charles Maier, Marc Trachtenberg, Stephen Schuker, Georges-Henri Soutou, Antony Lentin and Alan Sharp underlined the social and cultural impact of the war and in different ways emphasised the ambitious and open-ended character of the peace terms. This cycle of research was summarised in the landmark volume The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, edited by Manfred Boemeke, Gerald Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser and published in 1998.42 The appearance of Margaret Macmillan’s Peacemakers in 2001 was arguably the capstone of this revisionist project. Macmillan emphasised the pressure of time, the risk of famine, the social unrest and sometimes mutinous soldiers, factors which limited political leaders’ freedom of manoeuvre. She also stressed the scale of their achievements and dismissed claims that the peace treaties led to the Second World War. While she acknowledged the shortcomings of the treaties, Macmillan argued that the problems of the 1920s and 1930s

41

42

discussion of the literature by Michael Cox in his ‘Introduction’ in The Economic Consequences of the Peace: With a New Introduction by Michael Cox (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019), 1–44. For a selection of comparisons on the Euro debt crisis, Brexit and the Oslo Accords, see Greek bailout ‘a new Versailles Treaty’, says former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – Late Night Live – ABC Radio National; ‘Nigel Farage Likens Brexit Deal to Treaty of Versailles that Drove Hitler’s Rise to Power’, Independent, 27 March 2019; Ferenc Laczó and Mate Rigo, ‘New Versailles or a Velvet Revolution? Brexits and the Exits of Central and Eastern European History, 1916–2016’, Contemporary European History 28, 1 (2019), 57–60; and in a very different context, see Edward Said, ‘The Morning After’, London Review of Books, 21 October 1993; we are grateful to Hussein Omar for this reference. This volume offers an excellent guide to a voluminous scholarship.

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were rooted in the realities of political power, not the failings of diplomacy in Paris in 1919.43 Since the millennium, two significant moves have reshaped our understanding of the Paris peace conferences and their place in accounts of international order. Zara Steiner’s The Lights that Failed marked the first shift. She gave the most comprehensive account of the 1920s as a post-war decade, during which political leaders and others worked to establish a peaceful international system. ‘The treaty of Versailles was unquestionably flawed’, she argued, ‘but the treaty in itself did not shatter the peace that it established.’ Instead, she directed attention towards what she termed the ‘hinge years’ between 1929 and 1933, which marked the path from the process of reconstruction and peacemaking after the First World War to the conditions that led to the Second World War.44 Steiner’s work on the interwar period defies summary, but it led historians to view peacemaking not as a point in time, but as a process that stretched beyond 1919 and to take seriously internationalist prescriptions to resolve security dilemmas. In this vein, historians have revised views of French security policy, Italian foreign policy, Central European politics, Anglo-American diplomacy towards Europe, the League of Nations, international law and disarmament. Their work emphasises the imaginative and constructive efforts to make and sustain peace in the 1920s.45 43 44 45

Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001). Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 16. Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review 117, 4 (2007), 1091–117; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Andrew Webster, Strange Allies: Britain, France, and the Dilemmas of Disarmament and Security, 1929–1933 (London: Routledge, 2019); Patrick Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain, and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sandrine Kott and Joëlle Droux, Globalising Social Rights: The International Labour Organisation and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013); Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship, and Internationalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); Marcus M. Payk, Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedenschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2018); Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Jean Michel Guieu, Gagner la paix, 1919–1929 (Paris: Seuil, 2015); Isabelle Davion, Mon voisin, cet ennemi: sécurité française face aux relations polonotchécoslovaques, 1919–1939 (Lausanne: Peter Lang, 2012); Peter Becker and Natasha

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The second intervention was reflected in Erez Manela’s book, The Wilsonian Moment. Manela showed how the anti-colonial nationalists in India, Korea, China and Egypt took Wilsonian rhetoric about selfdetermination and fashioned it into a language that challenged imperial domination.46 Although empires survived these nationalist challenges in 1919, Manela argues that the roots of decolonization after 1945 are located in the First World War. The disappointments of Paris fuelled longer-term change in the international order. Manela’s argument drew attention to several issues for international historians. First, he brought a wide range of actors into the foreground of the action at Paris. Peace was negotiated not only among the diplomats, soldiers and political leaders, but it was also produced by activists, networks and crowds.47 Second, his book intersected with the rise of global history. Global history challenged Eurocentric views of international politics and directed attention to transnational networks and the flows of ideas around the world. The global dimensions of the Paris settlements and pressure ‘from below’ on international politics has attracted work on issues, including the struggle for women’s rights, citizen diplomacy, labour organisations and humanitarianism.48 Third, Manela directed renewed attention to Woodrow

46

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Wheatley (eds.), Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Kathryn Greenman, Anne Orford, Anna Saunders and Ntina Tzouvala (eds.), Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Antonio Varsori and Benedetto Zacaria (eds.), Italy in the New International Order, 1917–1922 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2020); Alan Sharp, The Consequences of the Peace. The Versailles Settlement: Aftermath and Legacy, 1919–2015 (London: Haus, 2010). For a full list of titles, see: Book Series: Makers of the Modern World (uchicago.edu). Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Erez Manela, ‘The Wilsonian Uprisings of 1919’ in D. Motadel (ed.), Revolutionary World: Global Upheaval in the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 152–74. Tyler Stovall, Paris and the Spirit of 1919: Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism, and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) directs attention towards working class struggles in Paris and connections between consumerism and globalisation as part of the revolutionary moment of world-making; see also Carl Bouchard, Le citoyen et l’ordre mondial (1914–1919): Le rêve d’une paix durable au lendemain de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Pedone, 2008). Mona Siegel, Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights after the First World War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020); Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Tosh Minohara and Evan Dawley (eds.), Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment and a New Order in East Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021); Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Keith David Watenpaugh, Bread from

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Wilson’s ideas. Coinciding with the emergence of the history of international political thought as a distinct field of scholarly research, Manela’s analysis of the dissemination of Wilson’s ideas reflected a growing appreciation of the importance of ideas in constituting the international order.49 By diversifying the social, chronological and geographical frameworks within which the peace settlement has been assessed, these works have enabled historians to think anew about the place of 1919 in the making of international order. Breaking down the classical chronological schema, with its markers of 1919, 1933 and 1939, enables historians to trace the significance of moments, peoples and processes that did not fit easily into a narrative founded on European great power politics. Tracing the ‘continuity of conversations’ across time and space provides potential for more histories of international politics to develop, so that Paris 1919 becomes a fulcrum, or a ‘Ground Zero’, to adapt Natasha Wheatley’s phrase, in explaining international order and its institutions, law and commerce, popular participation and international political thought.50

49

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Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Talbot Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Dominique Kirchner Reill, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Larry Woolf, Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020); Manfred Berg, Woodrow Wilson: Amerika und die Neuordnung der Welt (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2017) Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley, ‘Introduction: Central Europe and the New International Order’ in Peter Becker and Natasha Wheatley (eds.), Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Hapsburg Lands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 3; Susan Pedersen, ‘Foreword: From the League of Nations to the United Nations’ in Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley (eds.), The Institution of International Order: From the League of Nations to the United Nations (London: Routledge, 2018), xii; Sarah C. Dunstan, Race, Rights, and Reform: Black Activism in the French Empire and the United States from World War I to the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 8, 205–6; Natasha Wheatley, ‘Central Europe as Ground Zero of the New International Order’, Slavic Review 78, 4 (2019), 900–11; Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Penguin, 2012), 118; Patricia Clavin and Madeleine Dungy, ‘Trade, Law, and the Global Order of 1919’, Diplomatic History 44, 4 (2020), 554–79; Philip A. Dehne, After the Great War: Economic Warfare and the Promise of Peace in Paris, 1919 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great

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The centenary has provided the occasion to take stock of the Paris peace settlements and set them in a wider perspective. To the extent that one may discern a trend in the literature that has emerged, there is evidence of a return to a more critical position, with greater emphasis on the failure of peacemakers to establish a functioning order.51 Stella Ghervas distinguishes between the Paris peace conferences, which ‘reversed the progress made toward peacemaking of the postNapoleonic era’, and the League of Nations, ‘an ambitious and innovative’ project to make and sustain a peaceful European order. In fusing the League with peace treaties, Ghervas argues, the peacemakers at Paris undermined the legitimacy of the former.52 Several scholars advance new arguments to connect the failure of post-war peacemaking with international upheaval in the 1930s and 1940s. In Adam Tooze’s account, the combination of American exceptionalism and narrow self-interest doomed the promise of international stability and opened the way for the revisionist challenge of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and fascist Italy in the 1930s.53 Patrick Cohrs has underlined a failure to agree on ‘the principles, ground-rules and political foundations of the new order’ after 1918.54 Robert Gerwarth, in his work on the wars that ravaged much of Europe between 1917 and 1923, argues that the peacemakers in Paris fell well short of their ideal of ‘a peaceful and lasting world order.’ Instead, the ethnic conflicts and irredentist claims that pockmarked Central and Eastern European politics in 1918 and 1919 anticipated the ideas and practices that informed the Nazi regime and its ‘overtly exterminationist imperial project’.55

51

52 53 55

War to the Universal Declaration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Borislav Chernev, Twilight of Empire: The Brest–Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1917–1918 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2017); Jerzy Borzecki, The Soviet–Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). See the recent historiographical review by Robert Gerwarth, ‘The Sky beyond Versailles: The Paris Peace Treaties in Recent Historiography’, Journal of Modern History 93, 4 (2021), 896–930; see also the articles in the special issue ‘World Politics 100 Years after the Paris Peace Conference’, International Affairs 95, 1 (2019). Stella Ghervas, Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 162–73, 217. 54 Tooze, Deluge, 26–30, 500–7. Cohrs, New Atlantic Order, 3. Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Penguin, 2016), 171–81, 203–4, 214–15; Arnold Suppan, The Imperialist Peace Order in Central Europe: Saint-Germain and Trianon, 1919–1920 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019), 10.

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Two recent accounts from a global history perspective by Jörn Leonhard and Eckart Conze argue for the open-ended process of peacemaking after 1918, but still strike a pessimistic note. In particular, they show how the injection of ideology into international politics, particularly from 1916, undermined the making of peace. Conze argues that the range of peace projects, the advent of revolutionary Bolshevism in Russia and the complexity of collapsing multinational empires cramped the capacity of the peacemakers to fashion a new world order. He points to the flaws in the League of Nations, which failed to provide France with security, stabilised racial and imperial privilege, and excluded key states.56 Leonhard also zooms in on 1918 and 1919 as a moment of openness, a ‘unique possibility of change’. Nonetheless, this very sense of openness heightened people’s perception of risk. Politicians were constrained by social realities and public opinion, continued violence around much of the world and their own public pronouncements. He concludes by showing how visions of the future became divorced from the liberal progressive ideas, characteristic of the nineteenth century, opening the space for radical, and often violent, projects of the 1920s and 1930s.57 Klaus Schwabe’s account argues that the moral dimension of Anglo-American peacemaking produced a fatal contradiction between idealism and power politics, which excluded Germany, Russia and Turkey from the post-war order. The Treaty of Lausanne, rid of moral overtones, offered a successful counter-example of peacemaking in Europe after 1919.58

 -   These shifting historiographical approaches, particularly the emphasis on the institutional innovations, the importance of ideas, popular participation and the global scope, provide an opportunity to reassess the significance of the Paris peace settlements in the making of international order. The contributors to this volume explore the rich variety of ways in which international order was imagined, negotiated and constructed in the aftermath of the First World War. What ordering concepts were available to peacemakers? Which actors possessed the necessary power and 56 57 58

Eckart Conze, Die Grosse Illusion: Versailles 1919 und die Neuordnung der Welt (Munich: Siedler, 2018), 18–19, 224–75, 466–71. Jörn Leonhard, Der überforderte Frieden: Versailles und die Welt 1918–1923 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018), 19–21, 143–48, 853–56, 863, 1251–52. Klaus Schwabe, Versailles: Das Wagnis eines demokratischen Friedens 1919–1923 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2019), 8, 169–71, 224–34.

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authority to impose their visions of post-war order? What were the effects of ordering concepts, institutions and actors on outcomes in international politics? The contributors do not endorse a single interpretation or answer. But their contributions are guided by these questions, including whether there were rules and institutions that meaningfully shaped an international order that went beyond ‘the claims of state sovereignty and national egotism’ that have conventionally defined our understanding.59 While histories of peacemaking in Paris – whether written by historians or IR scholars – long focused on its ‘outcomes’, this volume is devoted to understanding the connections between the experiences of war, the proliferation of world-making projects and the kinds of international order produced by the peace settlements. Contributions to this volume consider the role of non-state actors in the making of peace, with chapters on transnational networks of feminist internationalists, colonial nationalists and international socialist organisations, as well as the participation of ordinary citizens in what Carl Bouchard calls the ‘Great Conversation’. We devote Part II of the book to the institutional architecture of peacemaking and international order – the dramatic experiments of the League of Nations and international disarmament commission and the reversion to well-established practices by centralising decision-making in the Council of Four. Several chapters focus on international finance and raw materials and underline the absence of international institutions to regulate and manage global economic interdependence. Others take their cue from a dynamic new international intellectual history and analyse the relationship between key ordering concepts, such as self-determination, sovereignty, international law, and power and the peace settlement. At the same time, states remained the most powerful actors in international politics. The most powerful states exercised decisive influence over the settlement that emerged, not least because of their power to ascribe practical meaning to new concepts of collective security and self-determination. Thomas Otte (Chapter 16) questions to what extent the core practices of international politics altered after 1918, while Martin Thomas (Chapter 6) examines how liberal internationalist ideas and institutions facilitated the ‘exploitative governance’ and state violence that enforced imperial rule.

59

See Otte’s chapter in this book (Chapter 16); see also Trygve Throntveit, ‘The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination’, Diplomatic History 35, 3 (2011), 445–81.

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The premise here is that the construction of international order in Paris was a complex negotiation and accumulation of ideas, norms, institutions and interests, many of which dated from before 1914, some of which were new. While ideas and institutions generated their own dynamics, and enabled new ways of practising international politics as well as new resources for the exercise of power, actors adapted language for strategic purposes and sought to mould institutions to their own advantage. By the mid-1920s these processes and innovations had begun to produce stability and peace on the European continent. And yet, similar to muchvaunted orders such as the Vienna system or the present ‘rules-based’ liberal international order, the international order after 1919 was incomplete, ‘bounded’ and Euro-centric, shot through with contradictions, and never entirely stable. Nonetheless, as the chapters show, it also proved innovative and flexible, and its legacies endured beyond the conventional chronological markers of 1939 and 1945, shaping the conduct of international politics throughout the twentieth century.

 ,   If it is a truism among IR scholars that new international orders emerge in the wake of hegemonic wars, most historians contend that the making of a particular order is a process of construction and does not simply reflect the distribution of material power at the end of the war. Wars have altered thinking about international order. Major wars have even provided the backdrop for some of the most notable European thinking about peace, such as Abbé de Saint Pierre’s Projet de paix perpétuelle and Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace.60 The First World War was distinctive for the range of people who produced visions of peace and how they produced those visions, from commissioned artwork to scribbled letters. Ways of thinking about peace were also distinctive, expanding the meaning of peace from the legal ending of war to more far-reaching projects to design all kinds of social relations. In some cases, there was a self-conscious focus on the capacity of institutions to transform political behaviour, even human nature.61 European and non-European political 60 61

Lucien Bély, L’art de la paix en Europe: Naissance de la diplomatie moderne XVIe– XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007). Bruno Arcidiacono, Cinq types de paix: Une Histoire des plans de pacification perpétuelle (XVIéme–XXème siècles) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011); David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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leaders alike produced comprehensive visions of future peace to justify wartime mobilisation. As we will see, these included reordering projects that focused on the management of international political and economic relations, alongside a desire to limit the chaotic effects of war, or even legitimate race equality, a new vision of the economy which favoured casting off state regulation and wartime cartels.62 The new demands for order reflected not only the ambitions of a political elite, but also experts who saw in the promise of nascent social sciences the potential to know the world and therefore regulate it. Throughout the nineteenth century, scientists and engineers had engaged in an ongoing project to subordinate nature to the aims of governments, business, settlers and others. Social scientists, bureaucrats, progressive reformers, revolutionaries, eugenicists – a whole array of people believed that the application of knowledge to social issues could order society and limit or even eliminate conflict. These assumptions were manifest in the late nineteenth century among diplomats, professional experts and campaigners who established institutions and promoted ideas to facilitate international cooperation in specific areas, such as copyright and communications. These developments in turn reflected the thickening connections that bound societies together and laid the basis for more ambitious international-scale social and economic projects during and after the First World War. Making international order demanded choices not only about the design of institutions to regulate conflict, but also the principles underlying legitimate political action and the right to representation and participation in international politics. These categories overlapped and sometimes even constituted each other. So, even though it is not difficult to identify decisions that violated the precepts of the new principles, it is also significant that departures from norms required justifications. Indeed looking at a much wider range of actors, ideas and institutions suggests that 1919 represented a critical moment in the evolution of both decolonisation and feminist internationalism.63 The escalating violence of the war, along with the growing sacrifices demanded of belligerent societies, combined to undermine the legitimacy of traditional power politics. Failure either to prevent the outbreak of war 62 63

Siegel, Chapter 10 and Martin, Chapter 11 in this book. See the relevant essays in Sluga and Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms; Minohara and Dawley (eds.), Asia after Versailles; Siegel, Peace on Our Terms; Dunstan, Race, Rights and Reform.

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or to achieve a negotiated settlement to end the fighting created the conditions for the ideological and geopolitical revolutions of 1917.64 The totalising logic of societal mobilisation connected everyday life to cabinet politics in ways that were unprecedented. Representations of the war as a crusade for international law, self-determination and, after 1917, democracy tended to erode the frontier between domestic and international order and created expectations that framed the peace negotiations.65 Ordinary citizens considered themselves entitled to a voice in the making of peace and even wrote their own projects for a new world order. These projects were wide-ranging because the most intimate human relationships were interwoven with and altered by the war. Popular opinion in belligerent countries tended to associate peacemaking with the remaking of daily life and reform of all kinds of social relations in both the domestic and international spheres.66 Wider participation embedded conflicts in the new international order, while simultaneously creating new modes of resolving conflict. For example, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) worked to overcome war cultures, while challenging the assumption that international politics was a masculine sphere.67 The participation of ordinary citizens, colonial nationalists, feminist internationalists and labour activists in international politics was an opportunity to strengthen the international order by co-opting popular support, but also created expectations that, in the context of 1919, were unlikely to be met. Political elites within all belligerent states responded to new pressures to justify wartime sacrifices by articulating comprehensive visions of future peace.68 The result was an extraordinarily diverse array of projects to remake both domestic and international order, from revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat to the creation of new institutions for the management of international political and economic relations.69 Many of these projects, and the networks supporting them, existed before 1914. As the Great War drew to a close, as Smith argues, political leaders ‘sought 64

65 66 67 68 69

Peter Jackson and William Mulligan, ‘The Great War and the Political Conditions of Internationalism’ in Norman Ingram and Carl Bouchard (eds.), Beyond the Great War: Making Peace in a Disordered World (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2022), 21–47. Smith, Chapter 4, Payk, Chapter 3 and Imlay, Chapter 13 in this book. Dunstan, Chapter 2 and Bouchard, Chapter 12 in this book. Siegel, Chapter 10, Manela, Chapter 15 and Imlay, Chapter 13 in this book. Smith, Chapter 4, Payk, Chapter 3 and Manela, Chapter 15 in this book. Siegel, Chapter 10, Martin, Chapter 11 and Webster, Chapter 9 in this book.

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to create the reality they purported to describe’.70 But the experience of the war and the manner of its ending – civil war and revolution, the shatterzone of empires, humanitarian crises – had a radicalising effect that, in Eastern Europe in particular, favoured more radical solutions to the problem of order and created the political conditions for enduring violence. Recent work on the post-war period has emphasised the significance of persistent paramilitary and political violence across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as large swathes of Russia, the Caucasus and Asia Minor after the armistice.71 Robert Gerwath, one of the leading figures in this new literature, stresses the need to ‘go beyond a narrow engagement with the negotiations in Paris and the Versailles Treaty in particular’ to consider the very considerable disorder that prevailed beyond Western Europe. Along with a number of other scholars, Gerwath argues that we must recast the classic 1914–18 chronology of the Great War to include hostilities that began in 1911 and subsided only in 1923.72 This scholarship on post-war disorder has added new dimensions to our understanding of this era of the Great War. But endemic political violence in the former imperial borderlands did not determine the international system after 1918. By bringing an end to more than four years of a great power war of unprecedented scale and intensity, the armistice created the political space for the ambitious renegotiation of political order that took place in Paris. What is more, new norms and practices introduced at the peace conference, including self-determination, sovereignty and plebiscites, provided a logic and a framework within which much of the violence in the borderlands took place.73 Ordering in Paris did not bring an end to disorder elsewhere. But it was pivotal in establishing the wider context within which political violence played out in Europe and beyond. 70 71

72

73

Smith, Chapter 4 in this book. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (eds.), Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Gerwarth, Vanquished. Robert Gerwath, ‘The Sky beyond Versailles: The Paris Peace Treaties in Recent Historiography’, Journal of Modern History 93, 4 (2021), 896–930; Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 19–100; Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan and Andreas Rose (eds.), The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Smith, Chapter 4 and Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this book; Wheatley, ‘Central Europe as Ground Zero’.

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       In 1919, peacemaking was a complex political process that began long before delegates reached Paris and remained a work in progress after the principals had left. Major decisions about territory, security and the international economy were postponed and these issues dogged the path from war to peace throughout the 1920s. It took time for new institutions created as part of the settlement to find their role and some, such as the Permanent Court of International Justice, were marginalised. Indeed, the peace treaties did not mark the end of violence in many regions of the world. Empires systematically denied juridical protection to their subjects, whose lived experience was characterised by violence. Most ‘post-war’ periods are shaped by continued violence and upheaval (for example, revolts in Italy and Spain after the Vienna Congress or the establishment of dictatorships and ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe after 1945). These conditions were also intrinsic to the new international order, and reflect how experiences of order and disorder are subjective and practices of ordering can be violent and oppressive as well as peaceful and conciliatory. Historians have long noted the delegitimising effects of the absences of Germany and Soviet Russia from the peace settlement. These absences also limited the resources and political will to sustain collective action. Soviet leaders challenged the ideological underpinnings of the settlement, whereas German leaders used the language of self-determination and disarmament to pursue their own agenda for change and to delegimitise a peace settlement that was being imposed on Germany. Even before the United States Senate rejected the treaty, its refusal to underwrite international economic cooperation and Wilson’s handling of crises over Fiume and Shantung raised questions about the capacity, indeed the will, of American diplomacy to manage the international order. On the other hand, the international order proved able to accommodate change, including the integration of Germany in the mid-1920s, supported by American financial diplomacy. Iraq joined the League in 1932, while imperial conferences recognised the autonomy of dominions within the British empire. As we show in this volume, popular mobilisation characterised the construction of the international order in 1919. Groups often excluded from participation in international politics became part of the ‘great conversation’. In other words, the conversations in cafes, in markets and in people’s homes constituted an expanded public sphere. The act

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of writing letters to leaders, notably the US President Wilson, reflected people’s sense of their own right to participate – people from a range of countries, whether imperial, colonial or post-colonial. Such transnational popular adulation bolstered Wilson’s power in early 1919, but it came with expectations of transformation. These expectations persisted after the treaties were signed as ordinary citizens from around the world continued to write letters in their thousands to the League of Nations, often in the form of petitions. Letters and other practices of popular mobilisation placed diverse issues on the agenda of high politics, from racial equality and women’s rights to disarmament.74 The expansion of public opinion did not move peacemaking in one particular direction; rather, it allowed groups to stake claims, sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting with each other. For example, some feminist activists deployed civilisational hierarchies to colonial questions, while other feminist groups, such as the Wafd Women’s Committee in Egypt, criticised their exclusion from politics at the hands of male colonial nationalists.75 At first glance, the achievements of the feminist activists who gathered in Paris were limited as they failed to secure female representation in the peace negotiations. Though inter-allied women delegates presented proposals to the Labour Commission, there were no female voting delegates at the International Labour Organization’s inaugural meeting in November 1919. These delegates and other feminist activists contributed to a broader imagination of what constituted peace and international politics, one that embraced health, education, human trafficking and disarmament, and also the fundamentally ‘international’ status of the rights of women. Yet even though Article 7 of the Covenant opened employment opportunities for women in the League of Nations, the Council of Ten refused to legitimate the international as an appropriate domain in general for addressing the woman question.76 Similarly colonial nationalists strategically used Wilsonian rhetoric to advance their claims, but many did not even make it to Paris. Britain blocked the travel of members of the Indian National Congress and arrested the Egyptian nationalist leader, Saad Zaghlul. Imperial authorities violently suppressed protests and revolts in Korea, Egypt and India, while the Chinese delegation refused to sign the peace treaty amid popular outcry in China at the terms. 74 75

Bouchard, Chapter 12, Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 and Webster, Chapter 9 in this book. 76 Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this book. Siegel, Chapter 10 in this book.

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The international order accommodated and arguably strengthened imperial regimes. Yet it also created space for colonial nationalist movements to challenge the legitimacy of imperial rule. Paradoxically, therefore, 1919 is a pivotal moment in the histories of both imperial expansion and decolonisation.77 International socialism, meanwhile, fractured utterly during and after the war. But different strands remained committed to international cooperation, albeit in their own particular ways and on their own terms. While the Comintern prescribed world revolution and the overthrow of capitalist economic relations as an alternative order, the Second International promoted international cooperation and ultimately sought to work through governments. The influence of international socialist collaboration was evident not least in the reparation settlements of the mid-1920s.78 In challenging the international order, feminists, colonial nationalists and socialists shaped its development. Through their strategic use of language, they established not only the validity of their own claims, but they also contributed to reimagining what peace meant and international ordering. Peacemaking, for these movements, required far-reaching international and social reform. Allied leaders also anticipated popular demands. The establishment of the International Labour Organization grew out of wartime cooperation between Allied trade unionists that was mirrored within the Central Powers. Its creation was a response to the Bolshevik alternative of revolution and class war, as was its corporatist vision of worker participation in the creation of a new social and economic order. The Mandates system, meanwhile, acknowledged the illegitimacy of simply seizing colonial territory. The reporting requirement to be overseen by the League of Nations was part of a normative agenda that aimed to temper colonial misrule and abuse.79 When we look at the claims of colonial nationalists and feminist internationalists to widen participation, they demanded institutional reform, justified on the grounds of self-determination.80 The result was that the scope of peacemaking broadened considerably at Paris. Peacemaking encompassed a wider range of political issues and social relations than previous peace settlements, reflecting the effects of wartime

77 79 80

78 Manela, Chapter 15 in this book. Imlay, Chapter 13 in this book. Imlay, Chapter 13, Manela, Chapter 15, Siegel, Chapter 10 and Thomas, Chapter 2 in this book. Manela, Chapter 15 and Siegel, Chapter 10 in this book.

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mobilisation on so many aspects of life and the appreciation of the connections between social reform and international relations.

        The experience of war altered the normative vocabulary of international politics. The rhetoric of wartime mobilisation provided a new language that was used to justify internationalist reform projects. The war undermined the legitimacy of power politics as the predominant discourse of international relations. Even in private diplomatic negotiations, it had become difficult to use the language of the balance of power to substantiate territorial, economic, and military claims.81 New principles grounded in self-determination, international law and sovereignty were elaborated to underpin the machinery created to regulate future conflicts of interest in international politics.82 Norms did not dictate political choices, but they provided a logic for the mitigation and peaceful resolution of future conflicts. Actors also had to account for their decisions within the normative vocabulary of the post-war order. The transformative effect of changing ideas about international order remains a matter of debate. ‘New concepts, instruments and methods’ were added to the diplomatic toolkit, argues Otte, without transforming the ‘core of diplomacy’, while Thomas emphasises how liberal internationalist ideas could easily justify imperialist rule.83 Other contributors place more weight on the transformative effects of new concepts, notably self-determination. Self-determination was closely associated with President Woodrow Wilson, but a wide range of actors developed their own definition to self-determination; indeed, most had developed their ideas before Wilson. It is well-known that Wilson never used the phrase ‘self-determination’ in his ‘Fourteen Points’ speech to Congress in January 1918, though it slipped out the following month. It is equally well-known that peoples across the globe attributed ‘self-determination’ to Wilson’s programme. The invocation of Wilson to justify programmes of self-determination around the world magnified the American president’s appeal. But it also eroded his power to shape the post-war normative environment because global public advocacy of this concept took on a life of its own that was quite independent of the 81 82 83

Jackson and Mulligan, Chapter 5 in this book. Dunstan, Chapter 2, Payk, Chapter 3 and Smith, Chapter 4 in this book. Otte, Chapter 16 and Thomas, Chapter 6 in this book.

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president’s original intentions. Wilson’s vision limited self-determination to the ‘civilized’, autonomous citizen. Although excluded from Wilsonian visions on the grounds of race and gender, women and colonial subjects took up the language of self-determination to advance their claims to citizenship and participation in the international order. The discourse of self-determination became a strategic resource, upon which different groups drew to advance specific interests.84 The task of rendering the concept of self-determination the basis for a functioning political order was a massive challenge, particularly as it had to be woven into other organising principles, notably sovereignty and international law. Just as problematic was the contestation of the content of these concepts. Wilson’s vision foresaw autonomous (white, male) citizens constraining sovereign nation-states to observe ‘liberal’ principles of peace and justice. V. I. Lenin, the newly installed leader of Soviet Russia, sought to recast sovereignty in terms of a world revolution that would render the very concept of the nation-state meaningless. Political theorists Max Weber and Carl Schmitt provided a third option for advocates of sovereignty, combining nineteenth-century romanticism, ethnic claims and the lessons of power politics to maximise the power of the sovereign state.85 Understandings of international law varied significantly, so that the translation of discourses of ‘law and justice’ into a coherent basis for the peace settlement proved formidably difficult. Variation arose from national difference and political preference. For French politicians, enforcement by sanctions, including military sanctions, must constitute a fundamental attribute of an order based on international law. For the American president, however, ‘the judgement of the tribunal of world opinion’ constituted a more effective sanction than any international sanction ‘because it is more powerful and can impose itself without technical subtleties’.86 Lawyers drafted the treaties to give legal expression to other principles, such as the management of plebiscites, mandates and minority treaties.87 Building on the existing conceptions of ‘order’, we can see that the profusion of ordering concepts had four major consequences for peacemaking. First, politicians bargained over the application of principles, as

84 85 86 87

Dunstan, Chapter 2, Siegel, Chapter 10, Smith, Chapter 4 and Manela, Chapter 14 in this book. Smith, Chapter 4 in this book. Wilson quoted in Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power, 270. Payk, Chapter 3 in this book.

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well as over territory and economic resources. The articulation and dissemination of new ordering logics reflected the political interests of the most powerful state actors at the peace conference. Similarly, the universal application of a particular principle conferred rule-making advantages on particular states and was an important source of power in its own right.88 Second, principles had effects and shaped the logic of the peace settlement, often in unintended ways. Measuring the terms of the peace settlement against declared principles necessarily illustrates numerous violations and compromises, but this also sets the bar of judgement at an impossibly high level. Making peace required compromise, principles shaped key territorial decisions and practices, from the constitution of new nation-states to plebiscites, and decisions at odds with key principles required justification. Third, the multiple meanings layered onto key ordering principles created the potential for disorder, as the different meanings created scope to justify conflicting solutions. The convention of honouring wartime treaties led Lloyd George and Clemenceau to support Italian claims under the secret articles of the treaty of London despite conflicting with the nationality principle and newly declared standards of transparency. The same was true of decisions to grant Poland a corridor to the Baltic Sea through East Prussia and to deprive Germany of much of the Sudetenland. These measures were aimed at ensuring the strategic viability of the new Polish and Czechoslovak states. But they were imposed on Germany in contravention of the logic of self-determination. ‘We must accept inevitable infringements to the principle of self-determination’, Clemenceau argued, ‘if we wish to safeguard the principle itself.’89 Fourth, the relative marginalisation of traditional forms of power as an organising principle of peacemaking undermined the chances of achieving political consensus on central questions about security. French projects to break up Germany and transform the European strategic balance, for example, had to be phrased in the language of self-determination and the greater good of the international community. The result was a series of unsustainable arguments about the ethnic status and political preferences of the German populations in the Rhineland that could easily be dismissed. The absence of an agreed measure of military power similarly

88 89

Sharp, Chapter 7 in this book. Clemenceau quoted in Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power, 243.

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hampered Anglo-French efforts to disarm Germany and to establish the basis for more far-reaching agreements about arms limitations.90

     Institutions were both an expression of principles and instruments intended to change the logic of international politics. The peace settlements created a dense network of international institutions centred on and around the League of Nations. Throughout the post-war decade, the League remained a site where ‘deft realists’, such as Austen Chamberlain, Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, could negotiate. But it also produced new ways of conducting international politics. The Secretariat, the permanent bureaucracy of the League, was a ‘radically novel invention’. Although its composition reproduced the hierarchies of European domination and power politics, it promoted new ways of conducting international politics. Eric Drummond, the founding Secretary-General, used the Secretariat’s Information Section to construct and buttress international public opinion. He and other diplomats at Geneva laid claim to represent ‘the greater international good’ that included the rights of stateless persons and refugees, minorities, victims of human trafficking and the drug trade. The League provided a forum for states beyond the circle of great powers to shape international politics and to resolve regional conflicts.91 The League was central to the management of the international order with oversight of mandates, disarmament and plebiscites.92 Drummond was a realist in that he was keenly aware of the need to balance the interests of the great powers with efforts to carve out an autonomous space for the League in international politics.93 In this way, despite evidence of the incorporation of social movements and new political ideals in the form of the new League, older institutional forms of great power politics persisted, as leaders wrestled with humanitarian crises and the collapse of state structures at the same time as they had to settle classic questions about territory and military security. For example, the Council of Four, set up in March 1919, was the most obvious expression of entrenched hierarchies of power in international 90 91 92 93

Webster, Chapter 9 and Jackson and Mulligan, Chapter 5 in this book. Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 in this book. Thomas, Chapter 6, Webster, Chapter 9, Payk, Chapter 3 and Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this book Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 in this book.

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politics. At one level, the Council of Four was an ad hoc solution to the complexity of negotiating the peace settlement, but its establishment also reflected long-standing practices by which the great powers arrogated to themselves the responsibilities for ordering international politics. Sharp examines how, locked in meetings with one another over the course of several months, each leader brought their ‘national agenda and personal vision’ to negotiations, creating conditions that lent themselves to bargaining.94 Britain and France, as Thomas shows, continued with arbitrary, exploitative systems of imperial rule, despite the changes introduced via the League’s mandate system.95 The Allies had institutionalised their economic cooperation gradually over the course of the war. Institutions such as the Allied Maritime Transport Council and the Supreme Economic Council provided a basis for the management of the post-war international economy. French leaders pushed for the continuation of Allied wartime economic institutions – just as Clemenceau aimed to maintain the wartime alliance with British and American guarantees of military assistance. American leaders, on the other hand, were loath to formalise economic cooperation, to mutualise debt obligations, and to extend state management of the domestic and world economy. Their opposition reflected a preference to roll back the state’s involvement in the economy as well as calculations of American national economic self-interest.96 In contrast to the aftermath of the Second World War, when American power underwrote international economic cooperation, American decisions against proposals for deepening economic collaboration undermined international economic order. The result accentuated the pursuit of national economic interests from the demands for reparations to the rise in interest rates. The effects of economic upheaval spilled into other domains, from the exploitation of colonial labour to geopolitical strains in Europe and East Asia. Post-war economic dislocation resulted in various innovations to promote greater cooperation during the 1920s, including cartels sanctioned by imperial states and the Bank of International Settlements. Yet, for all the efforts put into governing the economic dimensions of international order during the post-war decade, the Great Depression underlined the fragility of international economic cooperation.97 94 95 96 97

Otte, Chapter 16 and Sharp, Chapter 7 in this book. Thomas, Chapter 6 in this book. Siegel, Chapter 10 and Martin, Chapter 11 in this book. Thomas, Chapter 6, Siegel, Chapter 10 and Martin, Chapter 11 in this book.

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The ‘experiment’ in peacemaking in 1919 left the way open to very different types of international order. Take as an example the place of empire in world politics. Three different paths for empire were marked out in 1919: the often-violent expansion and consolidation of imperial rule; the establishment of a mandate system that curtailed imperial sovereignty; and, finally, the strategic use of the language of self-determination by colonial subjects to bolster claims to citizenship rights, home rule, and even independence. The day after the signing ceremony at Versailles, South African Jan Smuts declared that the ‘real work of making peace will only begin after this treaty has been signed and the definite halt has been called to the destructive passions that have been desolating Europe for nearly five years’.98 To paraphrase Ernest Renan, making peace and sustaining an international order was a ‘daily plebiscite’, requiring diplomatic commitment, strategic restraint, the construction of a sense of international public good, and popular support. A harmony of interests was never possible, but new norms, practices and institutions provided fresh approaches and new international machinery for the management of conflict. By the early 1930s that commitment to the ‘daily plebiscite’ of maintaining peace had frayed and the outbreak of the Second World War remains an irrefutable criticism of peacemaking after the First World War. The ‘limited durability’ of the Paris peace settlements continues to require explanation, but the Second World War did not extinguish the potential of international order in Paris in 1919. The UN, European integration, decolonisation, greater popular participation in international politics, the codification of international law and the restraints on power politics had their roots in the possibilities of peacemaking after the First World War.

98

Cited in William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2014), 301.

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  ORDERING CONCEPTS

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2 Vocabularies of Self-Determination in 1919 The Co-Constitution of Race and Gender in International Law Sarah C. Dunstan

The phrase ‘self-determination’ has had a storied trajectory throughout the twentieth century. It has manifested variously, and messily, as a political principle, a legal possibility and an instrument of international order. While self-determination was not explicitly included as a right in the Covenant of the League of Nations signed in January 1920, it was nevertheless a political principle that implicitly pervaded the legal framing of the League of Nations’ plebiscites, the Mandate System and the minorities protection treaties signed as part of the Peace Conferences.1 Moreover, it was an idea that motivated countless nationalist and anti-imperialist activists seeking to reconfigure world order in the aftermath of the First World War. This chapter is an effort towards thinking through how we might study the relevance of ideas – and specifically the idea of self-determination – in the shaping of an international order. In two articles, published in 1992 and 1993 respectively, legal scholar Nathaniel Bermann made an important methodological intervention into understandings of international law in the interwar period that has been subsequently overlooked in analyses of the legacies of the war and the 1919 peace treaties. In the first article, he argued that ‘much of interwar international legal writing can be seen as a form of [high] Modernism’, not in terms of ‘direct correlation’ or influence but as ‘an overlapping

1

‘The Covenant of the League of Nations’ in The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp, accessed 19 December 2020.

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series of responses’ produced by commonalities in the cultural situation.2 In the second article, Bermann pushed this further to argue that the writing of interwar international lawyers ‘bequeathed us the very framework within which we continue to think about international law’s relationship to nationalism’.3 This resonates with Clifford Geertz’s contention that law is ‘constructive of social realities rather than merely reflective of them’.4 So too does it intersect with Paul K. Saint-Amour’s 2015 argument that the work of key international jurists provided an important insight into the mentalities of the 1920s. In his case, ‘by reading interwar fiction alongside contemporary works by air power theorists, international jurists, and civil defense writers’ he showed ‘how the coercive psychodynamics of mass dread commonly associated with the Cold War’ actually emerged as a palpable threat during the 1920s.5 Read together, the approaches suggested by Bermann, Geertz and Saint-Amour’s scholarship show how new possibilities open up in intellectual history when we eschew a linear, genealogical approach to thinking about the relationship of ideas and instead adopt a more relational one. Something more akin to the concept of ‘montage’ developed by the philosopher Walter Benjamin. The idea that we can glean specific historical insights by arranging non-self-evidently connected objects of inquiry. Benjamin describes this process thus: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.’6 In this chapter, I ask what happens when I apply this approach to the immediate aftermath of the First World War, in regard to the concepts of self-determination, national belonging and citizenship rights, ideas that have lived very different lives as legal, political and cultural principles but that have also been elemental to descriptions of the new post-war

2 3 4 5 6

Nathaniel Bermann, ‘Modernism, Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction’, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 4, 2 (1992), 352. Nathaniel Bermann, ‘“But the Alternative Is Despair”: European Nationalism and the Modernist Renewal of International Law’, Harvard Law Review 106, 8 (1993), 1795. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 232. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopaedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and, K. McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1939] 1999), 460.

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international order.7 First, I will briefly parse the notion of selfdetermination in relation to concepts of state sovereignty, nationalism and minority peoples as they developed out of the promises of Allied leaders. Then I will turn to the efforts of non-state actors to leverage this moment to stake their claims to self-determination, citizenship rights and national belonging. Finally, I want to gesture towards a reading of these ideas against some of the legal discussions about self-determination, sovereignty and suffrage that occurred at the Paris Peace Conference and in its immediate aftermath. In so doing, I contend that we need to understand the particular visions of international law that emerged in this period as part of a much larger political and cultural conversation about the relationship between the state and national, racial and gendered belonging. The sense of crisis and deep dissatisfaction with pre-war iterations of such discussions threw all of these categories into question.8 This gives us insight into the legacies of the 1919 world order that go beyond the success or failure of the League of Nations as an international institution. From the beginning, the principle of the nation, and the associated complications of the constitution of the nation, were crucial components of the peace negotiations. Glenda Sluga has shown how ‘sexual difference was intrinsic to prevailing conceptualisations of “the principle of nationality” and national self-determination’ during these discussions.9 Here I want to build upon her meticulous reconstruction of the explicit references to ‘sex difference’ by the diplomats, lawyers and experts constructing the post-war world order, as well as her focus on elite European (or white) women, by bringing this history into conversation with the claims to self-determination made by anti-colonial actors throughout the empires of Britain, France and the United States. While these groups deployed similar vocabularies and frameworks to stake their claims, they are not

7

8

9

On the ‘murkiness’ of self-determination, see Eric Weitz, ‘Self-Determination: How a German Enlightenment Idea Became the Slogan of National Liberation and a Human Right’, American Historical Review 120, 2 (2015), 462–96. While I focus primarily on the development of the concepts of self-determination, national belonging and citizenship rights here, it is important to note that this post-war moment was characterised by the emergence of new vocabularies around a number of legal and political principles integral to the logics of world order. This can be seen in the contemporary trajectories of the concepts of sovereignty and international law, explored respectively by Smith, Chapter 4 and Payk, Chapter 3 in this volume. Glenda Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination: A Gender Re-Reading of the “Apogee of Nationalism”’, Nations and Nationalism 6, 4 (2000), 495–521; Glenda Sluga, Nation, Psychology and International Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 123–32.

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usually studied in tandem. In part, this is because these groups were usually explicit in the way that they foregrounded either a gendered or an ethnic-national identity.10 As Kumari Jaywardena has made clear, anti-colonial leaders often had ‘no intention of applying the concepts of . . . equality and self-determination to the masses of women . . . in their own countries’, despite the active role they played in nationalist movements.11 I contend, however, that a comparison is useful on several grounds. These groups deployed overlapping vocabularies of ideas around self-determination which are only apparent when they are considered in tandem. Examining this overlap reveals how, in 1919, questions of race and gender often intersected – indeed, were co-constitutive – to shape understandings of the principle of self-determination, as well as its relationship to national belonging and citizenship. When this overlap is considered in relation to contemporary discussions and debates within international law, we can see far more clearly how such understandings operated in a reciprocal manner with the construction of legal ideas. Engaging these points of intersection allows us to better reckon with their differences, too, showing clearly how the legal and cultural vocabularies were variously appropriated to further diverse ideas.

,  ,      - The First World War, and the Bolshevik Revolution, proved a turning point in thinking about the constitution of states and their relation to each other on the international stage. From May 1916 – almost a year prior to American entry into the war in April 1917 – the American President Woodrow Wilson publicly called for a new world order that overturned traditional ‘balance of power’ dynamics in favour of a ‘community of power’.12 The peace, for Wilson, would comprise a new international community grounded in ‘equality of rights’. Such a community would ‘neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small, 10 11 12

Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination’, 514. Kumari Jaywardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Verso, [1986, reprint] 2016), 17. ‘Peace without Victory Address’ in Arthur Link et al. (eds.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–94, hereafter PWW), vol. 40, 533–39; Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 111–13.

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between those who are powerful and those that are weak’. Inclusion in this community was to be contingent upon the ‘legitimate development of the peoples themselves’.13 Wilson grounded these principles in American republicanism but argued that they were values held by ‘forward looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation’.14 Adom Getachew has argued that Wilson, alongside the South African politician Jan Smuts, brought their particular visions of self-determination to the 1919 peace negotiations in reaction to the radical visions of worker’s self-determination espoused by Lenin and Stalin as part of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The two men saw self-determination as the inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon race and the international order they brought into being was designed to make ‘self-determination safe for empire’.15 Indeed, in the 1917 ‘Declaration of the Rights of the People of Russia’, the Congress of Soviets had argued for ‘the right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination, even to the point of separation and the formation of an independent state’.16 Only months after this declaration, speaking to Congress on 11 February 1918, Wilson offered the most famous version of his vision of a new world order organised around nation-states and predicated upon the right of self-government. ‘All welldefined national aspirations’, Wilson declared, ‘shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction.’17 A few days earlier, the British Prime Minister Lloyd George had also updated British war aims to include the principle that territorial settlements must be based on ‘the right to selfdetermination or the consent of the governed’.18 Like Wilson, Lloyd George emphasised that international relations henceforth would be based on the notion ‘equality of right among nations, small as well as great’.19 In a world of states and empires comprised of multiple ethnic, religious and linguistic groups, two questions quickly emerged: what constituted ‘a people or nation’ and which national groups had the right to 13 15 16 17

18 19

14 ‘An Address to the Senate’, 22 January 1917, PWW, vol. 40, 536. Ibid., 539. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 41. ‘Declaration of the Rights of the People of Russia’, 2 November 1917, www.marxists .org/history/ussr/government/1917/11/02.htm. Woodrow Wilson, ‘Address to Congress of February 11, 1918’ in Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (eds.), Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, War and Peace, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1927; [reprint ed., New York: Kraus, 1970]), 180. British War Aims, Statement by the Right Honourable David Lloyd George, 5 January 1918 (London: HMSO, 1918). Ibid.

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self-determination?20 In Lenin’s vision, national self-determination directly referred to the right to statehood of culturally or historically defined ethnic groups. In contrast, Wilson seems to have been gesturing towards the right of a ‘capable’ or ‘civilised’ population to be ruled only through consent. Capacity, or the status of being ‘civilised’, was, for Wilson, roughly equated with whiteness.21 One of the key challenges for the international community stemming from Wilson’s vision, predicated as it was on hierarchies of race and gender, were the implications for those minority groups living within nation-states deemed developed but that were themselves considered incapable of self-determination. Most obviously, this created the dilemma of the extent of self-determination to be granted those populations living in American, British or French imperial territories. Many colonial peoples clearly understood self-determination as a principle to be universally applied, even if their conceptualisation of the link between race and nation-state belonging was quite different to the thinking of Wilson and Lloyd George. Neither man, nor any of the Allied powers who set out to negotiate the peace at Versailles, believed that each nationality – a category in any case that would prove too slippery to precisely define – should have its own nation-state. But nor did many of those who mobilised the principle of self-determination to stake a claim to rights. To the contrary, many saw it as a pathway to political citizenship rights within empire, a status that many in the British and French empires did not hold for reasons of race, religion and gender.22 Indeed, Lloyd George had earlier, in June 1917, suggested that this principle would be applicable to colonies too, when he stated that ‘the wishes, the desires, and the interests’ of the people in previously German

20 21

22

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Internationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21–22. This observation is borne out not just in Woodrow Wilson’s remarks around selfdetermination but in his five-volume History of the American People (New York: Harper & Bros., 1901–2). Notoriously, quotes from this work were used as scaffolding for D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of the Nation. The film portrays black people as unintelligent and unfit for government and Wilson is often understood to endorse this perspective as he arranged for the film to be shown at the White House. See Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). In The Wilsonian Moment, Manela has shown the failure of Wilson and the League of Nations to successfully fulfil the hopes of this moment led to the calls for national independence rather than self-determination within the existing imperial formations.

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colonies would be paramount ‘in settling their future Government’.23 He reiterated this sentiment in 1918, stating that ‘[t]he general principle of national self-determination is, therefore, as applicable in their cases as in those of occupied European territories’.24 This sentiment was prefaced, however, by the notion that ‘[t]he governing consideration . . . must be that the inhabitants should be placed under the control of an administration, acceptable to themselves, one of whose main purposes will be to prevent their exploitation for the benefit of European capitalists or governments’. They were capable of a degree of self-determination, with ‘chiefs and counsels . . . competent to consult and speak for their tribes and members’, but were not quite, he implied, at the stage of European peoples. Lloyd George was speaking specifically about the fate of Germany’s previous colonies but colonial subjects within other imperial configurations believed their situations to be analogous. Self-determination did not necessarily mean freedom from empire – although many did seek that end, as we will see in the case of Egypt – it could also mean greater participation within empire. In France, for example, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau had publicly suggested that naturalisation might be accorded to Muslim Algerian French subjects on the basis of their service (173,000 indigenous Algerian solders) in French forces over the course of the war.25 Naturalisation, in this case, would mean the enjoyment of the political rights of the citizen, including the right to vote and thus representation in the French National Assembly. Thousands of Algerian soldiers had lost their lives during the war: estimates sit at around 26,000.26 The extension of citizenship status for such service had precedent in the legal status of the French empire’s tirailleurs sénégalais. The Senegalese- French Deputy, Blaise Diagne, had pushed through the conscription of Senegalese troops for the French forces in the First World War, on the basis that all of the male natives of the Senegalese Quatres Communes be granted full citizenship status – including voting rights – in return for their patriotic sacrifice. As a result, the so-called Blaise Diagne Laws had been passed in the form of the French Citizenship Law of 1916.27 23 24 25 26 27

David Lloyd George, Manchester Guardian, 30 June 1917, 5. British War Aims, Statement by the Right Honourable David Lloyd George, 5 January 1918. Jacques Frémeuax, Les Colonies dans la Grand Guerre: Combats et Epreuves des Peuples des Outre-Mer (Paris: 14–18 éditions, 2006), 55. Ibid., 18. Alfred Stepan, ‘Stateness, Democracy, and Respect: Senegal in Comparative Perspective’ in Mamadou Diouf (ed.), Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 215.

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This had set a precedent for the possibility of reconfiguring the status of French colonial subjects by pressing the connections between the performance of patriotic duties and access to citizenship rights.28 (It is important to note here, however, that the Blaise Diagne laws were not the straightforward reform of citizenship that they might have seemed, and it became clear in the aftermath of the war that many of the promises around citizenship would not be enacted.29) While this possibility was quickly foreclosed in the aftermath of the war, when the Loi Jonnart of 4 February 1919 extended only a limited franchise to those veterans, civil servants and a certain educated elite willing to repudiate Koranic law, the hope of French citizenship remained.30 Political actors of all ethnic identities sought to negotiate a new form of French-Algerian citizenship in this moment. For the indigenous community, this citizenship sought the political rights of citizenship alongside the right to difference, in this case religious.31 Indeed, Emir Khaled, a key advocate for the rights of Algerian indigènes, lobbied for their representation in the French National Assembly. The possibilities hinted at by Lloyd George and Clemenceau were further consolidated by news reports of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Messali Hadj, who would later become an Algerian nationalist activist, recalled 1919 in terms of these promises. Visiting Tlemcen, his home city, he heard people everywhere making ‘comment on “Wilson’s fourteen points”, which talked about the rights of peoples to self-determinations’.32

   Not only were people talking directly about Wilson’s self-determination, they appealed directly to him and his administration to stake their claim to the right to self-determination. From the Vietnamese community in 28 29 30 31

32

Iba Der Thiam, Le Sénégal dans la guerre 14–18 ou le prix du combat pour l’égalité (Dakar: Nouvelles Éditions africaines du Sénégal, 1992), 42–43. David Murphy, ‘Defending the “Negro Race”: Lamine Senghor and Black Internationalism in Interwar France’, French Cultural Studies 24, 2 (2013), 163. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Donal Hassett, ‘Defining Imperial Citizenship in the Shadow of World War I: Equality and Difference in the Debates around Post-War Colonial Reform in Algeria’ in Gearóid Barry, Enrico de Lago and Róisín Healy (eds.), Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War I (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 279. Messali Hadj, Ahmed Ben Bella, Charles-André Julien, Charles-Robert Ageron, Mohammed Harbi and Renaud de Rochebrune, Les mémoires de Messali Hadj: 1898–1938 (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1982), 103.

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Paris, a letter signed by ‘Nguyen Ai Quoc’ (a signatory believed to be the pseudonym of Ho Chi Minh and or Phan Van Truong) addressed a document titled ‘Demands of the Annamite People’ to Robert Lansing, Wilson’s Secretary of State.33 In it Nguyen Ai Quoc evoked ‘the principle of Nationality’ to lay claim, among other things, to the same laws for Vietnamese peoples as for Frenchmen, and the same representation in parliament currently granted to the old French colonies in the Caribbean.34 Nguyen Ai Quoc sought a personal audience with Wilson that never materialised. Lansing himself was clear about how he thought about self-determination, writing in his memoirs of the Paris Peace Treaties: ‘The more I think about the President’s declaration as to the right to ‘self-determination’, the more convinced I am of the danger of putting the idea into the minds of certain races . . . The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes that can never be realized.’35 Within America, multiple Black activist groups, including Marcus Garvey’s nascent Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the National Race Congress and the National Urban League, lobbied for representation as part of the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.36 Caribbean-American socialist activist Cyril Briggs utilised Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination to argue that African Americans were ‘an oppressed nationality’ that were worthy of ‘a square deal or failing that, a separate political existence’.37 Briggs was not alone in this thinking: a year later, a similar argument appeared in the pages of the Socialist Party of America newspaper, the New York Call, in reference to the Black population in the American South.38 Perhaps most famously in the American context, the African American scholar and activists, W. E. B. Du Bois, sought to carve out a role for African Americans as guardians of the newly ‘liberated’ German African 33

34

35 36 37 38

On the Declaration, see Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 155–56. Nguyen Ai Quoc to the American Secretary of State, 18 June 1919, Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, 1 Services de liaison avec les originaires des territoires français d’outre-mer, p. 8. Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 97–98. Adam Clayton Powell Sr, ‘Voices of Negroes of New York on the Scheme’, New York World, 12 December 1918. Cyril Briggs, ‘“Security of Life” for Poles and Serbs – Why Not for Colored Americans’ and ‘Liberty for All’, Amsterdam News, September 1917. ‘Self-Determination’, New York Call, 13 November 1918, 6.

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colonies. Contending that Black Americans stood at the vanguard of the African diaspora, he thought that they were best placed to offer advice on the fate of these territories.39 Du Bois accepted that ‘the principle of selfdetermination which has been recognized as fundamental by the Allies cannot be wholly applied to semi-civilized peoples . . . it can be partially applied’.40 Du Bois’ vision of the partial application of self-determination involved the oversight of those German-educated Africans who were ‘Chiefs and intelligent’, the ‘twelve million civilized Negroes of the United States’, officials from the independent Black states such as Haiti and Liberia and representatives of the ‘educated classes’ from within the British, French and Portuguese nations.41 Concerns about the fate of the African colonies were certainly not limited to Du Bois and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Another example of such thinking can be found in the International League of Darker Peoples. Formed in early January by A. Philip Randolph, Ida Wells-Barnett and Adam Clayton Powell Sr, among others, the aim of the League was to ‘organize all of the Negro delegates to the Peace Conference’ to advance the interests of all people of colour in Paris.42 Like the NAACP and Du Bois, the League believed that Africans still needed to be guided towards self-government. This guidance, they argued, should come from a coalition of ‘Africans, Japanese, Haitians, Americans and West Indian Negroes’, people of colour who had demonstrated their fitness for selfdetermination. In 1918, this seemed possible, and mainstream New York papers reported on these possibilities.43

,      - Like many of the colonial peoples and minority groups agitating for improved rights, women within Allied countries also sought to mobilise support for their causes by contacting Wilson and other members of his State Department. In much the same way, they reiterated their current 39 40 41 42 43

Sarah C. Dunstan, ‘Conflicts of Interest: The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment’, Callaloo 39, 1 (2016), 133–50. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Future of Africa’, Crisis 17, 3 (January 1919), 119. Ibid., 119. ‘The League of Darker Peoples: What It Is and What It Can Accomplish,’ World Forum 1, 1 (January 1919), 1. Louis Siebold, ‘Negroes Ask for African Colonies Lost by Germany’, New York World, 12 December 1918.

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lack of representation and seized upon Wilson’s declaration of the right to self-determination to advocate for women’s involvement in the peace treaties. Prominent American women’s suffragists such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul linked Wilson’s rhetoric about the fight for democracy and the right to self-determination to their own cause.44 With no vote, they argued, even the delegates from their own country could not be said to truly represent women’s interests. It is worth mentioning here that more radical American suffragette appeals to Wilson had, since the revolution of 1917, also leveraged the Soviet Union commitment to women’s equality in their efforts to reconfigure women’s citizenship.45 Russian women had gained the vote almost immediately after the February revolution and the Bolshevik government that came to power in the October had taken further legislative steps to expand women’s citizenship rights to be on a par with men. The militant United States’ suffrage group, the National Women’s Party, were quick to draw contrasts between this new women’s citizenship in the Soviet Union and the contemporary state of affairs in the United States, the supposed champion of democracy.46 Wilson became tentatively sympathetic to the cause of women’s suffrage in part because of his acute awareness of this contrast. In a September 1918 address to the Senate, he framed it in terms of the United States’ image on the world stage as a democracy: ‘The plain, struggling, workaday folk . . . are looking to the great, powerful, famous Democracy of the West to lead them to the new day for which they have so long waited; and they think, in their logical simplicity, that democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men.’47 Supporting women’s voting rights within the United States did not, however, translate to including them in the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. Jeannette Rankin, a Republican member of the House of Representatives, and the first woman to hold federal office, urged the State Department official Henry White to include women in the forging of the peace. She noted that ‘there is a possibility of this Peace Conference being made up on the assumption that the world is inhabited by men and 44 45 46 47

Karen Knop, Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 286. Julie L. Mickenberg, ‘Suffragettes and Soviets: American Feminists and the Specter of Revolutionary Russia’, Journal of American History 100, 4 (2014), 1023. Ibid., 1021–22. Woodrow Wilson, ‘An Address to the Senate’, 30 September 1918, PWW, vol. 51, 158–61.

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men only’ and admonished him ‘to keep in mind that there are women in the world and that they have an interest in the world’s affairs’.48 The president of the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, the French activist Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger, took a similar position in her own letter to White. She reminded him that ‘the women of the world’ were ‘more than half its population’ and ‘their needs and opinions’ should be represented in 1919.49 In many of these letters, the right to suffrage and the right to self-determination were treated as indivisible. The arguments of Rankin and De Witt Schlumberger’s were a common refrain in appeals to include women in the peace talks, and were often combined with the idea that women, as mothers, had a particular role to play as peacekeepers and guardians of morality.50 As Helen McCarthy has observed elsewhere, ‘the age-old binary opposition twinning femininity with peace and masculinity with war’ was pervasive in these years and the decades that followed.51 This thinking was mobilised in complex ways that did not map straightforwardly on to pacifist or patriotic arguments. It was nonetheless a key feature across the political spectrum of arguments for women’s right to self-determination and citizenship during the war and in its immediate aftermath.52 In Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, for example, Black women were often urged to take their place in the struggle for Black rights because ‘the redemption of Africa depends on the motherhood of black women’.53 Black women had a particular role to play in advancing the race because they would mould the leaders of tomorrow. The same kind of argument could, however, be mobilised against the right of women to be involved. Rehearsed at the level of the national as well as the international, the idea of women as moral guardians meant 48 49 50 51 52

53

Rankin to White, 30 November 1918, Henry White Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC (hereafter White Papers), Box 23. De Witt Schlumberger to White, 15 January 1919; White to De Witt Schlumberger, 15 January 1919, White Papers, Box 38. Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes to Wilson, 13 February 1919: Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, DC, Reel 393. Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 182. See Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Julie V. Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 10. ‘Message for the Negro Women of the World’, Negro World, 4 February 1922. See also Asia Leeds, ‘Toward the “Higher Type of Womanhood”: The Gendered Contours of Garveyism and the Making of Redemptive Geographies in Costa Rica, 1922–1941’, Palimpsest 2, 1 (2013), 1–27.

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that many believed they would vote along conservative, often religious, lines. Writing in 1917, the director of research at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and later official historian of the American delegation to the League of Nations, James Shotwell, observed that women were unlikely to be useful contributors to the post-war innovation of international law or world order because they ‘probably hold to old traditions longer than men’.54 Shotwell’s statement points to his urgent sense of 1919 as a moment that required new modes of thinking about the nature of relationships between nation-states. It also gestures towards the positionality of women and women’s access to political rights such as voting. Across the liberal and republican states like the United States, France and Germany, the citizen of the state was represented as abstract, rational and independent, yet symbolically and rhetorically cast in terms of white manhood. In the case of republican states, women transcended sex-based particularity by carving out a role for women grounded in a gendered essentialism. Women citizens occupied the private sphere as mothers and guardians of the moral order.55 Men, in contrast, occupied the public, political sphere and performed the ultimate duty of patriotic sacrifice. In the liberal tradition, sex-specific particularity was implicit, rather than explicit. The political citizens were recognised on the basis of their rationality and capacity for self-ownership. Women were automatically excluded from this polity due to their supposedly emotional, rather than reason-based, nature.56 Indeed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century justifications of imperialism had often stressed the similarities between the irrationality, or unfitness for political maturity, of women and colonised subjects.57 54

55 56

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James T. Shotwell, in ‘Proposal for a Plebiscite in Alsace Lorraine’, United States National Archives: NA Records of the Inquiry: MI 107, General Correspondence, Reel 35: R.G. 256, Doc. 32 I, p. 8. Ruth Rubio-Marín, ‘The Achievement of Female Suffrage in Europe: On Women’s Citizenship’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 12, 1 (2014), 7. See Elizabeth Mayes, ‘Private Property, the Private Subject and Women’ in Martha Albertson Fineman and Terence Dougherty (eds.), Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus: Gender, Law and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 119. Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Paris: Éditions Pierre Belfond, 1853), vol. 1, 150–52; James Hunt, ‘On the Negro’s Place in Nature’, Memoirs Read before the Anthropological Society of London (1863–1864), 10; Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations (London: H. Renshaw, 1862). For samples of long-term evolutionist thinking, see Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 35–26. I was directed to these sources by the references in Michael Adas, ‘Contested

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This was true of scientific literature too, where women’s ‘inferior intellectual capacity’ was considered analogous to that of people of colour.58 In the context of evolutionary biology, white men were cast as a ‘progressive’ genetic vanguard, while women carried the ‘conservative’, ‘primitive’ genes that characterised the ‘lower races’.59 European (white) women might have been considered to possess greater moral sensibilities but their unfitness for political life was described in very similar terms to that of colonial subjects. In the colonies themselves, efforts to spread ‘Western civilisation’ through education and the dissemination of scientific techniques were targeted almost entirely at elite cohorts of men rather than women.60 Women of colour bore the double burden of supposed inferiority by virtue of both race and gender. Claims to citizenship from colonial subjects often mobilised this gendered approach to citizenship and, by extension, to their capacity for selfdetermination. Anti-colonial movements across the colonised world grasped this gendered model in 1919 in order to show fitness for selfdetermination. When the United States had entered the war in 1917, nationalists in the Philippines eager to show Filipino fitness for selfdetermination joined the army, on the basis that it would prove their ‘capacity and martial masculinity’.61 Manuel Quezon, the President of the Filipino senate, then used this service to make the argument for Filipino independence to Wilson when he travelled to Washington DC in 1919. Wilson and his Secretary of War, Newton Baker, found it difficult to engage directly with these arguments. Instead, they staved off the Filipino commission with acknowledgements that independence was almost in sight.62 The situation was delicate, not least because the status of the Philippines and the protection of US interests in the country were a key component of Wilson’s efforts to persuade the US congress to become part of the League of Nations.63

58 59 60 61 62 63

Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology’, Journal of World History 15, 1 (2004), 35. Nancy Leys Stepan, ‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’, Isis 77, 2 (1986), 263. Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman: A Study of Secondary Sexual Characters (1894; 6th ed., London: A. & C. Black, 1926), 491. Adas, ‘Contested Hegemony’, 35. See Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 383. Emily Rosenberg, ‘World War I, Wilsonianism, and Challenges to U.S. Empire’, Diplomatic History 38, 4 (2014), 860. ‘Peace League as Lever for Free Philippines’, New York Times, 13 April 1919.

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In Paris at the 1919 Pan-African Congress, the Senegalese politician, Blaise Diagne, deployed a claim to French citizenship that resonated with the arguments of Quezon. He emphasized repeatedly that ‘[e]ach one of us who has come here is guided by the most genuine loyalty to the nation from which they have come’. War had proved a wonderful opportunity for Black men to prove their loyalty through patriotic sacrifice.64 Echoing earlier African American hopes that participation in the war would finally allow them to be seen as true American citizens, Diagne expounded upon the ‘fraternité’ of mankind that been demonstrated by the war. This ‘fraternité’ would make the ‘better evolved’ races of the world more likely to treat the ‘backward blacks’ in the generous way their moral, social and physical condition required. As we have seen, Diagne had ostensibly seen this kind of argument bear fruit in the Blaise Diagne laws of 1916. The role of the soldier, in this imaginary, was the domain of men rather than women (despite the latter’s sacrifices on the home front and as medical support). This elision of women from the equation of duties and the right to selfdetermination, enfolded in citizenship, did not go unnoticed or unchallenged by the few women delegates in attendance. Addie Waites Hunton, an African American activist in France working with the YMCA, urged the delegates to remember the ‘importance of women in the world’s reconstruction and regeneration’ and to think more broadly than the sacrifice of soldiers when staking claim to citizenship.65 In much the same way as Hunton urged her male peers in this Parisian context to include women in their claims for citizenship and selfdetermination, women involved in the 1919 Egyptian uprising were determined to have their contributions recognised. Shortly after the armistice was declared on 18 November, a delegation of Egyptian nationalist activists led by Saad Zaghlul had formally requested independent status from Britain for the protectorate of Egypt and Sudan. Zaghlul, the leader of the popular Wafd Party, also organised a delegation to plead Egypt’s case in Paris. It seemed to him, in January 1919, that ‘[i]t is altogether improbable that the Peace Congress, which is being held for the purpose of establishing the respect of all rights and giving freedom to all nations,

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‘Discours inaugural de M. Diagne au congrès pan-africain’, 19–20–21 février 1919, 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Pan-African Congress’, The Crisis 17, 6 (June 1919), 272; Adele Logan Alexander, ‘Introduction’ in Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson (eds.), Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Eagle Press, 1920), xxii.

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will create new dominations for the strong over the weak’.66 Zaghlul’s hopes, like those of many other petitioners to Wilson, were quickly dashed.67 Moreover, the British, hoping to quell protest, arrested Zaghlul and two other Wafd leaders in March 1919, exiling them to Malta. This only incited further unrest, as protests broke out throughout Egypt. Protestors explicitly framed their activism in terms of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, delivering letters to the legations of the United States, France and Italy to that effect. Similar sentiments were splashed over the signs held up by protestors in the street.68 Egyptian women such as the suffragette and nationalist Huda Sha’rawi – wife of the Wafd VicePresident ‘Ali Sha’rawi – organised women-only demonstrations on the streets of Cairo while women from poorer households joined the men in street protests.69 Although reluctant to fire upon the women-only protests, British forces had no such compunction about opening fire on the women marching with the men on the streets.70 In death, women such as Hamidah Kahlil and Shafiquah bint Muhammad Ashmawi became nationalist martyrs.71 Despite women’s clear involvement in the revolution and, in some cases, the sacrifice of their lives for the cause, the Wafd leadership was not entirely welcoming of women’s participation. Nor was Egyptian society more broadly open to the full participation of women in the public sphere. The Wafd Women’s Committee (WWC) was aware of the external eye upon Egypt, and also critical of Wafd leadership efforts to curb their involvement. In response to their exclusion from the drafting of a key independence document, the WWC issued the following statement:

66 67 68 69

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Speech by Zaghlul in ‘Hamad Pasha El Bassel’s Tea Party’, 16 January 1919, The National Archives, Kew, Foreign Office 141/810/6. Fawaz A. Gerges, The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution in the Arab World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 67. Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 76. Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 77; Nermin Allam, Women and the Egyptian Revolution: Engagement and Activism during the 2011 Arab Uprisings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 32; Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism, 51–56. This sort of violence in British-administered Egypt is also further evidence of Martin Thomas’ argument in Chapter 6 in this volume, namely that ‘that demarcating between “wartime” and “peacetime” . . . becomes harder . . . if we fix upon the vulnerabilities of colonial subject status in conditions of societal upheaval’, 196. Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 76–77.

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by neglecting us, the Wafd has caused foreigners in Egypt to slander our renaissance by claiming that . . . the women had simply been used by a group of men in the nationalist movement to mislead the civilized nations into believing in the maturity and advancement of the Egyptian nation and its ability to govern itself. Our renaissance, as you well know, is above that.72

They pointed to the clear hypocrisy of those who claimed ‘rights of Egypt and struggles for its liberation’, yet sought to ‘deny half the nation its share in that liberation’.73 The feminist activist Nabawiyya Musa argued that such a denial would ultimately undercut the effectiveness of the fight for self-determination and the potential of the Egyptian nation. In 1920, she declared: ‘A people cannot be vital so long as half are paralyzed and isolated from the affairs of everyday life. If women do not work, half the nation is unproductive . . . why do we lag behind in fighting for our political independence when we have the means in our hands?’74 Her words echoed those of Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger, when she urged Henry White to remember that women made up ‘half the world’.

,       While Wilson certainly disappointed those activists from the European colonies who sought better representation and access to rights, he did tentatively bring up some European women’s interests at the Peace Conference.75 At a meeting of the Council of Ten held in the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs on 13 February 1919, he mentioned the requests of ‘a group of ladies, representing the suffrage associations of the Allied countries . . . assembled . . . in Paris, under the Chairmanship of Mrs Fawcett of Great Britain’.76 The group in question proposed the establishment of a women’s commission to look into ‘the conditions of children and women throughout the world’. Wilson wondered if the Allied Powers might ‘agree to the appointment of a Commission consisting of one representative of each of the five Great Powers and four 72 74

75 76

73 Cited in ibid., 82. Cited in ibid., 82. Nabawiyya Musa, ‘Egypt’s Need for Women Doctors, Teachers, Dressmakers, and Other Professions’, in The Woman and Work, as cited in Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 79. Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination’, 498–99. ‘Secretary’s Notes of a Conversation Held in M. Pichon’s Room at the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, on Thursday, 13th February 1919 at 3.00 pm Present Wilson, Lansing, Balfour, Clemenceau, Orlando, Sonnino, Matsui’, United States National Archives: NA 256, American Commission to Negotiate Peace: 180.03101138.

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representatives of the Smaller Powers to report on the conditions and legislation concerning women and children throughout the world, and to determine whether any international relations should be issued’.77 Such a body would be purely consultative and advisory in capacity. It also mapped onto existing contemporary ideas about the gendered suitability of women for considering the problems of women and children. As Sluga has elegantly elucidated in her writing about this moment, the other attendees in the room – from French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, to Japanese Foreign Minister Baron Makino and Italian Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino – were agreed in their repudiation of the idea.78 Insofar as the subject of the conditions of women and children were concerned, the Inter-Allied Commission on International Labor Legislation had partially covered that topic already. Moreover, a commission like that, peopled by those involved in suffrage movements, risked raising the spectre of women’s suffrage in the international domain. For varying reasons – from political pragmatism to anti-suffragist politics – no one thought that the peace conference was the place to consider this issue. Many women, as we have already seen, felt differently.79 At the 10 April 1919 meeting of the Peace Conference commission, a joint delegation of women from the International Council of Women and the Conference of Women Suffragists of the Allied Countries and the United States presented a series of demands. This included the demand for women’s right to vote – both in the elections of individual nations and in the League of Nations’ plebiscites. The language of the demand was couched in the vocabulary of self-determination, and specifically of racialised ideas around self-determination.80 That is to say, they asked for women to gain the right to vote in every country as soon as the requisite level of ‘civilizational and democratic development’ had been reached.81 Ultimately, the Covenant of the League of Nations did not touch on the question of women’s voting rights. In Article 7, it did, however, make ‘[a]ll positions under or in connection with the League, including the

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78 Ibid. Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination’, 499–500. As Siegel, Chapter 14 in this volume, demonstrates, ‘Female activists were everywhere’ at the Peace Conference in 1919, even if male peacemakers were largely resistant to engaging their concerns. Reprinted in Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (London: Thorsons, 1985), App. 1, 20. ‘Women’s Petitions to League Framers’, New York Times, 13 April 1919.

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secretariat . . . open equally to men and women’.82 Moreover, the drafters of the peace treaties allowed women the right to vote in some of the plebiscites determining nationality. Never before had women been included in processes geared towards the expression of popular sovereignty. This inclusion was limited, however, depending on marital status. Married women’s nationality was determined by their husband’s choice, regardless of how they had cast their own vote.83 They did not have the right, as men did, to choose another nationality if they were unhappy with the results of the plebiscite.84 (The treaty drafters wished to avoid the creation of multinational households with split loyalties.) Moreover, women were excluded from the vote in the plebiscites held in Vilna, Peru and Chile on the basis that women did not have a pre-existing right to vote in these places. Indeed, in 1919, the United States and Britain were the only two powers on the League of Nations Supreme Council close to enfranchising women. A 1920 US constitutional amendment would prohibit the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex, although this was unevenly applied, and mostly excluded women of colour. Women over the age of thirty had been granted the right to vote in Britain in 1918 but they did not receive the right to vote on the same terms as men until 1928. Japan, Italy and France, the remaining three members of the Supreme Council, would not grant women the vote until the 1940s. More broadly, women had the vote in Austria from 1918, Denmark from 1915, Germany from 1919 and Poland from 1918. Universal suffrage did exist for a few years from 1919 in Hungary but by 1922, women’s suffrage was more curtailed. The Danish, German, Austrian and Hungarian delegations all demanded women’s suffrage for the plebiscites.85 Commenting on the issue of women’s inclusion in the plebiscites for the Grotius Society in 1920, the lawyer Paul de Auer argued that there could be ‘no objection to this, even in States where women have no votes in questions of internal politics’ because ‘in deciding the question of annexation a special political training is not necessary’. He was explicit in stating that deciding nationality required less decision-making skill than casting a vote ‘as to whether the happiness of the people is better

82 83 84 85

‘The Covenant of the League of Nations’, in The Avalon Project: Documents in law, History and Diplomacy, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp. Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination’, 511. Knop, Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law, 325. See Sarah Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933), vol. I, 477.

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assured by the liberal or conservative party’.86 De Auer, then was making a distinction between the capacity required to select one’s nationality, and the self-determining capacity implied in the right to vote on a representative for governance. Somewhat ironically, however, it was not standard for women to have a say in their nationality at this particular time. Upon marriage, women’s citizenship became entangled with the status of their spouse. In French law, the subordination of women’s legal rights to her husband was conceived in terms of the performance of female republican citizenship. In English common law, the doctrine of coverture meant that women were protected under their husband’s civil citizenship status. As Ruth Rubio-Marín has observed, this was not simply a matter of women’s exclusion from the polity. To the contrary, it meant that civil citizenship was constituted for white men through the act of ‘protecting’ or subsuming – and in some cases owning – the legal rights of others.87 This is particularly evident in the way that women lost not only their citizenship rights but their claim to nationality upon marriage to a foreigner. English women, from 1870 onwards, lost their nationality upon marriage to a non-British husband. Just after the war, in 1923, one English government lawyer described this as ‘one of the great principles of English law’, a status conferrable solely ‘through the male line’.88 Even after women gained the vote in Britain, marriage law remained unchanged until 1948. In France, the nationality of a married woman had been legally subject to her husband’s status since the Napoleonic code of 1804: indeed Article 1124 defined a married woman as legally incapacitated, a perpetual minor before the law. The question of nationality remained fundamentally the same until the passage of the 1927 Law on French Nationality which granted women the right to remain French and to pass this status on to their children.

86 87

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Paul de Auer, ‘Plebiscites and the League of Nations Covenant,’ Transactions of the Grotius Society 6 (1920), 53–54. Ruth Rubio-Marín, ‘The Achievement of Female Suffrage in Europe: On Women’s Citizenship’, International Journal of Constitutional Law 12, 1 (2014), 7; Ursula Vogel, ‘Marriage and the Boundaries of Citizenship’ and Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, ‘Civil Citizenship against Social Citizenship’ in Bart van Steenbergen (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London: Sage Publications, 1994), 76–89, 90–107. Committee of the House of Commons on the Nationality of Married Women, Report by the Select Committee Appointed to Join with a Committee of the House of Commons on the Nationality of Married Women Together with the Proceedings of the Committee. Minutes of Evidence and Appendices (London: HMSO, 1923), 4.

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This reform was not, however, accompanied by any concomitant civic rights such as suffrage or any other expression of political ‘self-determination’. To the contrary, it further embedded the notion of women as ‘citizen mothers’ in France and was justified primarily in terms of population restoration after the losses of the First World War.89 From the moment the debate over women’s national status had come before the French parliament in 1915, it had been framed in terms of women as mothers and guardians of the French civilization rather than in terms of their own rights. (This was particularly so in the context of the loss of so many of France’s men during the war.) It was often explicitly stated that this extension of nationality would not affect married women’s status as minors before the law.90 As the French feminist Alice Berthet put it, the law ‘treated [a] woman as a relative being. Both her material existence and her rights – up to and including that of her nationality – depend on men. Only her duties remain her own responsibility’.91 The notion of women as ‘citizen mothers’ is underlined by the French state’s decisions regarding citizenship in the province of Alsace, annexed to France from Germany following German defeat in 1918. Alsatians were assigned identity cards in categories from A to D. Each category entitled the holder to different levels of citizenship rights and protection. To be designated Carte A, and a full French citizen, an individual’s parents and grandparents had to have been French citizens prior to the German takeover of 1870. Those with only one French parent or grandparent were assigned Carte B. Foreigners from states that had been allies of France during the war fell under the designation Carte C, while those who had been born in Germany or Austria, or had a parent or grandparent born there, were assigned Carte D.92 In contrast to prevailing

89

90

91

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Elisa Camiscioli, ‘Intermarriage, Independent Nationality, and the Individual Rights of French Women: The Law of 10 August 1927’, French Politics, Culture & Society 17, 3/4 (1999), 59. See Senator Louis Martin, Journal Officiel (hereafter JO), Documents Parlementaires, Sénat. Séance du 10 février 1916, Annexe no. 35, p. 81. Cf. the bill of Ernest Lafont, JO, Documents parlementaires, Chambre. Séance du 18 février 1919, Annexe no. 5716, p. 1935. Alice Berthet, ‘La française doit rester française, même mariée à un étranger. La nationalité. Droit moral’, La Française, 25 January 1919. See also Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Tara Zahra, ‘The “Minority Problem” and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands’, Contemporary European History 17, 2 (May 2008), 138–39.

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international norms, German women who had married French men were classified as German, and their children were also denied French citizenship on the basis of the mixed nationality of their parents. One government-commissioned inquiry into the ‘problem’ of French and German marriages in Alsace twisted the logic of women as ‘citizenmothers’ to justify this decision, arguing that ‘[i]t is much more the mentality that the mother carries from her origins and her education that determines the sentiments and the ideas of the child than the accident of the father’s nationality’.93 German mothers in Alsace risked the so-called purity of the French race.94 Such thinking was the product of popular and political culture representations of Germans during the First World War as a barbaric race, as well as the increasing tendency of French social scientists and medical experts to allege a biological racial difference between French and German peoples (and between different national groups more broadly).95

     ‘ ’ The system of tiered nationality that France adopted in Alsace is but one example of the questions of citizenship and national belonging around the problem of minority populations following the First World War. The notion of self-determination arose frequently in these debates, even as it was not explicitly included in the Covenant of the League. Indeed, its status as a legal principle was tested in the first session of the League of Nations when expert advisers considered the Åland Islands case of 1920–21. In essence, the inhabitants of the Islands sought to exercise the right to self-determination by joining the Swedish state rather than Finland. Finland itself was seeking to assert its independence from the newly formed Soviet Union.96

93

94 95

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Alfred Zeil, Rapport sur les questions de nationalité. Comites d’études économiques et administratives relatives à l’Alsace-Lorraine, Adopté en séance du Comité du 23 Février 1918, 4, 30/AJ/96, Archives nationales françaises (AN), 46–47. Ruth Harris, ‘The “Child of the Barbarian”: Rape, Race, and Nationalism in France during the First World War’, Past and Present 141 (1993), 170–206. Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde: Studien zum nationalen Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792–1918 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), 350–64. R. Delavoix, Essai Historique sur la séparation de la Finlande et de la Russie (Paris: F. Loviton, 1932).

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Although often gestured to as an affirmation of self-determination as a political rather than legal principle, the reports on the Åland Islands case demonstrate that the term remained murkily defined. The League appointed two bodies to comment on the case. The first, the Commission of Jurists, ruled that Positive International Law does not recognize the right of national groups, as such, to separate themselves from the State of which they form part by the simple expression of a wish . . . the grant or refusal of such a right to a portion of its population of determining its own political fate by plebiscite or by some other method, is, exclusively, an attribute of the sovereignty of every State which is definitely constituted.97

As such, the particular circumstances of the case led to the Åland Islands’ population being granted autonomy rights instead.98 Self-determination, then, was a political rather than a legal concept. Nonetheless, this political concept manifested in a number of plebiscites held by the Allies; in a series of minority protection treaties conducted under the authority of the League of Nations in disputed areas and in the development of the ‘mandate system’, which fell under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League. Therein, Allied powers, now ‘mandatory governments’, were tasked with governing their wartime colonial acquisitions in the interests of the governed, as ‘a sacred trust of civilization’, until they were capable of exercising their established right to selfdetermination in the form of sovereign independence. As Adom Getachew has observed, this new system successfully ‘recast selfdetermination as a racially differentiated principle, fully compatible with imperial rule.’99 However, debates about the nature of the interlinked (and still blurrily defined) notions of nationalism and rights to selfdetermination continued to dominate international law forums and writings in the interwar period. Not in the revolutionary way that Lenin or Stalin imagined, or in terms of a cosmopolitan citizenship of empire predicated upon political assimilation that countless proto-nationalist groups had hoped for when they wrote to Wilson, or petitioned the Allied leaders at the Peace Conferences. 97 98

99

Report of Commission of Jurists (Larnaude, Huber, Struycken), LNOJ Sp. Supp. No. 3 (October 1920), 5–6. Report of the International Committee of Jurists Entrusted by the Council of the League of Nations with the Task of Giving an Advisory Opinion upon the Legal Aspects of the Aaland Islands Question (League of Nations. Commission of International Jurists on the Aland Islands Question, 1920). Getachew, Worldmaking, 40.

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However, something had changed in the way that these concepts were understood in relation to international law, both by the legal specialists themselves and by broader audiences. Pre-war international law had been governed by a statist positivism that derived its authority from the consent of sovereign states. The existence of national minorities (or gender-based lobbyists, for that matter) was not relevant to international law in this formulation because they had no juridical existence outside of their state belonging.100 An illustrative example of this can be found in the reluctant affirmation of the League that while mandatory powers possessed administrative and legislative authority over the territory, this did not equate to the full sovereign powers of an individual state.101 Indeed, supporters and detractors of this principle alike pointed to the mechanism of the League’s Mandate petitions system as evidence of the erosion of the nineteenthcentury concept that only states could be subjects of international law. This was, in part, because of a dedication to the principle that the catastrophe of the First World War had irrevocably shown that nationalist impulses needed to be taken into account by international law, even where they did not map onto existing sovereign territories. Increasingly, reformist jurists across Europe, such as the French thinker Georges Scelle, the British scholar James Leslie Brierly and the Greek legal scholar Nicolas-Socrate Politis, among others, cast doubt on the ‘reality’ of the notion of the state itself within international law. In their view, it was a legal fiction or abstraction that had led to the war. Through their critique, they sought to establish the individual person as ‘the only real subject of the law’.102 Politis, in a 1925 work, put this rather clearly – and a little radically for the time – when he wrote: ‘Behind the vain fiction of the State, there is only one real personality: that of the individual . . . If the State is pure abstraction the international community, as it has been

100

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102

For a brilliant excavation of ‘international law’s fictional persons’ in the interwar period see Natasha Wheatley, ‘Spectral Legal Personality in Interwar International Law: On New Ways of Not Being a State’, Law and History Review 35, 3 (2017), 753–87. Quincy Wright, ‘Sovereignty of the Mandates’, American Journal of International Law 17, 4 (1923), 691–703; James C. Hales, ‘Some Legal Aspects of the Mandate System: Sovereignty, Nationality – Termination and Transfer’, Transactions of the Grotius Society 23 (1937), 85–126; E. L. Matthews, ‘International Status of Mandatory of League of Nations: High Treason against Mandatory Authority’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law 6 (1924), n.p. Wheatley, ‘Spectral Legal Personality’, 766, fn. 42. On this tradition see Janne Elisabeth Nijman, The Concept of International Legal Personality: An Inquiry into the History and Theory of International Law (The Hague: T. M. C. Asser Press, 2004), 126–243.

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conceived hitherto, . . . is an even greater abstraction: an immense sum of fiction.’103 Of course, against the revisionism of jurists such as Politis, there were those who defended the ‘reality’ of the state, to different degrees. The 1928 edition of Lassa Oppenheim’s International Law: A Treatise reads: In contradistinction to sovereign States which are real, there are also apparent, but not real, International Persons – such as . . . insurgents recognised as a belligerent Power in a civil war, and the Holy See. All these are not . . . real subjects of International Law, but in some points are treated as though they were International Persons, without thereby becoming members of the Family of Nations.

Oppenheim was firm that this category of ‘international personality’ was not one that could be ascribed to private individuals ‘nor to organized wandering tribes’.104 The problem was that even in Europe the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires – all with diverse, multi-ethnic populations – in combination with the League of Nations’ drive for ethnically homogenous nation-states left many of these so-called organized wandering tribes. These enormous changes in the international landscape left millions of people homeless and stateless in the interwar period.105 Indeed, the drawing of new national borders across Europe and efforts to achieve homogenous populations culminated, in the case of Greece and Turkey, in the League of Nations-administered compulsory exchange of populations in 1923.106 E. Maxson Engestrom put it thus: ‘the goal of the 1919–1920 peace treaties was purely and simply to apply the principle of nationalities to the problem of geographically reuniting men of the same race, the same language and the same civilization’.107

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Nicolas-Socrate Politis, ‘Le Problème des limitations de la souveraineté et de la théorie de l’abus des droits dans les rapports internationaux’, Receuil des cours de l’Académie de Droit international 6, 6 (1925), n.p. Lassa Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise, ed. Arnold McNair, 4th ed., vol. 1 (London: Longman’s Green, 1928), 134. Barbara Metzger, ‘The League of Nations, Refugees and Individual Rights’ in Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch (eds.), Refugees in Europe, 1919–1959: A Forty Years Crisis? (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 102. On population exchange see Eric D. Weitz, ‘From Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions’, American Historical Review 113, 5 (2008), 1313–43. E. M. Engestrom, Les Changements de Nationalité d’après les Traités de Paix de 1919–1920 (Paris: A. Pedone, 1923), 8.

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Those three categories – of race, language and civilization – were not mutually constituent, however much the architects of the Peace treaties might have wished them to be. The Oxford scholar of colonial administration, Lucy Philip Mair, described ‘heterogenous populations within the borders of a single state’ as ‘[o]ne of the most difficult problems of present day Europe’. This was because citizenship was not sufficient protection. A host of discriminations ranging from violence and expulsion through to restrictions on language and culture could make these populations ‘feel like aliens in a country which is not theirs’.108 Lawyer Sarah Wambaugh saw the principle of self-determination as a means for allowing these new minority groups in Europe to have their ‘day in court’.109 Conducting a study on plebiscites funded by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Wambaugh became an international expert on plebiscites in the interwar and post-war period.110 Wambaugh believed that the First World War had ‘rescued the principle of self-determination from its academic retirement’.111 It seemed to her that ‘the main requisite of society is order, to which validity of title and territorial sovereignty is essential’. In such a formulation, it was ‘only by basing title on the principle of national self-determination’ that there could ‘be a presumption of stability for the State or for the world-wide society of States’.112 Plebiscites seemed to her to be the only basis for assessing the will of the majority as ‘the criteria of racial and geographic determination are not sufficient guides for judgement regarding national sentiment’.113 On the question of women, Wambaugh made the case on the basis that it would allow for ‘a more comprehensive expression of opinion’ as well as ‘representation for the men who have been killed in war or have perished through deportation’.114 Wambaugh’s formulation reflected the reality, as we have seen, that a woman’s nationality or belonging to a nation-state was contingent upon her relationship with men of that state. Both this reality and the expansion of the system of international law to take into account the nationalist impulses of minorities within existing sovereign states meant that the door was open to the existence of nonstate nationalities in the terrain of international law. This was not just a

108 109 110 111

Lucy Philip Mair, The Protection of Minorities (London: Christophers, 1928), 17. Sarah Wambaugh, A Monograph on Plebiscites (New York: Cambridge University Press), 33. See Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War. 112 113 114 Wambaugh, A Monograph, 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 32. Ibid.., 33.

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question of changing the source of international law’s authority but its audience. A series of debates involving Politis, Scelle and others at the Institut de Droit International in 1925 concerning the drafting of a ‘Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Nations’ are illustrative of these tensions. Intended as a formulation of the new system of international law that had emerged in the post-war moment, a fiery debate broke out between those who believed the declaration should be addressed to a ‘jurist’-only audience and those, such as the jurisconsult Albert de Lapradelle, who believed it should be ‘a document destined to strike the masses’.115 In the latter case, Lapradelle was signalling the reality that ‘the masses’ were already paying attention to international law as an instrument of activism in an unprecedented fashion. It was in this context that German lawyer Theodor Niemeyer argued that jurists must ‘penser en juriste, parler en paysan’ (think as jurists, but talk as the masses do).116 He, alongside Lapradelle, believed that this was the best way to marry the sophistication of new legal thinking with its new audiences and newly imagined source of international law’s authority: the popular nationalist impulses of the masses, or les paysans. Nathaniel Bermann has suggested that this elegant formulation is best read ‘as fixing the new lawyers’ task – that is, thinking through the relationship between the new welcome accorded to popular forces and the new emphasis on legal sophistication – than as achieving it’.117 By putting jurists’ discussions about post-war order in juxtaposition with those whose interests they sought to mediate, reflect or dismiss – we can see that the legal questions generated by the treaties of 1919–23 reflected broader socio-political preoccupation as they were refracted through the lenses of race and gender. These two categories were often mutually constitutive, deployed in various contexts as a means of preventing the recognition of, or laying claim to the right to self-determination, however variously defined. As others, such as Erez Manela and Adom Getachew, have shown, widespread disenchantment with the potential of the League as an international organisation prompted many of the anticolonial nationalist movements that swept Asia and Africa in following decades.118 For the purposes of this chapter, I am not so concerned with 115 116 118

Albert de Lapradelle, Avant-Projet de Rapport, 1925 Annuaire de l’Institute de droit international, 238, 240. 117 Ibid., 240. Bermann, ‘But the Alternative Is Despair’, 1803–04. Manela, Wilsonian Moment; Getachew, Worldmaking.

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whether the League vested the efforts of these ‘popular forces’ with legitimacy. Instead, I argue that they are evidence, as nationalist or gender-based movements (or both), of a new object of and audience for international law that emerged from 1919. In this figuring, international law and the socio-cultural and political changes that emerged from the First World War and the subsequent peace treaties have a reciprocal relationship.

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3 Recasting the ‘Fabric of Civilisation’ The Paris Peace Settlement and International Law Marcus M. Payk

Commenting on the sinking of the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania in May 1915, The Times did not spare bitter words for the German conduct of the war. After the atrocities against the civilian population during the occupation of Belgium and the use of poison gas on the Western front, the torpedoing of a passenger ship, leading to the death of almost 1,200 people off the coast of Ireland, was yet another appalling act of German brutality. The Reich has suffered a blatant ‘relapse into barbarism’, The Times contended, and its ignorance of any sense of moral and legal responsibility made it imperative for all nations to join forces to defend the international order: ‘The whole world is coming to understand that the Germans and their pliant tools cannot be permitted to wreck the fabric of civilisation which has been slowly built up through centuries of human endeavour.’1 This comment hints at a central theme that not only dominated wartime discourses but also proved critical for the Paris Peace Settlement of 1919/20: The Allied powers interpreted the conflict less as a conventional conflict between nations standing on an equal footing but rather as a struggle with an unprecedented foe over the future of the society of nations.2 There was a shared understanding that Germany had betrayed the claims of progress, moral superiority and shared legal values that had undergirded the dominance of Europe in nineteenth-century global hierarchies. International order prior to 1914 had been built on the idea of 1 2

‘The Sinking of the Lusitania’, The Times, 8 May 1915, 9. William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 82.

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discriminating between the principled, trustworthy states of the ‘civilised world’, among which international law guided conduct, and those polities and peoples around the world that allegedly lacked any sense of law, legal rules and binding international obligations. After August 1914, this juxtaposition strongly fed back into the relationship between the European powers. And there was ample evidence to support Entente propaganda about German ‘barbarians’ or ‘Huns’ wreaking havoc on the formal rules and informal understandings of the ‘civilised nations’, beginning with the flagrant German violation of the London treaty of 1839 guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality. The Allies easily rebutted Berlin’s argument that ‘military necessity’ outranked any legal obligation as a deliberate retreat from international law; German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s dismissal of the London treaty as a ‘scrap of paper’ reinforced the impression of a sinister regime transgressing all accepted norms of ‘civilisation’.3 In consequence, defending international law and upholding the idea of international order became a central rationale for the Allied and Associated Powers, and not only as propaganda.4 The sanctity of treaties, the honour of a given pledge, or the idea of sovereign equality were evoked as inherent moral standards of civilisation, as was the binding force of law governing the relations between nations.5 But what happened with these claims and assertions after the armistices of 1918? Did the rationalisation and legitimisation of Allied war efforts by highlighting the defence of international law, civilisation or the equality of all nations create a normative meaning of its own? Mostly dismissed as propaganda, meaningless once the guns fell silent and irrelevant for the development of ‘real’ international law, the lingering influence of those ideas on the Paris Peace Conference remains understudied.6

3

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Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Annie Deperchin, ‘The Laws of War’ in Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), vol. 1, 615–38. The Allied relationship to international law was never beyond doubt, as Britain’s maritime blockade suggests. If and to what extent the Allies were more respectful than the Central Powers is subject to endless debates. Ideas about the normative foundations of the Entente stretched even further; see Nicoletta Gullace, ‘Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law during the First World War’, American Historical Review 102, 3 (1997), 714–47. For a more detailed analysis see Marcus Payk, Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (München: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018).

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This chapter will assess the normative impact of the Allied turn to international law, how it informed the peace talks beginning in Paris in January 1919 and what this meant for the idea of international order after the Great War. This does not suggest looking at the peace settlement through the lens of a legal scholar. Instead of isolating the development of international legal norms from messy context, this chapter reflects on the political dimensions of international law in two ways: How it was understood, used or ignored by contemporaries in Paris, whether lawyers, politicians or diplomats, and how its normative ideas influenced, or loomed over, the decisions made by the Allies in difficult, often quarrelsome, negotiations.7 Both aspects are relevant to assess the intricate relationship of the peace settlement, international law and the reordering of international relations after the Great War. Would the ‘fabric of civilisation’ The Times spoke of in 1915 be recast after the war as new international order based on international law and under the auspices of the League of Nations?

     The Allied narrative of the Great War as a crusade for civilisation and law was, in the first place, designed to generate support at home and to convince neutrals to join their cause. But once the armistice with Germany had been concluded in November 1918, the victorious powers found themselves unable, and mostly unwilling, to abandon the language of international law and justice. When the delegates to the preliminary peace conference began pouring into Paris in late 1918, competing ideas emerged about what the Allied wartime commitment to international law meant for peacemaking. Even though hard to disentangle, three perspectives can be distinguished: The attempt to employ international law to safeguard and promote national interests as exemplified by French delegates; the more reluctant approach of British and US diplomats favouring ideas of political rapprochement and reconciliation above legal principles; and a technical understanding of international law as a medium to formally craft the treaties.8 7 8

For methodological considerations, see Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘Context in the History of International Law’, Journal of the History of International Law 20, 1 (2018), 5–30. Comprehensive accounts of the Paris Peace Conference include Jörn Leonhard, Der überforderte Frieden: Versailles und die Welt 1918–1923 (München: C. H. Beck, 2018); Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: Murray, 2001).

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Taking the French policy on peacemaking as the first example, it is easy to see how steeped in an ‘idealistic’ rhetoric an ‘apologetic’ or ‘realistic’ understanding of international law could be.9 Since allusions to law, justice and rights (droit meaning law and right in French) had been paramount in France during the war, with ‘La Victoire du Droit’ or ‘La Justice Internationale’ common propaganda slogans, it was only a small step to turn these phrases into legal claims against the defeated nations.10 Bolstered by an agitated public, French politicians insisted on a paix de droit as the means to prosecute and punish those responsible for the war as well as to extract full compensation for any damage done. The opening statement of French President Raymond Poincaré at the preliminary conference on 18 January 1919 made this point in an exemplary way: [O]ur victory is also the victory of right. . . . You will therefore seek nothing but justice . . . What it first demands, when it has been violated, are restitution and reparation for the peoples and individuals who have been despoiled or maltreated. In formulating this lawful claim, it obeys neither hatred nor an instinctive or thoughtless desire for reprisals; it pursues a two-fold object: to render to each his due and not to encourage crime through leaving it unpunished.11

These lofty words should be taken with a grain of salt. Even though ideas of a pacifisme juridique or hopes of juridification of international affairs had been flying high among French intellectuals and academics before 1914 – Léon Bourgeois being a prominent example12 – governmental decision-makers were clearly aware that seeking a peace in legalistic terms was the best way to accomplish a harsh and unsparing settlement. From a French point of view, the claim of a ‘victory of the right’ made any 9

10 11

12

For the classic confrontation between ‘apologetic’ and ‘utopian’ arguments in international law see Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). David Kennedy, ‘The Last Treatise: Project and Person (Reflections on Martti Koskenniemi’s From Apology to Utopia)’ in Russel A. Miller and Peer C. Zumbansen (eds.), Comparative Law as Transnational Law: A Decade of the German Law Journal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75–82. Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 81. Poincaré, 18 January 1919 in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 13 vols. (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1942–47) (= FRUS Paris 1919), vol. 3, at 162–63. The French original: ‘L’ouverture de la conférence des préliminaires de paix’, in Journal Officiel, 19 January 1919, 714–16. Alexandre Niess and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), Léon Bourgeois (1851–1925): Du solidarisme à la Société des Nations (Langres: Guéniot, 2006); Jackson, Beyond the Balance, 60–70.

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diplomatic overtures or political concessions to the vanquished powers unnecessary. The weakening of Germany, whether politically, economically or militarily, could be easily justified by the need to restore international law in Europe; only punitive and exacting terms that could effectively restrain the Reich, many in the Paris government and French public argued, would secure international justice and sustain international order.13 There were conflicting results from this approach, however. To name just the most glaring example: Invoking international law made it next to impossible to demand the annexation of the Left Bank of the Rhine. Even though it had been a prime military objective for France, securing a ‘natural frontier’ on the Rhine or the separation of various Rhenian provinces from Germany proved impossible to achieve.14 Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, in contrast to military top brass like Ferdinand Foch, clearly understood that unilaterally enforcing an annexation might not only wreck the alliance with the Great Britain and the United States but would do major damage to the claim of upholding international law, massively delegitimising the French narrative of the entire war. Despite bitter protest from friends and foes in the Parisian government, Clemenceau was a sufficiently hard-bitten realist to opt for what appeared as a legalistic, almost naïve solution to attain national security: Abandoning a traditional approach of power politics, he acquiesced to accepting an only temporary occupation of the Left Bank in combination with an Anglo-American treaty proposal guaranteeing military assistance against future aggression from France’s eastern neighbour.15 The French were not alone in this predicament. Other delegations faced similar problems of how to reconcile a public commitment to international law and international order with their national ambitions. Quite a few governments understood the Allied victory as an opportunity to realise longstanding expansionist or imperial objectives. Japan, for

13 14

15

Ibid., 209–11. Volker Prott, The Politics of Self-Determination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 69–75; David Stevenson, French War Aims against Germany, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 144–60; Robert McCrum, ‘French Rhineland Policy and the Paris Peace Conference, 1919’, Historical Journal 21, 3 (1978), 623–48. Jackson, Beyond the Balance, 276–315; Jean-Jacques Becker, Clemenceau, chef de guerre (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), 149–57. See Jackson and Mulligan, Chapter 5 in this volume.

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example, was able to assume control over the German colony in Shantung, a coastal province in East China. There was bitter Chinese protest as Peking had joined the Allied and Associated Nations in 1917 and had sent more than 140,000 labourers to help British and French forces in Western Europe; moreover, Woodrow Wilson’s alleged promise of self-determination for all peoples had resonated strongly in China.16 Japanese diplomats, however, were able to convince their European allies in Paris that there was a legally valid wartime agreement on Shantung between China and Japan which now had to be executed.17 A similar dilemma could be found in Europe. When the Italian representatives tried to secure the territorial gains promised by the secret Treaty of London in 1915, the Americans strongly objected. The United States had not been a party to that treaty, and most US delegates saw the Italian demands for wide-ranging annexations from Tyrol to Dalmatia and Anatolia’s south-west coast as a vivid illustration of the same European imperialism that had provoked the outbreak of the war in the first place.18 Negotiations about Italy’s claims among the leading statesmen, assembled in the Council of Four, were full of tensions until they collapsed in late April 1919. For almost two weeks, the Italians withdrew from the conference since no formulae could be invented to paper over the divide. Even though a compromise was worked out in the end, a severe disillusionment remained among Italian delegates about what the peace conference was all about.19 The Italian diplomat Luigi Vannutelli Rey even complained to international lawyer Manley O. Hudson, who had joined the US delegation as a junior counsel, that all the ‘talk about justice was mere bosh, and that statesmen should not deal in such rubbish. . . . Italy did not enter the war because of any ideals or any sense of justice or right’.20

16 17

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19 20

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 99–118. Xu Guoqi, ‘China and Empire’ in Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War: 1911–1923, The Greater War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 214–34, 232. Sterling J. Kernek, ‘Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination along Italy’s Frontier: A Study of the Manipulation of Principles in the Pursuit of Political Interests’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 126 (1982), 243–300; Charles Seymour, ‘Struggle for the Adriatic’, Yale Review 11 (1919), 462–81. H. James Burgwyn, The Legend of the Mutilated Victory: Italy, the Great War, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1915–1919 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993). M. O. Hudson, Private Journal, 15 June 1919, in Harvard Law School Library (= HLSL), Historical and Special Collections, Manley O. Hudson Papers, box 166/1, fol. 453.

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If this bitter verdict was targeted at the American approach to the peace settlement, it might have missed the point. US President Woodrow Wilson was by no means an avid supporter of international law. Even though ‘Wilsonianism’ is sometimes equated with ‘the rule of international law’,21 the stance of the US president towards legal principles as the foundation of international order was more complicated.22 It is safe to say that Wilson always had been sceptical towards any of the legalistic conceptions that had dominated US foreign policy since the turn of the century and that, for instance, had inspired Washington’s push for a Second Hague Conference in 1907.23 It is no surprise that Wilson’s difficult relationship with his own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, who was a well-known proponent of this Hague legalism, quickly deteriorated in Paris; Lansing was cut off from policy decisions and mostly confined to formal tasks.24 That reluctance to make international law a principal feature of the peace settlement does not mean Wilson’s approach was any less ‘utopian’. While he saw the need to deal with territorial claims, security concerns or reparations in the peace settlement, he wanted to address the underlying problems of the war – at least as they appeared from his perspective – by establishing a new kind of international order. Leaving behind old ideas of the balance of power or competing alliances, his idealistic vision of a League of Nations meant going beyond any Hague-style formalism of treaty arrangements, legal obligations or court-like institutions.25 To keep peace between nations, Wilson argued in a 1918 speech that ‘a common concert to oblige the observance of common rights’26 seemed indispensable. The League of Nations, in this understanding, was an organisation built on a moral purpose and on public commitment. Even though the League still needed to be created by an international treaty – the Covenant as included in the peace treaties and signed by all parties – it would rely 21 22 23 24 25 26

Patrick O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 33. Leonard V. Smith, ‘The Wilsonian Challenge to International Law’, Journal of the History of International Law 13 (2011), 179–208. Benjamin Allen Coates, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Payk, Frieden durch Recht, 269, 273; Smith, ‘Wilsonian Challenge’, 179. Lloyd. E. Ambrosius, ‘Woodrow Wilson, Alliances, and the League of Nations’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (2006), 146–49. Wilson, ‘Address in the Metropolitan Opera House on September 27, 1918’ in Arthur Link et al. (eds.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–94, hereafter PWW), vol. 51, 128.

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less on legal principles and more on political negotiations, diplomatic reconciliation and public deliberations. Wilson and his followers held the firm belief that international relations were to be conducted not only by governments and in secrecy but only in accordance with and with the participation of the people as the only legitimate bearers of selfdetermination and sovereignty; to keep peace, international law was of secondary importance, if at all.27 In consequence, it is hard to speak of a coherent impact or uniform understanding of international law that would have served as a foundation of the peace settlement. While some parties were using phrases of international law to shield national power ambitions, other delegates were much less inclined to refer to international law at all. Yet neither side gave much thought to the actual crafting of the peace. This drafting process, however, turned out to be the field where the influence of international law, and international lawyers, was essential for peacemaking, even though it was mostly out of sight of the public. In some ways, this was a matter of course. Peace treaties, like any international agreements, are not only sources of international law. Their crafting is governed by legal rules and formalities designed to set them aside from more fluid diplomatic arrangements or political deals that might adjust to changing circumstances. It is a common feature of peace talks since the early modern period to convey all decisions, compromises and concessions made between the negotiating parties into a legally binding treaty.28 At the Paris Peace Conference, the task to create this document was assigned to a drafting committee created at the first plenary assembly on 18 January.29 Its members were the lawyers and legal advisors of the five Principal Allied and Associated Powers, with an unspoken primacy of the Western powers. Sources about this committee are sparse and patchy but as far as the paper trail tells, the French, British and US members (Henri Fromageot, Cecil Hurst and James Brown Scott) dominated most of the

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Stephen Wertheim, ‘The League of Nations: A Retreat from International Law?’, Journal of Global History 7, 2 (2012), 210–32; Stephen Wertheim, ‘The League that Wasn’t: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organisation, 1914–1920’, Diplomatic History 35, 5 (2011), 797–836. Randall Lesaffer, ‘Peace Treaties and the Formation of International Law’ in Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 71–94. Frank S. Marston, The Peace Conference of 1919: Organisation and Procedure (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), 181–82.

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deliberations whereas the Japanese and Italian members (Nagaoka Harukazu and Arturo Ricci-Busatti) were more or less relegated to the fringe.30 In theory, the drafting committee would be walled off from any political decision-making since, according to the rules of procedure of the conference, its task was simply ‘draw[ing] up the text of the decisions adopted’.31 This seemed easy enough. Most delegates did not regard drafting the treaty as a particular challenge, especially since the commissions of the Peace conference had been instructed to finalise all decisions on borders, reparations or disarmament issues as treaty clauses.32 But the idea to create the peace treaties by simply stitching together these draft clauses soon proved unworkable. For one thing, the commissions operated in an uncoordinated fashion, pursing different objectives on overlapping subjects. There were interferences, conflicting decisions and incompatible vocabulary within these draft clauses that needed to be resolved. On a more fundamental level, the delegates often tried to avoid clear-cut decisions in favour of vague compromises that were hard, if not impossible, to translate into legally sound terms. The drafting committee turned out to be the one (and only) instance of the peace conference checking for, and assuring, the coherence, eligibility and feasibility of the treaty clauses. In doing so, it regularly received support and backing from the Council of Four to advise on, or even redraft, decisions regarded as the final say by the various commissions. Especially in the final stages of drafting the Versailles treaty, there was regular communication between the Council of Four and the lawyers of the drafting committee in crafting the final wording, with the legal experts enjoying a degree of freedom that goes unnoticed in most histories of the peace conference.33 The moment when all the different strands of what international law meant to the delegates came together was the drafting of the preamble of the Versailles treaty. Traditionally, preambles serve as introductions to the purpose and the guiding ideas of treaties.34 The key objective in

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31 32 33 34

Marcus Payk, ‘The Draughtsmen: International Lawyers and the Crafting of the Paris Peace Treaties, 1919–20’ in Marcus Payk and Kim Priemel (eds.), Crafting the International Order: Practitioners and Practices of International Law since c. 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 142–61. Article XV, Rules of Conference in FRUS Paris 1919, vol. 3, at 175. House, 6 March 1919 in FRUS Paris 1919, vol. 4, 214. Payk, ‘The Draughtsmen’, 149–54. For the approach of the ‘Big Four’ toward treatymaking see the chapter by Alan Sharp in this book (Chapter 7). Paul You, Le Préambule des traités internationaux (Fribourg: Imprimerie St-Paul, 1941).

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1919 was thus declaring that from ‘the coming into force of the present Treaty the state of war will terminate’ and peaceful relations would resume between the parties. But there was considerable disagreement on how much detail should be included about the causes of the war and whether the peace should be signified as ‘agreed’ between the parties or as ‘imposed’ by the victorious nations. On 26 April, the Council of Four met the lawyers of the drafting committee to discuss the preamble.35 The French had suggested a version that not only was explicit about the defeat of Germany but also referred to the underlying idea that the war had been fought over principles of international order. ‘United in a common sense of right, honour and freedom’, it said, the Allies had triumphed over German efforts ‘against the peace of the peoples and pursued by her in defiance of the law of nations and of any feeling of humanity’.36 Such an explicit indictment not to be found elsewhere in the treaty was a clear expression of the French instrumental approach, and maybe for that reason it was rejected by the British and Americans. Sources of the meeting in late April are sketchy but it is safe to say that there was a clear decision to reject the French draft and instead pick a brief preamble produced by the American member of the drafting committee, James Brown Scott. His draft reflected only the most basic assumptions of the peace, avoiding any assignment of moral or legal guilt and merely stating the agreement of all parties to establish a ‘firm, just and durable Peace’. This formality made all the more sense since the following first part of the Versailles treaty, the Covenant, had its own preamble. Drafted separately by the commission on the League of Nations, the preamble of the Covenant served as a kind of secondary, more elaborate introduction to the peace, outlining the general idea of a new international order based on ‘open, just and honourable relations’.37 Instead of building the peace upon German violations of international law justifying a punitive settlement, as the French rationale suggested, the focus would now shift to the

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Protocol, 26 April 1919 in FRUS Paris 1919, vol. 5, 299. Since Paul Mantoux, the French interpreter, was not present at this discussion, there are only sparse records about this meeting. Maurice Hankey to Paul Eugène Dutasta, 26 April 1919, The National Archives, Kew, FO 608/163, fol. 384. Projet A 2. Traité de Paix. Draft, 22 April 1919, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections, James Brown Scott Papers, Box 25/11, at fol. 7f. Protocol, 26 April 1919 in FRUS Paris 1919, vol. 5, 299. James B. Scott, ‘The Trial of Kaiser’ in Edward House and Charles Seymour (eds.), What Really Happened at Paris: The Story of the Peace Conference, 1918–1919, by American Delegates (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), 236; Payk, Frieden durch Recht, 372–79.

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political declaration of the Covenant and what it said about the principles of the new international order to be constituted by the League of Nations. The drafting of the preamble was thus deeply emblematic. It demonstrated the three ways international law was understood in relation to the peace settlement. On a very basic level, international law was essential for formally crafting the peace treaties. The lawyers of the drafting committee kept an eye on how political resolutions were translated into legal terms but that never meant they were interested in any juridification of the peace or pushing for a codification of international law. Others, like the French, tended to evoke law and justice as a means to achieve national ambitions; one might call this an apologetic and instrumental approach. Still others, like the US president and his supporters, looked beyond the peace settlement itself and focused on establishing the League of Nations, placing even less weight on international law.

‘     ’? These competing understandings of international law already indicate different opinions on how the peace settlement would relate to the future international order, both formally and substantially. From 1918 onward, there had been talks not only to conclude peace among the belligerent parties but to take the opportunity to create a much larger settlement, maybe even a general treaty signed by all states of the world inaugurating a global peace order. In May 1918, for instance, American planners had begun talking about a ‘permanent protocol of peace’, which would serve as the ‘basis for a future regime in international relations’.38 From this perspective, the political and territorial decisions in the aftermath of the war were not deemed to be essential topics but – as championed by Woodrow Wilson – the establishment of a new kind of international order with the League of Nations at its centre.39 The French organisers of the peace conference were deeply worried about this shift of emphasis and tried to separate any plans and proposals for the League from more traditional subjects like borders, indemnities or security issues. In November 1918, a French memorandum suggested two stages of 38 39

Manley O. Hudson, Letter to David Hunter Miller, 20 May 1918 in HLSL, Hudson Papers, Box 73/2. Trygve Throntveit, Power without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 162–64.

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deliberations: Once peace had been restored, a world congress, modelled on the example of the Congress of Vienna, would convene to debate new stipulations de droit public général40 as future foundations of international order.41 But French efforts to isolate debates about a new international order from the peace talks failed, as did, on the other side, sweeping US ambitions for a comprehensive universal treaty. Soon after the opening of the official inter-allied proceedings in January 1919, it became apparent that negotiations would be volatile, unpredictable and contentious. Representatives of the smaller nations were infuriated about not being fully involved in all talks. Delegates of the major powers struggled to coordinate their policy over the broad range of commissions and councils. It was unclear when, in what way, or if at all, envoys of the defeated nations were to be heard. Following several weeks of poorly organised consultations, a set of awkward compromises was reached in March 1919 to keep the conference on track: The peace agreement with Germany would be brought forward; it would have to include the League Covenant; and its conditions would not really be open to substantial negotiations with the other side.42 But this does not mean that aspirations for a systematic development of an international order vanished into thin air. Apart from separate peace agreements with each defeated nation, more than forty additional agreements were negotiated and concluded in Paris, often in small committees or commissions without much public attention.43 This number would have been even higher if talks in various fields of international regulation had been brought to conclusion. For example, large-scale plans for harmonising international trade by setting global rules for market access, customs legislation or goods traffic were soon reduced to terms solely for the defeated nations and the new states.44 Likewise, hopes for a general convention on 40 41 43 44

Note sur le Congrès de la Paix, nd, in Archives Diplomatiques, La Courneuve, Papiers Tardieu, PA-AP 116/296, fol. 293–308. 42 Jackson, Beyond the Balance, 225–28. Payk, Frieden durch Recht, 359–72. Ibid., 384–85. Allyn Abbott Young, ‘The Economic Settlement’ in House and Seymour (eds.), What Really Happened at Paris, 314. For an overview of the economic planning see Elisabeth Glaser, ‘The Making of the Economic Peace’ in Manfred Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 371–400. Also see Siegel, Chapter 10 in this volume. Much of the literature tends to ignore that the minority treaties also included rules for the integration of the new states into the ‘family of nations’ and laid down their admission to various international treaties and conventions.

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communication and transport did not translate into an actual agreement. Ambitious talks within the Commission on Ports, Waterways and Railways about establishing an international regime on transit had already been stopped in February – US delegates were worried about suggestions to internationalise the Panama Canal – and postponed for future deliberations; in the end, the topic was not picked up before a conference in Barcelona in 1921.45 The committee dealing with the emerging civil aviation, on the other hand, was more successful. A convention on the regulation of aerial navigation was passed in October 1919.46 Many of the additional agreements dealt with problems connected to the main peace treaties and their execution. The treaty dealing with the military occupation of the territories of the Rhine, signed by the German delegates in the same breath with the Versailles treaty on 28 June 1919, might serve as an example. Other settlements, like the distribution of reparations among the successor states of the Habsburg Empire, are less well-known: Since Allied statesmen rejected that compensation of all costs related to the war should be borne by Austria as Habsburg’s rump state, these financial obligations were to be allotted among the various successor states according to their territorial ratio. Despite fierce protests, these new states were forced into an agreement on ‘the contribution to the cost of liberation of the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’ signed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in September 1919.47 New states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia or the Yugoslav state were also subject to the new minority regime devised by the Paris peacemakers. Although delegates and politicians from these nations strongly objected to the imposition of any special rights for minorities, Western experts agreed that international stability required the reduction of internal strife caused by the suppression of national minorities.48 The minority treaties were 45

46 47 48

G. E. Toulmin, ‘The Barcelona Conference on Communications and Transit and the Danube Statute’, British Yearbook of International Law 3 (1922/23), 167–78; K. F. Reiter, Die Verkehrsbestimmungen des Versailler Vertrages und ihre Weiterbildung auf den allgemeinen Verkehrskonferenzen von Barcelona und Genf (Würzburg: Becker, 1929). Conférence de la Paix 1919–1920: Recueil des Actes de la Conférence, 42 vols., ed. Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1922–35), vol. VII-A-1. League of Nations Treaty Series (= LNTS), vol. 2, 36–40. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 133–60; Dzovinar Kévonian, ‘Les juristes, la protection des minorités et l’internationalisation des Droits de l’homme: le cas de la France (1919–1939)’, Relations

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thus part and parcel of the attempt to create a more stable state system, in particular in Eastern Europe; to Manley O. Hudson, they seemed ‘one of the very best features of our work in Paris’.49 Other treaties, too, combined humanitarian concerns with paternalistic and imperialistic notions. To replace the now defunct Brussels Act of 1890, a new convention was drawn up in Paris to regulate and control the trade in arms in Africa and the Middle East. As the preamble explained, ‘in certain parts of the world it is necessary to exercise special supervision over the trade in, and the possession of, arms and ammunition’, and to do so, the signatories committed themselves to limit or prohibit any arms business in these areas; the League of Nations would pick up those efforts to supervise the arms trade and regulate disarmament on a global stage.50 In sum, these various treaties and agreements might not have made up for the universal ‘future regime of international relations’ envisioned by some of the delegates in Paris, but they indicate the willingness of the peacemakers to use the conference as an opportunity to restructure and reinforce the international order even beyond the establishment of the League of Nations. Only against that background can the sweeping aspirations of the five major peace treaties be fully appreciated. The Treaty of Versailles with Germany (28 June 1919), the Treaty of Saint Germain with Austria (10 September 1919), the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria (27 November 1919), the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (4 June 1920) and, though never ratified, the Treaty of Sèvres with the Ottoman Empire (10 August 1920) were the central pillars of the settlement of Paris. Each of these treaties, with the 440 articles of the Versailles treaty serving as a blueprint, was highly complex and dealt in unmatched detail with questions beyond the scope of what similar treaties had stipulated in the past. While questions like border-drawing and compensation were still central to the settlement, the scale exceeded traditional fields of peacemaking, including regulations on international debts and

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internationales 149 (2012), 57–72; Christian Raitz von Frentz, A Lesson Forgotten: Minority Protection under the League of Nations: The Case of the German Minority in Poland 1920–1934 (Münster: Lit, 1999). Hudson, Letter to House, 17 December 1920, in HLSL, Hudson Papers, Box 9/7. See also Manley O. Hudson, ‘The Protection of Minorities and Natives in the Transferred Territories’ in House and Seymour (eds.), What Really Happened at Paris, 204–30. LNTS, vol. 8, 27–38. For the disarmament efforts of the League see Andrew Webster, ‘The League of Nations, Disarmament and Internationalism’ in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 139–69. See also his chapter in this book (Chapter 9).

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property rights, on shooting clubs and life insurance, on railroad tariffs, the restitution of an original Koran to Medina or the distribution of Habsburg treasuries among the successor states. There were good reasons for contemporaries to refer to the Versailles agreement as extraordinary and the ‘most exhaustive and remarkable document of its kind that the world has ever seen’.51

       But did these treaties with their plethora of detailed rulings imply an international order built upon legal principles? And in what way did the settlement contribute to the future development of international law? Even though there was no systematic treatment of international law as such within the treaties – at least not in the understanding of a codification project like the Hague Conferences of 1899/1907 – a closer inspection reveals a significant normative coherence, despite the deeply ingrained belief that the peace was a confusing mixture of various national objectives. Three distinct features that most terms and conditions coalesced around stand out: (1) the formalisation of international relations, peaceful conflict resolution and collective security as embodied by the League of Nations; (2) the stabilisation of the international order by means of defining borders and recognising self-determination; (3) the effort to legally sanction violations of international norms, in terms of an emergent international criminal law as well as with a view to reparations. (1) The League of Nations is often seen as a major shift in international relations – not only as a ‘move to institutions’, as David Kennedy famously put it, but also in terms of creating legal foundations for international cooperation.52 However, as already noted, the League’s origins offer little evidence about Allied goals for an organisation based on international law. Instead, the central idea was to reorganise political relations between states in the sense of giving them more structure, reliability and resilience. The League will ‘avert international anarchy’, the assistant US Attorney General proclaimed in January 1919, by overcoming ‘unregulated individual nationalism’ through ‘collective nationalism’

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Harry Hansen, The Adventures of the Fourteen Points: Vivid and Dramatic Episodes of the Peace Conference from Its Opening at Paris to the Signing of the Treaty of Versailles (New York: Century Co., 1919), 299. David Kennedy, ‘The Move to Institutions’, Cardozo Law Review 8 (1987), 841–988.

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modelled on the federalism of the United States.53 Other voices argued in a similar vein, stressing the need to replace notions of a balance of power by a more formalised structure of collaboration and communication in the international community.54 The League would not be a legalistic endeavour, rigid and inflexible, but a political body designed to facilitate coordination between national governments. The chief objective was minimising the chances of war, either by reducing the tensions through diplomatic means or by deterring any international aggression through the commitment of the League members to a collective response. While there were attempts, most notably by French delegate Léon Bourgeois, to align the emergent League with the pre-war traditions of the Hague conferences, Woodrow Wilson and others, like the British delegates, strongly rejected any such reference.55 Seminal figures of this Haguestyle legalism, such as Lansing or fellow international lawyer and US politician Elihu Root, had reasons to be disappointed. Seeing an early draft of the Covenant, Root already lamented in March 1919 that the proposal ‘practically abandons all effort to promote or maintain anything like a system of international law’.56 This pessimism was certainly exaggerated. But during its existence, the League mostly served other purposes than promoting and enforcing international law. Even though its preamble made a reference to ‘international law as the actual rule of conduct among governments’, the League would never evolve into a player on the field of international law in its own right.57 Demands in the Paris negotiations to include a mechanism for obligatory arbitration in the Covenant were scrapped early on. True, the League oversaw the creation of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) in 1922, as set out in article 14, but it did so with little enthusiasm. The ten members of the Advisory Committee of Jurists appointed by the League Council in early 1920 to work out the 53 54

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Samuel J. Graham, ‘League of Nations to Avert International Anarchy’, New York Times, 12 January 1919. Jan Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918); for a broader assessment, see Peter Yearwood, Guarantee of Peace: The League of Nations in British Policy, 1914–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jean-Michel Guieu, Le rameau et le glaive: Les militants français pour la Société des Nations (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 2008). Wertheim, ‘League of Nations’, 223–27. Root to Will Hays, 29 March 1919, Library of Congress, Elihu Root Papers, box 137; Coates, Legalist Empire, 162–76. Stephen Neff, Justice among Nations: A History of International Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 351–52.

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statutes of the PCIJ, in turn, were mostly sceptical about the political mechanisms of the League. With Elihu Root and James Brown Scott in key positions, this committee rather picked up where the Second Hague Conference left off in establishing an international court. Negotiations were more successful than in 1907. The committee agreed on a compromise about how to select international judges to the bench, something that had been impossible to achieve at the Second Hague Conference. To make the connection to the pre-war legalism even more explicit, the committee members also passed a string of three resolutions for a further expansion of the ‘empire of law’.58 Addressed to the League, these resolutions suggested taking up the Hague tradition of periodic conferences, creating a High Court of International Justice designed ‘to try crimes against international public order and the universal law of nations’ and establishing an academy for international law.59 Officials and delegates in Geneva, however, did not share this enthusiasm about the Hague model. While the draft statute of the PCIJ was reluctantly accepted (although altered behind the scenes), the three resolutions died on the vine. In the end, when the PCIJ opened in 1922, it operated largely independent from the League, only occasionally being called upon by the League Council to give non-binding advisory opinions to circumvent political gridlocks.60 The League of Nations could not entirely put off demands for a more systematic development of international law, however. As a remote offspring of the resolutions of the Advisory Committee from 1920, the League convened a committee of legal experts 1925 to assess the prospects of a ‘Progressive Codification of International Law’. Only halfheartedly supported by many of the member states, this initiative stalled at first, before its protracted deliberations led to the Hague Codification

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James B. Scott, The Project of a Permanent Court of International Justice and Resolutions of the Advisory Committee of Jurists: Report and Commentary (Washington: Carnegie Endowment, 1920), 13. Ibid., 168–72. P. Sean Morris (ed.), Transforming the Politics of International Law: The Advisory Committee of Jurists and the Formation of the World Court in the League of Nations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021); Ole Spiermann, ‘“Who Attempts Too Much Does Nothing Well”: The 1920 Advisory Committee of Jurists and the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice’, British Yearbook of International Law 73 (2003), 187–260: Ole Spiermann, International Legal Argument in the Permanent Court of International Justice: The Rise of the International Judiciary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Conference of 1930.61 But the results of this meeting were exceedingly meagre, at least when compared to pre-war hopes of building an international order based on legal principles. Only three marginal topics were debated over the course of four weeks in The Hague, and from those only a general agreement on a convention about ‘Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws’ was reached (later ratified only by a few states).62 This frustrating outcome of the codification project probably fed into the larger disappointment about the League as well as about international law during the ‘twenty years’ crisis’ (Edward Carr). A younger generation of diplomats and internationalists began critically evaluating the sweeping hopes of their predecessors to achieve universal peace by the systematic growth of a ‘world law’ overseen by a ‘world organisation’. Faced with the messy realities of how national governments navigated international politics, the idea that the League would be a legislative authority in the international community faded into the background. It was obvious that a bold step like the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 was not only made outside the League framework but that it was more a diplomatic endeavour than a legalistic project.63 While the advancement of international law under the auspices of the League remained a central theme of academic legal discourses, the dynamics of international politics increasingly pointed in a different direction.64 Events in Manchuria, Abyssinia or Spain seemed to underscore that great power politics dominated the international arena more than ever. When the unravelling of the League system gained momentum in the early 1930s, many alleged that this came 61

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Shabtai Rosenne (ed.), League of Nations Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification of International Law, 1925–1928, 2 vols. (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1972); G. Conetti, ‘Organi per la codificazione progressiva del dritto internazionale nella Societá delle Nazioni’ in Roberto Ago (ed.), Le droit international à l’heure de sa codification: Études en l’honneur de Roberto Ago (Milano: Giuffrè, 1987). Manley O. Hudson, ‘The First Conference for the Codification of International Law’, The American Journal of International Law 24 (1930), 447–66; LNTS, vol. 179, 89–114. Here I disagree with Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), who seem to overstate the importance of international law for the inception of the Kellogg–Briand Pact. This holds true especially for international lawyers in the United States, see Hatsue Shinohara, US International Lawyers in the Interwar Years: A Forgotten Crusade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jonathan Zasloff, ‘Law and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy: The Twenty Years’ Crisis’, Southern California Law Review 77, 3 (2004), 583–682.

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from an idealistic misconception of the peace settlement of 1919, based on international law rather than on realpolitik. Such a narrative of inevitable failure was not entirely fair. As recent research has shown, the League was neither doomed to fail, nor had it been solely founded on international norms, nor were legal considerations widely scrapped or ignored.65 Stripped of the high-minded normative expectations that had characterised its onset, the League was a central point of reference for cooperation and coordination among governments in the interwar years. It does not come as a surprise that even after 1945 the idea of a general international organisation was powerful enough to help establish the United Nations, followed two years later by the creation of the UN International Law Commission.66 When it came to preserving or enforcing peace among belligerent parties, the League might have failed the high hopes of its drafters in the 1920s and 1930s; as a venue for the cooperation of sovereign states, it represented a set of ideas about international order that was still relevant after the Second World War. (2) The territorial stipulations of the treaties provide further testimony about the binding spell wartime rhetoric put on Allied decision-making. To transform unspoken assumptions about the ‘fabric of civilisation’ into a viable international order, the creation of stable and cooperative nationstates was imperative. This stability, at least in the eyes of Wilson and many of his followers, required the full participation of the people (or at least of the white male citizenry) in the sense of self-governance.67 In a speech before Congress in February 1918, the US president had stated that a permanent peace required ‘national aspirations [to] be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. “Self-determination” is not a mere phrase’.68 And this entailed, in Wilson’s words, that ‘every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states’.69

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Haakon Ikonomou and Karen Gram-Skjoldager, League of Nations: Perspectives from the Present (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2019). Also see Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 in this volume. M. Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 191–213; Georg Nolte (ed.), Peace through International Law: The Role of the International Law Commission (Berlin: Springer, 2009). Knock, To End All Wars, 105–22. Wilson, ‘An Address to a Joint Session of Congress’ in PWW, vol. 46, 321. Ibid., 322–23.

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In placing the people at the heart of the national as well as the international order, this ‘Wilson sovereignty’, as it has been aptly called, created normative expectations with profound consequences for the settlement of 1919.70 The peacemakers developed various strategies to reconcile political needs, geopolitical concerns and national objectives with new ideas about a right to self-determination, trying to avoid blatant infringements of what they had committed themselves to during the war. Of course, there are prominent examples where this delicate balancing act utterly failed: the decision to place South Tyrol under Italian and Shandong under Chinese rule, already mentioned, offer vivid illustrations, as does the treatment of Austria, forbidden to unite with Germany. Those cases led to allegations of hypocrisy on the part of the Allied great powers and placed a heavy burden on the peace settlement. But this should not distract from the fact that in many instances solutions were found which, at least rhetorically, tried to take the will of the people into account. One way to do so was plebiscites. As borders in Central and Eastern Europe were deeply contested, the peacemakers approved plebiscites in six mixedlanguage regions as a direct measurement of national belonging. The results were ambivalent, however. It soon became apparent that the presumed innate national identity of the people was often unpredictable, making plebiscites at times more about security or prosperity than about democratic choice or ethnicity.71 But even though these experiences led to some hesitation about the use of plebiscites and referenda in international politics, in 1919 they helped to confirm the idea that the peace settlement was based on rules and norms rather than on power politics. Bartering over territories among the great powers, a customary practice at previous peace conferences, gave way to something that could at least remotely be justified as an effort to create a more stable international order. Still today, international legal theory refers to plebiscites ‘as a means to enhance democracy by giving a voice to the people: political decisions are then made openly and are clearly legitimate’.72

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Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 11. See Smith, Chapter 4 and Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this volume. Brendan Karch, ‘Plebiscites and Postwar Legitimacy’ in Marcus Payk and Roberta Pergher (eds.), Beyond Versailles: Governance, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 16–37. Yves Beigbeder, Referendum, in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (MPEPIL), https://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law9780199231690-e1088 (accessed 21 February 2021).

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Another attempt to create stable states was the restructuring of populations along lines of national allegiance. The resettlement of national minorities to their respective majority’s nation was, at least by some Allied peacemakers, believed to be the best way to avoid future irredentism, thereby reducing international tensions. There were two ways to think about the transfer of population between nations: the first one was based on voluntary resettlements. Any population affected by territorial changes would be able to opt for one side, meaning that people could either emigrate to the majority’s nation or remain and be integrated into the new nation (with the implicit expectation of abandoning any other national allegiance). The insertion of such an option in peace treaties was an established instrument of international law and had been used regularly in the nineteenth century.73 But in Paris there were also considerations of a second, compulsory way to resettle populations. Following early attempts of the ‘unmixing’74 of lands and peoples after the Balkan Wars of 1912/13, the Neuilly treaty stipulated an enforced transfer of populations between Bulgaria and Greece. Even though the treaty spoke of a ‘reciprocal voluntary emigration of the racial, religious and linguistic minorities’ in article 56, this resettlement forcibly uprooted thousands and paved the way for the even larger Greek–Turkish population exchange in 1923.75 More importantly, it also opened the door, as has been convincingly argued, for gruesome practices of ethnic cleansing in Central and Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century. In consequence, population transfers have been widely discredited in international law. But this should not distract from the fact that they seemed a valid instrument of peacemaking in 1919; population exchange was not a divergence but ‘an intrinsic element of the principles enunciated at Paris’.76 The idea that self-determination and national belonging of populations were central to stabilising states might have featured inconsistently in the peace treaties and produced mixed results with major flaws. But it strongly confirmed rather than challenged sovereignty as fundamental 73 74 75

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Josef Kunz, Die völkerrechtliche Option, 2 vols. (Breslau: Hirt, 1925). This expression was allegedly coined by Lord Curzon, see Smith, Sovereignty, 103. Umut Özsu, Formalising Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (New York: Berghahn, 2003). Eric D. Weitz, A World Divided: The Global Struggle for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 186.

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to international law: Cooperative and peaceful international relations, the ability to meet obligations and to act responsible in foreign affairs, required fully sovereign polities, and to achieve this, it was deemed imperative to include the will of the people in the equation. Similar notions can be observed across the board of the peace settlement, for example in the regime of the minority treaties or, in a different guise, in the assumptions and mechanisms of the mandate system. Both used legal instruments to define, guarantee and protect the will of the people while at the same time denying them full sovereignty, whether as national minority or as inhabitants of a colonised territory.77 (3) The field where the Paris Peace Settlement has probably left the most lasting impact on international law is the idea of restoring justice. As this had been a staple of Allied wartime rhetoric, it was imperative to place justice high on the agenda of the conference although it was far from clear how this would translate into peace conditions. Even some Allied leaders were worried about the implications and felt uneasy with the decisions finally made. Two main subjects can be distinguished in the attempt to bring about justice: the prosecution and punishment of those responsible for war crimes and for the war as such; and the efforts to make amends for damage caused by the war. Although these objectives turned out to be crucial for the future development of international (criminal) law later on, they were fiercely disputed after the war because they reflected the Allies’ central assumption that Germany bore a unique responsibility for the outbreak of the Great War; denying this allegation, German diplomats and politicians were soon to recognise in 1919, would seek to cut the root of the entire Versailles treaty.78 Taking wartime propaganda and popular demands in the victorious nations into account (like the ‘Hang the Kaiser’ slogans in the British election campaign of 1918), it comes as no surprise that the arraignment of German military leaders, up to and including the Kaiser, was a central

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Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Victor Laniol, ‘L’article 231 du traité de Versailles, les faits et les représentations: Retours sur un mythe’, Relations internationales 158 (2014), 9–25; MacMillan, Peacemakers, 476–78; Michael Dreyer and Oliver Lembcke, Die deutsche Diskussion um die Kriegsschuldfrage 1918/19 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1993). Cf. William Mulligan, ‘The Trial Continues: New Directions in the Study of the Origins of the First World War’, English Historical Review 129, 538 (2014), 639–66.

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topic of the negotiations.79 The decision to hold accountable anyone responsible for war crimes (albeit from the ranks of the defeated powers only) was framed as establishing a minimum standard of international justice; British Prime Minister David Lloyd George famously spoke of the Allies’ commitment to create a precedent with the prosecution of the Kaiser: ‘With regard to the question of international law, well, we are making international law, and all we can claim is that international law should be based on justice.’80 These efforts quickly dried up after 1919. The Netherlands repeatedly rejected the extradition of the Kaiser in the 1920s, to the relief of those Allied leaders who favoured political over legalistic solutions.81 Contrary to the wording of the Versailles treaty, Germany was also granted the possibility to prosecute war criminals itself; almost all verdicts reached by the Reichsgericht (Reich Court) in Leipzig were mild to meaningless.82 But with the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg reaffirming the idea of international jurisdiction in 1945 and the bold decision to establish an International Criminal Court in 1998, the trajectories of Versailles were picked up again. The idea that state officials and heads of states are no longer immune from prosecution and punishment for international crimes has, after all, become an established maxim of international law in the early twentyfirst century.83 A similar process of moving issues of responsibility from being the subject of political negotiations into the field of judicial proceedings and legal claims can be seen in the attempt to redress illegitimate acts of war by means of financial compensation.84 Peace settlements in the past regularly included indemnities as spoils of war, often to be paid as a lump sum to the victor; the five billion francs France was forced to pay to Germany after 1871 come to mind. In contrast, the Paris Peace 79

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William Schabas, The Trial of the Kaiser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 38–54; Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalisation of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 28–52. David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties: Memoirs of the Peace Conference, 2 vols. (London: Gollancz, 1938), vol. 1, 100. 82 Schabas, Trial, 269–73. Lewis, Birth, 55–63. Claus Kreß, ‘The Peacemaking Process after the Great War and the Origins of International Criminal Law Stricto Sensu’, German Yearbook of International Law 62 (2019), 163–88; Annette Weinke, Gewalt, Geschichte, Gerechtigkeit: Transnationale Debatten über deutsche Staatsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016). James Crawford, State Responsibility: The General Part (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 28.

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Conference of 1919 opted for a legalistic solution, with the Allies as claimants meticulously assessing all liabilities and calculating the exact payment that needed to be made for the various kinds of damage done.85 This method, many on the Allied side hoped, would allow demands for even more compensation, and for a longer period of time, even though at the cost of limiting any room for diplomatic manoeuvres or political compromises. The debate on reparations, as the war indemnities were now conveniently called, and their exact calculation haunted international politics in the 1920s. Even so, the Versailles decision was a crucial step from extracting payments based on coercive power to defining liabilities and obligations in the logic of civil law (at one point, even the Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch, the civil code of Germany, was invoked by French lawyers to bolster claims for compensation).86 That does not mean that there was no bitter bargaining among the Allied nations and behind the scenes. But the key effect was, in the end, that Allied demands were no longer put forward as the victor’s right but articulated in a language of international law and justice.

 In the end, it is fair to say that the Paris Peace Conference’s contribution to international law, and to the development of an international order based on legal principles, was complex and, at times, contradictory. After the Great War had seriously ravaged the ‘fabric of civilisation’ and laid waste to the old Ius Publicum Europaeum, the peacemakers had to find an answer on how to structure and regulate international relations in a way that would benefit the victorious nations, contain the defeated powers and integrate new states as well as mandated territories. In some fields, the Allied peacemakers tried to break new legal ground – not necessarily on purpose but to maintain the larger rationale of the peace settlement as paix de droit. State and individual responsibility was, for the first time, made a relevant issue of international law, creating precedents to enact sanctions for violations of international norms like reparations or criminal prosecution. By and large, however, the peacemakers turned to established maxims and principles of nineteenth-century international 85

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Leonard Gomes, German Reparations, 1919–1932: A Historical Survey (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Bruce Kent, The Spoils of War: The Politics, Economics, and Diplomacy of Reparations, 1918–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Payk, Frieden durch Recht, 524; Smith, Sovereignty, 64.

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law. There was essential consensus that the post-war international order needed to be built on states that were fully sovereign and independent yet willing to abide by international law, to meet international obligations and to honour international treaties. Nothing else had been the defining characteristics of ‘civilised nations’ in the nineteenth-century European discourse of international law. There were clarifications to be sure: The idea of self-determination, however elusive and vague, was merged with traditional interpretations of international law and thus reserved only for peoples demonstrating international responsibility (and, by extension, deference to the great powers). But even the League of Nations, novel as this ‘great experiment’87 was, rested on established notions of sovereignty and presumed the free will of states to join and bind themselves on the basis of an international treaty; instead of narrowing their sovereignty, the League promised its members the guarantee and protection of national independence against external threats. The founding of the peace on normative principles does not mean that there was a shared understanding of international law as a central point of reference among the Allied peacemakers. Although legal instruments were essential for formally crafting the treaties, it is hard to speak of a common interest in the juridification of international affairs. Powerful leaders like Woodrow Wilson tried to curb what they saw as excessive legalism in favour of more flexible arrangements; the League, in particular, was designed more as an organisation for multilateral cooperation than as an institution to develop or enforce international norms. Other delegations were more open to, but not necessarily sincere in, referring to international law. The French emphatically echoed Allied wartime claims of defending legal principles and restoring justice. Such an evocation of international law arguments did not always reflect a particular intent to promote justice or righteousness in international affairs; it could as well serve national objectives such as, in the case of France, security concerns. In some ways, this was the inevitable consequence of the narrative that the Great War had been fought over the defence of international law and civilisation. Even if they would have liked to, the Allies no longer had the option of abandoning the language of international law and making an openly political peace based on compromises and realpolitik. At no point 87

R. Cecil of Chelwood, A Great Experiment: An Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). A new reading of those narratives by Jean d’Aspremont, ‘The League of Nations and the Power of ‘Experiment Narratives’ in International Institutional Law’, International Community Law Review 22 (2020), 275–90.

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was the revival of the old European concert of the great powers or a gathering similar to the Vienna Congress 1814/15 conceivable, with diplomatic bartering about territories, peoples and alliances among victors and vanquished alike. Maybe peacemaking after the Great War is best understood as a moment of transition and ambiguity. The settlement recast the ‘fabric of civilisation’ as a new international order, based on international law and overseen by the League of Nations; but whatever pre-war ideas and understandings might have fed into this project, it soon proved to have a life of its own: The ‘fabric’ would gradually evolve into a dense multilateralism whereas any notion of ‘civilisation’ began diminishing over the course of the twentieth century; only legal standards remained against which to measure the international conduct of states and societies. The Paris Peace Settlement of 1919 served as a threshold: whatever the Allied intentions might have been, and however bitterly the Germans and their allies would resent the treaties, in the end they helped transform nineteenth-century ideas of European dominance and superiority into universally applicable values and norms.

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4 State Sovereignty Leonard V. Smith

Perhaps the single most famous aphorism occasioned by the outbreak of the Great War came from British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, as he recounted in his memoirs: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’1 In the ensuing century, observers have taken the lamps to stand for almost any and all aspects of European civilisation. Here, the right metaphor drawing from Grey is not just the lamps, but the space illuminated by the lamp. One lamp, state sovereignty as understood by 1914, did not exactly go out. Rather, it became many lamps. As a result, the space around the lamps, the international system, came to be illuminated differently. This chapter explores both the lamps and the space. By the time the ‘long nineteenth century’ came to an end in 1914, political leaders, diplomats and jurists enjoyed a general understanding of ‘Westphalian’ state sovereignty. As T. G. Otte’s chapter in this volume reminds us, the exact historical relationship between the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and its legacy remains more complicated than its instrumentalisation in international relations theory.2 Nevertheless, in what posterity deemed the ‘Westphalian system’, states existed largely for themselves. Autonomous and independent, states mobilised peoples and resources in the name of self-preservation. An oligarchy of European great powers lay at the heart of the Westphalian system. For all the 1 2

Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years, 1892–1916, 2 vols. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1925), vol. II, 20. Otte, Chapter 16 in this book. See also Andreas Osiander, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’, International Organization 55, 2 (2001), 251–87.

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fixation on the balance of power among states in the nineteenth century, few believed that security could be found through parity. Rather, safety lay in superiority, as shown by both the arms race and the alliance system among the great powers before 1914.3 International law articulated and legitimised the Westphalian system. In making that law, great powers led and ‘the world’ followed. Thus, international law helped states regulate international relations when they chose to make use of it. At least in principle, international law bound all states equally. Most famously, at international congresses held at The Hague in 1877 and 1907, the great powers sought codify when and how to wage war.4 No less important, jurists helped politicians and diplomats understand the international system in which they operated.5 The Westphalian system cared little about the internal legitimacy of regimes – a legacy of the doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm his religion) associated with the Westphalian peace itself. As liberalism took hold in the nineteenth century there were some exceptions – such as help for persecuted Christians under the Ottoman empire and the concerns in Spain with creating first a stable constitutional monarchy and then a republic in the 1870s. But the alliances that mattered had little to do with ideological affinity. Late in the century, la belle et bonne alliance joined France, the only republic among the European great powers, and tsarist Russia, the most autocratic of the powers. Wars, whatever their outcome, seldom destroyed states. New states could be created in response to nineteenth-century nationalism, such as the Kingdom of Greece in 1832, the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 or the Kingdom of Serbia in 1882. Such states complicated the international system but did not necessarily disturb it. Even a new great power, Germany after the founding of the Kaiserreich in 1871, actually helped stabilise the system for years thereafter. States partly or wholly outside the European oligarchy sought access to the international system in part through evolving international law. Imperial Russia, certainly a great power in geopolitical calculations, sought full inclusion in the European legal order through articulating

3 4 5

David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). See the contributions to ‘Symposium: The Hague Peace Conferences’, American Journal of International Law 94 (2000), 1–98. Hereafter referred to as AJIL. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civiliser of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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Russia as a ‘civilised’ nation.6 Douglas Howland has shown how the Meiji regime instrumentalised international law in order to gain acceptance for Japan among the great powers.7 Critiques of the Westphalian system coming from outside the oligarchy emerged before the Great War, as shown by Arnulf Becker Lorca.8 All of the great powers functioned as empires as well as states. A simple definition of empire suffices here – hierarchical contracting that preserves politically significant difference.9 Chapter 6 in this volume reminds us that beyond this definition, no two empires were exactly alike. Emperors could rule over peoples later coded as white as well as people coded today as persons of colour, typically in very different ways.10 Dynastic emperors, such as the Habsburgs, the Osmans, the Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns, ruled over myriad forms of historical difference. For example, Bohemia and Hungary might share the same Habsburg sovereign, but they never shared the same ‘country’, certainly not after the Ausgleich of 1867 which created Austria-Hungary. ‘Blue water’ empires, by definition, ruled over geographically non-contiguous domains. Like dynastic empires, they combined diverse forms of rule. The British Empire, the world’s largest in 1914, comprised lands and people with an array of asymmetrical contractual relationships to the British crown. Strictly speaking, the only ‘imperial’ title held by King George V was Emperor of India. Like the British Empire, the Empire of Japan was both a dynastic and a blue-water empire. The French Empire, the world’s second largest in 1914, was unusual in that its sovereign was the French people – at any rate its male people. Empires behaved much as states in the Westphalian system and tended to be treated as expanded states under international law. Great powers competed for colonies much as they competed for armaments, to seek security. For example, according to this paradigm, because the British ruled India, the French first conquered and then invented ‘Indochina’. 6 7 8 9

10

Lauri Mälksoo, ‘The History of International Legal Theory in Russia: A Civilizational Dialogue with Europe’, European Journal of International Law 19 (2008), 211–32. Douglas Howland, International Law and Japanese Sovereignty: The Emerging Global Order in the 19th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Similar definitions appear in Charles Maier, Among Empires: America’s Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 31; and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 8. Thomas, Chapter 6 in this book.

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How else besides security to explain the economically irrational partition of Africa late in the nineteenth century?11 Even rendering reasonable the economics of imperial expansion need not undermine this point. Imperial powers competed for the markets, present and future, as one feature of security. Nothing about the global division of labour under World Systems Theory, which so informs Becker Lorca’s analysis, precludes competition among core powers. Nor, for that matter, does an explanation of imperialism based on race necessarily undermine a Westphalian understanding of the international system. Antony Anghie has shown how state-based, positivist international law, sovereignty and imperial racism all grew up together.12 The constantly reinvented distinction in international law between civilised ‘self’ and uncivilised ‘other’ remained part and parcel of the game of imperial expansion. As Anghie and Martti Koskenniemi have argued, while the details of imperial sovereignty under international law were complicated indeed, the broad concept was not.13 The conqueror considered sovereignty itself, as Koskenniemi put it, ‘the gift of civilization’. Consequently, according to this logic, most colonised lands had no sovereign recognisable as such, and thus could be considered ‘unsettled’ by the coloniser. Existing forms of rule (and rulers) could be swept away without legal concerns. Protectorates were only a partial exception to this rule. Legally, protectorates were established through treaties between sovereign entities. The protector would direct external affairs while leaving many internal institutions of sovereignty in place. In the event, the protector would decide, often on a situational basis, the difference between ‘external’ and ‘internal’.14 The strains of the Great War threatened to tear asunder Westphalian understandings of state sovereignty. In August 1914, competing alliances went to war for reasons later understood as realist security. But the military stalemate resulting from the battles of 1914 required states to mobilise peoples and resources in unprecedented ways.15 These stresses shattered empires and called into question legitimate authority 11 12 13 14 15

Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961). Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See particularly Koskenniemi, Gentle Civiliser, ch. 2; and Anghie, Imperialism, ch. 2. See Anghie, Imperialism, 87–90. John Horne (ed.), State, Society and Mobilization during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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everywhere. As Peter Jackson and William Mulligan show in their chapter, the war profoundly altered the sources of legitimacy and power itself in the international system.16 The Great War gave rise to new ideologies and radicalised older ones. Liberalism, socialism and ethno-nationalism were never the same after the war. All shaped state sovereignty in new ways, as new lamps illuminating spaces in the world quite differently.

   A persistent fixation in the academy on the person of Woodrow Wilson should not obscure the profound radicalisation of liberalism he effected late in the Great War.17 Wilson imagined nothing less than an ideological imperium, a single ideology that would rule the world. Wilsonianism began with the liberal individual imagined by Adam Smith in economics and John Stuart Mill in politics and society. This was the proper ‘self’ of ‘self-determination’.18 The liberal individual became the building block from which all political units would be built – from the small New England town to the international system itself.19 Individuals were people who could make a covenant, a sacred and irrevocable vow binding them totally and individually to one another.20 As Sarah Dunstan has argued in this volume, this individual normatively speaking had white skin and a male gender.21 As such, these like-minded individuals bound by covenants would form communities guided by the same moral compass. Covenants would become the foundation of political society at all levels, and of international law. Point I of Wilson’s Fourteen Points referred to an international order based on ‘open covenants, openly arrived at’. The Covenant of the League of Nations, which served as a preamble to all five 16 17

18 19

20 21

Jackson and Mulligan, Chapter 5 in this book. This section draws from my previous work: Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), esp. 9–13, 17–33; and ‘The Wilsonian Challenge to International Law’, Journal of the History of International Law 13 (2011), 179–208. Michla Pomerance, ‘The United States and Self-Determination: Perspectives on the Wilsonian Conception’, AJIL 70 (1976), 1–27. Richard Hofstadter, ‘Woodrow Wilson: The Conservative as Liberal’ in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 234–35; and Niels Aage Thorsen, The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 4–11. Christine A. Lunardini and Thomas J. Knock, ‘Woodrow Wilson and Woman Suffrage: A New Look’, Political Science Quarterly 95 (1980–81), 655–71. Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this book.

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treaties produced by the Paris Peace Conference, called for ‘the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among Governments’. Difference beyond gender would not disappear under the Wilsonian imperium. Some forms, such as religion or what European-Americans call ‘ethnicity’, would be recognised but would lose political importance. ‘Civic’ nationalism would displace virulent ethnic politics.22 Other forms of difference, notably race defined mostly by colour, would determine whether individuals would be eligible to make covenants at all. Wilsonian liberalism was about including those eligible for inclusion, not everyone. The successful management of difference, Wilson believed, had made the United States the exemplary liberal democracy. The task ahead lay in exporting American exceptionalism to the rest of the world. It was utterly without irony that Wilsonians could speak of a disinterested and unselfish American approach to peacemaking, and of remaking the world in the image of the United States as they saw it. In international affairs, states would preserve their legal autonomy but would think and act more and more in synch because they all rested on the same kind of legitimacy. ‘Men have never before realised’, Wilson commented at a state banquet at Buckingham Palace on 27 December 1918, ‘how little difference there was between right and justice in one latitude and in another, under one sovereignty and another.’23 A collective consciousness of these similarities, he argued, had created a transnational community of liberal individuals that had won the war, through a historic combination of might and right.24 It remained to give this combination permanent institutional expression. Wilson told the Italian Chamber of Deputies on 3 January 1919 that he had come to Europe ‘to organise the friendship of the world – to see to it that all the moral forces that make for right and justice and liberty are united and are given a vital organization to which the peoples of the world will readily and gladly respond’.25

22 23

24

25

Allen Lynch, ‘Woodrow Wilson and the Principle of “National Self-Determination”: A Reconsideration’, Review of International Studies 28 (2002), 419–36. Woodrow Wilson, International Ideals: Speeches and Addresses Made During the President’s European Visit, December 14, 1918, to February 14, 1919 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1919), 24. Such a contention became more plausible after Russia left the war. It did require believing in aspirations for Taishō democracy in Japan, or more commonly, leaving Japan on the margins of great power calculations. Wilson, International Ideals, 110.

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The League of Nations would organise the Wilsonian imperium permanently. Wilsonians never foresaw the League as a bureaucratised super-state, even along the narrow lines envisaged by Léon Bourgeois.26 Rather, the League would express and nurture the transnational community of liberal citizens that would restrain state behaviour. States would no longer exist for themselves, as in the Westphalian system, but rather for the good of humanity. In an unspoken echo of Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), states would obey the dictates of the League yet remain as free as before. Liberal citizens would hold governments accountable around the world. Indeed, the power of the transnational liberal community would make the League the Panopticon of world peace, as Wilson told the plenary peace conference on 25 January: ‘the eye of the nations, to keep watch upon the common interest – an eye that did not slumber, an eye that was everywhere watchful and attentive’.27 How then to reconcile the Wilsonian imperium with the victorious British and French empires, each underpinned by some species of allegiance to liberal democracy? Moreover, the defeated dynastic empires had broken into nationalist pieces that might interpret self-determination on their own terms. The Wilsonian imperium as written into the treaties of the Paris Peace Conference had solutions to both of these challenges – the Mandate system and the minorities treaties. Both solutions built new sources of instability into the international system and showed that the history of Wilsonianism revolved around the messenger losing control over the message. As Erez Manela reminds us in this volume, the message sent by Wilson and the message received by the colonised could prove very different things.28 Wilson himself could not keep a generic, liberal ‘self-determination’ from morphing into ‘national self-determination’, all over the world. The Supreme Council of the Paris Peace Conference maintained a studied silence on the formal empires of the victors, as matters of purely ‘domestic’ concern.29 But the Mandate system, of which Wilson was only one of several fathers, posed a structural ideological challenge to the future of all empires. Rather than the literal property of the conqueror, mandates would become, in the language of the Covenant, ‘a sacred trust 26 27 29

Léon Bourgeois, La Pacte de 1919 et la Société des Nations (Paris: BibliothèqueCharpentier, 1919). 28 Wilson, International Ideals, 101. Manela, Chapter 15 in this book. See Smith, Sovereignty, esp. 182–88; and Leonard V. Smith, ‘Sovereignty Under the League of Nations Mandates: The Jurists’ Debates’, Journal of the History of International Law 21, 4 (2019), 563–87.

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of civilization’. Likewise, rule over them would occur in the interest of ‘peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’. But the Supreme Council, or for that matter the committee that wrote the Covenant of the League of Nations, never discussed in a meaningful way the capacities, real or imagined, of any of the peoples to come under mandatory rule. The classification system of A-, B- and C-class mandates was determined by how earnestly the future mandatory power had sought direct annexation during the conference. As Anghie has argued, the liberal penchant for hierarchical differentiation simply found new expression.30 Like much else under the Wilsonian imperium, the Mandate system could function properly only if the protagonists had a common understanding of its meaning. Manela concluded that what the colonised world heard on ‘self-determination’ proved to matter a great deal more than Woodrow Wilson had claimed.31 The implied trajectory of independence or at least self-rule in the mandates opened up a new front for withering critiques of the whole imperial enterprise.32 At best, the Mandate system itself rested on inconsistencies. Why should the peoples of only the former German and Ottoman imperial domains be set on even a theoretical path towards self-determination? As Susan Pedersen has shown, the governors of the Mandate system as implemented could never agree on whether it existed to replace or to modernise empire.33 If mandates provided for differentiated rule over colonised peoples of colour, minority treaties did the same for peoples coded as white. Indeed, in 1918 another respected liberal in Paris, Jan Smuts of South Africa, had advocated mandates throughout the former Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman domains.34 While the very idea of mandatory rule over people coded as white proved too radical even for the most fervent Wilsonians, the minority treaties provided their own form of tutelary governance. Successor states would learn ethnic tolerance through protections for minorities guaranteed externally. Through such protections, the treaties

30 31 32 33 34

Anghie, Imperialism, ch. 3, 115–95. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law, chs. 6–7. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). J. C. Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), 12–24. African and Pacific domains would remain outside the Mandate system, and subject to conventional colonial annexation.

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sought to disarm the political significance in the successor states of ‘ethnic’ difference based in language or religion.35 For example, Jews could become full Polish citizens and remain Jews, their religious and linguistic practices secured.36 These protections would become part of Polish domestic law, changeable only with the permission of the League Council. The Permanent Court of International Justice rather than national courts would have final jurisdiction over enforcement. Under a constitutive theory of international law, the Supreme Council of the peace conference gave the new states legal personality by requiring them to sign the minority treaties.37 The new states bitterly resented them as unnecessary, citing their own liberal bona fides. With equal bitterness, they protested at the flouting of a foundational principle of international law, the equality of states. They pointed out that Germany, otherwise so incriminated in the Treaty of Versailles, had not been required to sign a minority treaty. Successor state delegates saw the treaties as creating second-class states, not yet able to treat ethnicity in the proper Wilsonian manner amid the stresses of the modern world. Glenda Sluga wrote that ‘the peace of 1919 had effectively stamped the century with the imprimatur of nationality as the international norm of statehood, and of institutionalised internationalism’.38 The Wilsonian imperium helped determine that outcome. It rested on a new kind of state, simultaneously free and constrained by internalised liberal values, and on hierarchies embedded in those values. Peoples of colour in the mandates and minorities and majorities in the successor states would have prescribed roles under the Wilsonian imperium. The new liberal world order would depend on everyone knowing their proper place in the international system.

       More than sixty years ago, Arno Mayer argued that the real contest within the international system after the Great War lay not between the two alliances, but rather between a ‘party of movement’ and a ‘party of 35 36 37 38

In fact, contemporaries used the terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ more or less interchangeably at the conference. ‘Treaty of Peace between the United States of America, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan, and Poland’, AJIL 13 (1919), Supplement, Official Documents, 423–40. Smith, Sovereignty, 157–65. Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 49.

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order’.39 Two revolutionaries, liberal Woodrow Wilson and Marxist V. I. Lenin, sought not just to transform the international system, but sovereignty within the states constituting that system. The American exceptionalism underpinning Wilsonianism meant that it had a pre-existing geographic locus. Bolshevism had to forge one through prevailing in the Russian Revolution. From its origins, Bolshevism made no secret of its global ambitions, as ideological heirs to the international Left of the long nineteenth century.40 But Bolshevism had to consolidate its geographic locus slowly through a desperate civil war.41 From its first days, the new regime fought internal disintegration, even as it preached world revolution. In so doing, Bolshevism evolved from a discursive imperium to the founder of a particular kind of imperial state. That state would shape the international system until the end of the Cold War. Lenin detailed the Bolshevik imperium in two classic texts written not long before the October Revolution of 1917 – Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and State and Revolution. Both sought to create the reality they purported to describe. Both envisaged the elimination of the Westphalian state, as a transitory manifestation of doomed capitalism. Lenin explained imperialism as the cause the Great War, ‘a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital, etc.’.42 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the ruthless extraction of the surplus value of labour had created too much capital too unevenly distributed, both within states and among them. Desperate to avoid returning more of the value of labour to the workers who had created it, capital looked for new global markets. Organised through the Westphalian state, capital dragged the world into a competition for new areas of predation, as capitalism reached its ‘highest stage’. Capitalism’s war, so the theory went, would in the end destroy capitalism itself, paving the way for the proletarian revolution.

39

40 41 42

Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959). My colleague Nicholas Bujalski provided considerable help in thinking through this section. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left, 1850–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chs. 7–9. Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chs. 9–10. V. I. Lenin, ‘Preface to the French and German Editions’, 6 July 1920, ‘Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism’ in Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), vol. 22, 189–90. Hereafter referred to as CW.

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Lenin maintained that the bourgeois state by definition stood apart from society. It existed to protect capital and was ‘a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms’.43 State and capital could not exist without each other. When the revolution destroyed capitalism, it would destroy the bourgeois state along with it. That state would be replaced by what Friedrich Engels had called a ‘special coercive force’, operating in the interest of the proletariat. In time, this force would ‘wither away’ as the vestiges of capitalism were destroyed.44 Material conditions would no longer require the Westphalian state and would dispense with it. The defeat of capitalism thus would create a true ideological imperium governing the international system, which in time would write its own international law, the dictates of the proletarian world sovereign. Whatever else might be said of it, the intellectual boldness of the Bolshevik imperium made the Wilsonian imperium look timid. Two decrees issued within days of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd in autumn 1917 highlighted the relationship between the internal and global requirements of the revolution. The Decree on Land helped solidify the geographic locus of the new regime by legitimising the obvious, the peasant seizure of land.45 The Decree on Peace helped change the ideological foundations of the Great War.46 To be sure, the decree deferred to conventional Marxist wisdom that ‘advanced’ countries would lead the way to world revolution. It called on the ‘classconscious workers’ of Britain, France and Germany towards that end, so that ‘the workers’ movement will triumph and will pave the way to peace and socialism’. But much of the decree actually downplayed the ultimate goals of the Bolshevik imperium. It called for an armistice on all fronts, and ‘immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace’.47 The revolution would happen according to its own logic, in due course. The morphing of ‘self-determination’ into ‘national self-determination’ actually owes at least as much to Bolshevism as it does to Wilsonianism. ‘If any nation whatsoever’, the peace decree preached, ‘is forcibly retained within the borders of a given state’, then that nation cannot be denied ‘the right to decide the forms of its state existence by a free vote’.48 The 43

44 45 47

V. I. Lenin, ‘The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution’ in CW 25, 392. Lenin made specific reference to Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Chicago, IL: Charles Kerr & Co., 1894 edition). Engels, The Origin of the Family, 402. 46 ‘Report on Land, October 26 (November 8)’, CW, vol. 26, 257–61. Ibid., 249–53. 48 Ibid., 253 and 249 respectively. Ibid., 250.

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Bolsheviks saw national self-determination as a wrecking ball, to bring down dynastic and blue-water empires everywhere. If one took the gendered Marxist axiom seriously, that working men have no country, ethno-national identities would become fundamentally harmless, simply solutions to the same class oppressions expressed in different languages. As under Wilsonianism, these identities would cease to have political significance. The centripetal potential of ‘self-determination’, national or otherwise, did not go unnoticed at the time by critics such as Rosa Luxemburg, who in 1918 labelled such concepts ‘hollow, petty-bourgeois phraseology and humbug’.49 The Bolshevik history of ‘self-determination’, like its Wilsonian history, revolved around the messenger losing control over the message. The discursive Bolshevik imperium and material reality met at the peace conference in Brest-Litovsk, from December 1917 to March 1918. The delegation from Petrograd arrived with a daunting task – turning military defeat into global victory through the power of the Bolshevik argument. Certainly, such a project was not inherently ridiculous in the troubled winter of 1917–18. Appeals for self-determination, Bolshevik or Wilsonian, had considerable resonance among the restive nationalities of the Habsburg monarchy, deprived of its most important symbol of unity with the death of Emperor-King Francis Joseph in November 1916. In Germany, a wave of labour unrest during the Brest Litovsk conference threatened the operation of the war machine itself.50 Yet the Kaiserreich and even the beleaguered Habsburg monarchy could tell their peoples that they had won the war in the east, and that the task ahead lay in getting the new regime in Russia to respond accordingly. In Brest Litovsk, the Bolshevik delegation pursued complementary strategies of playing for time and seizing the discursive high ground.51 A talented team led first by Adolph Joffe and then Leon Trotsky pursued

49 50 51

Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (1918), www.marxists.org/archive/luxem burg/1918/russian-revolution/ Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 156–60. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Penguin Books, 2015 [originally published 2014]), 108–55; Borislav Cherney, Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, 1918–1919 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017); John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1938).

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the aim both sides claimed they shared of a ‘just, democratic peace’.52 Yet, Trotsky complained, ‘the negotiations are being carried on by those who are enemies not only on the war basis but also on the basis of the difference between social classes, and this fact has made its imprint on the negotiations’.53 To remedy this asymmetry, the Bolsheviks proposed changing the venue, to a neutral location that would also serve as a less obvious reminder of imperial Russia’s defeat. Further, the Bolsheviks sought to define on their own terms the consensus goal of ‘self-determination’ for the non-Russian former imperial domains. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians preferred to deal with representative assemblies in situ, most importantly the Rada of Ukraine. Trotsky countered that such ‘de facto plenipotentiary bodies could not appeal to the principles proclaimed by us’.54 In other words, the peoples of Ukraine had not yet been given an authentic chance to opt for ‘self-determination’ under the Bolshevik imperium. The Germans thus could deal with Ukraine legitimately only through the Petrograd Bolsheviks. Eventually, German patience with ideological debate grew thin, as it did with Trotsky’s passive/aggressive tactic of ‘no war/no peace’. The Central Powers signed a treaty with an independent Ukraine on 3 March 1918. Under considerable pressure from Lenin, who at least understood the gravity of the impending civil war, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the same day. In effect, the treaty created a massive buffer zone of independent and quasi-independent states running from Finland to the Crimea. The treaty began the proper transition from the discursive Bolshevik imperium to the geographic Bolshevik imperial state. The Bolsheviks considered the non-Russian domains of the former tsar as a special zone for the extension of the revolution.55 Nationality questions themselves did not decide the outcome of the civil war. But the counter-revolutionary White Russians surely helped the Bolshevik cause in the non-Russian lands by promising nothing better than a return to the status quo ante bellum. Bolshevik land policy could turn peasants against ‘foreign’ landlords everywhere. Of course, the defeat of Germany in the 52

53 55

The surprisingly public nature of the negotiations is detailed in collection drawn mostly from the British General Staff publication “Daily Review of the Foreign Press”, reprinted in Proceedings of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference: The Peace Negotiations between Russia and the Central Powers (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918). 54 Ibid., 55. Ibid., 67. Jeremy Smith, Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 2.

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west and the disintegration of Austria-Hungary in autumn 1918 rendered the buffer zone of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk a moot point. Through a judicious combination of deal-making for national autonomy (the Caucasus and Central Asia) and co-optation coupled with physical force (Byelorussia and Ukraine), Bolshevik Russia came to rule most of former tsar’s domains by the end of the civil war. The Bolsheviks recognised the independence of Finland, Poland and the Baltic states – for the time being. Joseph Stalin’s famous dictum of ‘socialism in a single country’ can be adapted in this context to ‘socialism in a single empire’.56 ‘Democratic centralism’, dating at least to Lenin’s 1902 classic, What Is to Be Done?, legitimised an unlimited capacity to coerce in the name of a vanguard of the proletariat. Stalin refined his own theoretical justifications during service as commissar for nationalities affairs under Lenin.57 Routinely referring to the non-Russian peoples as ‘backward’, as early as March 1921 Stalin (himself Georgian by birth) opined at the Tenth Party Congress that ‘the Party’s task is to help the labouring masses of the Non-Great Russian peoples to catch up with central Russia, which has forged ahead’.58 Ferocious purges and worse brought errant national sentiment into line as Bolshevik Russia morphed into the Soviet Union. As such, it became a true empire, based on asymmetrical contracting preserving hierarchical difference. Richard Pipes’ thesis of the Soviet Union as a mutant version of tsarist Russia assuredly had its roots in the Cold War.59 Subsequent generations have come up with more creative ways of thinking about the Soviet Union as an imperial space.60 But Pipes’ contention does help explain the Stalinist empire’s fixation on the plenitude of the former imperial borders, indeed on exceeding them. The German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 and the fall of France the following year essentially gave Stalin a free hand finally to reconquer Finland, the Baltic States and part of Poland. And if at the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union needed an immediate card to play against the American development of

56 57 58 59 60

Erik Van Ree, ‘Stalin and the Nationality Question’, Revolutionary Russia 7 (1994), 314–38. Jeremy Smith, ‘Stalin as Commissar for Nationality Affairs, 1918–1922’ in Sarah Davies (ed.), Stalin: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45–62. Smith, Red Nations, 55. Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997 [originally published 1954]). I. Gerasimov, S. Glevob, A. Kaplunovski, M. Mogilner and A. Semyonov, ‘In Search of a New Imperial History’, Ab Imperio 1 (2005), 33–56.

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the atomic bomb, where better to seize that card than Manchuria, where imperial Russia had so unsuccessfully competed with Japan for influence at the beginning of the century?61 At the same time, the Soviet Union never renounced the discursive Bolshevik imperium. Indeed, early on the Bolsheviks gave that imperium institutional expression through the Third International, more commonly known as the Communist International (Comintern).62 In contrast to the relative inclusiveness of the Second International, the Third International actively sought the division of the Left between communists and socialists. In July 1920, Lenin laid out the Twenty-One Conditions for entry into the Comintern, lest it be ‘faced with the danger of dilution by the influx of wavering and irresolute groups that have not as yet broken with their Second International ideology’.63 Towards that end, communists taking orders from Moscow were to infiltrate themselves among workers in the fields and factories everywhere. As Talbot Imlay observes in this volume, other socialist voices reimagining the international system did not altogether disappear – though not for lack of trying on the part of Lenin and Stalin.64 No more capable of irony than Wilson with regard to their respective discursive imperia, Lenin called on Communist parties to ‘ruthlessly expose the colonial machinations of the imperialists’.65 Democratic centralism, anti-imperial by self-definition, became the order of the day (Condition 13, 210). All Comintern decisions were final ‘and binding on all affiliated parties’ (Condition 19, 211). The Comintern, in effect an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, helped make the Soviet Union a unique species of empire, with vast geographic and ideological reach.66 Throughout the interwar period that empire would at intervals both

61 62 63 64 66

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2005), 177–214. Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ch. 2. V. I. Lenin, ‘Terms of Admission to the Communist International’ (July 1920), CW 31, 206–7. 65 Imlay, Chapter 13 in this book. Lenin, ‘Terms of Admission’, 209. More recently, scholars have investigated the more genuinely transnational characteristics of the Comintern. Sabine Dullin and Brigitte Studer, ‘Communism + Transnational: The Rediscovered Equation of Internationalism in the Comintern Years,’ Twentieth Century Communism 14 (2018), 66–95; and Peter Huber, ‘The Central Bodies of the Comintern: Stalinization and Changing Social Composition’ in Norman LaPorte, Kevin Morgan and Matthew Worley (eds.), Bolshevism, Stalinism, and the Comintern: Perspectives on Stalinization and the Comintern, 1917–53 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 66–88.

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compete and cooperate with the international system built in Paris by the erstwhile allies of imperial Russia.

   The Great War destroyed no fewer than four great power empires – the Habsburg monarchy, tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire and the German Kaiserreich. In a dynastic empire, sovereignty would no longer have a self-evident locus with the removal of the dynasty. A new and historically specific agent in the international system, the successor state, would seek to replace the dynastic empire as the locus of sovereignty. The new sovereign would become the ethnic group, commonly identified by the German term Volk. I define successor state here as a polity founded on an impossibility – a unitary state combining ‘ethnic’ and ‘historic’ boundaries, typically in a maximal sense.67 Such a foundation fostered a logic of national ‘necessity’ that could make its own international law, comparable to the logic that Isabel Hull has argued guided imperial Germany in breaking and making international law during the Great War.68 Neither Wilsonianism nor Bolshevism created the successor state, but both legitimised it. No reimagining of state sovereignty did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system. The imaginary of the successor state long predated the Great War and had deep roots in nineteenth-century Romanticism.69 Certainly, the emotional bent of Romanticism helped occlude something we now take as obvious – that ‘ethnicity’ and ‘history’ were discursive constructs naturalised by nationalists. The ethnic group, often coded as ‘the nation’, constituted an affective community whose boundaries remained porous and rooted in religion, language and ‘culture’, even as more biologically oriented notions of race rose later in the century. ‘History’ drew more from morality and desire than empiricism. For example, nationalists held that the tragedy of ‘Czechoslovakia’ began in 907 CE, when Hungary tore Slovakia from the Great Moravian Empire, as though terms such as

67 68 69

Smith, Sovereignty, 33–44. Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.) J. L. Talmon, Romanticism and Revolt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 95–109.

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‘Hungary’, ‘Slovakia’ or ‘Moravia’, let alone ‘Czechoslovakia’, could be projected backwards a millennium and retain the same meaning.70 Ethnicity was to the successor state what security was to the realist state. Forming an ethno-national state meant requiring diverse peoples who had lived alongside each other for centuries to choose one ethnic identity. Real people stubbornly crossed categories – such as Protestant Poles and Orthodox ‘Greeks’ in Anatolia who spoke no Greek, let alone Jews who lived throughout Central Europe and the Ottoman world who could comfortably transact business in four or more languages. How to establish ethnic boundaries in this zero-sum game? One successor state’s loss was always another’s gain. Perhaps the two most important theorists of the successor state, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, are not always thought of as such. Sarah Dunstan’s use in this volume of Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of montage rather than genealogy in the history of ideas applies here as well.71 Neither Weber nor Schmitt had the philosopher-king credentials of Wilson or Lenin. Both perhaps saw German ethnicity more as an effect than a cause of the greatness of Germany as a political community. But the ideas of Weber and Schmitt could readily be weaponised through applying them to ethnicity. The relationship between intellectual history and political history will never be straightforward. It seems doubtful, for example, that Admiral Miklós Horthy of Hungary ever intellectually engaged either Weber or Schmitt, even though the ideas of both help explain the behaviour of Hungary as successor state. Nor is Germany, the preoccupation of both Weber and Schmitt, commonly considered a successor state. Yet Germany, where a structurally challenged republic replaced a dynastic empire, satisfies the definition of successor state deployed here. Whatever else divided them, most Germans united in their claims to all of the discursive and territorial boundaries of Germany as a great power. Between them, Weber and Schmitt cut to the heart of successor state identity by opening up a space in the theory of state sovereignty that could be occupied by ethnicity, commonly thought of as the race or the Volk. Max Weber delivered his best-known statement on sovereignty in a lecture in Munich on 28 January 1919, just as the Paris Peace Conference 70

71

On the instrumentalisation of historical narratives, see Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this book.

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was opening.72 He posited a definition that became known as ‘Weberian sovereignty’ – the state as a community that successfully claims ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’.73 Such a definition placed the capacity for violence and boundaries at the centre of state sovereignty. As Stefan Eich and Adam Tooze have shown, Weber’s definition was born of the structural crisis of the birth of the Weimar Republic.74 Weber did not mention Wilson and Wilsonianism at all in the lecture, and referred to Bolshevism only occasionally and with scorn, such as when he compared the politics of the new regime in Russia to the politics of predation in medieval Italy.75 Weber’s famous definition of sovereignty serves as a starting point for an essay that is mostly an anguished meditation on political ethics. He hardly lamented the passing of the pseudo-democratic Kaiserreich yet worried that the revolution had desperately weakened Germany’s military position as peacemaking began.76 He certainly believed that Germany owed few concessions in territorial sovereignty. On another occasion, the public intellectual so committed to responsible politics told a group of students in Heidelberg: ‘When the time comes, when you are not determined to give fine speeches but to quietly ensure that a bullet meets the first Polish official who dares to set foot in Danzig – then I shall be with you, then come with me!’77 A few months after his lecture in Munich, Weber would serve on the German delegation sent to receive the draft Treaty of Versailles.78 He sided with those such as Walther Rathenau who advocated refusing to sign the treaty and opposing any resulting allied invasion with a popular uprising.79

72 73 74 75 76

77 78

79

Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds. and trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 27–128. Ibid., 78 (emphasis original). Stefan Eich and Adam Tooze, ‘The Allure of Dark Times: Max Weber, Politics, and the Crisis of Historicism,’ History and Theory 56 (2017), 197–215. Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, 99–100. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, trans. Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984 [originally published in German in 1959]), 311–31. Quoted in Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009 [originally published in German in 2005), 506. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Max Weber and the Peace Treaty of Versailles’ in Manfred F. Boemke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 535–46. Eich and Tooze, ‘Allure of Dark Times’, 203–6.

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Max Weber was the Rupert Brooke of the political theory of the successor state. He brought to the table an influential interpretation at a specific historical moment but died long before the implications of that interpretation could be realised.80 Of course, the famous typology in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ of authority legitimised by tradition, charisma or clerical-legalism is applicable to any species of state. Weber’s legacy as a theorist of state sovereignty has always been contested. In 1959, Wolfgang Mommsen interpreted Weber’s fascination with plebiscitarycharismatic leadership as helping to pave the way for the grim turn of German politics in the 1930s.81 Others have emphasised Weber’s ethics of political responsibility.82 The political theory of the successor state would become what successor states made of it. If Max Weber was the Rupert Brooke of successor state political theory, Carl Schmitt was the Ernst Jünger. Having done so much to provide the discursive infrastructure of Nazi rule, both Jünger and Schmitt broke with the party before the Second World War and went on to influential careers after the war.83 Understandably, Schmitt’s association with the Nazis has somewhat overshadowed his contribution to the theory of state sovereignty. For our purposes, this contribution lies in his 1922 treatise on the matter as it relates to successor-state formation, notably its famous first line: ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’84 From this, Schmitt derived a whole theory of public power, more radical than anything imagined by Weber. Sovereignty to Schmitt exists beyond any kind of law, as power defined ‘not as the monopoly to coerce or rule, but as the monopoly to decide’.85 Sovereignty pre-exists the state and the law, both of which serve to 80 81 82 83

84

85

Weber died of pneumonia on 14 June 1920. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, esp. 415–47. For example, Peter Briener, Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). The parallel is far from exact. Jünger never joined the Nazi Party, and publicly broke with it as early as 1934. Schmitt became a fervent Nazi in 1933, though he fell out of favour with the party after 1936. Schmitt never regained an academic position after 1945 but remained an important voice in legal theory. Thomas R. Nevin, Ernst Junger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014 [originally published in German in 2009]), esp. chs. 27–29. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985 [originally published in German in 1922), 5. The term Ausnahmezustand is sometimes translated as ‘state of exception’, though not in this translation. Schmitt, Political Theology, 13.

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articulate sovereignty. In themselves, these are not particularly radical notions. So staid a positivist as Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state and an international lawyer by training, made essentially the same argument before the Great War.86 What distinguished Schmitt was his extended reflection on the exception, defined as ‘a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law’.87 The modern state, whether a liberal democracy or the authoritarian Kaiserreich, masks sovereignty in written constitutions and legal codes. But the exception – notably the creation of successor states after the Great War such as the vulnerable Weimar Republic – reveals both the destructive and the creative capacities of sovereignty.88 If the liberal individual guided Wilsonian sovereignty, and the proletariat Bolshevik sovereignty, what would guide a sovereign that would decide upon the exception? Schmitt, who after all entitled his work Political Theology, posited that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’.89 Tracy Strong suggested that in the twentieth century, an ethos of technological progress would perform the work of a divinity in providing certainty.90 To others, notably Giorgio Agamben, sovereign power deciding the exception legitimised itself as a normalised practice of governance.91 Whatever Schmitt intended in the abstract, the Volk and those who claimed to channel it came to decide upon the exception in the successor state. Had not Romanticism made the Volk the repository of primordial wisdom, an article of faith constantly reinforced for more than a century in music, poetry and all manner of nationalist propaganda? How better to articulate an alternative version of a democratic state than to base it in the ethnic collectivity rather than in the atomised individual of liberalism or the materially determined proletarian consciousness of Bolshevism? Surely, thinking of the Volk as a secularised divinity

86 88 89 90 91

87 Smith, “Wilsonian Challenge,” esp. 183–86. Schmitt, Political Theology, 6. Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 31–61. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. Tracy B. Strong, ‘Introduction’ in Schmitt, Sovereignty, xxiv. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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helps explain Schmitt’s fawning response to the rise of Nazi power in its early years.92 Mark Mazower has written of a ‘deserted temple’ of democracy in interwar Europe, a designation that surely applies to the successor states.93 The successor states set about dismantling or simply ignoring the minorities treaties virtually from the moment they were signed.94 The combination of the Weberian preoccupation with borders and charismatic leaders and Schmitt’s preoccupation with the exception proved irresistible to interwar ethno-nationalism. The doleful tale of the descent of the successor states into toxic ethnic politics is too well known to require repeating at length here. Admiral Horthy literally rode on a white horse into Budapest on 16 November 1919, to rescue and purify the Magyar national community. In Poland, a fragmented and paralysed parliament gave way in 1926 to a coup by Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who promised sanacja or ‘moral cleansing’ to the Polish people. Even Czechoslovakia, the closest thing to an authentic liberal democracy among the successor states to the Habsburg monarchy, practised fierce ethnic politics. Edvard Beneš, of liberal reputation and beloved in allied circles (at least until his betrayal at Munich in 1938), advocated land reform in western Bohemia because of a stated need to ‘teach the Germans a lesson’.95 Every successor state leader claimed to act democratically as the instrument of the sovereign ethnicity. Adolf Hitler did not invent the logic of the successor state, he simply carried it to its logical conclusion.

:   ? No one did more than Zara Steiner to restore contingency to the history of peacemaking after the Great War. Treaties, she showed, were not destiny. But even she obliquely referenced Sir Edward Grey’s metaphor of light in her two-volume magnum opus on European international 92

93 94

95

Detlev Vagts, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Ultimate Emergency: The Night of the Long Knives’, Germanic Review 87 (2012), 203–9. The article includes a translation of Schmitt’s article, ‘The Führer Protects Justice: On Adolf Hitler’s Reichstag Speech of 13 July 1934’. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), title of ch. 1. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chs. 9–11. Quoted in Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 219.

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history between the wars.96 Doing so reinforced time-honoured tropes of darkness and failure. At a certain level, this conclusion is obvious. Peacemaking after the Great War failed to prevent the Second World War. But as many of the contributions in this volume confirm, conflating the end of the story with the whole story obscures longue durée changes in the international system. The Wilsonian and Bolshevik imperia, and the successor state, had long afterlives after their lights appeared to fail. A century later, Wilsonianism remains remarkably polarising. The Wilsonian imperium legitimised narratives of national awakening and national selfconsciousness, culminating in national liberation. Such narratives helped constitute a second ‘Wilsonian moment’ of decolonisation after 1945. Even today, few of those in American academia who so detest Wilson seem aware of how much they owe to the Wilsonian imaginary in the politics of identity. Wilson’s own lack of irony long survived him. For its part, the Soviet Union held on to the Bolshevik imperium to the last. On its own and through ideologically motivated surrogates such as Cuba, the Soviet Union continued to spread the idea of Marxist revolution, with at least some level of sincerity.97 For a time after 1989, it seemed as though the logic of the European successor state could be consigned to the dustbin of history – not least because the brutal ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe effected by the Red Army after 1945 reduced the numbers of ethnic minorities throughout the Eastern Bloc. But the dislocations of the financial crisis of 2007–09 and the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020 abetted an already rising tide of ethno-national populism, notably in states like Hungary and Poland, where it proved so virulent in the interwar period. Do we really believe this populism will not return eventually to revisiting post-Second World War borders? To be sure, the Westphalian state never disappeared. But the Westphalian system could never fully explain state sovereignty after the Great War. Old lights dimmed, notably those of the European great powers of the nineteenth century whose merchants, gunboats and soldiers

96

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Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The title of the first volume draws from Rudyard Kipling’s early novel, The Light That Failed (1891). Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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could work their will around the world. But new or radicalised lights pointed the way to a global liberal citizenry and a global proletariat. Ethnicities and races created their own lights. Indeed, part of the problem by the time the world went to war again – in Asia in 1931 and Europe in 1939 – was not so much darkness as too many kinds of competing light.

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5 The Crisis of Power Politics Peter Jackson and William Mulligan

This chapter examines the status of power as an ordering concept at a transformative moment in the history of international relations. It argues that the role of power politics at the Paris Peace Conference has been misunderstood. The closing phases of the First World War witnessed the rise of new currencies of national and international power that shaped negotiations in ways that have not been recognised in the existing literature. The German request for an armistice in 1918 marked a victory for Allied military power. The terms of the armistice were enforced by the menace of an ongoing economic blockade and the threat of invasion by Allied armies. And yet a closer look at the negotiations that took place in Paris, particularly when it came to the European territorial settlements, illuminates a crisis of power politics. In 1919 the experience of four and a half years of death and destruction had created the political space for new thinking about peace and international legitimacy to flourish. New norms for international behaviour emerged to exercise unprecedented influence on the way policy-makers understood and responded to the post-war international environment. Traditional power politics based on the balance of power and military alliances lost their authority as ordering concepts in international negotiations. Two new norms were particularly important in shaping the international political context in which peace negotiations took place. The first was ‘self-determination’, never defined with precision but widely understood to signify the right to democratic representation and selfrule for those peoples able to make a successful case that they constituted a ‘nation’. The second was the perceived need to devise new practices of international politics based on multilateral cooperation and the rule of 114

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law rather than power-balancing and alliance-building. This new norm had underpinned widespread transnational advocacy during the war for the creation of a Society or League of Nations.1 The political conditions under which the Paris peace treaties were negotiated were therefore markedly different that those that had prevailed a century earlier during the Congress of Vienna and its aftermath. Powerpolitical considerations were central to the logic of the 1815 settlement. Peacemakers were unapologetic about the need to impose territorial adjustments aimed explicitly at containing French power in the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.2 The settlement of 1919, conversely, introduced an international order that conferred legitimacy and authority on new practices of multilateralism and international cooperation. New institutions were designed to promote consultation, the peaceful settlement of international disputes and collective security. The European territorial settlement similarly reflected the changed normative context of the post-war period and was justified chiefly with reference to the principle of self-determination. Even the extra-European settlement, where former German and Ottoman colonies became ‘mandates’, was represented as a clear departure from traditional European imperial practices. But power politics were by no means eradicated. It was no coincidence that Woodrow Wilson, the world’s most prominent and influential advocate of peaceful cooperation as a substitute for traditional great power diplomacy, was leader of the world’s most powerful state. This provided Wilson with an outsized voice and the ability to impose his own vision of post-war order in Paris. The language of power politics lost much of its pre-1914 authority. Yet the order that emerged could only be upheld if its members were willing to use power to defend its rules and institutions.

    , – ‘Power politics’ is an approach that attributes decisive importance to the pursuit of economic and military power as fundamental to the logic of all 1 2

See chapters in this volume by Dunstan (Chapter 2), Payk (Chapter 3) and Smith (Chapter 4). Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Paul W. Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 519–639.

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international orders. It further assumes that the use of force is a legitimate and a necessary tool of international statecraft. Durable security can only be obtained through a preponderance of power. Power politics as a mode of statecraft is typically associated with traditional practices of powerbalancing and alliance-building.3 It is worth emphasising that power politics in their purest form have never constituted the only logic in a given international order. During the modern period (since 1789), the practice of power politics has always been mitigated by normative principles and legitimating strategies. The pursuit of power is typically represented to domestic audiences as either defensive in inspiration or as a means of serving abstract causes such as ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’. Power-political calculations therefore exist alongside other policy reflexes and ideological considerations.4 International relations during the nineteenth century were long considered a classic era of European power politics. Historians emphasised the importance of power-political calculations in shaping the territorial dispensation at Vienna. Power as an ordering concept in European politics was understood largely in terms of military resources, territorial security and the primacy of the interests of the great powers. The German Confederation strengthened Central Europe but did not upset the power balance by making the centre of the continent overmighty.5 During the revolutions of 1848, in the dying days of the Vienna system, the great powers hindered the establishment of a ‘Greater Germany’, fearing the balance of power would be overturned. Similarly, the Treaty of Paris (1856) contained, but did not destroy Russian, power. The unifications of Italy (1860) and Germany (1871) attempted to reconcile nationalist aspirations with the European balance of power. The final

3

4

5

Classic statements on the nature of power politics include Hans Morganthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948); Martin Wight, Power Politics (London: Pelican, 1978); and, more recently, John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001). Martin Wight, ‘Western Values in International Relations’ in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1966] 2019), 111–53; see also Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Ian Clark, International Legitimacy and World Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Two classic studies of the Congress of Vienna are Charles Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919) and Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (Boston, IL: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

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major European peace treaty of the nineteenth century, the restructuring of the Balkans by the Treaty of Berlin (1878), rested upon a careful calibration of Russian, British and Austro-Hungarian gains and their impact on the overall strategic balance.6 This vision of the nineteenth century as the heyday of traditional power politics has been challenged over the past three decades by historians who emphasise the cooperative and consultative character of great power relations for much of this period. Scholars from this school of interpretation stress the novelty and importance of the multilateral institutions created after 1814 to manage international rivalry and limit conflicts. They prefer concepts such as ‘political equilibrium’ and ‘hegemony’ to ‘balance of power’.7 It is argued that a collective preference for peace and stability more often than not took precedence over the pursuit of power in what has been termed a ‘new European security culture’ that emerged ‘after Napoleon’.8 Power was by no means absent from the post-1815 system. Nor was there any attempt to eradicate war from the postNapoleonic European order. War as a tool of statecraft remained ‘in the order of things’.9 The difference was that new institutions and practices were developed to manage power and limit great power war in an order designed above all to avoid a return to the catastrophic conflicts of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. The ‘Allied Council’ created to 6

7

8

9

Jörn Leonhard, Bellizismus und Nation: Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten 1750–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008); Winfried Baumgart, Europäisches Konzert und nationale Bewegungen: Internationale Beziehungen, 1830–1878 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999); for more general studies of nineteenth-century Europe that take this line see F. R. Bridge and Roger Bullen, The Great Powers and the European State System, 1814–1914, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004); Norman Rich, Great Power Diplomacy, 1814–1914 (New York; McGraw Hill, 1992); Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019 ed.), 80–116; Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 139–47 and 269–84; Thomas Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); see also Otte, Chapter 16 in this volume. The classic statement of this case remains Paul Schroeder, ‘The Nineteenth Century System: Balance of Power or Political Equilibrium?’, Review of International Studies 15, 2 (1989), 135–53. Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan and Brian Vick (eds.), Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and a New European Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Philippe Contamine and Laurent Testot, ‘La guerre au Moyen Âge: rencontre avec Philippe Contamine’ in Jean Vincent Holeindre and Laurent Testot (eds.), La guerre: Des origines à nos jours (Auxerre: Sciences Humaines, 2014), 79–80.

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manage the military occupation of French territory and to exact reparations payments is a good example of the innovative character of the post1815 order.10 As the century progressed, however, the underpinnings of this order came under increasing strain. Nationalism remained a political dynamic shaping internal politics and external policies across the continent. Programmes for nationhood and territorial unification led to great power conflicts in 1859, 1866 and 1870–71. The issue of these wars eroded the ‘Concert’ while at the same time transforming the continental balance of power with the advent of Italy, and especially Germany, as European great powers. Just as corrosive to the practices and institutions of European order were imperial rivalries that were focused first on the status of Ottoman possessions in the ‘near East’ but expanded to dramatically during the latter half of the century as European empires engaged in a global competition for power and prestige. Britain and France cooperated to defend the Ottoman Empire from the threat posed by Russian imperial expansion in the Crimean War (1853–56). The conflict remained limited, however, and did not destroy the foundations of the European order. More destabilising in the longer term was a wave of imperial expansion from the 1860s onwards that saw virtually all of the European powers as well as the United States and Japan engage in global imperial competition. In theory, the acquisition of colonies was supposed to provide the economic and demographic basis for military power. In practice, however, imperial expansion often created fresh sources of tension, new strategic vulnerabilities and novel justifications for the use of force in international politics.11 The global competition for new colonial territory also injected a zero-sum ethos to great power rivalry that was profoundly corrosive to the consultative and cooperative principles of the ‘European concert’. Political and military elites feared the imperial resources of their 10

11

Schroeder, Transformation; Matthias Schulz, Normen und Praxis: Das Europäische Konzert der Grossmächte als Sicherheitsrat, 1815–1860 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009); Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Beatrice de Graaf, How Europe became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Glenda Sluga, The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). On the Allied Council see Beatrice de Graaf, Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. 138–204. Jochen von Bernstorff, ‘The Use of Force in International Law before World War I: On Imperial Ordering and the Ontology of the Nation-State’, European Journal of International Law 29, 1 (2018), 233–60.

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rivals would be brought to bear upon the balance of power in Europe. The shift towards a more competitive order based on the pursuit of imperial power was exacerbated by the advent of a unified Germany and its bid for world empire status after 1890. A large German empire threatened to transform the most powerful continental state into the hegemon of European politics. This perception caused particular anxiety among political and policy elites of France, Russia and Great Britain. It played an important role in the transformation of the international order and the emergence of rival alliance blocs in Europe.12 Not all international dynamics pointed in the direction of ever greater interstate rivalry. Technological change stimulated unprecedented levels of worldwide commercial and cultural exchange that took place both at and beneath the level of the state. Although these developments were often obscured by the primacy attached to economic, military and imperial power following the mid-century wars, they created new relationships of interdependence between states and peoples. It is undeniable that the thickening connections and entanglements between societies offered states a variety of levers with which to wield influence. Trade treaties, bank loans and expert missions became central issues in international politics. States sought to influence media in other societies and cultural foreign policy became a domain for state rivalry in the early twentieth century.13 But they also facilitated an explosion of internationalism of all kinds. From the late 1850s the number and variety of international institutions increased dramatically. Among the most important were those created to manage international trade and communications: the International Telegraphic Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1874), the International Union for Weights and Measurements (1875), the International Union of Customs and Tariffs (1890) and the International Office for Public Hygiene (1907).14 All of these institutions promoted and enabled international cooperation. And they emerged 12 13

14

William Mulligan, Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Laurence Badel, Diplomaties européennes, XIXe–XXIe siècle (Paris: Presses de Science Po, 2021), 197–264; William Mulligan and Jack Levy, ‘Rethinking Power Politics in an Interdependent World, 1871–1914’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 49, 4 (2019), 611–40. Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulman (eds.), Mechanics of Internationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4–16; John Boli and George Thomas, Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley:

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alongside a growing network of transnational movements and associations created to foster intellectual collaboration and the cause of peace. Glenda Sluga has illustrated the importance of what she terms ‘new forms of international sociability’ that reflected ‘a world shrinking under the influence of commercial and cultural interdependence’.15 The notion of growing interdependence was a central element in internationalist doctrines calling for increasingly peaceful cooperation among nation-states. A thriving network of transnational peace activism emerged from the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1900 there were at least 425 peace organisations worldwide. Many of these organisations met regularly to exchange ideas and practices in large annual ‘Universal Peace Congresses’.16 One of the major themes to emerge out of the transnational peace movement was a call for international institutions to promote the peaceful resolution of disputes between states and imposing the rule of law in (white) international society. Arbitration was identified as the most promising means of settling international disputes without recourse to war. A more peaceful international order, moreover, was expected to open the way to multilateral arms limitations and restrictions on the use of military force in relations among the world’s ‘civilised’ (meaning white imperial) peoples. International arbitration, arms limitation and codification of the laws of war dominated the international diplomacy of the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907. The Hague conferences were global events, with delegates from twenty-six countries attending the first conference, and from forty-four countries attending the second. Maartje

15

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University of California Press, 2002), 9–22; Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in an Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 18–32. Sluga, Internationalism, 2; see also Daniel Laqua, ‘Transnational Endeavours and the “Totality of Knowledge”’ in Grace Brockington (ed.), Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the fin-de-siècle (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 247–71; Mark Mazower, Governing the World. The History of an Idea (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 31–66, 94–115. W. H. van der Linden, The International Peace Movement, 1815–1874 (Amsterdam: Tilleul, 1987); Sandi Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); David Patterson, Toward a Warless World, the Travail of the American Peace Movement, 1887–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976); Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Rémi Fabre, Thierry Bonzon, Jean Michel Guieu, Elisa Marcobelli and Michel Rappoport (eds), Les défenseurs de la paix, 1899–1917 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018).

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Abbenhuis has argued persuasively that pressure from transnational civil society was decisive in compelling governments first to attend the conference and then to respond to specific proposals.17 Out of the Hague conferences emerged the first calls for an international association or ‘society’ of nations to preserve peace through interstate cooperation and the rule of international law.18 Scholars and commentators at the time and ever since have criticised the Hague conferences for their failure to eradicate power politics and establish new bases for international relations. The coming of war in 1914 and the repeated violation of the laws of war by all belligerents have been represented as a confirmation of the ineffectiveness of international efforts for peace. Yet this criticism misses the significance of international peace advocacy before the First World War in three important ways. First, although the jus ad bellum remained a touchstone of state sovereignty, in practice the Hague conferences underlined the significant normative restraints on the use of military force in relations between great powers.19 Second, the internationalist advocacy that was so prominent at The Hague and after was the necessary precursor to the much larger, more pervasive and more influential global campaign to remake the international order during the Great War.20 Third, the moral authority of these norms would be transformed beyond all recognition by the unparalleled death and destruction of the First World War. Transnational support for a new international order based on peaceful cooperation and the rule of law gathered force over the course of the

17 18

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Maartje Abbenhuis, The Hague Conferences and International Politics, 1898–1915 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). Léon Bourgeois, Pour la Société des Nations (Paris: Charpentier, 1910); see also Christian Birebent, Militants de la paix et de la SDN: les mouvements de soutien à la Société des nations en France et au Royaume-Uni (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 14–29; Sakiko Kaiga, Britain and the Intellectual Origins of the League of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Ludovic Tournès, Les États-unis et la Société des nations, 1914–1946: le système international face à l’émergence d’une superpuissance (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), 21–26. William Mulligan, ‘Justifying International Action: International Law, The Hague and Diplomacy before 1914’ and Thomas Munro, ‘The Hague as a Framework for British and American Newspapers’ Public Representations of the First World War’ in Maartje Abbenhuis, Christopher Barber and Annalise Higgins (eds.), War, Peace and International Order? The Legacies of the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 (London: Routledge, 2017) 12–30 and 155–70 respectively. But see also von Bernstorff, ‘The Use of Force in International Law before World War I’. Abbenhuis et al. (eds.), Legacies of the Hague Conferences; B. J. C. McKercher (ed.), Restraints on War, 1899–1939 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992).

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Great War to emerge as a powerful counterpoint to traditional power politics.21 Despite these developments, on the eve of the war, the strategic balance was unquestionably the primary preoccupation of leaders across the great powers. The practice of counting ships or numbers of soldiers was a crude measure of relative power, but it provided a baseline that increasingly shaped the security policies of all major European states. As leaders demanded increases in naval expenditure, armaments and the length of military service, they also proclaimed their defensive intentions. Critics feared that arms races were producing the conditions that made war inevitable. Others were less concerned about the impact of ever more armaments on the international order. In 1913 the German statesman Kurt Riezler described the era as that ‘of the greatest armaments and the longest peace’. He went on to argue that the ‘cannons do not fire, but they speak in negotiations’. In short, possession of military power was a vital of source of strength for great powers in international negotiations. Riezler’s articulation of the doctrine of Risikopolitik gave eloquent expression of the role of balance of power as a mechanism for regulating European politics before 1914.22

         The outbreak of war set in train processes that culminated in a fundamental crisis for power politics. All belligerent governments justified their entry to war as an act of defence. But they also claimed to fight for broader principles such as justice, the rights of small nations, civilisation and peace itself. International lawyers, peace activists and others had articulated these principles long before 1914. But political leaders’ public declarations endowed these ideas with a new normative power. Allied governments denounced German policy as brutal realpolitik. German intellectuals responded with a defence of militarism in the form 21

22

William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 180–301; Jan Stöckmann, ‘The First World War and the Democratic Control of Foreign Policy’, Past & Present 249 (2020), 121–66. J. J. Ruedorffer, Grundzüge der Weltpolitik in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1916 ed.), 217–22; see also Andreas Osiander, ‘A Forgotten Theorist of International Relations: Kurt Riezler and His Fundamentals of World Politics of 1914’ in Ian Hall (ed.), Radicals and Reactionaries in Twentieth Century International Thought (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 43–73. On the impact of arms races see David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); David Hermann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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of the ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three’. But the ‘Manifesto’ proved a gift to Allied propagandists and magnified criticisms of conventional power politics across Allied and neutral countries.23 The balance of power, exclusive alliances and secret agreements had failed on their own terms. They had not preserved the peace and they had not provided security. Over the course of the war these traditional approaches were deprived of their legitimacy in public discourse. The concept of power, meanwhile, became so evidently multidimensional that it could no longer be judged using the reductionist criteria of military resources. The failure of proposals for a negotiated peace between 1914 and 1917 provides a good illustration of the erosion of balance of power thinking as an underpinning logic of international order. None of these proposals, all of which were framed as bargains about territory, resources and security, succeeded in brokering even a truce. This stood in marked contrast to major European wars of previous centuries, when coalitions fractured and peace agreements were negotiated. The appeal of decisive victory and the claim to fight for universal principles effectively decoupled wartime diplomacy from balance of power practices. There could be no compromise over principles and no trust in enemies who traduced those principles.24 The conduct of power politics suffered no restraints. By late 1916, the advocates of decisive victory were in control in Berlin, London and Paris as belligerent societies geared up for what John Horne has described as the ‘remobilisation’.25 Decisive victory, meaning the permanent weakening of the enemy states and their effective expulsion from the ranks of the great powers, was represented as the only basis for lasting peace. This form of international politics was the negation of the balance of power. The global dimensions of the war eroded the last distinctions between a European balance of power and the global imperial order. The British

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Jürgen von Ungern-Sternburg and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternburg, Der Aufruf ‘An die Kulturwelt’: Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996). David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Mulligan, Great War for Peace, 133–79; Frank Winters, ‘Exaggerating the Efficacy of Diplomacy: The Marquis of Lansdowne’s “Peace Letter” of November 1917’, International History Review 32, 1 (2010), 32. John Horne, ‘Introduction: Mobilizing for Total War, 1914–1918’ in John Horne (ed.), State, Society, and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–18.

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foreign secretary George Canning famously remarked that he had called the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old world.26 The First World War, conversely, destroyed the fiction of a hermetically sealed European balance. Britain, France and Russia mobilised their colonial citizens and subjects to fight on the battlefields of Europe, while the German Foreign Office sought to foment insurrections across Allied empires. The entry of the United States into the war confirmed that the balance of power could no longer operate on a European scale. The first years of the war illuminated the complexity of power relations in international politics. The practices of blockade and counter-blockade revealed the economic vulnerabilities of modern states, particularly the Central Powers, in an increasingly interdependent global commercial system. Part of the effectiveness of the Allied ‘distant’ blockade, particularly from mid-1917 onward, lay in the fact that it drew on a global intelligence-gathering effort and required little overt use of violence. This stood in sharp contrast to German submarine warfare, which was waged by attacking and sinking Allied naval and merchant shipping. When Germany intensified its blockade with the practice of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915 and again in 1917, this led to confrontations with the United States that played a role in American entry into the war on the side of the Allies. Both Allied and German economic warfare practices violated customary as well as treaty international law. But the protests of the Central Powers that the Allied blockade was illegal and worked through the systematic starvation of civilians had little purchase in the political calculations of neutral states.27 The politics of economic warfare served to magnify how power relations functioned in an interdependent international political and economic order. The Allies were also vulnerable. As the Great War became a test of economic power and political resolve, American finance, raw materials and heavy industry became increasingly vital to the Allied war effort. American neutrality benefited the Entente powers, which were better able to finance their purchases in the United States and to transport them 26 27

Harold Temperley, The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1822–1827 (London: Bell, 1925), 381. Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law during the Great War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 183–209 and 240–75; Nicholas Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022), 27–86.

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across the Atlantic. By late 1916 American trade with the Allies had quadrupled while that with the Central Powers stood at just over 1 per cent of its pre-war levels. An ever-greater requirement for loans to finance US purchases forced the Allies to turn again and again to Wall Street. Financial relations gradually became an essential lever of American power. The war transformed the United States into the world’s largest creditor. American gold reserves nearly doubled during the conflict and by 1918 represented nearly half total global holdings.28 By early 1917 US policy elites had come to view American financial power as their ‘strongest weapon’ in the coalition politics of the ‘Allied and Associated Powers’.29 Wilson was reluctant to use this leverage during the war. But he had every intention of doing just that during peacemaking after the war: England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means. When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking, because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands; but we cannot force them now, and any attempt to speak for them or to speak our common mind would bring on disagreements which would inevitably come to the surface in public and rob the whole thing of its effect’.30

The president understood that American power would provide the means to impose an American vision of the post-war order once the fighting ceased. And he had strong views about the content of that vision which, he believed, must replace traditional power politics with a rules-based international order where power would be managed by an association of democratic states exercising mutual restraint in the name of ‘world opinion’. Over the course of the war, Wilson had acquired the conviction that American power must be brought to bear in an effort to establish a new moral and political basis for world politics. From May 1916 onward the US president launched an enormously influential public campaign calling for a new international order characterised by ‘a new and more

28

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30

Arthur Walworth, America’s Moment, 1918: American Diplomacy at the End of World War I (New York: Norton, 1977), 4–6; Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (London: Penguin, 2014), 34–53. Arthur S. Link (ed.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson [hereafter PWW], 69 vols., vol. 45 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), ‘A Memorandum by Sidney Edward Mezes, David Hunter Miller, and Walter Lippmann’, 4 January 1918, 462. Wilson to House, 21 July 1917 in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters, vol. VII, War Leader (New York: Doubleday, 1939), 180.

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wholesome diplomacy’ and served by a ‘universal association of nations’.31 He argued for an organic conception of order based on an ‘international concert of peace’. Power politics must therefore be replaced by a ‘community of power’. Wilson insisted that [t]he question upon which the whole future peace and policy of the world depends is this: Is the present war a struggle for a just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of power? . . . there must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries but an organized common peace.32

For Wilson, the chief function of the League would be the moral regeneration of world politics. This would be achieved by ensuring that ‘force of arms’ was replaced by ‘the force of world opinion’ as the ultimate arbiter in international relations.33 Wilson’s public proclamations struck a chord with an unprecedented global audience. They functioned as a magnetic pole of attraction not only for anti-colonialist movements, but also for internationalist projects calling for a new international order based on cooperation under the rule of law. The result was that, when the American president first arrived in Europe, he had secured for himself a position of authority and legitimacy that had no precedent in the long history of international politics. Italian statesman Francesco Savario Nitti recalled that he had ‘seen Wilson come to Europe in 1918 acclaimed as the apostle of the new civilisation and the liberator of peoples’.34

31 32 33

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Wilson Address to the League to Enforce Peace, 27 May 1916 in Link (ed.), PWW, vol. 37, 115. ‘Peace without Victory Address’, 22 January 1917 in Link (ed.), PPW, vol. 40, 533–39. Quote from Wilson’s address to the second plenary session of the peace conference on 25 January 1919 in Albert Geoufrre de Lapradelle (ed.), La Paix de Versailles, vol. 1., La Conférence de la Paix et la Société des Nations [hereafter PV-SDN] (Paris: Éditions internationales, 1929), 8; on Wilson’s overall conception see Lloyd Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (London: Palgrave, 2002), 51–64; Thomas Knock, To End All Wars. Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 44, 126–27, 149–53, 207; Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe. Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America’s Strategy for Peace and Security (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009), 182–202. Nitti quoted in Andreas Osiander, ‘Peacemaking and International Legitimacy: Stability and Consensus in the State System of Europe, 1644–1920’ (DPhil., University of Oxford, 1991), 460; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Carl Bouchard, Cher Monsieur le Président: Quand les français écrivaient à Woodrow Wilson, 1918–1919 (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2015).

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In his ‘Fourteen Points’ address to Congress on 8 January 1918, Wilson sought for the first time openly to bind the Allies to his vision of post-war order. He declared that the principles of power politics belonged to ‘an age that is dead and gone’. He then proceeded to outline an American ‘program of the world’s peace’. Wilson’s programme was a repudiation of traditional power-political practices. It emphasised the need for ‘open diplomacy’, free trade and arms reductions ‘to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety’. It also stipulated that the post-war territorial settlement must reflect the political aspirations of the various nationalities in the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires. The fourteenth and final point declared that ‘general associations of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike’. Wilson observed that: ‘An evident principle runs through the whole program I have outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.’ The new international order would bring an end to traditional great powerhorse-trading of peoples and territories. Wilson concluded with a warning, directed as much at the Allies as at the Central Powers, that the American programme for peace was ‘the only possible program’.35 In the months that followed American policy aimed consistently at compelling all belligerent parties to accept Wilson’s vision as the basis for postwar order.

        The United States was in a very strong position to impose its will. As the Great War drew to an end, American industrial, financial and military power had far eclipsed that of any other state. The remarkable pre-1914 growth of American heavy industry had only been accelerated by the war. In 1919 America’s share of world manufacturing production was approaching 40 per cent and its gross domestic product was nearly triple 35

‘President Wilson’s Fourteen Points’, doc. 3 in Ray Stannard Baker (ed.), Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1923), vol. III, 42–45; Thomas Knock, ‘Wilsonian Concepts and International Realities at the End of the War’ in Manfred Boemeke, Gerald Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 114–19.

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that of its nearest competitor (Great Britain). American steel production, meanwhile, was greater than that of all the other great powers combined. Its military expenditure had also outstripped that of any other belligerent and its ‘war-making potential’ was more than double that of the world’s second most powerful state (Great Britain again).36 The Wilson administration was well aware that American power gave it a commanding voice in the design of the post-war order. Treasury secretary William McAdoo advised the president that ‘Our economic strength, and particularly the financial part of our economic strength, is so great . . . that we have a paramount advantage [in negotiations]’.37 Wilson fully intended to use this power to place power politics outside the lexicon of negotiations at the peace conference. Allied policy elites recognised the crucial importance of American power as well as the restrictions it placed on their post-war planning. Louis Aubert, an influential junior secretary within the French delegation, judged that French negotiators should ‘orient our argumentation in the American sense wherever possible’ to secure the trust and good will of the president. ‘The Americans’, lamented senior French diplomat Philippe Berthelot, ‘are necessary undesirables’.38 The British government of David Lloyd George responded to the transformation of the strategic balance by adopting an ‘Atlanticist’ policy orientation that rested on the fundamental conviction that Britain’s interests were best served by close cooperation with the United States.39 Always seeking a tactical advantage in negotiations, Lloyd George viewed tension between the French and American delegations as a positive 36

37 38

39

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict, 1500–2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 199–202; Ikenberry, After Victory, Appendix II, 278, which uses data from the ‘Correlates of War’ project: J. D. Singer and P. Diehl (eds.), Measuring the Correlates of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). McAdoo quoted in David Stevenson, 1917: War, Peace & Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 49. France, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères [MAE], série Papiers d’agents – Archives privées [PA-AP] 166, Papiers André Tardieu, vol. 415, ‘Note sur le dossier relative au basin de la Sarre’, 12 December 1918 (Aubert was secretary to French lead negotiator André Tardieu); Berthelot quoted in Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 168. On the question of ‘Atlanticism’ in British policy, see Michael Fry, Illusions of Security: North Atlantic Diplomacy, 1918–1922 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 7–25; David Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1991), 83–107.

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development. ‘The Americans . . . are becoming more and more antiFrench’ he observed with satisfaction in March 1919. This provided British negotiators with an advantage because ‘in proportion to their increasing suspicion of the French is their trust of the British’.40 Contending colonial claims were a further source of tension. Britain and France were thus far from united in resisting American efforts to shape the language of negotiations and the parameters of the peace settlement. Wilson’s repudiation of power and security as justifications for the distribution of territory has become such an accepted part of the history of the peace settlement that its revolutionary effects on framing strategies during the negotiations had been obscured. A new normative context prevailed that privileged territorial proposals made on the grounds of self-determination, nationality, international law and sovereignty, despite the conceptual confusion surrounding these norms. Claims articulated and justified in traditional geopolitical and strategic terms were much more difficult to make and were resisted with determination by an American president willing to use his enormous popularity in the aftermath of the armistice to go over the heads of European leaders to appeal to popular sentiment. An appeal to public opinion was entirely in keeping with Wilson’s conception of the League of Nations as a vehicle to bring the weight of ‘world opinion’ to bear on international statecraft. ‘What we seek’, he proclaimed, ‘is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed, and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.’41 New normative dynamics therefore shaped the way territorial claims were both formulated and received. The fate of Italian and French territorial claims made in Paris provide an excellent illustration of the effects of this crisis of power politics. Both sets of claims were rooted in the persistent logic of military security, balance of power and the perception of threat. Yet French and Italian representatives felt obliged to frame their claims in the language of self-determination, historic rights and shared democratic values. Their framing strategies responded to the ascendancy of Wilson, who was convinced of the need to turn away from the logic of power politics. Yet, as Clemenceau, Italian premier Vittorio Orlando and others pointed out, Wilson could only afford to take this position because of the preponderance of American power. 40 41

United Kingdom, Parliamentary Archives, Bonar Law Papers, BL 101/3/38, Lloyd George to Bonar Law, 30 March 1919. Quoted from Wilson speech at Mount Vernon, 4 July 1918 in Link (ed.), PWW, vol. 48, 517.

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French leaders were acutely aware of the long-term threat posed by Germany’s much greater demographic and economic resources. Weakening Germany’s position in the Rhineland offered a means to offset this threat. The swathe of territory between the Rhine and the FrancoGerman frontier was a historic avenue of invasion and a crucial source of industrial strength for the Reich. During the war and after the armistice France’s military, diplomatic and political elites had entertained a range of different solutions to the problem of German power in the Rhineland, from permanent occupation to the creation of an autonomous buffer under French influence. General Edmond Buat, Marshal Philippe Pétain’s chief of staff, offered a colourful expression of the logic of power politics and distrust of Germany: ‘If one holds such an animal by its most sensitive part, one can control its behaviour . . . and in the case of Germany, the sensitive part is the left bank of the Rhine.’42 This and other French schemes were difficult to square with the Wilsonian principles of self-determination, democratisation and security though collective institutions. If traditional strategic considerations remained prominent in French policy, the prevailing normative context shaped not only the articulation of French claims, but also the overall design of the French government’s security policy. Clemenceau’s negotiating team understood the need to frame French policy in the language of broader Allied principles. Louis Aubert, secretary to France’s chief negotiator André Tardieu, deployed the language of democratic solidarity in a memorandum drafted in early February 1919: ‘The Rhine, which for centuries has been considered the natural frontier between France and Germany, must as a result of this war, be considered as the natural frontier between the democracies of the North Atlantic and Germany.’43 Aubert was drawing on a new vocabulary for the expression of war aims and peace planning as the Allied and Associated Powers looked towards a post-war European security regime based on multilateral cooperation and shared political values. In early 1919 French leaders made the strategic choice to steep their claims for territorial revision and a transformation of the European balance of power in the language of democratic solidarity. Principles and geopolitics mapped neatly onto each other in an official memorandum from Foch to Allied leaders on 10 January 1919. This document, which was heavily edited by Tardieu, 42 43

Archives de l’Institut de France, Souvenirs du Général Edmond Buat, MS 5391 (1918–20), cahier 1 (9), 6 October 1918. MAE, PA-AP 166, vo. 417, Papiers Tardieu, ‘Rive gauche de Rhin’, 2 February 1919.

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fused France’s strategic aims with the defence of democracy and freedom in Europe. These vital aims could best be secured, it was argued, by detaching the Rhineland from Germany and making it a neutral buffer to future aggression against the ‘states of the West’. A bid to transform the European strategic balance was framed as a defence of Western democracies.44 The proto-Cold War discourse of an Atlantic security community was taken up again in a wide-ranging memorandum circulated by Tardieu on 25 February. This document proclaimed that ‘the common security of the Allies . . . demands that the Rhine becomes, as president Wilson expressed, the “the frontier of liberty”’.45 Invoking the norm of self-determination, Tardieu further claimed that the Rhineland had been ‘latinised by Rome’ and been influenced as much by French as German culture over the centuries. Detaching Rhineland from Prussia (if not completely from the Reich) was a ‘solution of liberty, not of imperialism’. Tardieu went further in a section entitled ‘The Rhine Frontier and the League of Nations’ to insist that an autonomous Rhenish state would function as a vital pillar upholding the viability of the new international organisation.46 Behind this exercise in normative engagement were acute anxieties rooted in the inescapable fact that Germany’s population and warmaking potential were nearly double that of France. The speed of German mobilisation combined with the delay in transporting British and American forces across the seas would mean France must once again bear the brunt of any future invasion on its own. But it was recognised that, on its own, this strategic reality was not a sufficient justification for territorial demands in the changed normative context of 1919.47 French 44

45

46

47

France, Service historique de la défense – Département de l’Armée de terre [SHD-DAT], Fonds privés: Archives du maréchal Foch, 1K 129, carton 1, ‘Note’ Foch to Allied plenipotentiaries, 10 January 1919; Tardieu’s revisions of Foch’s original draft are in MAE, PA-AP 166, Papiers Tardieu, vol. 422; among the phrases inserted by Tardieu was an allusion to ‘cooperation between all democratic powers’. In fact, Wilson had not referred to the Rhineland in his speech to the French Senate on 20 January. He had, however, praised France for standing ‘at the frontier of liberty’ during the war. Wilson, ‘Remarks to the French Senate’, 20 January 1919, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/317820. SHD-DAT, Fonds Clemenceau, 6N 73-2, ‘Mémoire du gouvernement français sur la fixation de la frontière occidentale de l’Allemagne et l’occupation interalliée des ponts du fleuve’, 25 February 1919 (reprinted in André Tardieu, La paix (Paris, Payot & Cie, 1920), 165–84 and Great Britain, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Command Paper 2169, Papers Respecting Negotiations for an Anglo-French Pact (London, 1924), 41–57. France, Archives Nationales, Archives privées, 324 AP 51, André Papiers Tardieu, ‘Rhin’, undated but certainly the first week of March 1919.

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leaders felt obliged to use the vocabulary of democracy, civilisation and justice when advancing balance of power aims. In negotiations with the British and Americans, Tardieu’s memorandum also served as an initial bargaining position. Clemenceau and his advisers considered the League of Nations, German disarmament and the demilitarisation of the Rhineland as fragile reeds on which to base their country’s future security. The French premier was determined to obtain more solid security guarantees, but he was more flexible in his approach than most historians have understood. Doubtless he would not have turned down detaching the Rhineland, had it been on offer, but at meetings between 11 and 14 March, senior British and American officials, including Lloyd George and Wilson, all made clear that this was not an option. Lloyd George’s private secretary Philip Kerr noted that such arguments were ‘wholly strategic’ and contrary to the British ‘sense of justice and fair play’. The ground had shifted to favour self-determination at the expense of strategic calculation. Tardieu admitted that ‘the separation [of the Rhineland] could not be permanent unless the people themselves wished it’. In fact French diplomats were keenly aware of the weakness of the Rhenish separatist movement. At the same time, Tardieu highlighted the divergence between British and French perceptions of the German threat. The United States remained safe on the other side of the Atlantic. Delivery of the German fleet, meanwhile, had ended the naval threat to Britain. But the long-term military threat to France remained just across the Rhine. The British and American focus on principles, argued Clemenceau and Tardieu, was the product of their sense of security. France required ‘supplementary guarantees’. The premier and his deputy were aiming for a British and American military commitment to defend France in the event of future German aggression.48 On 14 March, Lloyd George and Wilson agreed to extend a guarantee of military support against German aggression. In doing so they acknowledged the persistent importance of balance of power concerns in Western Europe. A preponderance of British and American power was thrown into this balance in order to reconcile French concerns with the principles of self-determination (applied to the Rhineland). While Clemenceau’s

48

‘Notes of a Discussion between Mr P. H. Kerr, M. Tardieu, and Mr Mezes’, Parliamentary Papers. France. No. 1, 1924 (London, 1924), 59–65; Tardieu, La Paix, 190–94; Peter Jackson, ‘La conception transatlantique de sécurité du gouvernement Clemenceau à la Conférence de Paix de Paris 1919’, Histoire, économie & société 38, 4 (2019), 65–87.

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advisers agreed that it would be ‘criminal’ to reject this offer, they considered the guarantee insufficient without at least a temporary military occupation of the Left Bank of the Rhine. Clemenceau once again used the language of geopolitics: ‘America is far away, protected by the ocean. Not even Napoleon himself could touch England. You are both sheltered, we are not.’ Like the vast majority of his advisers and vast swathes of French public opinion, he doubted that the ‘German spirit’ would turn away from conquest, but he also recognised the importance of a British and American security commitment.49 French policy combined conventional strategic concerns with liberal internationalist values. Nor was the language of shared political values deployed in these negotiations merely for British and American consumption. When defending the peace settlement before the French chamber and senate the following summer, Clemenceau repeatedly stressed the importance of ideological and cultural affinities to the trans-Atlantic security system that he argued was the true achievement of his negotiating strategy.50 The fact that the French programme was articulated in these terms illustrates the impact of the post-war normative context on deliberations in Paris. French negotiators recognised and adapted to the new standards of political legitimacy that had emerged out of the experience of the Great War. Clemenceau joined with Lloyd George and Wilson in imposing these same standards on Italy. Orlando and the Italian foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, aimed to bargain with Wilson, trading support for the League of Nations in return for American acceptance of Italian aims rooted in the logic of security and power politics. Their strategy was to amalgamate the terms of the Treaty of London with demands based on the nationality principle, most notably in relation to their claim to Fiume.51 The destiny of Fiume became one of the most controversial issues at the peace

49

50 51

Paul Mantoux [and Arthur Link] (eds.), The Deliberations of the Council of Four: March 24–June 20 1919, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33–35; Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power, 314. Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. 1, 33–35; Jackson, ‘Conception transatlantique’, 82–86. Italo Garzia, ‘Italy Faces the Birth of the League of Nations’ in Antonio Varsori and Benedetto Zaccaria (eds.), Italy in the New International Order, 1917–1922 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2020), 287–90; Luca Ricardi, ‘Divisioni e aspirazioni’ in Pier Luigi Ballini and Antonio Varsori (eds.), 1919–1920: I trattati di pace e l’Europa (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 2020), 63–64.

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conference and a test of the nationality principle. This contest played out in negotiating rooms in Paris and on the ground in Fiume.52 The debate over whether Fiume was Italian or Slav was just one example of the enormous difficulties peacemakers faced when attempting to apply the nationality principle. But the Italian delegation compounded this difficulty by making further claims to the coast of Dalmatia, where Italians were clearly a minority. They justified these claims on the grounds of Italy’s security and the Treaty of London, which by then had become a byword for cabinet power politics. At a meeting of the Big Four on 14 April, Orlando raised Italian claims to the Alpine watershed line, Fiume and Dalmatia. Possession of the Dalmatian coast was a long-term Italian strategic aim to ensure its predominance in the Adriatic. The collapse of Austria-Hungary and the formation of a new Yugoslav state did not alter the strategic calculus of Italian leaders. Dalmatia, Orlando argued, was of ‘strategic and military interest’ for Italy. He then pivoted to draw comparisons with French claims to the Rhine in order to argue that the neutralisation of Dalmatia was inadequate.53 Wilson consistently rejected the legitimacy of the Treaty of London. He insisted that his Fourteen Points must constitute the basis of the armistice agreement. At the height of the crisis, he denounced the absent Sonnino for having led Italy into a war of conquest. ‘I [brought the United States into the war] by invoking a principle’, Wilson declared, ‘I believe my claim takes precedence over his.’ Lloyd George demurred, observing that Italian claims were a ‘question of security’ rather than conquest.54 Orlando and Sonnino were ‘invoking an argument other than that of the will of the people; they are speaking of Italy’s security’. The American president responded: ‘That is an argument which doesn’t hold. It would obviously be very dangerous for them to refuse plebiscites, because it would mean admitting the weakness of their claims.’ The norm of self-determination, Wilson insisted, must trump arguments based solely on strategic considerations.55 The Italian premier was keenly aware of the normative power of Wilson’s principles and the need for French and British support. 52 53

54 55

Dominique Kirchner Reill, The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Conversation, plus Sonnino, 19 April 1919, 11 a.m. in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 276. Orlando said: ‘I will attempt to make comparisons with other cases to show how these principles apply.’ Conversation of Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George, 22 April 1919, 4 p.m. in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 335–39. 30 April 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 421–22.

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Orlando proclaimed that Italy had no imperial or territorial ambitions and sought only to satisfy its ‘legitimate aspirations’. He added that the peace conference must bring about ‘the renewal of humanity’ to create ‘a new ethical and political order of the world’.56 He therefore moved beyond strategic arguments to frame Italian demands in the context of the nationality principle. ‘The question of Dalmatia’, he observed in midApril, ‘as well as corresponding to a military necessity, has a national aspect.’ He proceeded to cite some statistics from the nineteenth century, which showed that the majority of inhabitants spoke Italian. He then drew a parallel with French claims to the Saar coal basin. ‘You have taken the Saar valley from Germany to give the coal to France; do you consider the defence of a race less important than the industrial defence which accrues to France from being assigned the Saar coal?’ Orlando then reiterated that the Treaty of London was his preferred basis for the settlement of Dalmatian claims.57 The problem with the Italian premier’s argument was that the attribution of the Saar coalfields had been determined largely according to the principle of self-determination. Clemenceau advanced strategic and historical claims to the region. Wilson and Lloyd George rejected his arguments on the grounds that the population of the Saarland was overwhelmingly German. The question was settled when France was granted temporary control of the coalfield and its infrastructure pending a plebiscite after fifteen years. But the region as a whole was to be administered by a League of Nations commission.58 Five days later, Sonnino adopted a different strategy, deploying history to bolster Orlando’s strategic arguments. The ‘tragic destiny of Italy’, he told the Council of Four, ‘has for centuries been to lie open to invasions.’ Power politics were an enduring reality in European politics. He used similar logic to that deployed by French negotiators over the Rhineland: the League of Nations was ineffective, the United States was too distant to render meaningful aid against an attack, and Italy’s neighbours in the

56

57 58

Orlando to Vittorio Emmanuele, 29 March 1919, Documenti diplomatici italiani (hereafter DDI), 6th Series, vol. III (Rome: Farnesima, 2007), 65–66; Orlando, Discorsi per la Guerra e per la pace, [A. Giannini ed.] (Foligno: Campitelli, 1923), 287–88 and 322. Relazione del Presidente del Consiglio, Orlando, 14 April 1919, DDI, 195–98. Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement (London: Macmillan, 1991), 113–18; Harold Nelson, Land and Power: British and Allied Policy on Germany’s Frontiers, 1916–1919 (London: Routledge, 1963), 255–81; Stephen Schuker, ‘The Rhineland Question: West European Security at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919’ in Boemeke et al. (eds.) The Treaty of Versailles, 298–309.

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Balkans lacked ‘good faith’ and had no respect for the rule of law. ‘It is not enough to sign a pact’, Sonnino insisted, ‘[t]ime alone will give this pact its true value.’59 The transformation of international relations was a long-term project, not a revolutionary moment. Wilson responded by reiterating his insistence that the Fourteen Points must provide the framework for peace. ‘I do not feel at liberty to suggest one basis for peace with Germany and another for peace with Austria’, he argued. While the American president was prepared to concede Italian claims to contiguous territory with Austria in accordance with the Treaty of London, he rejected its terms in relation to the Adriatic. He emphasised the fundamental change in international politics, which, he argued, reduced the salience of military security in the post-war order. The Treaty of London assumed the continued existence of Austria-Hungary, a persistent threat to Italian security. ‘But Austria-Hungary no longer exists’, he observed: These Eastern frontiers will touch countries stripped of the military and naval power of Austria, set up in entire independence of Austria, organized for the purpose of satisfying legitimate national aspirations, and created by states not hostile to the new European order, but arising out of it, interested in its maintenance, dependent upon the cultivation of friendships, and bound to a common policy of peace and accommodation by the covenants of the League of Nations.60

Wilson asserted that ‘[the] military advisers who imposed strategic boundaries [in 1815 and in 1871] bear responsibility for some of the gravest mistakes committed in the history of the world’.61 Nine days later, Clemenceau and Lloyd George both articulated a similar interpretation of the transformation of international politics. The needs of war had been accorded primacy in 1915, but by 1918, the League of Nations and the drawing of boundaries in accordance with the ‘wishes and lasting interests of the population’ were the determining principles.62 Yet power was not absent at the creation of a new international order in Paris. Even if the discourse of power politics was marginalised in the public rhetoric of the peace conference, it was clear to all parties that the military victory of the Allies and the United States was the crucial precondition for negotiations. Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George all 59 60 61 62

19 April 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 284–85. Wilson to Orlando, ‘Memorandum concerning the question of Italian claims on the Adriatic’, DDI, 199–201. 19 April 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. II, 283. Clemenceau and Lloyd George to Orlando, 23 April 1919, DDI, 302–05.

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recognised that a geopolitical revolution had transformed the conditions for peacemaking. When Clemenceau and Lloyd George wrote that ‘the ideals of the Western Powers had grown and strengthened’, they acknowledged the centrality of the alliance to victory in 1918 and in particular the transformative impact of the United States. American power loomed over the peace conference not least because it provided Wilson with a decisive voice over all of the most important issues addressed in Paris. Clemenceau warned Orlando that the refusal of the United States to sign the treaty would inspire opponents of the peace settlement. American economic support was essential to all plans for a European reconstruction. ‘I do not know how Europe can get back on its feet if the United States does not stay with us’, warned Lloyd George. The Federal Reserve had already ceased supporting sterling, the franc and the lire in March 1919. Of the Allies, Italy was most dependent on American financial support.63 Wilson only occasionally made explicit reference to American power. But he made clear he was willing to use American strength and Italy’s relative weakness as leverage. ‘The Italians must realize’, he told Clemenceau and Lloyd George, ‘that they can’t have what they want without American consent.’64 To Balfour’s warning that, without American aid, Italy’s economy would collapse and revolution would ensue, Orlando responded that the alternatives of conceding on Fiume and Dalmatia or facing economic collapse were equally serious. His government would fall if he did not secure these aims. ‘We know how to die of hunger’, the Italian premier observed, ‘[b]ut if the two dangers are equally grave, and the one and the other lead to death, I would prefer the death that leaves some honour.’65 For Clemenceau, the preservation of the trans-Atlantic alliance was always the primary objective, a marriage of principle and material power that would ensure peace and French security. He and Lloyd George appealed to Orlando to uphold the wartime alliance. If Orlando left the negotiations, this would play into German designs to split the allies, which, in turn, cast doubt on

63

64

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Gianni Tonioli and Dario Pellegrino, ‘Ricostruire l’economia internazionale, debiti e cambi’ in Ballini and Varsori (eds.), 1919–1920, 374; Lloyd George quoted in Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 297. 26 May 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. II, 213; Luigi Aldrovandi Marescotti, Guerra diplomatica: Ricordi i frammenti di diario, 1914–1919 (Milan: Montadori, 1942), 245–49. ‘Appunti del segretario generale della Delegazione per la pace’, 21 April 1919, DDI, 276–80.

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the credibility of the League of Nations. The disintegration of the alliance, they warned, risked the renewal of geopolitical rivalry and military competition.66 The pleas of Clemenceau and Lloyd George were in vain. Orlando was unmoved and the leaders of the Italian delegation left the peace conference on 23 April 1919. Peacemaking continued without Italian participation. After the United States withheld a vital $25 million loan to Italy, Orlando and Sonnino reluctantly returned to the conference and signed the Treaty of Versailles in Italy’s name. But failure to secure Italy’s objectives on the eastern Adriatic coast led to the fall of Orlando’s government on 19 June. In the end, Italy’s borders with the kingdom of Yugoslavia were settled by the treaty of Rapallo in November 1920, by which time Wilson’s power had ebbed away and the United States was pulling back from involvement in the territorial settlement in Europe. Orlando’s successor, Francesco Nitti, favoured closer cooperation with Yugoslavia and found a more favourable geopolitical context for advancing Italy’s claims. In the end, Mussolini’s fascist regime annexed Fiume in 1924.67 The episode of Italian territorial claims in Paris further illuminates one of the chief paradoxes of peacemaking in 1919. The political and normative context relegated traditional power politics to the margins in official and public discourse. Yet American financial power was deployed to coerce Italy during negotiations and to impose Wilson’s vision on the territorial settlement in the Mediterranean. What is more, the long-term viability of any order that would emerge rested on the overwhelming preponderance of the wartime coalition.

    -  A very different approach to order-making was applied to peacemaking outside Europe. When negotiators addressed the fate of German and Ottoman imperial possessions, traditional imperial practices prevailed 66

67

19 April 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 288; (Général) Henri Mordacq, Le Ministère Clemenceau: journal d’un témoin, tome III, Novembre 1918–Juin 1919 (Paris: Plon, 1932), ‘L’entrevue Clemenceau-Orlando (20 avril)’, 231–32; William Mulligan, ‘Lloyd George, Italy, and the Making of a New World Order, 1916–1922’ in Varsori and Zaccaria (eds.), Italy, 19–39. For more see Massimo Bucarelli and Benedetto Zaccaria, ‘Encroaching Visions: Italy, Yugoslavia, and the Adriatic Question, 1918–1920’ in Varsori and Zaccaria (eds.), Italy, 229–54.

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over the norms of self-determination and multilateral cooperation. Fundamental compromises were made to these principles to satisfy the demands of imperial powers such as Japan, France and Great Britain. As the crisis over Italy’s claims reached its zenith in April, the Big Three were also obliged to address Japan’s ambitions in the Far East. The two issues were related. The logic of Japan’s demands, interestingly, was very similar to that of Italian claims in Europe. Japan asserted its claims to political and economic privileges in the Chinese territories of Kiaochow and Shandong on the basis of a series of treaties and agreements concluded during the war, most notably the Sino-Japanese agreement in May 1915, Japan’s ‘Twenty-One Demands’ and treaties concluded between Japan, Britain and France in 1917. In essence, the Japanese delegation demanded the cession of all German rights in China.68 Like the Italians, the Japanese threatened to leave the peace conference if their claim to Shandong, in particular, was refused. And, as Orlando had done, the Japanese plenipotentiary in Paris, Baron Makino Nobuaki, was careful to frame Japan’s demands in Wilsonian language wherever possible. The Japanese delegation expressed support for the League of Nations idea – mainly in the hope that membership in the new international organisation provided a means to undermine existing racial hierarchies and allow Japan to deal as an equal with the other imperial powers.69 In terms of self-determination, however, Japan’s case was much weaker in China than that of Italy over Fiume. And yet the response of the ‘Big Three’ to Japan’s demands in Asia was very different to that given to Italian claims in Europe. The British and French premiers both made clear they felt bound to honour Japanese claims based on wartime treaties. Wilson, conversely, made clear the United States had no such obligations. And yet, whereas he had steadfastly refused to recognise the Allies’ treaty with Italy, the American president accepted Japan’s claims. In doing so, Wilson was

68

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Sōchi Naraoka, ‘A New Look at Japan’s Twenty-One Demands: Reconsidering Katō Takaaki’s Motives in 1915’ in Tosh Minohara, Tze-ki Hon and Evan Dawley (eds.), The Decade of the Great War: Japan and the Wider World in the 1910s (Leiden, Brill, 2014), 189–210; the record of the Japanese delegation’s key meeting with Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George is in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 317–28. Tadashi Nakatoni, ‘What Peace Meant to Japan: The Changeover at Paris in 1919’ in Minohara et al. (eds.), Decade, 171–84; Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998); Thomas Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007).

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obliged to reject the robust case made against Japanese demands by the Chinese delegate Wellington Koo, who invoked the principle of selfdetermination’70 ‘The principles we support here’, the US president told Makino, ‘cannot have the effect of destroying valid treaties; they cannot be invoked to annul obligations accepted earlier. I do not admit that respect for treaties could be considered an injustice.’ He justified the treaties as necessary to defeat Germany, saving the world and China. The American president acknowledged the ‘apparent contradiction’ in his position, but then liberated himself from this straitjacket by arguing that ‘different conditions’ obtained in East Asia and in the Mediterranean. The Italian departure from Paris only underlined the importance of ensuring continued Japanese participation in peacemaking. 71 The issue was particularly acute given the rejection of Japan’s proposal for racial equality. ‘Concerning Japan, we do what is required to make her join the League of Nations’, Wilson told Lloyd George and Clemenceau. ‘If she [Japan] stands aside [from the League]’, he continued, ‘she would do everything she wanted to do in the Far East. You heard them this morning say clearly that they won’t sign the treaty if the obligations contracted towards them are not honoured.’72 Wilson added that the influence of the League of Nations would eventually transform the conditions of Japan’s presence in China. The establishment of the League of Nations would provide a political framework for realising the independence and self-determination of all peoples. ‘This system’, he predicted, ‘will make its effects felt in the Far East.’73 For Wilson, the League of Nations was to be the handmaiden of the eventual transformation of imperialism. The Chinese people, in Wilson’s view, were not yet ready to embrace the benefits of this transformation in 1919. 70

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22 April 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 329–36; see also Hiroko Sakamoto, ‘The Impact of Versailles on Chinese Nationalism’ in Urs Matthias Zachmann (ed.), Asia after Versailles: Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order, 1919–1933 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 212–36. 22 April 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 336; see also ‘“Peoples of Many Races”: The World beyond Europe in the Wilsonian Imagination’ in Erez Manela, John M. Cooper and Thomas Knock (eds.), Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson: The Dilemma of Race and Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 191–204. 22 April 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. I, 336. Ibid., 325–34. The Chinese delegation refused to sign the treaty. In the medium term, however, Wellington Koo’s strategy of denouncing Japanese power politics and asserting rights to self-determination contributed to the return of Shandong to Chinese sovereignty at the Washington Conference in 1922.

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Post-war norms were even less influential when it came to the settlements in the Middle East and Africa. In theory, at least, the new normative context should have posed an unmistakeable threat to the legitimacy of European empires. The fifth of Wilson’s Fourteen Points stipulated that all colonial adjustments must take into account ‘the interests of the population concerned’. The Wilson administration was unequivocal that the United States had not joined the war to further the interests of the European empires.74 British leaders stole a march on the other colonial powers by paying early and frequent lip service to the principle of selfdetermination. As early as January 1918, Lloyd George had recognised that ‘the separate national conditions’ of the Arab peoples must be recognised and that ‘wishes and interests’ of the populations in Germany’s colonies must be a ‘primary regard’ in any peace settlement.75 In reality, the imperial appetites of the British policy elite were as expansive as ever. George Curzon, a member of the War Cabinet and chair of government’s powerful ‘Eastern Committee’, argued that British policy must ‘play self-determination for all it is worth, wherever we are involved in difficulties with the French, the Arabs or anybody else’.76 The Lloyd George government squared its aim of imperial expansion with its support for new international norms by proposing a ‘mandate’ system. Victorious imperial powers would administer former German and Ottoman imperial territories under a ‘mandate’ from the League of Nations. French negotiators initially interpreted the mandate proposal as a British plot to annex prime German colonial possessions. The core French aim was to secure access to the perceived reservoir of manpower in German equatorial Africa as a means of improving the Franco-German military balance.77 These power-political considerations were combined with concepts of racial hierarchy in the negotiations that ensued. In the end, German and Ottoman colonies were divided into different categories 74 75

76 77

Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 15–118. Lloyd George’s ‘Caxton Hall’ address is reprinted in The War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 2 vols. (London: Odhams Press, 1938), II, 1514; see also Pedersen, Guardians, 25. Quoted in W. Rogers Louis, Ends of Imperialism: The Scramble for Africa, Suez and Decolonization (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 205. MAE, Série Société des Nations [SDN], vol. 6, ‘Rapport’ on the mandates system for the Commission interministérielle pour la Société des Nations; Foreign Relations of the United States, Paris Peace Conference, vol. III, Council of Ten Minutes, 30 January, 803–5; see also A. S. Kanya-Forster, France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax of French Imperial Expansion (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981), 181–89.

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(‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’) according to their supposed level of political and economic development. Category ‘A’ mandates were expected to be granted self-rule in the near future, while it was expected that category ‘B’ and ‘C’ mandates would for the foreseeable future remain under the tutelage of the ‘mandatory power’ to which they were attributed. When it came to Africa, France obtained most of Cameroon and part of Togoland as category ‘C’ mandates while the British were allotted Tanganyika, Ruanda, Urundi, South-West Africa and the rest of Togoland. These territories were administered for all intents and purposes as integral parts of the French and British empires.78 The League-mandated carve-up of former Ottoman territories was much less straightforward. The 1916 ‘Sykes–Picot’ agreement divided up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into French and British spheres of influence. This accord was a classic example of imperial horsetrading. It stood in direct contradiction not only to the principle of selfdetermination, but also to commitments made to the cause of Arab independence by British officials in Egypt in order to secure Arab assistance in the war against Turkey. At the war’s end, Britain and France had issued a joint declaration promising ‘the final liberation of those peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks’ and support for ‘national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations’. But the declaration also expressed the aim of both the French and the British to ‘ensure by their support and by adequate assistance the regular working of [post-Ottoman] governments and administrations’.79 Neither power had any intention of surrendering the imperial ambitions underpinning the Sykes–Picot accord. In the event, the British military played a much greater role in driving the Turks out of the Arab lands. The Lloyd George government aimed to use the presence of British power on the ground to force a revision of Sykes–Picot and, in the words of colonial secretary Lord Milner, to

78 79

The best account of the evolution of the mandate system at the peace conference is Pedersen, Guardians, see 17–35, 53–84 and 138–40. ‘Syria and Mesopotamia: Franco-British Declaration of 8 November 1918’, IOR [India Office Records, British Library, London] L/PS/18/B339; see also David K. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 36–67; Vincent Cloarec, La France et la question de Syrie (1914–1918) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2002), 132–57.

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‘diddle the French out of Syria’.80 Tensions between the two imperial powers came to a head in fraught meetings of the Council of Four in March 1919. The issue was only partially resolved by Wilson’s proposal to create an impartial commission under the auspices of the League to ‘discover the desires of the populations’ of the region. A commission was appointed, but after many delays it did not publish its report until 1922. By this time the issue was resolved in classic imperial terms by a series of bilateral agreements under which the French and British unilaterally awarded themselves category ‘A’ mandates in Syria and Mesopotamia respectively.81 In sum, very different normative standards prevailed when it came to peacemaking outside Europe. When it came to settling the political fate of non-white peoples, power politics remained central to what was in essence an imperial world order.82

    :    Germany’s formal military power all but collapsed in the aftermath of the armistice. As the Imperial Army withdrew from France and Belgium, it left behind most heavy weaponry and transport equipment. Unwilling to accept responsibility for Germany’s defeat, the de facto military dictatorship of Erich von Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenberg called for a new government with democratic credentials to negotiate armistice terms. At the same time, a sailors’ mutiny in Kiel was transformed into a general revolutionary movement. By the time the armistice was signed, a German republic had been declared in Berlin and large swathes of Germany were caught up in revolutionary upheaval that would last well into the following year. As part of the armistice terms, Germany surrendered up virtually its entire fleet of submarines, all of its powerful ships, more than 5,000 artillery pieces and all operational military aircraft.83 Meanwhile, 80 81

82 83

Milner quoted in John Fisher, ‘Syria and Mesopotamia in British Middle Eastern Policy in 1919’, Middle Eastern Studies 34, 2 (1998), 144. James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (London: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 79–92; Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 151–62; Macmillan, Paris 1919, 381–85. See Thomas, Chapter 6 in this book. Volker Ullrich, Die Revolution von 1918/1919 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009); Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 24–91; David Stevenson, ‘Britain, France and the Origins of German Disarmament, 1916–1919’, Journal of Strategic Studies 29, 2 (2006), 261–62.

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the Allied and Associate Powers maintained in place the machinery of economic warfare that had, according to one recent estimate, caused the deaths of over 300,000 civilians over the course of the conflict.84 Germany was in no position to resist Allied peace terms. During what Ernst Troeltsch later described as the ‘dream-world (Traumland) of the armistice period’, German officials, including senior officers, acknowledged military weakness. At the same time, they saw economic interdependence and the normative discourse at the heart of Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech as the basis for the recovery of Germany’s position in European politics after the war. Conditions within Germany were too unstable and the international context too unfavourable to produce a coherent and focused strategy. Moreover the imposition of treaty terms in June 1919, widely denounced in Germany as a Diktat, was considered the ultimate expression of power politics. It also laid bare the illusions upon which German foreign policy had been based in the first half of 1919. The prominence of financiers and industrialists in the making of foreign policy in Germany after 1918 was a recognition of how economic interdependence had altered the operation of power in international politics. Max Warburg, the Hamburg banker, was the most prominent financier working for the German foreign office. He and others argued that Germany’s political recovery would depend on its economic performance.85 Economic recovery, in turn, required the provision of credit, for which German commercial circles looked to the United States. This emphasis on economics in German planning, along with the invocation of Wilsonian principles, was based on a shrewd appreciation of the transformation of power relations during the war. At the centre of this transformation was American power. ‘The whole world’, predicted the German ambassador to Washington, Johann von Bernstorff, in November 1918, ‘will slip into economic and financial dependence on the United States.’86 German officials sketched their negotiating strategy in spring 1919. Assuming the return of a liberal international trade system and Allied interest in German economic recovery to fund reparations, senior diplomat Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau argued that German industrialists should borrow American capital, which would then fuse German and 84 85 86

Mulder, Economic Weapon, 27–109. Peter Krüger, Deutschland und die Reparationen 1918/9 (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1973), 65, 72. Cited in ibid., 52.

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American economic interests. Although crossed out, the final line Brockdorff Rantzau’s memorandum was telling: ‘Our economic task will be to get rid of American capitalist domination gradually through our own capital formation, as we succeeded in doing during the course of the nineteenth century with British capital.’87 It was hoped that American loans would forge shared political interests with the United States that could be turned to Germany’s advantage in the medium term. In addition, German diplomats also sought to take advantage of their adversaries’ intention to fashion a new international order that repudiated power politics. On taking up office as German foreign minister, BrockdorffRantzau declared: ‘I wish to negotiate and conclude a peace of justice. I reject a peace of violence, destruction, and enslavement.’88 BrockdorffRantzau and other German leaders consistently used the term Gewalt (violence) rather than Macht (power), contrasting it with a peace of justice. In private, German diplomats had doubts about the appeal to international law, but the contrast between a peace of violence and peace of justice remained central to their rhetorical strategy. What hopes German delegates had harboured were dashed on 7 May 1919, when they received peace terms from the Allied and Associated Powers. Again, however, negotiations at this late stage of the conference reveal the contradictory character of the international order under construction. First, the German delegation cleaved to arguments drawing on international law and self-determination.89 Although they recognised that this strategy had little chance of success in the short term, it held out greater promise in the longer term by establishing rhetorical resources for use in future debates. The official German response of 17 June underlined the limitations placed on Germany’s sovereignty, the burdens of reparations, and argued the terms were a breach of both the armistice agreement and Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Germany was compelled to accept a Gewaltfrieden als Rechtsfrieden (‘a peace of violence as a peace of law’). The delegation judged that the Allies would use military and naval force

87

88

89

‘Aufzeichnung des Staatssekretärs des Auswärtigen Amts Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau’, 21 January 1919 in John P. Fox, Peter Grupp and Pierre Jardin (eds.), Akten zur Deutschen Auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945 (hereafter ADAP), Serie A, vol. I (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982), 204–06. ‘Programmatische Erklärung beim Amtsantritt’, 2 January 1919, in Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Dokumente (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellscahft für Politik und Geschichte, 1920), 17–18. Marcus M. Payk, Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des Modernen Völkerrechts unter Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2018), 393–411.

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to exact a signature, but such measures would constitute strategic benefits for the future. ‘If the opponent carries out the threat against us and, despite our willingness to fulfil all justified demands, uses force (Gewalt), we are convinced that the continuing peaceful development of the world will soon bring about an impartial court before which we can seek justice.’90 Second, Allied leaders threatened military action and a tightening of blockade measures should Germany reject the terms. Military and economic power was therefore very much back on the table as a tool of peacemaking. This development destroyed the calculations of Warburg and others that economic interdependence would moderate the Allied response in negotiations. The asymmetries of interdependence would instead be turned against Germany. The continuation of the blockade in 1919 has been marginal in many accounts of Allied diplomacy during the peace negotiations, but it is clear this tool of power weighed heavily on German perceptions and calculations. Gustav Noske, the socialist minister of defence, observed that ‘under the pressure of the hunger blockade, we will in the end have to accept the conditions, like a beaten dog’.91 In Vienna, Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer acknowledged that the Allies possessed the Machtmittel (power instruments) to compel the defeated states to accept their terms.92 Indeed, the Council of Four considered the continuation of the blockade a more draconian measure than military occupation. When Wilson baulked at starving Germany into submission, Robert Cecil noted that the ‘what matters most just now is the threat, whether or not the blockade is effective’.93 Cecil was to the fore in recognising how global economic interdependence had altered power relations. Having chaired the Allied Supreme Economic Council and served as minister of blockade, he had first-hand knowledge of the power of economic warfare. He argued that ‘in the modern world, military force is not everything’. A future League, ‘properly furnished with machinery to enforce the financial, commercial, and economic isolation of a nation determined to force its will upon the world

90 91

92 93

‘Aufzeichnung der deutschen Friedensdelegation’, 17 June 1919, in ADAP, vol. II, 126. ‘Besprechung zwischen dem Ersten Generalquartiermeister und dem Reichsminister des Äussern Graf Rantzau’, 4 April 1919; ‘Aufzeichnung des Reichsministers des Auswärtigen Gaf von Brockdorff-Rantzau’, 27 April 1919, in ADAP, vol. I, 398, 449–50. Text of the speech, Wiener Zeitung, 8 June 1919, 1–5. 14 May 1919 in Mantoux [and Link] (eds.), Deliberations, vol. II, 65–66.

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by mere violence, would be a real safeguard for the peace of the world’.94 Cecil’s confidence in the capacity of the League to secure peace through the threat or use of economic sanctions was the calculation of a realist in the service of liberal internationalism. Economic warfare was a central tool in the service of power politics. In 1919, Cecil, Brockdorff-Rantzau and others recognised that power politics now took place within the context of a culturally and economically interdependent world. States sought to bend the thick transnational networks and state-based relations that constituted this interdependent world to their advantage. At the centre of this system lay the United States. In October 1919 the SPD foreign minister, Hermann Müller, set out his foreign policy strategy, which sought American capital to fund German industrial and commercial recovery. Müller also recognised the risks that American financial dominance would lead to ‘the gradual economic enslavement’ not just of Germany, but of the world.95 Economic warfare, significantly, was given pride of place in the machinery of collective security as, in the words of the American president, ‘a terrible remedy’, the ultimate sanction, ‘which, in my judgement, no nation could resist’.96 The contradiction between the growing importance attached to ‘the economic arm’ as an instrument of power, on the one hand, and aspirations to forge a new international order based on law rather than force, on the other, were not lost on the powerless in 1919.

 The catastrophic consequences of the Great War created a profound crisis of legitimacy for the practice of power politics. The suffering and destruction caused by the war created fertile political space for a robust transnational movement to advocate an internationalist alternative to traditional practices. This movement was rooted in pre-1914 critiques of alliance-building and power-balancing, along with calls for the creations of new international institutions to promote cooperation between states. Crucially, during the war this cause had been championed by the 94

95 96

Philip A. Dehne, After the Great War: Economic Warfare and the Promise of Peace in Paris, 1919 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 33; Mulder, Economic Weapon, 91–104; see also Madeleine Dungy and Patricia Clavin, ‘Trade, Law, and the Global Order of 1919’, Diplomatic History 44, 4 (2020), 554–79. ‘Runderlaß des Reichsministers des Auswärtigen Müller’, 21 October 1919, ADAP, vol. II, 369–70. Wilson quoted in Mulder, Economic Weapon, 1–2.

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elected leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Woodrow Wilson’s determination to lead a revolution in international politics was fundamental to the creation of a new normative environment that shaped practices of peacemaking. Leaders could no longer frame their reasoning exclusively, or even primarily, in terms of national interests and the balance of power. They were instead obliged to use the language international law and self-determination and to frame their interests in terms compatible with international cooperation through new institutions, most notably the League of Nations. The discursive marginalisation of power politics in no way eradicated military and economic power from ordering practices in Paris. One of the fundamental paradoxes of the settlement was that its conception, as well as its future viability, rested on the same preponderance of economic and military power that had delivered victory in 1918. American power was used to impose Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a new international order on America’s allies as well as its enemies. More often than not, this process was implicit and indirect. But Wilson, as we have seen, was willing, when necessary, to use American financial power to compel Allied negotiators to accept his conception. Traditional categories of national power operated alongside new sources of authority and legitimacy in structuring the political order that emerged in Paris in 1919. This contradiction was highlighted by two lastingly influential theorists of power in international politics: Carl Schmitt and E. H. Carr. The legal theorist Schmitt produced a powerful critique of the way the power relations produced by the ‘liberal moment’ of 1919 were misrepresented as universal principles. At the heart of his argument was a ‘concept of the political’ based on what Schmitt called the ‘friend–enemy’ distinction. Political communities, for Schmitt, existed as a result of their members’ sense of collective belonging as well as their willingness to defend their community from external enemies. The peace settlement, Schmitt argued, was based on just such a distinction. But it disguised the political domination of the victorious liberal powers by cloaking it in the universal language of international law, technical administration and even humanitarianism. These phenomena, along with the international institutions created for their implementation, were, in reality, machinery for the exercise of power. ‘The acute question to pose’, Schmitt asserted, ‘is upon whom will fall the frightening power implied in a world-embracing economic and technical organization.’ The liberal attempt to bring into being a truly global community that transcended both the individual state and the friend–enemy distinction was at best a chimera and at worst

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dishonest. ‘The world’, Schmitt declared, ‘will not become depoliticized with the aid of definitions and constructions.’97 The historian and former diplomat E. H. Carr offered a different critique of the post-1918 liberal international order. Carr considered structural inequality in the international system as the chief source of conflict. This condition, which was exacerbated by liberal opposition to economic regulations, made the struggle for power an ineluctable feature of international politics. He attacked the idea that international institutions could overcome the systemic sources of conflict and denounced the notion ‘that the establishment of the League of Nations meant the elimination of power from international relations’.98 Carr considered the liberal notion of a ‘harmony of interests’, which underpinned Wilson’s conception of a ‘world opinion’, to be a retrograde legacy of nineteenthcentury liberalism. The result, he lamented, was the fact that ‘power politics’ had come to be ‘regarded as a mark of the bad old times, and became a term of abuse’. Carr argued that the marginalisation of power politics from international discourse was in reality a rhetorical strategy aimed at disguising the overwhelming predominance of the victorious powers of 1918 and their interest in maintaining a political order that served their interests. ‘What was commonly called the “return to power politics” in 1931’, Carr asserted, ‘was, in fact, the termination of the monopoly of power enjoyed by the status quo powers.’99 The crisis of power politics was therefore in its essence a discursive crisis. The traditional language of the balance of power and alliance diplomacy was marginalised in both public and official discourse. But it was no less a crisis for all that. The discursive space that discourses of power politics had occupied was filled by a new normative language that shaped core elements of the peace settlement, from the establishment of the League of Nations to the role of self-determination in shaping the European territorial settlement. New international actors from feminist internationalists to human rights activists and colonial nationalists identified the opportunities presented by the new context of peacemaking and sought with varying degrees of success to embed their own vision in the political order under construction in Paris.

97 98 99

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. with an intro. by George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 57, 77–79. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis: With a New Introduction by Michael Cox (London: Macmillan, 2001), 97. Ibid., 98.

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The failure to articulate the true role of power in the post-war order would have far-reaching consequences. Our aim, to be clear, is not to argue that power was the only element that mattered in the post-1918 order, still less to endorse the positions of Carr and especially Schmitt. Rather, our argument underlines the fragility of an international order that lacked a combination of powers capable and willing to defend its legitimacy. When Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles for a second time in March 1920, the new political order was deprived of the American military power. Over the course of the 1920s a succession of American bankers, diplomats, transnational organisations and political elites intervened to promote the construction of a peaceful trans-Atlantic order. These interventions led to watershed moments of interwar stabilisation, including the Dawes Plan (1924), the Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928) and the Young Plan (1929). But an American military commitment to uphold the post-war order was not forthcoming. The lack of a strategic commitment from the world’s greatest power left the interwar political order vulnerable in ways that could not be acknowledged in the lexicon of post-war peacemaking. The financial collapse of 1929, and the prolonged global economic crisis that followed, transformed the international political situation and set in train the destruction of the international order fashioned in Paris after the Great War. The ‘Wall Street Crash’ led to an abrupt withdrawal of US financial power which, in turn, undermined the foundations of post-war economic recovery and introduced a decade of economic decline and political instability. These events left the interwar order vulnerable to the political and military challenges posed by revisionist powers Japan, Germany and Italy.100 The mid-1930s witnessed the return of power politics as a discourse and a practice. Arms races of increasing intensity paved the way for a return to military brinksmanship and, in 1939, another war of unimaginable violence.

100

See especially Tooze, Deluge, ch. 26.

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6 The Challenge of an Absent Peace in the French and British Empires after 1919 Martin Thomas

Historians of the global aftermath of the First World War ascribe distinct qualities to the political instabilities and social unrest left by the conflict. They dwell upon its legacies of competing local and imperial claims to territories and sovereignties, paying particular attention to the forcible population transfers, paramilitarism and continuing intra-state violence that ensued.1 Imperial and global historians have meanwhile moved in different directions when analysing the absence of imperial peace after 1919. The mandated territories of the Middle East have attracted most attention. For some, the underlying issue is one of territorialisation, what Cyrus Schayegh defines in the context of Greater Syria as a ‘transpatialisation’, in which the absence of geopolitical fixity combined with the fundamental contingency of the Mandates to produce a remarkable political fluidity.2 For others, the core issues are juridical and normative: about the ways in which the Mandate system fundamentally altered conceptions of political legitimacy and lasting imperial sovereignty,

1

2

Jonathan Wyrtsen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), Introduction. My thanks to Jonathan for sharing his manuscript ideas with me. Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 132–64; Benjamin Thomas White, ‘Refugees and the Definition of Syria, 1920–1939’, Past & Present 235 (May 2017), 141–57; Simon Jackson, Mandatory Development: French Colonial Empire, Global Capitalism, and the Politics of the Economy after World War One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, in press), chs. 1 and 2; Lerna Ekmekçioglu, ‘“Republic of Paradox”: The League of Nations Minority Protection Regime and New Turkey’s Step-Citizens’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, 4 (2016), 657–79.

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rendering empire open to unprecedented oversight and challenge at the core level of a presumptive rich world ‘right to rule’.3 Reflecting on longstanding tenets of liberal internationalism as it was practiced among victor powers after the First and Second World Wars, Ian Hall emphasises the imperialist paternalism intrinsic to it. Empires and colonialism were, in this sense, part of the global furniture: items that might occasionally be rearranged but were not to be thrown out, a ‘part of the natural order of things, to be lamented in a sense, especially when imperial rule was poorly done, but to be celebrated if it could be made to serve a higher purpose’.4 Leonard Woolf, writer, publisher and interwar secretary of the Labour Party’s two standing advisory committees on international and imperial policy, personified this latter trend. Convinced that protectionism and capitalist exploitation sustained imperial rivalries and immiserated colonial peoples, Woolf’s solutions lay in free trade, development and supranational oversight. If imperial practice were reformed and held internationally accountable, empire might even become a force for good.5 Woolf was not an outlier here. For leading imperialists in the Anglophone world of the early twentieth century, the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples was first to impose, then to conserve global peace through the mechanisms of empire6 – what IR thinker Duncan Bell describes as the ‘empire peace thesis’.7 3

4 5

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Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Susan Pedersen, ‘Empires, States and the League of Nations’ in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A TwentiethCentury History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 113–38; Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Natasha Wheatley, ‘Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations’, Past & Present 227 (May 2015), 206–35. Ian Hall, ‘The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and Its Repercussions in British International Thought, 1945–75’, International History Review 33, 1 (2011), 44–45. Luke Reader, ‘“An Alternative to Imperialism”: Leonard Woolf, The Labour Party and Imperial Internationalism, 1915–1922’, International History Review 41, 1 (2019), 159–69. Woolf was not just a prominent public intellectual, but a busy one. A writer and columnist, he also founded the publishing company Hogarth House with his wife Virginia, and served as secretary to the Labour Party’s Advisory Committees on International and Imperial Questions. Paul A. Kramer, ‘Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule Between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910’, Journal of American History 88, 4 (2002), 1316–52. Duncan Bell, ‘Before the Democratic Peace: Racial Utopianism, Empire, and the Abolition of War’, European Journal of International Relations 20, 3 (2014), 654–55, 660–01. British idealist advocates of human rights also suggested that ‘good’ imperial governance

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Whatever the differing constructions – political, cultural and spatial – applied to concepts of international order, there’s a shared concern for the analytical categories of – and connections between – war, peace and enduring political violence. But an operating presumption is that these concepts may be clearly separated and temporally limited. Empirical observation lends weight to this assessment. 1923’s Treaty of Lausanne, the first interstate accord acknowledging the failure of the preceding Peace Settlement, marked the closure of one intense phase of region-wide disturbance in Western Asia, much as the equally contingent end of civil war in Ireland ended or, more accurately, diminished the first major twentiethcentury phase of political violence on the island of Ireland.8 My argument is that demarcating between ‘wartime’ and ‘peacetime’ and setting the imperial limits of Greater War becomes harder the further we travel from European or Mediterranean shores, particularly so if we fix upon the vulnerabilities of colonial subject status in conditions of societal upheaval.9 What colonialists identified as ‘order’, subject populations experienced as lives disordered: for them, the humiliations of everyday violence, dispossession, cultural and political marginalisation were intrinsic to colonialism’s social hierarchies. Crucially, colonial subjecthood, at once a juridical category that varied colony by colony and a generic measure of cultural difference within and between empires, was substantially unaffected by wider international efforts to define civilian status and non-combatant rights in time of war.10 After the First World War, colonial subjects, still the overwhelming

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might promote respect for social rights, see Nazli Pinar Kaymaz, ‘From Imperialism to Internationalism: British Idealism and Human Rights’, International History Review 41, 6 (2019), 1240–42. On the nature and persistence of often non-lethal political violence in 1920s Ireland, see Anne Dolan, ‘Killing in “the Good Old Irish Fashion”? Irish Revolutionary Violence in Context’, Irish Historical Studies 44, 165 (2020), 11–24. Sudan is a useful example here, British-ruled, but in nominal – often antagonistic – partnership with the Egyptian authorities and, in practice, scarcely administered outside its urban centres, beyond which violent dissent remained endemic, see TNA, AIR 20/680, Report on Operations, South East Sudan, 1920–21, RAF Operations Communiqué No. 2: ‘Operations of H Unit RAF, South East Sudan, January to June 1920’, Air Ministry, DO1, June 1921; WO 32/5588, E10510/10086/16, FO Egyptian Section, ‘Covering Memo. on Sir Lee Stack’s memorandum of October 11th 1923’; WO 33/999 Sudan Monthly Intelligence Reports, 1922–1925, especially reports 359–70 covering the breakdown of Anglo-Egyptian cooperation in Khartoum in 1924; WO 33/2764: War Office, General Staff, ‘Military Report on the Sudan 1927’. Kimberly Jensen, ‘Gender and Citizenship’ in Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.), Gender and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 10–11, 18–19.

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majority among empire populations, were neither citizen nor ‘civilian’. Nor did they inhabit territories with autonomous capacity to declare war or peace. For all the noise of international conferencing and legislative proscription, dependent populations remained vulnerable to forced labour, collective punishment and arbitrary detention. Colonial subject status also inhibited local efforts to achieve enforceable rights and protections for women, the elderly, children and adolescents, while setting narrow parameters to supranational jurisdiction in cases of empire rebellion or social protest. Such were the transformative effects of total war that it is easy to miss an underlying continuity. For forty years or so after the Great War, much of Asia and Africa were authoritarian, imperial and colonised spaces in which the majority subject populations, lacking civic rights and confronted with the possibility of violent punishment, lived in an indeterminate condition that was neither ‘peace’ nor ‘war’. For much of the interwar period, the new territories and expanding edges of European overseas empires were turbulent spaces, culturally contested, geopolitically disturbed and never meaningfully ‘at peace’: the lands of ‘violent peacetime’.11 The central paradox of the post-First World War settlement lay in the racism underpinning it. Colonial and quasi-colonial territories bound to Europe’s imperial powers were excluded from the new liberal order that those powers sought to establish.12 The international reordering of 1919, the supranational agencies that reordering created and the juridical framework of international law underpinning them were not globally singular but had different registers between nations and dependencies, between sovereign and non-sovereign spaces. The racial hierarchies intrinsic to European imperialism condemned dependent territories to the discriminations of colonialism at the same time as new ideas of sovereignty and self-determination set the European continent apart from the wider world over which its leading state actors claimed dominion.

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Peter Gatrell, ‘Trajectories of Population Displacement in the Aftermath of Two World Wars’ in Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White (eds.), The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011), 3–6, quote at 5; for Asian parallels, see Christopher E. Goscha, ‘Bringing Asia into Focus: Civilians and Combatants in the Line of Fire in China and Indochina’, War & Society 31, 2 (2012), 87–105. Eric D. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions’, American Historical Review 113, 5 (2008), 1326–33.

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      Whether in 1919 or 1945 the colonial world’s indeterminate condition between peace and war was achingly familiar. Anti-colonial opposition was as old as colonialism itself. So was imperial use of lethal force to suppress it with measures described in terms of internal order and policing rather than the prosecution of war, or warlike violence, against sections of the colonised population.13 In other ways, though, the Great War changed the rules of the game. August 1914 began with Germany’s invasion of Belgium. A spectacular violation of sovereign neutrality, this action cornered the British government into declaring war. Britain, although never formally neutral, had profited mightily from neutrality. Largest of the empire states, its maritime supremacy and breakneck colonial expansion rested on keeping out of most big interstate wars after 1815. All that changed with the First World War.14 The conflict was a global one, fought over multiple continents by people of many cultures. Experientially, culturally and materially, it changed lives worldwide.15 Empires’ troops, military laborers and war workers were pivotal throughout.16 The exception here is Belgium, which, even prior to occupation, chose not to recruit large numbers of Congolese to fight or work in Europe for fear of potential destabilisation in the Belgian Congo.17 Even so, the global shipment of colonial bodies to assist imperial war efforts marked the largest spike in the Oceanic transportation of subject persons since the formal end of transatlantic slavery, a parallel on which, unsurprisingly, few Allied propagandists cared to dwell. Domestic labour shortages caused by the war also triggered huge internal migrations of non-white workers, perhaps most notably so in the ‘Great Migration’ of over 400,000 African-Americans from 13

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Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers, Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chs. 1–2; Michelle Gordon, Extreme Violence and the ‘British Way’: Colonial Warfare in Perak, Sierra Leone and Sudan (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Maartje Abbenhuis, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, 1815–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 239–42. Michelle Moyd, ‘Centring a Sideshow: Local Experiences of the First World War in Africa’, First World War Studies 7, 2 (2016), 111–15. As evidenced in the chapter contributions to Andrew Tait Jarboe and Robert S. Fogarty (eds.), Empires in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Matthew G. Stanard, ‘Digging-In: The Great War and the Roots of Belgian Empire’, in ibid., 26.

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southern states to industrial centres in the north of the country between 1916 and 1918.18 The motivations, experiences and grievances of colonised war workers, civilian and military, would have lasting ramifications for the politics of the global South.19 In the frontline, as in the munitions factory, racial coding mattered, a poignant daily reminder that the war’s principal antagonists were imperial powers.20 They drew on all their global resources in trying to win it.21 As the editors of a defining work on the subject point out, not only was the war ‘fought by empires to determine the fate of those empires’, but those who took part ‘experienced the war . . . in imperial terms’.22 It’s questionable, though, whether colonial possessions were as economically vital as their imperial owners presumed. Germany and the United States, latecomers to empire, each enjoyed faster economic growth before 1914 than the more established imperial powers. Of these, the foremost, Great Britain, certainly milked its largest colony, India, for human and material resources, but the other major centres of wealth within its empire were all self-governing Dominions, including Canada, Australia and South Africa. Rather, it was war itself that made empire seem more, not less, vital as each side worked globally to sever their enemies’ trade, grab their property and block their capital movements.23

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Michael A. Gomez, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 190. Tyler Stovall, ‘The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the First World War’, American Historical Review 103, 3 (1998), 739–69; Michelle Moyd, ‘Color Lines, Front Lines: The First World War from the South’, Radical History Review 131 (May 2018), 13–35, at 14–16. Moyd notes that some 2,350,000 African troops and labourers were mobilised, while India supplied 1.4 million soldiers and workers, and China a further 140,000 labourers. MAE, PA-AP 216, Augustin Bernard papers, file 15, Procès-verbaux des séances du Commission interministérielle des affaires musulmanes (CIAM), 1929–36, CIAM, 178th Meeting, procès-verbal, 30 October 1934 and annex II. Tyler Stovall, ‘Love, Labor, and Race: Colonial Men and White Women in France during the Great War’ in Tyler Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele (eds.), French Civilization and Its Discontents: Orientalism, Colonialism, Race (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003), 297–314. For an overview, see the essays in Jonathan Krause (ed.), The Greater War: Other Combatants and other Fronts, 1914–1918 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Andrew Tait Jarboe and Robert S. Fogarty, ‘Introduction: An Imperial Turn in First World War Studies’ in Jarboe and Fogarty, Empires in World War I, clauses quoted from pages 1 and 8. Carl Strikwerda, ‘World War I in the History of Globalization’, Historical Reflections 42, 3 (Winter 2016), 116–20. On the fiscal consequences, and borrowing especially, see Martin Horn, Britain, France, and the Financing of the First World War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 79–92, 101–04.

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Empires, even territorially contiguous ones, were hard to defend. There were multiple flanks to attack and numerous ethnicities whose loyalties might be swayed. More significant in the long term, the war fuelled rebellions. Its relentless economic and manpower pressures laid bare colonialism’s racial hierarchies, ethnic discriminations and cultural insensitivities24 The colonial dispossessed were objectified once more, this time as weapons of war. In these changed circumstances, all combatants tried to hasten victory by offering support to their enemies’ colonial subjects, separatists and secessionists above all. For the most part, such strategies failed in the short term.25 But their consequences lingered. The war mixed together peoples within and between continents as never before.26 Could they really be ‘unmixed’ as some hoped? To paraphrase historian Leonard Smith, would boundaries be made to fit peoples, or would peoples be moved to fit boundaries?27 With such disruptions still to come, in some ways the war was not over at all; its disintegrative legacies created new sources of hostility while deepening others. Its global reverberations also connected oppositional voices in new ways, making their claims audible to wider audiences in the public sphere or within the institutional apparatus of supranational oversight created by the peace settlement.28

     Was this a surprise? By 1917 what historian Georgi Derlugian describes as ‘three great revolutionary projects’ promised to break the mould of world politics. Communist revolution in Russia rejected capitalist economics and the respect for national and imperial sovereignties on which it rested. New strains of anti-colonial nationalism in China, India, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere posited different ideas of belonging, rejecting the

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Jonathan Krause, ‘Islam and Anticolonial Rebellion in North and West Africa, 1914–1918’, Historical Journal 64, 3 (2020), 674–95. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, ‘Empires after 1919: Old, New, Transformed’, International Affairs 95, 1 (2019), 71, 85. Richard S. Fogarty, ‘Gender and Race’ in Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.), Gender and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 67–73. Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 143, 165. Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, ‘The Great War as a Global War: Imperial Conflict and the Reconfiguration of World Order, 1911–1923’, Diplomatic History 38, 4 (2014), 798–800.

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prevailing imperial order as a self-serving white man’s deceit.29 The commitment to black liberation among anti-colonialist radicals from the United States, francophone Africa, South Africa and the Caribbean could not be corralled into the narrower precepts of either national selfdetermination or Marxist-Leninism. For these black thinkers and activists, neither the independent nation-state nor the rigidities of a Sovietdirected international communist movement promised the realisation of global equality for non-European peoples and black diaspora communities. Of stronger appeal were interwar movements such as the League against Imperialism, which emerged from the 1927 Brussels Congress against Imperialism, and the International Trade Union Committee for Negro Workers, established two years later. Its early supporters included the Trinidadian George Padmore, Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, the Malian Garan Kouyaté and the American radicals Williana Burroughs, William Patterson and James Ford. For them, these organisations seemed more authentically anti-colonial and more politically imaginative in seeing beyond the nation-state as the only destination after empire.30 Even liberal internationalism, the third project Derlugian identifies, held revolutionary potential in its recognition that legitimate aspirations to statehood would require fundamental reconfiguration of the old imperial order. In the meantime, the lived experience of colonialism revealed the international order for what it was, as much a construct permissive of exploitative governance as a juridical basis for the regulation of world affairs. Within a few short years, fascism’s racial ideologies would add a fourth revolutionary challenge to the way international politics had worked before 1914. The significance of this challenge grew inexorably. By the late 1930s an international order delegitimised by a failing peace settlement and the destabilising effects of the global economic crisis brought together strange bedfellows: new strains of anti-colonial sentiment inside existing empires and revisionist anger among fascist empire-

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Georgi M. Derluguian, ‘Mozambique in the 1980s: Periphery Goes Postmodern’ in Eric Morier-Genoud, Michel Cahen and Domingos M. do Rosário (eds.), The War Within: New Perspectives on the Civil War in Mozambique, 1976–1992 (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2018), 208. Minkah Makalani, ‘An Incessant Struggle against White Supremacy: The International Congress against Imperialism and the International Circuits of Black Radicalism’ in Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow (eds.), Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of US History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 182–98.

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builders at their ‘have-not’ status among leading industrial powers.31 In Quinn Slobodian’s telling phrase, ‘a new principle of national selfdetermination was going global, readying an ambush against the old language of empire’.32 Alongside disputes over the universality of self-determination, perhaps the starkest sign of global imperial crisis in 1919 was the prevalence of hunger and the physical dislocation of numerous ethnic minority groups inside shifting colonial boundaries and jurisdictions.33 Wartime disruptions to crop cultivation and regional grain markets, plus the virtual cessation of local maritime trade exacerbated the chronic insecurity and insufficiency of food supply throughout Africa’s Red Sea region, a vast area of recent European colonisation stretching from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to Italian-ruled Ethiopia and Eritrea. Millions of people from Darfur to Djibouti faced chronic malnutrition and social breakdown.34 Peacemakers in Paris were able to overlook the magnitude of these human disasters in 1919; less so twenty years later in 1939, when the relationship between empire stability and adverse economic conditions would be starker still. That being said, throughout the interwar years biopolitical challenges – from living standards and reproductive health to population pressure and hunger – were conceptualised as global, rather than national, issues.35 Which peoples would settle successfully where?

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Louise Young, ‘When Fascism Met Empire in Japanese-Occupied Manchuria’, Journal of Global History 12, 2 (2017), 274–76, 280, 284–88; Mats Ingulstad, ‘The Interdependent Hegemon: The United States and the Quest for Strategic Raw Materials during the Early Cold War’, International History Review 37, 1 (2015), 60–61. Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neo-Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 27–28. Among territories most severely affected was Ottoman Syria, where famine took hold from 1915, and Indian Bengal, see Linda Schatkowski-Schilcher, ‘The Famine of 1915–1918 in Greater Syria’ in John P. Spagnolo (ed.), Problems of the Modern Middle East in Historical Perspective: Essays in Honour of Albert Hourani (Reading: Middle East Centre, St Antony’s, Oxford, 1992), 230–58; Melanie Schulze Tanielian, ‘Feeding the City: The Beirut Municipality and the Politics of Food during World War I’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, 4 (2014), 737–58. Steven Serels, ‘Starving for Someone Else’s Fight: The First World War and Food Insecurity in the African Red Sea Region’ in Richard P. Tucker, Tait Keller, J. R. McNeill and Martin Schmid (eds.), Environmental Histories of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 208–30. See, in particular, Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), parts II and III; Alison Bashford,, ‘Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health’, History of the Human Sciences 19 (2006), 67–88; Alison Bashford, ‘Nation, Empire, Globe: The Spaces of Population Debate in the Interwar Years’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, 1

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Which had the more defensible claims to do so? Who, or what organisations, national or supranational, should judge such claims? Or would demographic stresses within and between states engender violent competition over the most prized lands and the resources contained within them?36 By the time of the Geneva World Population Conference in August 1927, migratory patterns and the densities of population in particular places generated most concern among leading imperial demographers.37 Far from considering the First World War peace settlement a ‘done’ global deal reifying fixed nation-states alongside triumphant empires, these analysts thought that successful societies would want to expand, pushing for additional territory as their populations grew. Competition over space and resources was likely to resolve itself into peaceful pathways of migration and assimilation or violent contests of imperial expansion.38 Albeit gradually, the interplay of geopolitical rivalries with demographic pressures and heightened economic insecurity between the wars would reconfigure empires and the justifications advanced for them.39 Changes in the language of empire and the substance of colonial policy after 1919 registered their strongest effects in Africa and the world’s most densely populated arc of colonised territory stretching across southern Asia from India’s turbulent western frontier to northern Vietnam. More immediately, existential struggles for and against empire were most visceral in a band of territory that spanned the southern Balkans in the west and extended through the northern reaches of the Ottoman Empire to the Caucasus. Throughout this region, the claims of putative nation-states were pitted against land empires – Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian – which tried to thwart the national claims of local populations by targeting the ethnic groups that advanced them. The outcomes were

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(2007), 170–201; Alison Bashford, ‘Population Planning for a Global Middle Class’ in Christof Dejung, David Motadel and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 85–101, at 90–95. 37 Bashford, ‘Nation, Empire, Globe’, 193–97. Ibid., 177–80. Ibid., 188–91. Bashford’s insights resonate with Michel Foucault’s definition of governmentality as a ‘science of populations’: Benoît de l’Estoile, Federico Neiberg and Lygia Sigaud, ‘Anthropology and the Government of “Natives”: A Comparative Approach’ in Benoît de l’Estoile, Federico Neiberg and Lygia Sigaud (eds.), Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 12–14. Bashford, ‘Global Biopolitics’, 67–88.

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registered in communal violence, mass expulsions and genocide.40 The severity of the war crimes committed against particular ethnic communities within the Ottoman Empire, as well as against civilians living under the occupation of the Central Powers and their clients, Bulgaria in particular, left legacies of bitterness and regional instability.41 Culturally, the levels of suffering experienced by minority populations catalysed transnational activism, which, in turn, impelled a wave of humanitarian interventionism. Ironically, the cultures and practices of this relief work were facilitated by colonialism, thanks to the Mandates regime instituted in former Ottoman territories.42 Making the most of this humanitarian mantle, the Allied powers responded by punishing selected perpetrators in the short term and by mapping out new mechanisms for the enforcement of international laws of war in the longer term.43 Between 1919 and 1922, British and French jurists at the Paris Peace Conference put forward various justifications for the institution of war 40

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Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 65, 291; Yiğit Akın, When the War Came Home: The Ottomans’ Great War and the Devastation of an Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018); Jonathan E. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Hapsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Laura Robson, States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017). For longer-term background, see Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan and Andreas Rose (eds.), The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Gerwarth and Manela, ‘The Great War as a Global War’, 786–800; Robert Gerwarth and John Horne (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For the wartime roots of this violence on the Ottoman ‘home front’, see Akın, When the War Came Home, especially ch. 4. Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 18–19, 53–59. In Keith Watenpaugh’s words, ‘modern international humanitarianism, as embodied by the League, was envisioned by its participants and protagonists as a permanent, transnational, institutional, and secular regime for understanding and addressing the root causes of human suffering’. Keith David Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927’, American Historical Review 115, 5 (2010), 1315–39, at 1318; Tehila Sasson, ‘From Empire to Humanity: The Russian Famine and the Imperial Origins of International Humanitarianism’, Journal of British Studies 55 (2016), 519–37. Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice, 290.

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crimes trials, the codification of new instruments of international law to constrain and punish perpetrators of illicit wartime violence, and the establishment of international courts to uphold the treaty settlements and peace itself.44 Some commentators have interpreted these actions as victors’ justice, even as retribution. Others see them as necessary political efforts to justify the enormous sacrifices made during the war. Still others point to the emergence of new ideas of international justice built on efforts to limit future conflicts and, should they occur, to constrain the organised violence within them.45 Such was certainly the rhetorical case made by the British and French governments in 1919 and afterward. Putting aside their own status as authoritarian rulers of dependent empires, each argued that the First World War was less an inter-imperial contest of arms than a struggle over competing ideologies and the different ethics that underpinned them. At root, the conflict pitted the Allies’ democratic standards and liberal internationalist impulses against the autocracy of the Central Powers, which had tried but failed to grab what they wanted by force.46 The resulting judicial process, easily criticised as selectively biased, left its advocates open to other accusations of blindness toward the millions living under colonialism. In its blithe acceptance of an imperialist world order, liberal internationalism revealed the hypocrisy at its core: a readiness to differentiate between the rights claims of white and non-white peoples. As Duncan Bell observes, strands of liberal internationalism ‘contained a dynamic conception of “international society,” a picture in which civilization always emanated outwards, in concentric circles, from a European core’.47 The first generation of Soviet international lawyers to emerge from the Soviet Institute of State and Law, including Evgeny Korovin and Evgeny Pashukanis, were piercing critics of the complicity between imperialism and the international legal instruments of the League, highlighting how the Mandates system, international trade and even treaties of

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Michelle Tusan, ‘“Crimes against Humanity”: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the Armenian Genocide’, Journal of American History 119, 1 (2014), 62–69. Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice, 29–33. Increasingly precise as instruments of justice, these international laws retreated from utopian fin-de siècle visions of global government and an end to war, see S. Wertheim, ‘The League of Nations: Retreat from International Law?’, Journal of Global History 7, 2 (2012), 210–32. Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice, 34. Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 258.

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independence denied legal reciprocity to colonised peoples.48 How could international law be upheld as the embodiment of humanistic values when its chief protagonists maintained empires grounded on racial difference and hierarchies of rights separating rulers from ruled?

      The Peace Settlements left colonial populations stranded between continuing subject status for the vast majority and unfulfilled promises of enforceable rights minima in domestic colonial legal codes.49 On paper, colonial subjects as well as the indentured laborers on which numerous empire export industries had relied became visible in international law, both in 1919 and in the years that followed. Article 23 of the League of Nations Covenant stipulated that all signatories, many of them imperial powers, should ‘secure and maintain fair and humane conditions of labour for all men, women and children’. And the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye further obliged the League to investigate ‘slavery in all its forms’, wherever found. By 1926 the League was committed to a Forced Labour Convention, the precise drafting of which would fall to its affiliate, the International Labour Organization (ILO).50 In practice, regulating forced labour did not mean ending it.51 Neither the League nor the ILO challenged the persistence of empire or the unfree labour practices that remained commonplace in the colonial world.52 48

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Boris N. Mamlyuk, ‘Decolonization as a Cold War Imperative: Bandung and the Soviets’ in Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah (eds.), Bandung, Global History, and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 199–206. Wertheim, ‘The League of Nations’, 228. J. P. Daughton, ‘ILO Expertise and Colonial Violence in the Interwar Years’ in Sandrine Kott and Joëlle Droux (eds.), Globalizing Social Rights (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2013), 86. TNA, CO 323/1170/5: Forced Labour Convention, Arthur Wauchope, High Commissioner for Transjordan to Colonial Secretary, 3 December 1932. See also Marie Rodet, ‘Forced Labor, Resistance, and Masculinities in Kayes, French Sudan, 1919–1946’, International Labor and Working-Class History 86, 1 (2014), 107–23. The are parallels here with the increasing legislative regulation and medical oversight of colonial prostitution, particularly in interwar ports around the Mediterranean, as analysed by Liat Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports: Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017). Frederick Cooper, ‘Afterword: Social Rights and Human Rights in the Time of Decolonization’, Humanity 3, 3 (2012), 481. As Cooper points out, while the League and the ILO imposed a simple binary between forced and free labour without taking a closer interest in the social rights of workers, the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 did at least provide a new juridical framework against which colonial working practices could be judged.

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Crucially, the logic of the Forced Labour Convention as codified in 1930 was that imperial states should police themselves, subject to lighttouch monitoring by the ILO and the League’s ability to marshal international disapproval of known violations.53 An end-of-year report about local workplace legislation, compiled in 1937 by the India Tea Association, the organisation representing British estate owners, typified the elisions that remained possible: At present children are sometimes employed in leaf houses attached to tea factories which, by virtue of the provisions of the present rules under the Factories Act [1934] in Bengal and Assam, are not regarded as constituting factories for the purposes of the Act so long as they are effectively separated from the factory proper. Consequently children employed in leaf houses are not affected by Section 50 of the Act, which stipulates that no child under twelve years of age shall be employed in a factory.54

Elsewhere, European imperial governments liked to claim they had broken the link between debt bondage and indenture in which fixedterm labour contracts promised, but rarely delivered, eventual freedom from debt and a transition to working freely.55 Indentured Indians and Chinese predominated, encountering intense workplace discrimination from employers and, sometimes, from their local counterparts as members of this transnational labour force.56 Over time, although indentured labour became less easily identifiable, the worker indebtedness at its heart persisted.57 In part, this was due to hidden employer charges such as 53 54

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Cooper, ‘Afterword’, 480–81. India Office Records, Mss EUR F174: India Tea Association papers, file 628a: Detailed Report of the General Committee of the Indian Tea Association for the Year 1937 (Calcutta, 1938), 30–31. Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 161–48; Margo Groenewoud, ‘Towards the Abolition of Penal Sanctions in Dutch Colonial Labour Legislation: An International Perspective’, Itinerario 19, 2 (1995), 72–90. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 23; Gary B. Magee and Andrew M. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 66. ANOM, Marius Moutet papers, 28PA/carton 3, ‘La législation française et le travail forcé’, ‘L’Organisation internationale du Travail et le travail indigène’, ‘Argument de la compétence’, none dated, but all likely 1930. For high mortality and morbidity rates among indentured laborers, see David Northrup, Indentured Labour in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Sunil S. Amrith, ‘Tamil Diasporas across the Bay of Bengal’, American Historical Review 114, 3 (2009), 563–69; Andreas Steen, ‘Germany and the Chinese Coolie: Labor, Resistance,

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adding costs for transportation and upkeep to the labourer’s debt burden.58 In part, it could be put down to the Depression, as its economic impact on imperial nations heightened government and corporate interest in colonial export production to compensate for declining industrial revenues at home. In the Belgian Congo, for instance, early 1930s export drives in the rubber, timber and mining industries followed sharp declines in government revenue between 1931 and 1933.59 In a similar vein, the colonial administration in French Madagascar actually widened the legislative scope for forced labour, introducing decree legislation in April 1938 to augment the workforce of field workers cultivating Madagascar’s most lucrative export crops, vanilla and tobacco.60 Among the decree provisions were the imposition of ten days’ corvée (compulsory labour on public works) for all adult males, regulations on the permissible loads to be carried by pregnant women (no more than twenty kilograms) and rules covering forced labour by minors (children of twelve and over were only to perform hard labour when ‘urgently needed’).61 The toleration of unfree labour also reflected a deeper ideational shift within the League itself. To be sure, concern for the welfare of all humanity informed the work done by specialist League commissions. But the evolving conception of human security that would emerge from such thinking was predicated on the idea that individual wellbeing was best served by the resumption of global economic growth. This assumption created the space necessary for coercive labour practices to

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and the Struggle for Equality, 1884–1914’ in Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn and Patrice Nganang (eds.), German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 147–49; Eric Allina, ‘“No Real Freedom for the Natives”: The Men in the Middle and Critiques of Colonial Labor in Central Mozambique’, Humanity 3, 3 (2012), 337–59. Stanley L. Engerman, ‘Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History 43, 3 (1983), 635–39; Alec Gordon, ‘The Agrarian Question and Colonial Capitalism: Coercion and Java’s Colonial Sugar Plantation System, 1870–1941’, Journal of Peasant Studies 27, 1 (1999), 1–34. Belgian Foreign Ministry archives, Archives Africaines, Archives du Fonds des Affaires Indigènes (AI), File AI/1403, dossier: Impôt indigène: tax receipts for Belgian Congo, 1931–33. ANOM, Inspection du Travail, ‘Textes portant réglementation du travail indigene à Madagascar et dependences (décret du 7 avril 1938)’. TNA, FO 371/21605, C10769/141/17, Imprimerie Officielle pamphlet, Tananarive, sent by Antananarivo consul to Foreign Office, 26 August 1938.

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continue.62 The Depression as a catalyst to imperial production drives also explains the resuscitation of dormant post-First World War schemes for colonial development after 1929. Infrastructure building on roads, ports and power generation was an obvious complement to the extraction of more labour from workforces within colonial export industries.63

   Turning our attention to another category of vulnerable people, minorities’ protections had little imperial traction beyond newly mandated territories. A striking feature of the peace treaties, even inside the Mandates, League of Nations protections for ethno-religious minority groups were more evident in their breach than their application. At first glance, this was surprising. Protections for minorities were enshrined both within the peace treaties with individual defeated powers and in the attendant settlements with ‘successor states’ in Eastern Europe.64 Minority groups facing infringements of cultural freedoms including religious practice and linguistic autonomy, or abuse of social rights such as access to schooling and employment, could petition the League for help. A Permanent Court of International Justice, established in 1922, raised the prospect – revolutionary at the time – of a persecuted individual seeking redress through some sort of supranational agency with global authority. As Mira Siegelberg puts it, ‘After World War I, the notion that subjects could transcend national jurisdictions offered the inviting possibility that other individuals or groups could connect directly to

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Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy. The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 231; Amanda Kay McVety, ‘Wealth and Nations: The Origins of International Development Assistance’ in Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela (eds.), The Development Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 26–29. Valeska Huber, ‘Introduction: Global Histories of Social Planning’, Journal of Contemporary History 52, 1 (2017), 6–10; Christopher Bonneuil, ‘Development as Experiment: Science and State-Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930–1970’, Osiris 15 (2000), 258–81. Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), parts II and III; Volker Prott, The Politics of Self-Determination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 212–33; Stefan Dyroff, ‘Avant-Garde or Supplement? Advisory Bodies of Transnational Associations as Alternatives to the League’s Protection System, 1919–1939’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 24, 2 (2013), 192–208.

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international legal order without the mediation of the state.’65 Revolutionary indeed. There were also new institutions to give form to these judicial powers and supranational oversight. The League established a Permanent Commission to oversee such protections within the mandated territories, whereas no equivalent existed for the minorities of Eastern Europe. Petitioning thus became integral to the political language of social protest in the Mandates.66 On the one hand, ethno-religious minorities within mandated territories, or, as in the case of the Zionist movement’s arguments for a Jewish national home in Palestine, those claiming rights of residence within a particular mandated territory, could now assert their political rights before a supranational authority.67 This was important. It meant that an identifiable collective of people other than a nation-state was now claiming legal rights to be heard in international politics. On the other hand, it remained unclear precisely what such rights amounted to, and whether they had much leverage in international law.68 The Mandatory powers would soon discover that the system they had created was not easily controlled. To be sure, Mandates facilitated distinctly imperialist governance, albeit constrained by the search for new 65 66

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Mira L. Siegelberg, ‘Neither Right nor Left: Interwar Internationalism between Justice and Order’, Humanity 6, 3 (2015), 466. Andrew Arsan, ‘“This Is the Age of Associations”: Committees, Petitions, and the Roots of Interwar Middle Eastern Internationalism’, Journal of Global History 7 (2012), 166–88; Wheatley, ‘Mandatory Interpretation’, 206–35; Mark Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 59–60. Petitioning was already commonplace among colonial elites and local ex-servicemen and public servants whose careers conferred citizenship or other social rights. See MAE, PA-AP 65, private papers of Edmond Doutte, Commission interministérielle des affaires musulmanes (CIAM), file 2: Représentations des indigènes d’Algérie au Parlement, 1919–1923’; MAE, PA-AP 216, Augustin Bernard papers, file 15, ‘CIAM procès verbal de la réunion du 31 Mai 1929’, 146th Meeting held to differentiate Muslim voting rights in territories under civilian and military administration. Robson, States of Separation, 25–26, 32–33. Natasha Wheatley, ‘New Subjects in International Law and Order’ in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 265–81. Aside from petitioning over rights infringements, the cloudiness of international law was evident in asymmetric conflicts over which the League of Nations was asked to reach a judgement. Throughout the interwar years the organisation never resolved matters to the benefit of the weaker military actor, see Mathias Schulz, ‘Cultures of Peace and Security from the Vienna Congress to the TwentyFirst Century: Characteristics and Dilemmas’ in Beatrice de Graaf , Ido de Haan and Brian Vick (eds.), Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 33.

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local clients with whom to do business and by the scrutiny of the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC).69 Unjust, if not unexpected, this outcome was nonetheless transformative. Because, as Leonard Smith remarks, empires as organising political units ‘simply did not make sense in the same way’ after the Mandate system was enacted.70 Nominally an equal association of sovereign states, in practice the League of Nations was anything but. Its true political complexion, as a league of victor empires resented by local populations and undermined by hostile competitors, was nowhere more apparent than in the Middle East.71 ‘Imperial sovereignty’ came to be more widely understood as oxymoronic, as self-serving and hypocritical. At the same time, by ‘accepting the mandate system, imperial agents accepted a discursive structure that undermined their own legitimacy’.72 Mandate-holders were, after all, supposedly ruling in the interests of those they governed. Administration was, in theory, not only dispassionate but also contingent.73 The presumption was that, within the type-A Mandates of the Middle East especially, sovereign legitimacy rested not on any British or French claims of conquest but on a form of government that served the people in an educative process to prepare the local population to administer their own affairs.74 As Susan Pedersen observes, this obligation kept the issue of sovereignty in the minds of the Mandate-holders, who could not simply annex the territories they administered. This was a real constraint. South Africa could not absorb South-West Africa (Namibia); Britain could not add Tanganyika to a projected British East African Federation; and Rwanda and Burundi would remain territorially intact next to the vast domains of

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Pedersen, The Guardians; Schayegh, Middle East, 132–64; Simon Jackson, Mandatory Development: French Colonial Empire, Global Capitalism, and the Politics of the Economy after World War One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, in press), chs. 1 and 2. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference, 47–49. Susan Pedersen, ‘Empires, States and the League of Nations’ in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 137. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference, 49. Sherene Seikaly uses a striking phrase, the ‘temporality of deferral’, to capture the sense of sovereign rights postponed for those living within the Mandates. See her ‘The Matter of Time’, American Historical Review 124, 5 (2019), 1681–88, quote at 1683. Leonard Smith, ‘Sovereignty in the Mandates: The Jurists’ Debates, 1918–1923’, paper presented at University of Glasgow conference, Visions of Global Order, 1919: Peace, Law and Security after the First World War, 29 May 2019.

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the Belgian Congo at their western edge.75 Inhabitants of type-B Mandates of tropical Africa, like their counterparts in the Middle East, recognised the possibilities. The juridical instantiation of sovereignty in the League of Nations as distinct from the imperialists governing the territories in question nourished a claims-making culture of petitioning the PMC. In Togoland and Cameroon, former German colonies awkwardly partitioned between their new French and British overseers, local lawyers and clerks, already accustomed to highlighting administrative misdeeds, seized on the opportunity to petition a multinational agency whose raison d’être was supposedly to uphold higher standards of governance.76 League oversight of the Mandates was always going to be difficult as long as the PMC, if not beholden to the Mandate-holders, was still conditioned by their requirements. Nor was it clear what constituted sovereignty, still less sovereign rights, within the territories held under Mandate. For many, the internationalisation of sovereign control between Mandate powers, Mandate populations and the League’s oversight agencies seemed paradoxical. Where sovereignty had commonly been understood in unitary terms, as something that was either wholly attained or not, the idea of trusteeship underpinning the Mandate system proposed that sovereign control could be subdivided, its relative weight between stakeholders gradually changing as Mandate territories edged toward independence. Could sovereignty be carved up in this way?77 More importantly, could Mandate powers be compelled to comply?

:     In terms of the recognitions and rights it acknowledged, the international order that emerged from 1919 was strictly bounded, at once sustaining the larger global order of colonialism and excluding the majority populations of dependent territories. This was an international order of sorts, but it was neither liberal nor global insofar as colonial peoples were

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Susan Pedersen, ‘An International Regime in an Age of Empire’, American Historical Review 124, 5 (2019), 1678. Meredith Terretta and Benjamin N. Lawrance, ‘“Sons of the Soil”, Cause Lawyers, the Togo-Cameroun Mandates, and the Origins of Decolonization’, American Historical Review 124, 5 (2019), 1709–14. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 98–103, 171–74.

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denied either individual freedoms or rights of citizenship.78 Tellingly, key architects of the League of Nations, among them Woodrow Wilson and South Africa’s Jan-Christian Smuts, shaped the League’s normative standards by framing self-determination as a prize to be awarded by the industrialised nations of the global North to the most deserving of dependent societies.79 Theoretically measured through standards of governance, the criteria for such a prize were actually imagined in terms of proximity to ‘Western’ cultural values. Wilson was the outlier here, attaching greater weight to democratic self-government than to national independence for ethnically homogeneous communities.80 For others, ethnicity, an ascription sometimes conflated with religious affiliation, remained more significant than civic politics.81 The idea that ethnicity and its more sinister cousin, racial difference, were the principal markers between peoples, and therefore the logical foundation of global hierarchy between empires and nations, remained normative in interwar international politics, just as it did within the League.82 The global vision of racial hierarchy shared by two of the League’s founding fathers left lasting legacies. It would be confirmed by the organisation’s dismissive treatment of its two black African member states, Abyssinia and Liberia. Drawing on these examples, Adom Getachew argues that the organisation became an instrument of ‘imperial counter-revolution’ between the wars, one in which genuine great power respect for the sovereign rights of black nations and black peoples was unthinkable.83 78

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For disaggregation of the components of liberal international order, see David Lake, Lisa L. Martin and Thomas Risse, ‘Challenges to the Liberal Order: Reflections on International Organization’, International Organization 75 (Spring 2021), 227–31. Rejecting the liberal international order espoused by Wilson and Smuts, the Bolsheviks had been using a similar language of rights to self-determination since at least 1917. See Borislav Chernev, ‘The Brest–Litovsk Moment: Self-Determination Discourse in Eastern Europe before Wilsonianism’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 22, 3 (2011), 369–87. Trygve Throntveit, ‘The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination’, Diplomatic History 35 (June 2011), 447–73, quote at 469. Throntveit highlights the wording of Point V, which called for ‘free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims’, affirming that ‘the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’. Robson, States of Separation, 9–11, 20–23. Christian Guelen, ‘The Common Grounds of Conflict: Racial Visions of World Order, 1880–1940’ in Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier (eds.), Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 69–71, 88–89. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 37–62, quote at 52.

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The same evidence of limited juridical protections for non-white peoples is apparent when it comes to repressive imperial violence. In the British Empire, Winston Churchill argued relentlessly for using chemical weapons against Kurds and Shia Marsh Arabs in Mesopotamia/Iraq during 1919 and 1920.84 The issue came before Cabinet, where Churchill was overruled by ministerial colleagues supportive of League of Nations’ efforts to ban gas warfare. One reason that Churchill’s lobbying got so far was because military force within empires was not legally conceptualised as ‘war’ but as a matter of internal security or ‘pacification’. Regulating repression was a domestic issue. Imperial powers not only legislated their own emergency powers, martial law or states of siege but also monitored their own effectiveness in sticking to the rules they devised.85 Viewed from this colonial perspective, 1919 might be singled out less as a faltering start to the international regulation of sovereign imperial spaces and more as a milestone year in the development of colonial ‘lawfare’. Extended legal powers facilitating mass arrests, collective punishments and detention without trial were commonplace throughout the colonial world. In the British Empire alone, 1919 saw British India’s Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes legislation of February–April, plus the contemporaneous extension of emergency legislation during and after the Egyptian revolution, then continuing with the dissolution of the Dáil Éireann and the ban on Sinn Fein in September, and culminating with the defeat and imprisonment of Shaykh Mahmud Barzanji and his Kurdish supporters in Sulaymaniyah at the close of the year.86 Martial law, 84 85 86

R. M. Douglas, ‘Did Britain Use Chemical Weapons in Mandatory Iraq’, Journal of Modern History 81, 5 (2009), 859–87, at 872 and 882. TNA, WO 32/5234, Report of the Committee on Mesopotamia appointed by the Secretary of State for War, 21 January 1921. For detailed, empire-wide description, see TNA, CO 774/835: British Empire, Riots and Disturbances, 1915–1919. For specific regional examples: Shereen Ilahi, Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence: India, Ireland and the Crisis of Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); William J. Berridge, ‘Object Lessons in Violence: The Rationalities and Irrationalities of Urban Struggle during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 12, 3 (2011), published online; Wadie Jwaideh, The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 173–79; Lyndall Ryan, ‘Martial Law in the British Empire’ in Philip Dwyer and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds.), Violence, Colonialism, and Empire in the Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018), 93–109; John Horne, ‘End of a Paradigm? The Cultural History of the Great War’, Past & Present 242 (February 2019), 155–92, at 174–77. For long-term background to such punitive legislation, see Mark Condos, ‘“Fanaticism” and the Politics of

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meanwhile, applied ipso facto in military-administered territories of French Africa and Indochina. 1919 would also see états de siège in force from Morocco’s highland interior in the west to a French-occupied Syria in ferment at the overthrow of its popular republic in the east.87 Nor were restriction and violence absent from other parts of the colonial world where peacetime administration was supposedly returning to normality. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the vast territories of the Belgian Congo witnessed sustained local resistance to taxation. Although primarily localised within district chefferies (or ‘chiefly areas’), the violence sometimes engulfed entire provinces, requiring intervention by paramilitary units of the Congo’s Force Publique. In 1918 and 1919, for instance, sustained disorders attended the annual taxation round in the provinces of Equateur, South Kasai and Orientale.88

 However one approaches problems of international order in the after math of the First World War, the analytical problem confronting historians of empire is not that scholars of international relations have, until recently, said relatively little about colonialism, but that their conceptual tools whittled empire and imperialism down to familiar problems of interstate rivalries. The significance of social constructions of race, intractable cultural stereotypes, and the consequent impact of racism on international affairs were elided.89 Several leading scholars in the field acknowledge the usefulness of a more global approach, decentred from the European statessystem once regarded as the core of ‘international society’.90 Some argue

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Resistance along the North-West Frontier of British India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, 3 (2016), 717–45, at 727–31. Jonathan Wyrtzen, Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 116–21, 131–32; James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 51–85. MAE, série K: Afrique 1918–1940, sous-Série: Congo Belge, vol. 8: Rapports annuels du Ministre Belge des Colonies sur l’administration du Congo, 1919–28, Governor General E. Henry, ‘Rapport sur l’administration du Congo belge pendant l’année 1919’, submitted to Brussels Chamber of Representatives on 7 October 1920. Robert Vitalis, ‘The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations’, Millennium 29, 2 (2000), 331–56; also cited in Bell, ‘Before the Democratic Peace’, 649. See the contributions in Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit (eds.), The Globalization of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), especially Jennifer M. Welsh, ‘Empire and Fragmentation’, 145–64, Jacinta O’Hagan, ‘The Role of

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that this change in perspective marks the start of a bigger task, requiring deconstruction of Western presumptions about colonised peoples as part of any revaluation of international order and the anti-colonial challenge to it.91 Others contend more basically that imperialism should be fundamental to international studies.92 It is surely self-evident that local and interregional interactions between non-Western actors, including those opposing colonialism from within the boundaries of empire, impacted the international system: decolonisation is the proof.93 To be sure, practitioners of international politics after the First World War sought new ways to avoid major conflict in an anarchic global system lacking enforceable global oversight of national or imperial actions.94 But most such practitioners came from the victorious Western powers. They retained an arbitral role in devising interventionist schemes and modes of governance predicated on the assumption that economically advanced industrial nations retained both the means and the right to rule over non-Western societies.95 From the 1920s to the 1960s different

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Civilization in the Globalization of International Society’, 185–203, and Barry Buzan, ‘Universal Sovereignty’, 227–47. See also Barry Buzan and George Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 273–78; and Alena Sajed and Randolph Persaud (eds.), Race, Gender and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2018), authors’ Introduction, 1–14. For ideas of global IR in general, and the ways that decolonising societies asserted their agency in international politics, see Amitav Acharya, Rethinking Power, Institutions and Ideas in World Politics: Whose IR (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Amitav Acharya, ‘Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies’, International Studies Quarterly 58, 4 (2014), 647–59; Amitav Acharya, ‘Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty, Regionalism, and Rule-Making in the Third World’, International Studies Quarterly 55, 1 (2011), 95–123; Zeynep Gulsah, ‘Decolonising International Relations?’, Third World Quarterly 38, 1 (2017), 1–15; Erez Manela, ‘International Society as a Historical Subject’, Diplomatic History 44, 2 (2020), 184–209. Alina Sajed, ‘The Post Always Rings Twice? The Algerian War, Poststructuralism and the Postcolonial in IR Theory’, Review of International Studies 38, 1 (2011), 142–47, 152–56. Nicolas Guilhot, ‘Imperial Realism: Post-War IR Theory and Decolonisation’, International History Review 36, 4 (2014), 698–701. Amitav Acharya, ‘Studying the Bandung Conference from a Global IR Perspective’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 70, 4 (2016), 344; Amitav Acharya, ‘Who Are the Norm Makers? The Asian-African Conference in Bandung and the Evolution of Norms’, Global Governance 20 (2014), 405–7. Joseph Maiolo, ‘Systems and Boundaries in International History’, International History Review 40, 3 (2018), 577–80. John Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially chs. 7–8.

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calibrations for the requisite ‘standard of civilisation’ sufficient to warrant national independence would emerge. Overtly racist ideas of ethnic difference, the value of different cultural practice and of civilisational quality would, after the Second World War, give way to a new emphasis on industrial modernisation, democratic governance and respect for human rights.96 But the underlying presumption that rich-world nations should do the measuring and, where necessary, intervene to keep poor-world societies on track remained.97 Comparing post-independence regimes in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, what political scientist Brook Coe describes as ‘the sovereignty norm-set’ rests on international recognition of three elements: a state’s territorial integrity, its equality as a sovereign nation and noninterference in its domestic decision-making.98 This norm-set served both to exclude dependent peoples from the international order reconfigured after 1919 and to prevent effective supranational oversight of colonial coercion. Imperial and global historians have tended to categorise the colonial disorders that followed the First World War in ways that reflect their contrasting methodological approaches. For the former, the years 1918 to 1923 have been viewed top-down in terms of crisis, whether as a geopolitical indicator of failing European imperial power or as preludes to decolonisation, imminent in the Irish case, narrowly averted in others.99 Working outward from local experiences, global historians have asked bigger questions about causation and inter-imperial comparability, drawing fascinating conclusions about the nature of trans-imperial violence, the worldwide dimensions of ‘Greater War’ and the persistence of 96

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There are other analytical problems here. For one thing, it is wrong to assume that decolonising states were human rights violators. For another, anti-colonial movements were adept in arguing that sovereign independence was both a basic right in itself and the prior requirement for the institution of culturally authentic rights regimes. On these points, see Christian Reus-Smit, ‘Human Rights and the Social Construction of Sovereignty’, Review of International Studies 27, 4 (2001), 534–37, also cited in Sarah Teitt, ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility’ in Tim Dunne and Christian Reus-Smit (eds.), The Globalisation of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 328. Jacinta O’Hagen, ‘The Role of Civilization in the Globalization of International Society’, and Barry Buzan, ‘Universal Sovereignty’, both in Dunne and Reus-Smit (eds.), The Globalization of International Society, 199–201, 240–41. Brooke Coe, ‘Sovereignty Regimes and the Norm of Noninterference in the Global South: Regional and Temporal Variation’, Global Governance 21, 2 (2015), 275–78. A recent history that ends by invoking this post-war crisis of empire is John Connor, Someone Else’s War: Fighting for the British Empire in World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019), 241–47.

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collective demands for self-determination.100 In this telling, the conceptualisation of self-determination as a collective right to statehood owed as much, if not more, to early Soviet support for anti-colonialism as it did to Woodrow Wilson’s whites-only liberalism. The Bolsheviks’ Congress of Peoples of the East convened in Baku in September 1920, which defended the right of colonised societies to fight imperial rule, might thus be set alongside the better known, but largely abortive, efforts of colonial leaders to break into the Paris Peace negotiations.101 Political violence within French Mandate Syria makes the case for picking apart the causal links between world wartime change and the outbreak of ‘post-war’ insurgencies. While anger simmered over Western rejection of Syrian claims to statehood and self-determination – in other words, over the disappointments of the Wilsonian moment of peacemaking during and after 1919 – by 1925 the more widely cited rebel grievances during Syria’s Great Revolt were local.102 They related to lost communal rights, tax burdens and regional maladministration. Paramilitarism and collective violence were embedded in late Ottoman Syria, typically as a defensive community response to extreme fiscal or military exactions, and cannot be attributed wholly or even primarily to altered post-war conditions. Indeed, the very idea of a Syrian ‘post-war’, whether in the circumstances of 1918–25 or, telescoping forward, in the months before final French withdrawal in 1945–46 seems inaccurate. The broader conclusion this implies is that notions of ‘empires at peace’ or ‘peacetime colonialism’ are oxymoronic. For the majority of people living under variants of colonialism during and after 1919, the varying degrees of coercion and constraint that shaped their daily lives points to a more intermediate condition: neither war nor peace, but imminently affected by the proximity or actuality of violence.

100 101

102

For a clear-sighted summary of these trends, see William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 302–38. Eric D. Weitz, ‘Self-Determination: How a German Enlightenment Idea became the Slogan of National Liberation and a Human Right’, American Historical Review 20, 2 (2015), 483–85. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michael Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), 57–64.

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  INSTITUTIONS

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7 A ‘New Diplomacy’? The Big Four and Peacemaking, 1919 Alan Sharp

The Paris Peace Conference following the First World War was to be unlike any before, its procedures and objectives apparently set by the 1918 speeches of the American president, Woodrow Wilson.1 These had raised an expectation, across the belligerent lines, of a new world order created by an even-handed application of justice, bringing universal peace and prosperity. Peacemaking would be conducted openly, eschewing the secrecy and prescriptions of the Congress of Vienna that had rebuilt international society after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars a century before. It would replace obsolescent ideas like the balance of power with those championed by Wilson, most notably national selfdetermination and collective security, and use evidence evaluated by academic experts as an aid to its decision-making. Wilson dominated contemporary opinion and was perceived to have the power to execute his manifesto. ‘Never’, declared John Maynard Keynes, ‘had a philosopher held such weapons wherewith to bind the princes of the world.’2 The devil was in the delivery. Wilson’s impressive but imprecise rhetoric raised unfulfillable expectations either because listeners took more than he intended from his words or because they promised the impossible. He knew the negotiations must be secret; for him, ‘open diplomacy’ meant the full publication of the resulting agreements. Self-determination 1

2

‘The Fourteen Points’, 8 January 1918; ‘The Four Principles’, 11 February 1918: ‘The Four Ends’, 4 July 1918; ‘The Five Particulars’, 27 September 1918, in H. W. V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1920–24), Vol. I, 431–48. J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 38.

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had a resonance far beyond his intentions, creating potential clashes with the French, Italians and Japanese and guaranteeing disappointment to the conflicting aspirations of new states emerging from the defunct, defeated multinational empires. All nations should be equal (up to a point) but should all races? Could new international arrangements really prevent future war? Could Wilson’s vision be translated into reality when confronted by the aspirations of allies3 who had borne the brunt of the fighting and suffered the resulting losses? Or would the outcome justify the despair of Harold Nicolson, a young British diplomat, who reflected: ‘We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established; we left it convinced that the new order had merely fouled the old.’4

’ ‘      ’ Wilson’s objective was ambitious, to universalise what he termed ‘American principles, American policies’ to create a post-war world led by the United States. Initially he hoped that neutral America could broker ‘peace without victory’ between exhausted belligerent states but, following Germany’s resumption of unlimited submarine warfare and its clumsy Mexican intrigues in early 1917, America declared war against Germany on 6 April 1917 and Austria-Hungary on 10 December. Wilson now sought victory, expecting to force Britain and France ‘to our way of thinking because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands’.5 He almost abandoned his first address outlining his ‘world safe for democracy’, the ‘Fourteen Points’ delivered on 8 January 1918, believing British premier David Lloyd George’s speech on 5 January had pre-empted him. As his friend and confidant Colonel Edward House predicted, however, it was Wilson’s ‘program for the peace of the world’ that captured the world’s imagination.6 He proposed free trade, an end to secret diplomacy and naval blockades against neutral shipping in international waters 3 4 5

6

Used for convenience, America was, strictly, an ‘associated power’, not an ally of the Entente. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (London: Constable, 1933), 187. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order (London: Penguin, 2015) 51–67; Thomas Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 111–22; Robert Hannigan, The Great War and American Foreign Policy, 1914–24 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 197. Charles Seymour (ed.), The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 4 vols. (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), vol. III, 350.

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(freedom of the seas), the restoration of invaded Allied countries and, implicitly, the idea of self-determination in his calls for returning AlsaceLorraine to France, an independent Poland and autonomy for the subject peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. A new international organisation promoting the peaceful resolution of disputes would underpin the settlement.7 With an apparently endless war consuming men, money and munitions at an unprecedented rate, Wilson offered inspiration and solace to millions whose lives had been devastated. That most encountered him as a detached but larger-than-life figure on cinema screens enhanced his messianic image, which was confirmed by the ecstatic welcome he received from crowds in Paris, London and Rome when he arrived in Europe in December 1918. Their inflated expectations of his ‘New Diplomacy’ led Wilson to fear ‘a tragedy of disappointment’,8 not least because American mid-term elections in November 1918 delivered control of both houses of Congress to his Republican rivals. Wilson believed popular sovereignty would create a peaceful and equitable international society – in Leonard Smith’s words: ‘in the Wilsonian Promised Land, all states would operate in accordance not just with the wishes of the liberal individuals they governed, but with those of a transnational community of liberal citizens’.9 The September 1914 manifesto of the Union for Democratic Control, founded by British radical liberals and socialists, articulated ‘the first important synthesis of the so-called New Diplomacy in any form’. It demanded a population’s assent to any transfer of territory, parliamentary approval for any treaty, no alliances for maintaining the balance of power, the settlement of disputes by an international court, a drastic reduction in global armaments and the nationalisation of armaments manufacture. The principles of a liberal democratic international order were also advanced by individuals like Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, Jan Christian Smuts, the South African defence minister, Léon Bourgeois, the French jurist and statesman and American organisations such as the Woman’s Peace Party and the American Union against Militarism.10

7 8 9 10

Temperley, History, vol. 1, 431–35. George Creel, The War, the World and Wilson (New York: Harper, 1920), 162. Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 11. Knock, To End All Wars, 37, 76; Sally Harris, Out of Control: British Foreign Policy and the Union of Democratic Control, 1914–1918 (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1996), 54–55. See also Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this volume.

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Without a powerful sponsor, such ideas had little hope of realisation. Hence the importance of Wilson’s statement to the Republican party’s League to Enforce Peace on 27 May 1916 that, ‘The peace of the world must henceforth depend upon a new and more wholesome diplomacy’ based on three principal points: First, that every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live . . . Second, that the small states of the world have a right to enjoy the same respect for their sovereignty and national integrity . . . And, third, that the world has a right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its origins in aggression and disregard for the rights of peoples and nations.

Wilson declared that, despite its isolationist tradition and present neutrality, the United States should participate in world affairs and join ‘any feasible . . . universal association of nations to maintain the inviolate security of the highway of the seas . . . and to prevent war begun either contrary to treaty covenants or without warning . . . a virtual guarantee of territorial integrity and political independence’.11 The German government’s appeal to him for an armistice on 4 October 1918, requesting that peace be based on his principles, gave them formal significance. His resentful allies agreed only to discuss freedom of the seas and demanded clarification of his definition of restoration of invaded allied territories. With these reservations American secretary of state Robert Lansing’s 5 November pre-armistice note contracted the victors to deliver a Wilsonian settlement. Since the armistice’s military terms amounted to surrender, this undertaking was important for Germany, with its leaders ready to cry foul if the outcomes did not match their interpretation of his meaning.12

  Japan’s very presence distinguished the Paris conference from its predecessors, bringing an Asian great power to the top table. Apart from its aspiration to have racial equality enshrined in the League Covenant, its ambitions were regional, seeking territorial and economic gains in China

11

12

Knock, To End All Wars, 77; Alan Sharp, ‘The New Diplomacy and the New Europe, 1916–1922’ in Nicholas Doumanis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 119–37. Bullitt Lowry, Armistice 1918 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996).

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and the North Pacific. European affairs were not its concern.13 Of the Europeans, Vittorio Orlando, the Italian premier, was the junior partner, representing a state whose resources barely matched its pretentions to great power. In 1914 Italy, nominally an ally of Austria-Hungary and Germany, remained neutral. After negotiating with both sides and signing the Treaty of London with Britain, France and Russia in April 1915, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary in May 1915 and Germany in August 1916. The Entente promised a generous reallocation of Austrian territory, delivering the ‘unredeemed lands’ to complete Italian unification and more – Trieste, Trentino, the Tyrol, Istria, Dalmatia, Valona in Albania, the Dodecanese islands – plus imperial gains from the German and Ottoman empires. Italy’s entry into the war, and the constitutional coup by which it was manipulated, deeply divided the country, leaving a bitter political legacy exacerbated by heavy military and civilian casualties and economic disruption. Orlando sought the London terms and, in addition, the Adriatic port of Fiume (Rijeka), the focus of a strong nationalist campaign. He was hampered by the perception that, despite its losses, Italy had not delivered the anticipated significant military contribution to the Entente, by potential clashes with Wilson’s ninth Point that changes to Italy’s frontiers must be supported ‘by clearly justifiable lines of nationality’, by an insecure domestic political base, disputes within his own delegation and his limited command of English.14 French premier Georges Clemenceau’s main priority was security. Believing only powerful allies had thwarted the second German invasion of his lifetime, retaining Anglo-American support was crucial. ‘To this unity I will make every sacrifice’, he told the French parliament on 29 December 1918, securing a massive vote of confidence. AlsaceLorraine, seized by Germany in 1871, must be restored and the demographic disparity between Germany’s 65 million people and France’s ageing population of 40 million redressed by further redrawing Germany’s borders to the benefit of its neighbours, old and new. Germany could also be weakened by enforced disarmament and the imposition of heavy reparations, though he was prepared to consider an alternative strategy of closer Franco-German economic cooperation. 13 14

Xu Guoqi, Asia and the Great War: A Shared History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 153–56. Robert Lansing, The Big Four and Others of the Peace Conference (London: Hutchinson, 1922), 127; Spencer Di Scala, Vittorio Orlando: Italy (London: Haus, 2009), 138–79; H. James Burgwyn, The Legend of the Mutilated Victory: Italy, the Great War, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1915–1919 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 237–41 and 247–48.

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He led an acquiescent delegation but his bitter rival, Raymond Poincaré, the French president, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the commander of the Allied forces, powerfully advocated a harsh peace with tangible physical guarantees. The demands of a vociferous colonial lobby were never his priority, but he was determined to defend France’s status as a great power with worldwide interests.15 Lloyd George defined Britain’s war aims on 5 January 1918. He denied wishing to deprive the Turks of their national territory16 or to destroy Germany or Austria-Hungary, though he advocated autonomy for their subject peoples, and an independent Poland. He supported AlsaceLorraine’s return to France and reparations for invaded allies. Three points summarised his objectives: ‘First, the sanctity of treaties must be re-established; secondly, a territorial settlement must be secured based on the right of self-determination or the consent of the governed; and, lastly, we must seek by the creation of some international organisation to limit the burden of armaments and diminish the probability of war.’17 Britain had already achieved its immediate aims. Germany no longer menaced France or the Low Countries, its navy was interned, its colonies conquered, its mercantile marine swept from the seas and Britain was the dominant military presence in the Ottoman empire’s former Arab territories. Russia was in chaos, nullifying the main external threat to India. The British general election campaign in November and December 1918 found a much enlarged electorate unimpressed by the Coalition’s original concentration on domestic issues but enthused by two proposals: the trial and punishment of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II and other prominent German military and political leaders for their responsibility for starting the war and the manner of its conduct; and that Germany should pay for the war. Lloyd George won a landslide victory, though entirely dependent on the Conservatives, who held an effective majority in

15

16

17

Peter Jackson, ‘Great Britain in French Policy Conceptions at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 30, 2 (2019), 358–97; David Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), 331–79; JeanBaptiste Duroselle, Clemenceau (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 720–73. A pledge echoed by Wilson which, by May 1919, both had forgotten. Meeting 19 May 1919, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 [FRUS], 13 vols. (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1942–47), vol. V, 708. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 2 vols. (London: Odhams Press, 1936), vol. II, 1510–17.

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the new parliament.18 He needed to satisfy both Liberal and Tory supporters and deliver a peace that would avoid creating new sources of conflict, enable Britain to retreat from European commitment, restore its economic fortunes by revitalising trade, and develop its new Middle Eastern interests. He believed Russia must be reintegrated, even under its new Bolshevik rulers, one of several of his post-war policies that the Tories found unpalatable and, eventually, unacceptable.19

   For all the talk of the equality of nations it became clear that first five, later four or possibly three, were more equal than others. ‘I make no mystery of it – there is a Conference of the Great Powers going on in the next room’, Clemenceau told the token Plenary Conference to which the minor states were consigned.20 The conference opened on 18 January 1919 but, lacking a clear agenda or structure, little had been decided by the end of February. The main decision-making body, the Council of Ten – Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson together with their respective foreign ministers, Stephen Pichon, Arthur Balfour, Sidney Sonnino and Lansing and two Japanese representatives – was too unwieldy, too prone to leakage of sensitive material at delicate stages of negotiation and apparently making no significant progress with complicated problems whose complexity was magnified by real or contrived interconnections between them. The peacemakers believed they must resolve the void left by the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German empires or risk revolutionary alternatives like Russian bolshevism. Domestically governments had to demobilise men, decommission mechanisms for waging total war and fulfil promises of a future commensurate with the enormous sacrifices. Pressure mounted, the world needed decisions – Il faut aboutir, as Clemenceau was wont to declare; a new structure was required. In mid-February, Wilson, Orlando and Lloyd George departed to tackle domestic political problems, while the remarkably resilient 18

19 20

Coalition Conservatives won 335 seats in a House of 707 MPs that the 73 successful Irish republican Sinn Fein candidates never attended. Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberals won 133 seats. David Butler and Jennie Freeman, British Political Facts 1900–1967, 2nd ed. (London: Papermac, 1968), 141. Alan Sharp, ‘From Caxton Hall to Genoa via Fontainebleau and Cannes: David Lloyd George’s Vision of Post-War Europe’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 30, 2 (2019), 314–35. FRUS, vol. III, 196.

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seventy-seven-year-old Clemenceau survived an assassination attempt on 19 February. On 7 March, two days after his return, Lloyd George began discussing outstanding issues privately with Clemenceau and House. When Wilson returned on 14 March, he replaced House and Orlando joined them from 24 March. Over the next six weeks, often meeting twice or more a day, the Council of Four tackled the most contentious and recalcitrant problems of the German treaty. Although they determined relatively few of the Treaty of Versailles’ 440 articles and even fewer in the four subsequent Parisian treaties with the other defeated Central Powers, the Four wrangled and compromised over those defining articles on Germany’s borders, reparations, changes to international law and other issues that shaped contemporary and subsequent perceptions of the peace. The majority of the settlement was based on the recommendations of diplomats, temporarily enlisted academic experts, civil servants and government ministers staffing the fifty-two commissions established by the conference. These were then approved by the Council of Five (Pichon, Balfour, Sonnino, Lansing and Baron Makino Nobuaki of Japan) and passed to the Allied drafting experts. Anticipating negotiations with German representatives, the commissions proposed extreme positions, allowing for later concession. The precariousness of the Allied compromises these proposals represented destroyed thoughts of direct negotiations. Instead, with minimal acknowledgement of Germany’s many written objections, the treaty became an amalgamation of maximum demands in which the whole became greater than the intended sum of its parts. Harold Nicolson reflected: ‘Had it been known from the outset that no negotiations would ever take place with the enemy, it is certain that many of the less reasonable clauses of the Treaty would never have been inserted.’21 The Four thus did not even take responsibility for the final editing of the assembled articles or for consideration of their cumulative effect. Indeed, on the eve of its delivery to German representatives on 7 May 1919, Wilson remarked that, at some point, he was looking forward to reading the whole treaty.22 Yet even before December 1919 when Keynes published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the book that has done so much to shape later perceptions of the settlement as the unworkable and 21 22

Nicolson, Peacemaking, 100. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), 469.

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immoral product of negotiations held in the ‘hot, dry room in the President’s house, where the Four fulfilled their destinies in empty and arid intrigue’, commentators were fascinated by this gathering of the world’s most powerful leaders. The complexities of peacemaking could be simplified by concentrating on the personalities and programmes of four men (or three – Keynes, a British economic adviser who left the conference in despair in June 1919, dismissed Orlando in a sentence and a footnote, not the least of the distortions of reality in his magnificent, but pernicious, polemic).23 Their inadequacies, not the immense pressures upon them or the enormity of the task they faced, explained flaws in the treaty.

   ? The key points of Wilson’s programme were self-determination and a new international architecture based upon an alliance of responsible governments to preserve peace. Although it was arguably self-determination which would have the greatest consequences, many unintended by Wilson, he insisted the conference’s first duty was to create the League Covenant with its eventual twenty-six articles becoming the first part of each of the treaties. His fourteenth Point advocated ‘a general association of nations . . . formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’.24 Lloyd George, however, envisaged a far less ambitious international consultative organisation25 and, like Clemenceau and Orlando, was anxious to exploit Wilson’s preoccupation with the League to further national priorities. Working closely with his British colleague, Lord Robert Cecil, using an Anglo-American text and disregarding French, Italian and Japanese alternatives, later using dubious procedural practice to exclude the Japanese 23

24 25

Keynes, Economic Consequences, 7, 31 and fn.1. See also the insightful introduction in The Economic Consequences of the Peace; With a New Introduction by Michael Cox (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and John Milton Cooper’s review, which concludes: ‘Simply put, no serious scholar of the peace conference can place any reliance in Keynes’s version of events.’ https://hdiplo.org/to/E245 accessed 16 June 2020. Temperley History, vol. I, 435. Peter Yearwood, ‘“On the Safe and Right Lines”: The Lloyd George Government and the Origins of the League of Nations 1916–1918’, Historical Journal 32, 1 (1989), 131–55; and Peter Yearwood, Guarantee of Peace: The League of Nations in British Policy, 1914–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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proposal for a racial equality clause, Wilson presented a first draft of the Covenant to the Plenary Conference on 14 February. His original Parisian proposal stated, ‘Should any Contracting Power break or disregard its covenant . . . it shall thereby ipso facto become at war with all the members of the League’. Lansing and the European leaders rejected this kernel of collective security as an existential challenge to national sovereignty since a member’s paramount decision to go to war would be preempted by another state which had broken its international bond. Article 16’s final version declared a covenant breaker would ‘be deemed to have committed an act of war’ against all League members, leaving each to decide its response, thereby depriving collective security of its necessary certainty and immediacy. This undermined Article 10’s promise ‘to respect and preserve as against international aggression the territorial integrity and political independence’ of all members. Article 10 also aroused British concerns about rigidity in the international order which were partly assuaged by Article 19 which permitted the League to reconsider ‘international conditions whose continuance might endanger the peace of the world’. Since the conference would sanction new frontiers, many of them contentious, reconciling their reconsideration with Article 10’s promise of territorial integrity might prove challenging. The French believed a League lacking its own armed forces would be useless, but Wilson trusted to the power of liberal public opinion. When Clemenceau refused to renounce the ‘old system of alliances called the Balance of Power’, he articulated the scepticism of many national leaders reluctant to trust their security to an untried entity.26 Without Wilson the League might never have been created. His three colleagues indulged his vision – at a price – but Lord Eustace Percy, a British diplomat, believed, ‘As a matter of cold historical fact [the League] happened because Cecil and Wilson wanted it – and for no other reason’.27 America’s refusal to ratify its president’s commitment was disastrous, leaving Britain and France to squabble over the future of an infant they might not have conceived. The League enjoyed some success in the 1920s dealing with disputes among minor powers but except as a last resort, as over the interpretation of the Upper Silesian plebiscite results,

26

27

Ruth Henig, The League of Nations (London: Haus, 2010), 25–53; Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking after the First World War, 1919–1923, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), 43–68. Lord Percy of Newcastle, Some Memories (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1958), 60–61.

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Britain and France excluded it from the business of treaty enforcement. The increasing international tensions created by Japan, Italy and Germany in the 1930s overwhelmed it but one of the victors’ first acts in 1945, after an even greater conflict, was to create a remarkably similar successor, the United Nations. The League’s tragedy was that, although not a revolutionary supranational organisation transforming the whole nature of international society, many, whom their leaders did not hasten to dissuade, clung to the illusion that it was.28

-: ,    Wilson did not invent self-determination but it became synonymous with him. ‘Absent him’, declared Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ‘the “principle” of self-determination would not be ratified by the United Nations Charter; it was he who put it on the agenda of international order.’29 Although the warring multinational empires had, with varying degrees of reluctance, adopted the potentially suicidal ploy of stirring nationalist discontent in enemy ranks, it was Wilson who declared self-determination to be ‘an imperative principle of action’,30 unleashing a ‘Wilsonian moment’ as subject nationalities in Europe and colonial peoples in Africa and Asia perceived their causes to have the support of the world’s most powerful leader.31 Only some did. When Wilson declared that the war ‘had its roots in the disregard of the rights of small nations and nationalities’ who lacked the power ‘to determine their own allegiances and their own forms of political life’,32 he spoke in the context of white Europeans and, even then, with imperfect knowledge. The European autocracies’ sequential collapse left self-determination as the only principled alternative to force in redrawing frontiers. This enjoyed the wide sympathy of the British Political 28 29 30 31

32

Alan Sharp, Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective (London: Haus, 2018), 57–68. See Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 in this book. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 81. Wilson’s speech, 11 February 1918, ‘The Four Principles’, Temperley, History, vol. I, 437. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2007); and his chapter in this volume (Chapter 15). Temperley, History, vol. I, 438.

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Intelligence Department, the French Comité d’Études and the American Inquiry, governmental advisory groups of academics and experts established to prepare for peace, many of whom brought their support for the subject nationalities’ aspirations to the Parisian territorial commissions.33 Wilson’s self-determination was predicated upon the civic nationalism essential to a state of immigrants who could, whatever their ethnic origins, choose to be American. His Western liberal assumptions clashed with the prevailing philosophy of Eastern Europe which eschewed choice, perceiving nationality to be determined by birth, race, language and religion. The Four faced the daunting task of reconciling the competing aspirations of would-be successor states to the failed empires and delineating frontiers that would offer them military security, economic viability, satisfactory communications networks, avoid provoking international instability and yet deliver the closest possible approximation to nationstates in areas of ethnic complexity. Lansing predicted disaster: selfdetermination was ‘a principle loaded with dynamite, raising hopes that can never be realised’.34 Lloyd George told his colleagues: ‘The strongest impression made upon me by my first visit to Paris was the statue of Strasbourg [symbolising Alsace-Lorraine] veiled in mourning. Do not let us make it possible for Germany to erect a similar statue.’35 The obvious ‘Alsace-Lorraine in reverse’ was the French attempt to detach the Rhineland from Germany, reducing German resources and offering France a river barrier, but, in Clemenceau’s words, ‘When confronted with the Rhineland question Mr Wilson shook his head in an uncompromising fashion, and Mr Lloyd George assumed a determined air of antagonism’.36 Clemenceau faced a choice between maintaining an Anglo-American alliance and securing the physical guarantee of the Rhine, the preferred option of Poincaré and Foch. After Lloyd George persuaded Wilson to offer Anglo-American guarantees against future unprovoked German aggression, Clemenceau

33

34 35 36

Volker Prott, The Politics of Self-Determination: Remaking Territories and National Identities in Europe, 1917–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 21–53; Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning and the Paris Peace Conference 1916–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 57–89; Lawrence Gelfand, The Inquiry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), passim. Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 97–98. See Smith, Chapter 4 in this volume. André Tardieu, La Paix (Paris: Payot, 1921), 171. Georges Clemenceau, Grandeur and Misery of Victory (London: George Harrap, 1930), 220.

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settled for the Rhineland’s permanent demilitarisation and a fifteen-year occupation. If future provisions for French security were deemed inadequate or Germany did not fulfil its reparations obligations the occupation could be extended. He believed this satisfied both his aims, declaring, ‘I shall make a prediction: Germany will default and we shall stay where we are, with the alliance’.37 This concession to French security freed the wider logjam of questions that threatened to stall peacemaking. House noted cynically in his diary for 20 March, ‘I have my doubts as to the Senate accepting such a treaty, but that is to be seen. Meanwhile it satisfied Clemenceau and we can get on with the real business of the Conference’.38 The Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919 effectively negated the American guarantee whose ratification Lloyd George had made the condition of its British counterpart. Nonetheless, Clemenceau defended his decision vigorously, berating his successors for neglecting opportunities to extend the occupation and, at Locarno, surrendering that advantage.39 Alsace-Lorraine’s return was a given, but Clemenceau sought the frontiers of 1814, including the mineral-rich Saar district, rather than those of 1815–70 imposed after Napoleon’s return and defeat. Wilson and Lloyd George refused. The Anglo-American experts were sympathetic to French claims for the Saar’s coal to compensate for the retreating Germans’ deliberate destruction of their mines, but not their demands for sovereignty. Lloyd George suggested Saarland autonomy under French control but Wilson objected: ‘to grant a people an independence they do not request is as much a violation of the self-determination principle as forcibly handing them over from one sovereignty to another’.40 Meetings between 9 and 13 April, following expert advice and the reluctant Wilson’s persuasion, produced a special regime for the Saar. France took ownership of the mines but sovereignty passed to the League for fifteen years, after which a plebiscite would offer the Saarlanders three choices: remain under the League, revert to Germany or become French.41

37

38 39 40 41

David Stevenson, French War Aims against Germany, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 177; Watson, Georges Clemenceau, 352; see Jackson and Mulligan, Chapter 5 in this volume. Seymour, Intimate Papers, vol. IV, 409. Clemenceau, Grandeur and Misery, 218–34, 300–16. Paul Mantoux, Les Délibérations du Conseil des Quatre, 2 vols. (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1955), vol. I, 74. FRUS, vol. V, 66–70; Agnes Headlam-Morley (ed.), Sir James Headlam-Morley: A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference (London: Methuen, 1972), 67, 74, 78.

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The overwhelming vote for Germany in January 1935 handed Hitler an early propaganda triumph. Wilson’s thirteenth Point calling for a Polish state inhabited by ‘indisputably Polish populations’, enjoying ‘free and secure access to the sea’, with its ‘independence guaranteed by international covenant’ encapsulated the contradictions within his rhetoric. Access to the Baltic, through what became the Polish corridor linking Poland’s heartland to the obvious, but German-populated port of Danzig (Gdansk), necessitated assigning non-Poles to Poland and isolating East Prussia from the remainder of Germany. The ethnic intermingling of the area and disputes surrounding all Poland’s frontiers made any international guarantee unlikely. The resurrection of an independent Polish state after over a century seemed inconceivable in 1914, when Poles fought on both sides as the unwilling subjects of Germany and Austria-Hungary or Russia, but defeat and revolution created the opportunity. The demands of its self-appointed government were not modest, encompassing historic claims that went far beyond 1772, when Poland was first partitioned – mineral-rich Upper Silesia, for example, was lost in the fourteenth century. The sympathetic Polish commission recommended Poland be assigned most of Upper Silesia, Danzig and a corridor including both railway lines running from Danzig to the interior, one to Thorn, the other through Marienwerder to Mlawa. Clemenceau and Wilson accepted their findings but Lloyd George did not. Although he supported an independent Poland, he had warned his colleagues of the danger of transferring too many Germans to alien rule in his 25 March Fontainebleau memorandum outlining Britain’s objectives. Arguing such minorities would pose a threat to both domestic and international stability, he objected (with typical rhetorical exaggeration) to handing over ‘millions of people to a distasteful allegiance merely because of a railway line’.42 Lloyd George had a huge impact on the Polish settlement. Against strong opposition from Clemenceau, he argued successfully for plebiscites in Allenstein and Marienwerder, which, by voting to remain German, reduced the Polish corridor. He persuaded a grudging Wilson that making Danzig a free city under League sovereignty but within the Polish customs regime was the president’s own idea. The draft treaty still assigned Upper Silesia to Poland but, briefed in particular by James Headlam-Morley, one 42

Paul Mantoux, Paris Peace Conference 1919: Proceedings of the Council of Four (March 24–April 18) (Geneva: Droz, 1964), 29.

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of the British advisers, Lloyd George demanded a plebiscite as one of the priorities of his June attempt at treaty revision. This provoked Clemenceau’s anger and Wilson’s exasperation but, reminding the president that it merely upheld his principle, he prevailed. Subsequent events proved embarrassing for Britain when it was forced to withdraw its contingent from the international force supervising the region prior to the vote in 1921, after which Anglo-French relations were further embittered by disputes over the allocation of territory between Poland and Germany.43

,    The Four reached agreement on these issues in Paris but the dispute over Fiume provoked a major breach between Orlando and Wilson that persisted beyond Orlando’s resignation and Wilson’s return home in June 1919. Orlando sought ‘the Pact of London plus Fiume’. His European allies agreed, reluctantly, to uphold the treaty, thus putting themselves at odds with Wilson, but not the demand for Fiume, a city with an Italian majority population surrounded by a Croatian hinterland, designated as the Adriatic port of the new Yugoslav state. The analogy with Danzig was obvious and Wilson suggested free city status for Fiume in meetings with Orlando on 9 and 10 January 1919, hoping to persuade Italy to drop its Dalmatian claims. Orlando deluded himself that Wilson would accept Italian sovereignty over Fiume just as he had conceded the Brenner frontier that committed some 250,000 German speakers in the South Tyrol to Italy despite the obvious clash with self-determination. Yet even as Wilson agreed with Orlando on 30 January that Italy should have the Brenner, Trentino and Trieste (on the basis, he later admitted, of insufficient study) he told him, ‘I cannot consent for Fiume to go to Italy’, and this remained his unalterable stance.44 Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson prioritised the German settlement and Italy’s demands were not discussed until a series of tense meetings from 19 to 23 April. Although Clemenceau and Lloyd George contemplated trading Fiume for Italian concessions over Dalmatia or its Anatolian ambitions, Wilson would not budge. Orlando and Sonnino left the conference for Rome in protest on 24 April, only returning just before 43 44

Sharp, Versailles Settlement, 119–23; Prott, Politics of Self-Determination, 131–42. Burgwyn, Legend of the Mutilated Victory, 246–47; Antony Alcock, The History of the South Tyrol Question (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), 19–26.

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the Germans were handed the draft treaty on 7 May. Their absence did nothing to advance their Fiume demands, which Wilson continued to oppose until March 1920 when he agreed to a settlement reached by direct Italian–Yugoslav negotiations, but it profoundly influenced two highly significant developments in the Near East and Asia. Both Italy and Greece had ambitions in Anatolia and Italy had the advantage of the Anglo-French promise of a share in any Ottoman spoils. In Orlando’s absence, the Three’s decision on 6 May, permitting the Greeks to occupy Smyrna (Izmir) to forestall the Italians, reflected their exasperation at Italy’s demands for Fiume and its unauthorised troop landings in Antalya. The Greek landings on 15 May provoked widespread disorder and anti-Greek and anti-Allied sentiment in Turkey, strengthening Mustafa Kemal in his successful three-year bid to oust the Sultan, end Ottoman rule, expel the Greeks, void the August 1920 Treaty of Sevrès, and establish a secular Turkish republic. In September 1922, Kemal’s troops occupied Smyrna, massacring the Greek population. Their advance towards Constantinople (Istanbul) encountered a small British force at Chanak (Canakkale). The resultant crisis was resolved peacefully but precipitated a Tory backbench rebellion that drove Lloyd George from government in October 1922. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 24 July 1923, recognising complete Turkish sovereignty over its territory except for a small demilitarised zone along the Straits, was the only negotiated and longest surviving post-First World War settlement. It was also notable for the participation of the newly formed Soviet Union.45 In August 1914, Japan declared war on Germany and occupied its Chinese concessions of Kiaochow, Tsingtao and Shandong. In May 1915, Japan forced China to accept the ‘Twenty-One Demands’ acknowledging its right to Shandong and extensive economic concessions in China. In 1917, Britain sought Japanese naval assistance, promising support for the Japanese claim to Shandong and the German islands north of the equator. France entered a similar agreement, acknowledging Japan’s contribution to the war effort. In August 1917, China declared war on Germany but its demand for the return of the concessions was ignored. When the conference considered the Japanese claim for their retention and China’s demand for their return, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were again in the invidious position of acknowledging commitments clearly at odds

45

Andrew Mango, From the Sultan to Ataturk: Turkey (London: Haus, 2009), 59–176.

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with self-determination. Wilson supported China, despite misgivings about breaching the sanctity of even treaties and agreements considered unjust, such as the ‘Twenty-One Demands’, but isolated and facing a Japanese threat to join Italy in leaving Paris, he feared the conference might collapse and Japan refuse to join the League. On 30 April, Wilson accepted the outright transfer of Germany’s concessions to Japan, provoking the 4 May protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a key moment in Chinese history. Wilson’s messianic aura collapsed, China refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles and hopes of creating a new domestic political unity were dashed with far-reaching consequences for the country, the region and the world, with Asian resentments at the settlement playing a significant role in the interwar period.46

   Under existing international law, combatants could face prosecution for operational misdemeanours but there was no provision for trying a head of state for initiating a war or for the concept of crimes against humanity which might bring the Ottoman perpetrators of the Armenian massacres to justice. With great difficulty, Lloyd George overcame his cabinet’s objections to indicting the Kaiser and he encountered equally strong opposition from Wilson, Orlando and the Japanese representatives in Paris. Lansing declared that trying Wilhelm for a non-existent crime equated to international lynch law but Wilson later compromised, possibly hoping to secure approval for changes made to the draft League Covenant at his behest. Between 8 and 10 April he consented to Article 227 seeking Wilhelm’s extradition from asylum in the Netherlands and his eventual trial before a special international tribunal ‘for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’. The Dutch refused to surrender their unwanted guest and attempts to extradite over 800 German politicians and servicemen for trial by Allied military courts also failed. The compromise allowing forty-five cases, none involving prominent civilian or military leaders, to be tried before the German court at Leipzig led to farcical acquittals or derisory sentences. The equivalent proceedings in Constantinople fell victim to changing political circumstances but both established important 46

Manzela, Wilsonian Moment, 177–93; Jonathan Clements, Prince Saionji: Japan (London: Haus, 2008), 137–44; and Jonathan Clements, Wellington Koo: China (London: Haus, 2008), 67–85; Guoqi, Asia and the Great War, 153–210.

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precedents for the post-Second World War trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo and, ultimately, for the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002.47

 The war was enormously expensive – the British Treasury estimated that victory cost £24 billion (in 1914 gold values) – and everyone, even the Germans, understood there was a bill to pay, but no other issue raised so starkly the dilemmas of retribution and redemption, of justice and fairness. There were three key questions: for what was Germany liable; what was its capacity to pay; how would the receipts be divided? France and Belgium had been invaded, their industries despoiled, great swathes of their territory, the principal battlefields in an industrialised conflict, ravaged. Lloyd George expressed it simply: ‘Those who ought to pay were those who caused the loss.’48 However, both he and Wilson had stated in 1918 that Germany should restore the invaded territories but would not be liable for Allied war costs. Lloyd George defined this concept of reparations for Lansing’s 5 November note as covering ‘all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea and from the air’.49 Under such a definition, Belgium and France would receive the lion’s share of any payments, Britain little and the Dominions nothing. Lloyd George’s intention to abide by it has been questioned, and in Paris all delegations, except the Americans, submitted claims for their full war costs. Clemenceau and Lloyd George insisted this was their right, Wilson was adamant that it was not. The resulting crisis was solved, at the suggestion of a young John Foster Dulles, by Article 231, the ‘war 47

48

49

James Willis, Prologue to Nuremberg: The Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982), passim; Garry Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 106–46; Sharp, Versailles 1919, 120–26; Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27–77; Smith, Sovereignty, 74–81; Antony Lentin, Guilt at Versailles: Lloyd George and the Pre-History of Appeasement (London: Methuen, 1983), 24–25, 136–37. See Payk, Chapter 3 in this volume. British Empire Delegation meeting 1 June 1919 in M. Dockrill (ed.), British Documents on Foreign Affairs: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, 6 vols. (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1989), vol. IV, 111. Temperley, History, vol. I, 458.

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guilt’ clause, perhaps the most notorious of the treaty, which asserted the Allied moral right to compensation for all the loss and damage sustained ‘as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies’. Article 232 then recognised that Germany’s resources were insufficient to make full restitution and restricted the Allied demand to certain categories of civilian damage. To boost Britain’s receipts, Lloyd George sent Smuts to persuade Wilson to include pensions and allowances paid to servicemen and their dependants because service personnel were only civilians in uniform. Acknowledging the illogicality of the proposition, Wilson nonetheless agreed, expecting the Allies would allow Germany to discharge its debt by accepting a fixed sum of less than its total liability and hence including pensions would affect the distribution of German payments but not the amount.50 The Four could not agree a fixed sum, partly because Clemenceau and Lloyd George feared disappointing their electorates’ inflated expectations. They shelved the problem, establishing a Reparation Commission to make recommendations in 1921. In May 1921, the Commission suggested a total bill of £6,600,000,000 – approximately half the sum of the claims presented by twenty-three states51 – payable by three bond issues, A, B and C. The C bonds, worth over £4,000,000,000, were ‘phoney money’, window-dressing pandering to Allied public opinion but whose payment was never expected. Germany’s effective debt was £2,500,000,000, within AngloAmerican estimates of its capacity to pay, though the question was always one of politics, not economics. The perception that reparations represented an immoral attempt to extract impossible sums from Germany has prevailed over any alternative view stressing the very real burdens on the victors, struggling to repair their territories, their economies and to honour the debts they had incurred from the United States, which expected repayment.52

50 51

52

Antony Lentin, Lloyd George and the Lost Peace: From Versailles to Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 23–46. See The Treaty of Versailles and After: Annotations of the Text of the Treaty (reprint of the US Government Printing Office publication of 1944, New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 470–75. Sharp, Versailles Settlement, 85–99; Sally Marks, ‘Mistakes and Myths: The Allies, Germany and the Versailles Treaty, 1918–1921’, Journal of Modern History 85, 3 (2013), 632–59. See Siegel, Chapter 10 in this volume.

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      The settlement was founded on liberal principles: a law-based international system; the reduction of armies and armaments, initially for their enemies but ultimately universally; and frontiers drawn, to the best of their ability, on lines of nationality (provided this did not increase the territories of their former foes), with guaranteed rights for some left on the wrong side of new boundaries. The Treaty also contained aspirational clauses about women’s and workers’ rights. The peacemakers hoped these values would bring good governance, prosperity and solutions to the continuing problems caused by the war and its aftermath but guilt was a fundamental complication.53 Wilson aspired to make ‘no discrimination between those to whom we wish to be just and those to whom we do not wish to be just’54 but the Calvinism that he shared with Lloyd George required that Germany be punished for its sins and yet become a wholehearted participant in the new world order. Lloyd George believed this dilemma was soluble: ‘To achieve redress our terms may be severe, they may be stern and even ruthless, but at the same time they can be so just that the country on which they are imposed will feel in its heart that it has no right to complain.’55 Clemenceau was less sanguine: ‘You wish to do justice to the Germans. Do not believe that they will ever forgive us. They will seek only the chance of revenge. Nothing will suppress the fury of those who hoped to dominate the world and believed success so near.’56 The Allies believed Germany had started a war that it had fought using illegitimate methods and lost. The Germans accepted none of these judgements, perceiving the war as one of self-defence which they had won in the east and drawn in the west, with a growing belief that victory was denied only by domestic treachery. They expected a Wilsonian peace to reflect their interpretation and were shocked by the reality of territorial losses, particularly to Poland, an unspecified reparations bill, enforced disarmament, colonial extinction and exclusion from the League. The official focus for resentment was Article 231’s claim of German

53 54 55 56

Peter Clarke, The Locomotive of War: Money, Empire, Power and Guilt (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Speech, 27 September 1918, Temperley, History, vol. I, 404. Lloyd George memo, 25 March 1919, Cmd 2169 Papers Respecting Negotiations for an Anglo-French Pact 1919–1922 (London: HMSO, 1924), 79. Mantoux, Délibérations, vol. I, 70.

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aggression, which a powerful campaign sought to disprove, thus, hopefully, delegitimising the settlement; but this disguised the real reason – defeat. It is difficult to envisage terms that would have satisfied both victors and losers as a peace of justice.

 The Four were politicians needing to satisfy domestic electorates but although Lloyd George and Wilson, like Orlando and Clemenceau, had particular objectives, their shared Gladstonian tradition encompassed a wider vision that happily coincided with many of their national interests. Orlando’s role in the German treaty was limited and his inability to secure Fiume led to his resignation and the unfair verdict that he had delivered a mutilated victory. Italy made significant gains that effectively completed the national territory, with a frontier on the Brenner. Yugoslavia was not such a powerful neighbour as the defunct Austria-Hungary and, although its imperial gains were disappointing, the Balkans and Danube basin offered interesting prospects for the expansion of Italian interests.57 Despite regrets that Germany remained substantially intact, the French parliamentary commission investigating the negotiations accepted that Clemenceau had achieved the best deal possible and that Poincaré and Foch’s Rhineland ambitions were undeliverable. Lansing judged Clemenceau the most successful of the Four – ‘the strongest of the many strong men who participated in the negotiations in Paris’ – but demography and geography, particularly the absence of any other great power to menace Germany’s new borders, left France with an ongoing security dilemma which British policies did little to alleviate.58 As Clemenceau wryly indicated, Britain, with its main concerns apparently satisfied, could advocate greater generosity to Germany and pursue more idealistic objectives but Lloyd George, the only one of the Four who survived to execute the treaty, had now to consolidate British achievements and deal with the problems left by the war and its aftermath. His fear was that a revanchist Germany would combine with Russian bolshevism to create a massive new threat; his hope lay in the liberal shibboleth of commerce. He forced reluctant Liberals and Tories to accept the 57 58

Di Scala, Vittorio Orlando, 163–90. Rapport Général fait au nom de la Commission charge d’examiner le projet de loi portant approbation du Traité de Paix, conclu à Versailles le 28 Juin 1919 par M. Louis Barthou – Deputé (Paris, 1919), 22; Lansing, Big Four, 10

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March 1921 Anglo-Soviet trade treaty and he based his final foreign policy initiative, the April 1922 Genoa conference, on the belief that the prosperity created by German industry reconstructing Russia after revolution and civil war would prove a panacea to Europe’s continuing difficulties. An important reason for Genoa’s failure was his inability to reach the satisfactory post-war relationship with France that was so vital given America’s abnegation of its responsibilities for a treaty that its leader had profoundly influenced.59 Adam Tooze suggests that, although Wilson had not intended the Senate’s rejection of the treaty, non-ratification delivered his aim of making America’s ‘absent presence’ the defining feature of the new international order. Its economic power and absence from the League made it ‘potentially a de facto “super-state” exercising a veto over the combined decisions of the rest of the world. Nothing less was the ambition of Wilson and his Republican successors’. Yet neither he nor they succeeded in using ‘America’s position of privileged detachment and the dependence upon it of the other major world powers, to frame a transformation in world affairs’.60 For all their shortcomings and the chaotic manner in which some decisions had been reached, the Paris peacemakers did create a settlement. It was inevitably a compromise between principles, pragmatism and practicalities, based neither on a balance of power nor collective security, still centred on Europe but unbalanced by two outriders, the United States, whose president had championed one alternative system, and the Soviet Union, whose ideology suggested it would become the ultimate revisionist of the many countries dissatisfied with that settlement. For the moment, with the exception of Turkey, the disgruntled lacked the power to undo the treaties which were, in any case, only the starting point of continuing negotiations about their implementation or adjustment. Britain and France were now left to wrestle with the problems of reintegrating Germany and the Soviet Union into an international system torn between the untried promises of the ‘New Diplomacy’ and reliance upon the methods of the old which many judged responsible for all that had 59

60

Alan Sharp, ‘Anglo-French Relations: From Versailles to Locarno, 1919–1925’ in Alan Sharp and Glyn Stone (eds.), Anglo-French Relations in the Twentieth Century: Rivalry and Cooperation (London: Routledge, 2000), 120–38; Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sharp, ‘From Caxton Hall to Genoa’, passim. Tooze, The Deluge, 516, 68–87.

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gone wrong in 1914. Developments in the 1920s suggested that there were positive trends which might be fashioned into arrangements that satisfied more of the international community, but the political consequences of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the subsequent Great Depression proved fatal, bringing to power in Germany a leader who did not believe that war had been removed from the diplomatic chessboard. Military power continued to be a crucial element. As one of the American experts in Paris, Isaiah Bowman, pointed out, ‘if we introduce a new set of conceptions into diplomacy, if we call it, let us say, “The New Diplomacy”, we shall perhaps be able here and there to achieve justice in minor cases, but the great stakes of diplomacy remain the same. We simply discuss them in different terms’.61

61

Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and also the work of Conan Fischer, in particular A Vision of Europe: Franco-German Relations during the Great Depression, 1929–1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Isaiah Bowman, ‘Constantinople and the Balkans’ in Edward House and Charles Seymour (eds.), What Really Happened at Paris (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 154; see Otte, Chapter 16 and Sluga, Afterword in this volume.

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8 The League of Nations The Creation and Legitimisation of International Civil Service Karen Gram-Skjoldager

The organisational backbone of the post-war international order was the League of Nations and the bureaucratic backbone of the League of Nations was its permanent Secretariat. Set up in a small back office in London in 1919 with a staff of just three, the Secretariat rapidly evolved into a large and professional administrative body with a staff of more than 700 who managed the new organisation’s wide-ranging activities from security and economy to health and infrastructure.1 The Secretariat was a radically novel invention. As the British diplomat and politician, Philip Noel-Baker, observed in a speech held at the last Assembly of the League in April 1946, the very idea of an international secretariat had seemed deeply foreign to the political leaders and diplomats who had debated its creation at the Paris Peace Conference: I remember how one night in the Hotel Crillon Hymans [Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Hymans] expressed his doubts and fears. ‘I understand the Assembly’, he said; ‘that is like the Conference at The Hague. I understand the Council; it is like the Concert of the Powers. But the Secretariat! How can men and women of forty different nations work together beneath a single roof? It will be not only be a Tower of Babel, but a Bedlam too.’2

As we know now, this turned out not to be the case. The Secretariat was arguably among the League’s most important and enduring legacies, an inspiration for the UN civil service and other international organisations’

1 2

Raymond B. Fosdick, The League and the United Nations after 50 Years (Newton, CT: self-published, 1972), 23–24. The League of Nations, The League Hands Over (Geneva: League of Nations, 1946), 40.

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bureaucracies after the Second World War.3 This was also what NoelBaker observed at the 1946 Assembly: ‘The League leaves much behind it for the United Nations but above the rest I rank the existence, the traditions, the men of the first international civil service of the world.’4 In this chapter, we will consider some of the ways in which the League Secretariat managed to establish this status for itself. The chapter proceeds in two steps. First, it will briefly explore the early decisions on key principles regarding the Secretariat’s organisation taken by its first Secretary-General, British diplomat Sir Eric Drummond – decisions that ensured the Secretariat became a genuinely international body with substantial institutional autonomy that enabled it to represent the League of Nations and a (perceived) general international interest. Second, it will explore how the Secretariat built legitimacy for itself by developing close relationships with three key audiences. We will consider (1) its bilateral relationships with member states; (2) its multilateral relations with the other actors in the League’s institutional landscape and (3) its transnational relations to international public opinion – a concept that was key to the novel Wilsonian discourse of a new and open diplomacy.

    In recent years, the League of Nations has been the object of booming scholarly interest and by now more or less all the organisation’s major policy areas – from health to economy and finance and from mandates and national minorities to international crime prevention have been investigated. Across these studies, the League Secretariat plays a role but is rarely the centre of attention.5 3

4 5

Karen Gram-Skjoldager and Haakon A. Ikonomou, ‘The Making of the International Civil Servant c. 1920–60: Establishing the Profession’ in Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Haakon A. Ikonomou and Torsten Kahlert (eds.), Organizing the 20th Century World. International Organisations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920–1960s (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 215–30. League of Nations, The League Hands Over, 39. For a slightly older, but excellent literature review, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review 112, 4 (2007), 1091–117. Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Paul Knepper, International Crime in the 20th Century: The League of Nations Era, 1919–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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At the same time, the Secretariat itself has also attracted increased scholarly attention from a different body of literature, with researchers approaching it from mainly two perspectives. On the one hand, a substantial biographical literature has analysed the League secretariesgeneral and their role as players on the classical diplomatic scene of international security politics and conflict resolution. On the other hand, a broad range of studies have looked at various national groups within the Secretariat and their career patterns, political roles and loyalties.6 This chapter takes a different approach and focuses on what we may term, borrowing from Caterina Carta, the metadiplomatic activities of the Secretariat, namely the activities carried out by the Secretariat leadership in order to develop close and productive relations to its main stakeholders: member states, other League institutions and international public opinion with the overall aim of establishing and expanding its legitimacy.7 In doing so, we will highlight the combination of important principled decisions and incremental day-to-day practices in the Secretariat’s relationship with its external stakeholders. We will have a particular focus on the early, formative years of the Secretariat’s life in the first half of the 1920s. The chapter draws on and attempts to synthesise a number of key insights from the research project ‘The Invention of International

6

7

For two classical studies of Secretaries-General: James Barros, Office without Power: Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); James Barros, Betrayal from Within – Joseph Avenol, Secretary-General of the League of Nations, 1933–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969). For two recent analyses of Drummond and his work, see David Macfadyen, Michael Davies, Marilyn Carr and John Burley, Eric Drummond and His Legacies: The League of Nations and the Beginnings of Global Governance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Marco Moraes, ‘Internationalism as Organisational Practice: The League of Nations Secretary-General 1918–1946’ (unpublished DPhil Dissertation: Oxford University, 2020). For an insightful recent example of the study of a national group in the Secretariat, see Elisabetta Tollardo, Fascist Italy and the League of Nations, 1922–1935 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). The only institutional history of the League Secretariat is Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, The International Secretariat – A Great Experiment in International Administration (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945). Caterina Carta, The European Union Diplomatic Service: Ideas, Preferences and Identities (London: Routledge, 2012), 22. In this chapter, legitimacy does not refer to the lawfulness or legality of the Secretariat and its endeavours but rather relates to whether its activities were viewed as justified by its relevant stakeholders. Legitimisation, by extension, is understood here as practices aimed at gaining the support and approval of the Secretariat from these stakeholders (see Antonio Reyes, ‘Strategies of Legitimisation in Political Discourse: From Words to Actions’, Discourse & Society 22, 6 (2011), 782).

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Bureaucracy: The League of Nations and the Creation of International Public Administration, c. 1920–1960’.8

 :       The League of Nations was created at the Paris Peace Conference as part of the Versailles Peace Treaty in order to safeguard the post-war international order. To support this endeavour, four League bodies were created: a Council, an Assembly, a Secretariat and a Permanent Court of International Justice (the latter of which we will leave aside in this chapter).9 The Council – much like today’s UN Security Council – was home to the great powers. Britain, France, Italy and Japan held permanent seats (the United States never took up its seat) while the smaller member states shared four non-permanent seats.10 The Council had a broad mandate and could debate any issue relating to the ‘peace of the world’ while holding a set of specific obligations when it came to international conflict resolution, initiating international sanctions and overseeing the League’s mandates and national minority regimes.11 The Assembly, by contrast, introduced a new form of deliberative diplomacy12 where all member states held one seat and had one vote.13 In the Assembly, national delegations, comprising both political leaders and diplomats as well as parliamentarians and experts, convened once a year to debate ‘any matter within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace of the world’.14

8

9

10 11 12 13 14

I would like to thank Emil Eiby Seidenfaden, Torsten Kahlert and Haakon A. Ikonomou for all their excellent research and all the inspirational conversations we have had about international bureaucracy over the last five years. On the Permanent Court of Justice and the Paris Peace negotiations, see Marcus Payk, Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018). Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 4, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ leagcov.asp#art4 (accessed 21 January 2021). Covenant of the League of Nations, Articles 11, 12, 15, 16, 22, https://avalon.law.yale .edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp (accessed 21 January 2021). Norbert Götz, Deliberative Diplomacy: The Nordic Approach to Global Governance and Societal Representation in the United Nations (London: Republic of Letters, 2011). Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 3, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ leagcov.asp#art3 (accessed 21 January 2021). Ibid. and Article 4, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp#art4 (accessed 21 January 2021)

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The Secretariat was the only permanent institution in the League, and in the beginning it was not entirely clear what its status and role would be. Part of the reason for this was that experiences from national public administration could hardly be transferred directly into the new international realm. As former League official, Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, noted in his 1945 history of the Secretariat and its work: National administration is part of the executive branch of government and is under permanent control of the legislative branch of government. The international Secretariat on the other hand is the only permanent element in international organisation. Its policy-shaping organs are not legislatures but diplomatic bodies.15

The Secretariat’s unsettled status was exacerbated by fact that the League Covenant set very few directions for its work. It was evident that the founders of the League had had more important problems on their mind at the Paris Peace Conference than sorting out the finer details of the new bureaucratic body. The Covenant simply asserted that a permanent Secretariat should be established ‘at the Seat of the League’, that this Secretariat should ‘comprise a Secretary General and such secretaries and staff as may be required’ and that the Secretary-General had the authority to appoint Secretariat staff – with the subsequent approval of the League Council.16 This authority to appoint staff ensured some basic autonomy for the Secretary-General. The same may be said for Article 7, which granted League officials diplomatic privileges and immunities when ‘engaged in the business of the League’,17 a provision that had been tabled by the British government to enable League officials to perform their functions without fear of interference, pressure or reprisal from national governments.18 In other words, Drummond had considerable scope as he developed the new international civil service. In doing so, he chose a model for his organisation that marked a clear break from previous forms of international administration. Before the war, international public unions such as the International Telegraph Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union 15 16 17 18

Ranshofen-Wertheimer, International Secretariat, 9. Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 6, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ leagcov.asp#art6 (accessed 18 January 2021). Covenant of the League of Nations, Article 7, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/ leagcov.asp#art23 (accessed 18 January 2021). Martin Hill, ‘Immunities and Privileges of Officials of the League of Nations’, Studies in the Administration of International Law and Organisation (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945), 1–2.

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(1874) and the International Health Office (1909) only had small administrations that were populated either by nationals of the host country or by officials seconded to the organisation by their governments.19 Likewise, the inter-allied war agencies that dealt with issues of transport and supply during the war were made up of national representatives, each appointed by their government and accompanied by their own experts and secretaries.20 After the war, some believed that the Secretariat should follow this model. The British Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, for instance, suggested that the Secretariat be organised along national lines with the Secretary-General distributing the Secretariat’s tasks among nine national secretaries, one from each Council state, who would be in charge of their own individual staffs.21 By contrast, Drummond believed the Secretariat should be international not only in its responsibilities but also in its composition, organisation and loyalties. In his own words, it should be ‘a truly international civil service’ in which officials from many different member states ‘would be solely the servants of the League and in no way representative of or responsible to the Governments of the countries of which they were nationals’.22 He therefore organised the Secretariat along functional lines, creating a number of sections, each dealing with a particular policy area much like national government ministries and each staffed with civil servants from different national backgrounds.23 These officials, according to the Secretariat’s first set of staff regulations from 1922, were expected to be loyal only to him and the organisation: ‘The 19

20 21

22 23

For an introduction to international secretariats before the League of Nations, see Bob Reinalda, International Secretariats: Two Centuries of International Civil Servants and Secretariats (London: Routledge 2020). F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 75. ‘Secretariat of the League of Nations. Draft of Provisional Organisation. Villa Majestic, Paris’, 31.3.19, R1455, League of Nations Archives (henceforth LONA); Walters, History, 76, For an in-depth study of the various proposals for the organisation of the Secretariat, see Moraes, Internationalism, 102–15. Eric Drummond, ‘The Secretariat of the League of Nations’, International Public Administration 9 (1931), 229. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, International Secretariat, 79. ‘Schemes for organising the International Secretariat. Two schemes by Sir M. Hankey and Sir Wiseman v comments thereon’ ‘Secretariat of the League of Nations. Draft of Provisional Organisation – Villa Majestic, Paris’, 31.3.1919, both R1455, LONA; Moraes, Internationalism, 113; Drummond, The Secretariat, 232; Karen Gram-Skjoldager and Haakon A. Ikonomou, ‘The Construction of the League of Nations Secretariat: Formative Practices of Autonomy and Legitimacy in International Organisations’, International History Review 41, 2 (2019), 257–79.

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officials of the Secretariat of the League of Nations are international officials, responsible in the execution of their duties to the SecretaryGeneral alone. They may not seek or receive instructions from any other authority.’24 The staff regulations went on to spell out what this undivided loyalty to the organisation entailed: League officials could not hold any kind of political office or side job without the Secretary-General’s consent; they were not allowed to receive any honours or decorations while serving in the Secretariat; they could not publish or lecture on matters relating to the League without the Secretary-General’s permission and they were to maintain strict secrecy on all confidential matters relating to the League.25 The result of these decisions was that – at least formally – Drummond had created a new type of international bureaucratic entity steeped in a discourse of internationality, with a high degree of institutional autonomy and the potential to claim a role for itself as a neutral representative of the greater international good.

 :   Drummond’s Secretariat was constructed in such a way that in principle a person of any nationality could fill any position in his new administration. He was, however, keenly aware that in order for the new Secretariat to gain legitimacy, its formal independence had to be combined with staffing practices that ensured close and cordial relationships with the foreign policy elites of the great powers that had created the new organisation.26 This was clearly reflected in the Secretariat’s leadership. From an administrative perspective, Drummond only needed the assistance of one Deputy Secretary-General to support his work. However, for political reasons, he selected Jean Monnet from France as well as Raymond B. Fosdick from the United States as Deputy Secretaries-General in the spring of 1919. This prompted complaints from Italy and Japan, which led him to add Dionisio Anzilotti from Italy and Inazo Nitobe from Japan to the Secretariat as Under-Secretaries-General. In this way, in the words of Ranshofen-Wertheimer, a ‘kind of ambassadorial position’ had been created at the top of the Secretariat where Deputy and Under-Secretaries-

24 25 26

Staff Regulations 1st Edition, Geneva: League of Nations, 1922, Article 1, LONA. Ibid., Articles 1–4, LONA. ‘The Secretariat of the League of Nations 9 April 1919, E. Drummond’, R1455, LONA.

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General ensured that the Secretariat was in close contact with the great powers behind the organisation.27 The founding member states also dominated the Secretariat at the level just below these top ‘ambassadors’. Here we find the directors, the officials who headed the different sections into which the Secretariat’s work was now organised and who together with the Deputy and UnderSecretaries General made up the Secretariat’s leadership.28 The first generation of these directors, hired between 1919 and 1922, were a diverse group in terms of education and professional training. In a new type of international institution such as the Secretariat, there was no settled understanding of the types of qualifications needed for a successful international career and Drummond hired a broad range of professional profiles, including diplomats and journalists, historians, economists and lawyers.29 By contrast, national diversity was very limited. With two British and two French directors, one director from Italy and one from Japan, Drummond here too gave priority to Council members. As the remaining directorships were held by Allied or neutral states such as the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and Poland, Drummond had created a strong European – and more specifically Northern European – dominance in the Secretariat’s leadership.30 As Torsten Kahlert has demonstrated, this highly biased form of internationality came to shape the administration for more than a decade. With the gradual professionalisation of 27

28 29

30

Ranshofen-Wertheimer, International Secretariat, 56, 62, 68; C. Howard-Ellis, The Origin, Structure and Working of the League of Nations (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), 185; Drummond, ‘Secretariat’, 229. For a broader exploration of nationality and legitimacy, see Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou, ‘Construction’. The number of sections fluctuated between nine and twelve, see Ranshofen-Wertheimer, International Secretariat, 87–88. This professional diversity was unique to the first generation of Secretariat directors. From the mid-1920s, directors had a more homogenous professional background, with university degrees in law and professional experience from the diplomatic services: Torsten Kahlert and Karen Gram-Skjoldager, ‘The Men behind the Man: Canvassing the Directorship of the League of Nations Secretariat’ in Haakon A. Ikonomou and Karen Gram-Skjoldager (eds.), The League of Nations: Perspectives from the Present (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2019), 24. A substantial number of women worked in the Secretariat, but very few made it into the high-ranking roles discussed here (on women in the League Secretariat, see Myriam Piguet, Gender Distribution in the League of Nations: The Start of a Revolution?’ in Ikonomou and Gram-Skjoldager (eds), The League of Nations, 62–73. For an in-depth study of the League directors, see Torsten Kahlert, ‘Pioneers in International Administration: A Prosopography of the Directors of the League of Nations Secretariat’, New Global Studies 13, 2 (2019), 201–24. See also Kahlert and Gram-Skjoldager, ‘The Men behind the Man’.

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the Secretariat, internal promotions rather than external recruitment became the order of the day when Drummond was hiring personnel for the highest-ranking positions; this was the only way to ensure that the people holding the Secretariat’s top jobs had previous training and experience in international administration. Consequently, the national privileges and power structures baked into the early Secretariat were reproduced well into the 1930s.31 In sum, it seems therefore that Drummond, while making a clear, principled break with former models of international administration, shared Maurice Hankey’s awareness that the integration of the most influential member states and their interests was a sine qua non for the new organisation. Ensuring that the major member states had a strong presence in the League leadership undoubtedly helped boost the legitimacy of the Secretariat in its earliest years – but it also immediately became a liability for Drummond as the smaller and non-European member states voiced concerns over the de facto administrative replica of the Council inside the Secretariat.32 At the 1920 League Assembly, the smaller member states, headed by New Zealand’s Sir James Allen, aired their discontent and demanded that positions in the Secretariat should be filled through open, competitive exams as a way of ensuring equal access to the new international body. With the help of the British representative, who reminded the Assembly of the Secretary-General’s exclusive right to appoint the Secretariat’s staff, Drummond managed to ward off this suggestion by agreeing to set up an internal Appointments Committee that could assist him in the selection of the Secretariat staff.33 However, criticisms of his hiring practices continued. At the second Assembly, the Indian representative in particular voiced concerns over the heavy overrepresentation of Europeans in the Secretariat, pointing to the fact that India, paying 6.6 per cent of the League’s expenses, only had one member of staff.34 In the same Assembly, an expert committee set up by the first Assembly to review the organisation of the Secretariat presented a report which also touched on future recruitments. The Noblemaire Report, named after the French politician Georges Noblemaire, who headed the committee, expressed understanding for the difficult 31 32 33

Kahlert, ‘Pioneers in International Administration’, 201–6. See for instance Arthur W. Rovine, The First Fifty Years: The Secretary-General in World Politics 1920–1970 (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1970), 41–43. 34 Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou, ‘Construction’, 263. Ibid., 266.

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circumstances under which Drummond had had to recruit his first members of staff. But it also insisted on the ‘extreme desirability’ of proper and fair national representation in the Secretariat in relation to future appointments.35 If not before, Drummond was now acutely aware that in the new multilateral context of the League, it was not sufficient to accommodate the interests of the great power that had led the war effort. It was crucial for the Secretariat’s legitimacy that it had representation from a wider circle of member states – if not for practical reasons and as a means of doing liaison work with all the member states,36 then as an important symbolic practice that demonstrated the Secretariat’s international character and the fact that it was operating in a new and democratic multilateral setting where all member states were considered equal. From 1922, the Secretariat’s staff regulations stipulated that when hiring officials for the Secretariat, ‘special regard [should] be had to the maintenance and development of the international character of the organisation’,37 and under the watchful eye of the Assembly, the question of national representation became an ever-present concern in the deliberations about recruitment and promotions in the Secretariat’s Appointments Committee.38 Consequently, the number of nationalities represented in the Secretariat gradually expanded – from fifteen in 1920 to forty-three in 1938. As the number of member states also grew during this period, the percentage of member states represented in the Secretariat increased from 36 to 62 per cent.39 However, this increasingly broad national representation still played out within a fundamentally hierarchical system. Despite the absence of any explicit rules or guiding principles in the Appointments Committee, its hiring practices gradually came to reproduce European power hierarchies and mimic global civilisational orders and relations. The European great powers thus largely succeeded in maintaining their monopoly of the top positions in the Secretariat while small and middle

35

36 37 38

39

Organisation du secretariat et du bureau international du travail. Rapport de la commission d’Experts constituée en vertu de la decision prise par l’Asemblée de la Société des Nations dans sa séance du 17 décembre 1920 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1921). A function of the League staff highlighted by Drummond in a directors meeting on 20 February 1923, DM 1919–39, LONA. Article 15, Staff Regulations 1st Edition, Geneva: League of Nations, LONA. For an in-depth study of the more specific debates and conflicts that played out in the context of the Appointment Committee, see Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou, ‘Construction’, 12–14. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, International Secretariat, 355–58.

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powers competed for the mid-range positions in the organisation. Likewise, officials from Western Europe were systematically preferred over officials from Eastern and South Eastern Europe, while European staff was consistently preferred over non-European staff.40 This picture only began to shift in the 1930s as the prestige of the League dwindled and several major member states left or became passive members of the organisation.41 In other words, while Drummond developed a keen awareness of the need for broad national representation to create legitimacy for the new bureaucratic body in the democratic diplomatic context of the League, he recruited staff in ways that matched the power-political realities and cultural and civilisational assumptions in the international system surrounding the Secretariat.

 :      The Secretariat’s attempts to gain legitimacy not only played out bilaterally in relation to the many large and small member states which all demanded representation in the Secretariat. While shaped by the power dynamics surrounding it, the League as an institution also produced new ways of doing politics. Consequently, during the organisation’s earliest years, Drummond and his colleagues also attempted to build transparent and productive relationships with the Council and the Assembly – the two other institutional pillars of the new multilateral League system. When the Secretariat started operating in the spring of 1919, Drummond was primarily concerned with its relations to the Council. During the first years of the organisation’s existence, the weekly Secretariat meetings between him and his deputy and under-secretaries and directors usually had the Council and its sessions as the first item on its agenda.42 This in part reflected Drummond’s general belief in the importance of the major member states for the success of the League

40 41

42

Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou, ‘Construction’, 268–75. Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Haakon A. Ikonomou and Torsten Kahlert, ‘Scandinavians and the League of Nations Secretariat, 1919–1946’, Scandinavian Journal of History 44, 4 (2019), 458–64. See minutes of DM 1919–23, DM 1919–39, LONA.

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but it was also an indication of the severe problems that the Council faced during the first years of its existence.43 The League was weighed down by the American delay and eventual rejection of League membership. It also had to compete with the Allied Supreme War Council (from January 1920 the Conference of Ambassadors), where the same great powers that held seats in the League Council met regularly until 1923 to discuss related, and sometimes overlapping, issues regarding the enforcement and interpretation of the peace treaties and the mediation of various European territorial disputes.44 In this situation, Drummond centred most of his work on carving out an independent role for the new League Council. In one of his earliest decisions as Secretary-General, he insisted that the Council should convene in January 1920, immediately after the Treaty of Versailles and the League Covenant had come into force, even if there was only one small item on the agenda: the appointment of three members of a commission that was tasked with drawing up the border between the Saar territory and Germany.45 He made clear that he believed that even though the Supreme Council was still in operation, the League Council should not limit itself to dealing with this type of minor issue but engage with a wider range of political problems such as the publicity of the League, the creation of the International Court of Justice and getting the League’s disarmament work off the ground.46 A number of important political issues such as war reparations and Germany’s future status in Europe remained off-limits for the Council in its first years. Still, the number and weight of issues on its agenda grew steadily and already by the end of 1920 it had come to include questions related to mandates and minorities, humanitarian problems in and around Russia, and the settlement of several minor European territorial disputes.47 During these first meetings, Drummond took great care to assert the Council’s authority vis-à-vis the Supreme Council. In a clear demonstration of this point, he refused to accommodate the Supreme Council when it wished to rule on the issue of Switzerland’s membership 43

44 45 46 47

Drummond’s focus on the support of the great powers, and that of Great Britain in particular, for the success of his work lies at the centre of James Barros biography (Barros, Office, 1979). Walters, A History, 93–94. Drummond in DM 5.11.1919; 26.1.1919 DM 1919–39, LONA. Drummond in DM 13.8.1919 and 31.12.1919, 28.12.1920, DM 1919–39, LONA. For the agendas of the Council meetings, see Official Journal/Journal Officiel (Geneva: League of Nations, 1920).

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of the League. The great powers, Drummond argued, could only bind other states when they were deciding on this issue in their capacity of League Council members.48 He also worked actively to establish the Council’s public profile. Before the first Council meeting, the Secretariat ensured that photographs and biographies of all Council members were available to the press; and in preparation for its second meeting in London in February 1920, he managed to convince the Council to start and end its meeting with public sessions, open to the press.49 This format became the template for the majority of the Council’s subsequent more than 100 meetings during the 1920s and 1930s.50 In the Secretariat’s early interactions with the Council, Drummond applied a dual strategy to convince Council members of the legitimacy and relevance of the Secretariat. On the one hand, he took great care to present the Secretariat as a neutral, self-effacing and apolitical entity entirely at the service of the Council. The League, so Drummond lectured to his staff, could not be considered an independent personality, capable of exercising sovereignty. It was a club that was no more than the sum of its parts.51 When producing documents for the Council, therefore, officials ‘ought, generally speaking, to be careful not to give too much indication that one line of policy commended itself rather than the another’. The Council ‘did not like it, and it was apt to have the opposite effect to that which was desired’.52 For this reason, Drummond introduced a rapporteur system where the Secretariat prepared documents that laid out the facts of a case, while a Council member served as the rapporteur on the case, presenting the political analysis that formed the starting point of the Council’s discussions – a working method that was later copied into the Secretariat’s relations to the Assembly.53 On the other hand, it was clear that informally Drummond and his top staff were keen to play an active role in developing the political work of the Council. Indeed, this role as discreet and trusted policy advisers became key to the close and cordial relationship that developed between Drummond and the Council members. As his Deputy Secretary-General, Frank P. Walters, observed with more than a hint of pathos in his 1952 history of the League: ‘In due course his industry and prudence so

48 49 50 51 52

Drummond in DM 28.1.1920, DM 1919–39, LONA. Drummond in DM 3.9.1919, DM 1919–39, LONA. Drummond in DM 28.1.1920, 4.2.1920, DM 1919–39, LONA; Walters, History, 87–97. Drummond in DM 10.12.1919, DM 1919–39, LONA. 53 Drummond in DM 31.31919, DM 1919–39, LONA. Walters, History, 87.

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won the trust of the Council members that each of them would consult with him as freely as with his own staff.’54 Unlike later UN SecretariesGeneral, Drummond did not have a formal right to bring issues to the Council’s attention. But he influenced the Council’s work in other ways: serving as a gatekeeper, who decided which enquiries and appeals were passed on to the Council and drawing up the draft agendas for its meetings based on input from his group of directors.55 Gradually his influence grew and by 1921 he played a significant role in the Council’s management of the Åland Island dispute between Sweden and Finland. He offered the parties to the conflict frequent and detailed suggestions on how best to proceed, coordinated his activities with the British Foreign Office and developed the idea of having a legal commission with neutral countries arbitrate the dispute – a solution adopted by the Council. By the mid-1920s, he was allowed to play an even more active role in negotiations over Germany’s accession to the League, offering input to the Council and serving as an intermediary between the Council and the Assembly as well as between member states and Germany.56 By the end of his tenure in 1933, he took initiatives and actions that would have been considered entirely unthinkable in the early 1920s. For instance, he worked actively to ensure Argentinian and Mexican membership of the League in order to strengthen the organisation’s leverage in the Southern hemisphere and played a key role in the League’s management of the Manchurian Crisis (1931–33).57 In theory, there was an obvious tension in this dual strategy of formal neutrality and discreet, informal political consultancy. As Swiss director William Rappard put it in a 1923 directors meeting, there was a conflict between ‘the officially impersonal character of the Secretariat’ and ‘the very real influence of members of the Secretariat’.58 Drummond also acknowledged this: ‘while agreeing that, technically, the Secretariat must not be held to have any policy of its own, [he] recognised that the individual directors did, in fact, exercise considerable influence’.59 In practice, Drummond and the Secretariat managed to successfully bridge this tension by applying the somewhat fuzzy dogma that the Secretary54 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid., 86. See for instance Drummond in DM 4.2.1920; 18.2.1920, 1.5.1920; 10.6.1920, DM 1919–39, LONA. Barros, Office, 112, 144–200, 209–60; Moraes, Internationalism, 139–40. Barros, Office, 218–34, 311–81. Rappard in DM 28.2.1923, DM 1919–39, LONA. Drummond in DM 28.2.1923, DM 1919–39, LONA.

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General ‘had a moral responsibility for the development of the League – this with the help of Governments and not against their will’.60 In parallel with this delicate balancing act, Drummond also worked to strengthen the legitimacy and relevance of the Secretariat in an altogether different manner: by boosting its technical work. In his analysis, the League ‘was founded for a settled world’, and in the volatile international economic and political situation after the war one of the most efficient ways to give the Secretariat leverage was to focus on technical and humanitarian activities such as managing the post-war epidemics in Eastern Europe.61 If it succeeded in these types of endeavours, Drummond argued in 1922, it would ‘assume the dominant position in the world as soon as we arrive at this settled condition’.62 From the outset, Drummond and his staff took care to remind the Council that even if it had some similarities with the Supreme Council, it existed within a multilateral ecology where other institutions also had their roles to play. At a meeting in August 1920, the Council, to Drummond’s relief, had asserted that the Secretariat held a key role in the organisation as the sole institutional bridge between the Council and the Assembly, meaning that all matters that the Council wanted to present to the Assembly had to pass through the Secretariat. After the meeting, however, Council President Léon Bourgeois added that this did not mean that the Secretariat had the authority to put any issues before the Assembly that had not first been approved by the Council. This idea was unacceptable to Drummond, who argued that this would not only ‘limit the authority of the Secretariat vis-à-vis the Assembly’ but also ‘arouse feelings of jealousy from the Assembly with regard to the Council’.63 In the same vein, he insisted that that every document presented to the Council by the Secretariat should simultaneously be distributed to all other member states. As Erik Colban, director of the Administrative and Minorities Section, put it, this was ‘necessary to show that the Secretariat worked in the open, and did not conceal anything from the members of the League’.64

60 61 62

63 64

Van Hamel in DM 28.2.23, DM 1919–39, LONA. Drummond in DM 8.06.1922, LONA. Drummond in DM 8.06.1922, LONA; Karen Gram-Skjoldager and Haakon A. Ikonomou, ‘The League of Nations Secretariat: An Experiment in Liberal Internationalism?’, Monde(s) 19 (July 2021), 38–45. Drummond in DM 18.8.1920, DM 1919–39, LONA Drummond and Colban in DM 7.10.20, DM 1919–39, LONA

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Whether Drummond’s attention to the Assembly was rooted in any deeper ideological sympathies for Wilson’s visions of a new and open diplomacy is difficult to assess.65 What is clear, however, is that he was keenly aware of the power that the Assembly held through ‘the power of the purse’, as the institution passing the Secretariat’s budget. One of the greatest challenges to the Secretariat’s legitimacy throughout its existence was, as Walters noted with considerable frustration in his post-war account of the organisation, recurring accusations of lavishness and overspending.66 In order to secure the status and activities of the Secretariat, therefore, it was essential to establish a close working relationship with the Assembly – in general and particularly regarding the Secretariat’s economic arrangements.67 These concerns manifested themselves clearly for the first time at the 1921 Assembly when the Noblemaire Report presented its review of the Secretariat’s spending and activities. Anticipating the debates over the League’s budget that the report would prompt, Drummond decided to engage actively with the Assembly and make it take responsibility for the prioritisation of the Secretariat’s activities.68 It was therefore with his full support that the Assembly recommended the Council should appoint a ‘Control Commission’ (from 1922 called the Supervisory Commission) to audit the Secretariat’s spending.69 Arguably, Drummond got more than he wished for. The creation of the Control/Supervisory Commission marked the beginning of a very tight budgetary control of the Secretariat.70 The members of the Commission were a combination of prominent politicians and financial experts, and during its first year they established a practice of meticulously reviewing all aspects of the Secretariat’s income and expenses in the previous year, probing into anything from rules for gifts and donations to travel expenses and money spent on publications and telephone calls.71 65

66 68 70

71

Compare Barros, Office, that does not ascribe any liberal internationalist sympathies to Drummond, and MacFadyen et al., Eric Drummond and Moraes, Internationalism, which both argue that Drummond should be considered a proponent of liberal internationalism while not directly addressing his views on the Wilsonian ideas of open diplomacy. 67 Walters, History, 129–36. Drummond at DM 20.8.1921, DM 1919–39, LONA. 69 Ibid. ‘First Report of the Commission of Control’, A.7.1922.X, LONA. For a full account of the Supervisory Commission and its activities, see Karen GramSkjoldager, ‘Taming the Bureaucrats. The Supervisory Commission and Political Control of the Secretariat’, in Ikonomou and Gram-Skjoldager (eds.), League of Nations, 40–50. For the first prominent example of this, see ‘Supervisory Commission. Second Annual Report’, A.2.1923.X, LONA. On the League finances in general, see Hannah Tyler,

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While the zealous control of the Secretariat’s expenses no doubt helped curb criticism of the Secretariat for overspending, it also resulted in a considerable loss of autonomy. Formally, the Commission had no policyshaping functions but it developed a practice of reviewing the Secretariat’s draft budget for the upcoming year in a process where members enthusiastically scrutinised the Secretariat’s planned activities on everything from mandates and minorities to economic and financial cooperation, weeding out any expenses they considered unnecessary or wasteful.72 During the 1920s, this work took an increasingly political turn. As one former League official pointed out in an evaluation of the Commission during the Second World War, it: got into the position not of considering the question of how a given piece of work can be most economically done, but into a quite different position of advising strongly and often and to the extent of deciding the different questions, i.e. should this or that piece of work be done at all; or should it be done in preference to another one?73

In relation to the Assembly, in other words, Drummond’s search for legitimacy came with considerable negative consequences for the Secretariat’s autonomy.

 :    The Secretariat, like the rest of the League, was rooted in a new, democratic vision of world politics. This ‘New Diplomacy’ considered secrecy in foreign policy dangerous.74 It aimed to create a new international order in which diplomatic negotiations would be carried out ‘always frankly and in the public view’, as Wilson phrased it in his Fourteen Points.75 This idea was based on a fundamentally new understanding of legitimacy in international politics where diplomatic negotiations and decisions were

72 73

74 75

‘Show Me the Money: Die Finanzen des Völkerbundes zwischen 1920 und 1933’ (MA thesis, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, 2018). ‘Supervisory Commission. Second Annual Report’, A.2.1923.X, LONA. Proceedings of the Conference on Experience in International Administration Held at Washington on January 30, 1943, under the Auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (New York: Carnegie Foundation, 1943). Sharp, Chapter 7 in this volume. Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy (London: Routledge 2011), 141–84; Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_ century/wilson14.asp (accessed 12 February 2021).

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now expected to be scrutinised by a perceived ‘world public opinion’.76 Indeed, as Ranshofen-Wertheimer observed: ‘In no other respect did the creation of the League mark a more complete break with the habits of the past than in the new kind of relationship between a diplomatic body and public opinion that was established at Geneva.’77 In the Secretariat, Drummond and his directors were aware from the very beginning that their work was now being followed, debated and evaluated in new and public ways that transcended the traditional diplomatic community.78 As a consequence, Drummond set up an Information Section, which was to serve as the information department of the Secretariat while also offering press services to the Council and the Assembly. Under the enthusiastic leadership of French journalist and diplomat, Pierre Comert, the section quickly became the Secretariat’s largest and occupied around one-sixth of its salary budget throughout the interwar years.79 However, from the very beginning, it faced a dilemma very similar to the one the Secretariat had been straddling in relation to the Council: how to demonstrate the political importance of the League and make its results tangible to the peoples of its member states without compromising the perceived neutrality of the Secretariat and without being accused of engaging in untimely political propaganda.80 Here, too, the Secretariat managed the dilemma by employing a twopronged strategy. On the one hand, it engaged in an active and broadbased information campaign, the key to which lay in making neutral information about the activities of the League widely available to the public. A telling example of this type of communication was the yearly report from the Secretary-General on the activities of the organisation. When the first report was being drafted in 1920, Drummond made it clear 76

77 78

79 80

The argument in this section draws extensively on Emil Eiby Seidenfaden’s PhD dissertation: ‘Message from Geneva: The Public Legitimisation Strategies of the League of Nations and Their Legacy, 1919–1946’ (Aarhus University, 2019). For a more substantive summary of the dissertation’s argument regarding the Secretariat’s relations with international public, see Emil Eiby Seidenfaden, ‘The League of Nations’ Collaboration with an “International Public”, 1919–1939’, Contemporary European History 31 (2022), 368–80. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, International Secretariat, 201. For some early examples, see Drummond at DM 1.9.1920, van Hamel at DM 29.12.1920; DM 1919–39, LONA. See also Arthur Sweetser, The League of Nations at Work (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 187–88. Drummond, ‘The Secretariat’, 231; Seidenfaden, ‘Message from Geneva’, 35–41. Seidenfaden, ’Message from Geneva’, 52–53.

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that these reports should be ‘entirely a question of facts’ and they were therefore publications of hundreds of pages meticulously detailing all the activities of the League during the previous year.81 These SecretaryGeneral’s reports appeared alongside a wide range of other publications from the Information Section that all projected an image of the League as a neutral, transparent and fact-based organisation. These included publications books, pamphlets and booklets on various issues regarding the League, while the Monthly Summaries of the League of Nations presented tens of thousands of pages chronicling League-related events and news on a monthly basis throughout the League’s existence.82 The Secretariat’s efforts to ensure that it was perceived as open and transparent also included many other types of activities, such as providing international press representatives in Geneva with daily communiqués about meetings and events, ensuring as much openness and publicity around Council and Assembly meetings as possible, ensuring a high degree of public access to the League’s buildings and accepting that the Supervisory Commission’s scrutiny of the Secretariat was publicised in yearly reports.83 In sum the Secretariat’s legitimisation work, as Emil Seidenfaden has observed in his thorough study of the Information Section, ‘operated on a base line of neutrality, of sticking to “the facts”’.84 On the other hand, and as a way of circumventing the official ‘taboo of propaganda’, the Secretariat also practised more activist forms of engagement with the public.85 As early as 1919, the deputy-director of the Information Section, the American Arthur Sweetser, argued that the Secretariat should develop a new type of ‘cooperative publicity’ based on close cooperation with pro-League groups and associations.86 Sweetser’s idea became a core strategy of the Secretariat in the 1920s as the Information Section developed close working relationships with around twenty-two organisations and associations whose aims it judged to be in line with its own work. These organisations included the International Federation of League of Nations Societies and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The Secretariat 81 82 83 84 85 86

Drummond at DM 26.5.1920, DM 1919–39, LONA; see some early examples: A.10.1923, A.9.1921, A.6.1922; LONA. Seidenfaden, ‘Message from Geneva’, 93–101. Gram-Skjoldager, ‘Taming the Bureaucrats’. Seidenfaden, ‘Message from Geneva’, 130. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, International Secretariat, 409. Sweetser, ‘League of Nations publicity. Memo defining activities of the publicity section’, 27.5.1919, R1332/272, LONA.

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provided these organisations with information and non-binding suggestions for topics and events to discuss. This allowed them to promote the Secretariat and its agendas while at the same time permitting the Secretariat itself to maintain its neutrality.87 This liaison work was combined with more traditional forms of liaison activities. Thus, in a reflection of the general ambassadorial thinking about the role of staff as liaison officers, every member of the Information Section was expected to maintain relations with one or two NGOs alongside influential members of the press and the foreign policy milieu in their home country.88 The Secretariat’s public information work arguably represented the most innovative dimension of its legitimisation efforts. However, it was also here that it experienced the most severe backlash. The involvement of ordinary citizens and diverse groups of activists in the production of the new international order after the world war created expectations that proved difficult to meet.89 A case in point, as Haakon A. Ikonomou has demonstrated, relates to the League’s disarmament work.90 In the Secretariat, a Disarmament Section had been set up to support the realisation of the Covenant’s goal to ensure general international disarmament (Art. 8). However, from the outset, the section operated under a severe cross-pressure: On the one hand, ambitions for disarmament were high, with massive popular mobilisation around the issue and fervent beliefs that the reduction of arms would be the key to taming international anarchy. On the other hand, the politics of disarmament, more than any other issue dealt with by the League, was riddled with enormous technical complexities and touched on the most sensitive issues of national security and sovereignty. In this situation, the Secretariat attempted to move the issue forward and create a role for itself by applying an adapted version of the two-stringed strategy outlined earlier. On the one hand, it focused on producing ‘objective’ information about member states’ armaments, military, naval and air programmes.91 On the other hand, it consistently fed various transnational and national peace 87 89 90

91

88 Seidenfaden, ‘Message from Geneva’, 73–84. Ibid., 73. Bouchard, Chapter 12 in this volume. Haakon A. Ikonomou, ‘The Administrative Anatomy of Failure: The League of Nations Disarmament Section, 1919–1925’, Contemporary European History 30, 3 (2021), 321–34. For a broader analysis of international disarmament, see Webster, Chapter 9 in this volume. See in particular the Armaments Year-Book and the Statistical Year-Book of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition

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and disarmament movements information they could turn into propaganda for the cause. This, it turned out, ‘was not an undivided blessing for the League Secretariat’, as Haakon A. Ikonomou diplomatically observes: By the late 1920s, Drummond and Comert both complained that the NGOs were ‘creating unrealistic expectations in the general public with unattainable demands and utopian schemes’. As the 1932–34 World Disarmament Conference yielded no results, the activist stance of the Secretariat meant that the failure to deliver on disarmament became highly visible and closely related to the League.92 At this point, a more general backlash against the Secretariat’s public information work had also set in. By the early 1930s, calls for reductions in League spending had re-emerged in the wake of the world economic crisis. At the same time, Italy and Germany had started pushing for tighter national control over the Secretariat while the general fragmentation of European politics made it increasingly difficult for the Secretariat to maintain its assertion that it represented one collective international interest and was accountable to one world public opinion.93 It was therefore hardly surprising that the Supervisory Commission suggested in 1933 that the Information Section’s public information work should be radically reduced and distributed among the other sections of the League, leaving only the press services with the section. The Information Section was now diminished to half its size and even though its new director, the Dutchman Adrianus Pelt, attempted to continue some of its previous activities, these efforts were severely hampered by the section’s limited budgets and lack of political support.94 At a more fundamental level, as Seidenfaden has argued, Pelt and his Secretariat colleagues had also started realising that the organisation’s neutral, discrete and elite-oriented information work directed at proLeague civil society actors was deficient and ineffective. Faced with the aggressive propaganda machines of the fascist and communist regimes, they believed that a different type of public legitimisation strategy would be needed in the future: one that was led not by journalists but by communications experts, that was based on the newest communication technologies and that shifted its focus away from semi-diplomatic and elite-focused liaison activities and targeted the masses instead.95

92 93 94

Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou, ‘The League of Nations Secretariat’, 44. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, International Secretariat, 28–29. 95 Seidenfaden, ‘Message from Geneva’, 134–37. Ibid., 199–220.

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   In April 1946, Noel-Baker concluded his League Assembly speech by lauding the Irish Secretary-General Seán Lester and his predecessors for having ‘for the first time in human history, recruited and trained a great international civil service, actuated by a spirit of co-operation and genuinely attached to its duties, whose assistance and example will surely facilitate the work of to-morrow’.96 As we have seen in this chapter, this image of the Secretariat as a depoliticised, competent bureaucratic entity and a natural role model for future international civil services was by no means a given and did not appear without substantial political struggle and contestation. On the contrary, the Secretariat gained its status through a deliberate set of meta-diplomatic activities aimed at clarifying its position and securing its legitimacy towards three types of stakeholders: the organisation’s member states; League institutions; and international public opinion. Across these activities, we notice several key dilemmas and tensions in the Secretariat’s legitimisation work. Drummond’s insistence on making the Secretariat a genuinely autonomous international enterprise was de facto combined with a deep integration of national interests. At first, this attempt at gaining legitimacy through national representation in the Secretariat played out primarily in relation to the Council states at the very top of the organisation, demonstrating clear elements of continuity from European wartime politics as well as the European Concert system before that. Gradually, however, this logic expanded and came to include almost every member state of the new organisation as each state was accorded a position in the Secretariat reflective of its status in the political, cultural and civilisational hierarchies surrounding it. In the Secretariat’s relationship with the Assembly, we observe a parallel tension between a wish for institutional autonomy and the need for the political legitimacy that came from integrating stakeholders’ interests. In this case, Drummond tackled consistent criticisms of lavishness and overspending in the Secretariat by engaging constructively with the Assembly’s Supervisory Commission and allowing for its close monitoring of the Secretariat’s activities. As we have seen, this strategy was not without its drawbacks, as it markedly reduced the Secretariat’s space for action.

96

[no author], The League Hands Over (Geneva: League of Nations, 1946), 40.

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Another dilemma that structured the Secretariat’s meta-diplomatic activities was how it could demonstrate its political importance and relevance without compromising its perceived neutrality and without risking accusations of propaganda and untimely meddling in political affairs. To manage this dilemma, the Secretariat applied similar strategies towards the Council and Assembly and in the broader public domain towards perceived global public opinion: in both spheres, it produced and presented large amounts of fact-based neutral information that spoke to the unpolitical, transparent and reactive nature of the Secretariat while at the same time engaging in discrete, but active, alliance-building and political consultancy work with member state representatives and organisations, associations and individuals considered sympathetic to the League. Looking at the Secretariat’s meta-diplomatic activities across the bilateral, multilateral and transnational domains, we see that its struggle for legitimacy was a dynamic practice. In the early years of the League, building and maintaining constructive relations with the major European powers that had created the organisation was at the centre of Drummond’s attention. Gradually, this scope broadened and came to include a wider group of member states as well as the development of close institutional bonds to the Council and the Assembly. In parallel with these developments, the Secretariat’s public information work unfolded at a consistently high pace while also changing track. There was a growing realisation, particularly from the 1930s, that the League’s neutral, discrete and elite-oriented information work was ineffective and insufficient in the face of the aggressive propaganda machines of fascist and communist regimes; here, new mass-oriented communication strategies would be needed in the development of future global governance structures. By way of conclusion, we may then consider to what degree the League Secretariat represented a real and lasting transformative innovation. It seems reasonable to argue that it did – though it did so as much by way of its shortcomings and failures as its achievements. A prominent example of learning from failure is the transnational information work where the focus on mass communication directed at the ‘man in the street’ grew out of the League’s failed attempts to compete with totalitarian propaganda and came to shape the UN’s early communications efforts.97

97

Seidenfaden, ‘Message from Geneva’, 208–22.

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On a more positive note, the fundamental principles of international loyalty, independence and multilateral staffing that Drummond had established made their way directly, in some instances almost verbatim, into the UN Charter. Here, the experiments and experiences of the League transformed into fully fledged, formalised concepts and principles at the highest legal level. For instance, we note how Article 100(1) in the UN Charter came to stress that ‘[i]n the performance of their duties the Secretary-General and the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organisation’.98 Likewise, the principle of national diversity so far only present in the staff regulations became enshrined in the Charter’s Article 101(3), which states that ‘[d]ue regard shall be paid to the importance of recruiting the staff on as wide a geographical basis as possible’.99 Based on the experiences from the League, the work division between the Secretariat and the other multilateral bodies was also addressed. Article 101 of the Charter asserted the General Assembly’s right to draw up the regulations of staff appointments while also specifying the sole autonomy of the Secretary-General in appointing staff within this framework.100 At the same time, the political role of the Secretary-General was strengthened considerably in the Charter, which now authorised him to bring issues before the Security Council that he considered to be a threat to international peace and security (Article 99). In the same vein, the UN Secretary-General could be assigned any function that the Security Council or General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council or the Trusteeship Council decided on (Article 98), thus transcending the purely administrative function that he had (formally) held in the League.101 This boost to the Secretariat’s political role that clearly grew out of the League’s incapacity to act in the 1930s was initiated by the United States and embraced in particular by the UN’s second Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld (1953–61). While Hammarskjöld acknowledged the role of the League Secretariat in shaping the post-war international civil service, he also distanced himself from its legacy, in particular in regard to the ‘self-restraining role’ played by Drummond, who never addressed

98 99 100 101

Article 100(1), United Nations Charter, www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-xv/ index.html (accessed 15 June 2021). www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-xv/index.html (accessed 15 June 2021). UN Charter, Article 1010 (1) Chapter XV: The Secretariat (Articles 97–101), www.un .org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-15 (accessed 15 July 2022). Ibid.

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the Assembly or the Council, or, according to Hammarskjöld, took any positions that might compromise the impartiality of the Secretariat.102 The early, formative effects of the Secretariat were also evident at the bureaucratic level in the creation of a new UN Standard of Conduct for international civil servants. In 1949, an International Civil Service Advisory Board was set up to develop a standard of conduct for international civil servants. The board was chaired by the long-term League official Thanassis Aghnides and it drew heavily on the so-called London Report, which had been drawn up by Drummond and other leading exLeague officials in London during the war to pass on the most important institutional knowledge of the League Secretariat to subsequent international organisations. The work of the board resulted in the ‘Report on Standards of Conduct in the International Civil Service’ (1st ed. 1954), which fleshed out the principles of independence, loyalty and multinationality. In doing so, it placed a strong emphasis on the rules and procedures that enhanced the institutional autonomy of the Secretariat and highlighted the need for a high degree of flexibility and room for manoeuvre on issues such as staff appointments. The ‘Standards of Conduct’ came to serve as a handbook for international civil servants in the UN, the International Labour Organization, the World Health Organization, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and many other international organisations. It remained relatively unchanged until 2001 and it is still an important document for international civil servants today.103

102 103

Dag Hammarskjöld, The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 7. For more on the Standards of Conduct and its relations with the League, see GramSkjoldager and Ikonomou, ‘The Making of the International Civil Servant’, 215–30.

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9 The Treaty of Versailles, German Disarmament and the International Order of the 1920s Andrew Webster

The enforced disarmament of Germany enshrined within the 1919 Treaty of Versailles appeared to be one of the cornerstones of the post-war order. The formal definition of the boundaries of military strength for the greatest power on the European continent could have provided a foundation upon which other calculations regarding regional security could rest – whether territorial, financial, economic or legal. For this to happen, however, three elements had to be realised. In the first place, the physical disarmament of a defeated country had to be implemented in practice. This would be no easy task, but experience across the nineteenth century had demonstrated that it was potentially achievable in technical and logistical terms.1 Second, this enforced disarmament could only be transformed into a constant for European security calculations if it was founded upon an underlying political consensus regarding what it meant. Were the limits on Germany’s armed forces to be truly permanent? Was there common ground that Germany’s disempowerment might establish longer-lasting mutual confidence between former wartime antagonists? What other obligations did acceptance of these limits impose, on Germany or indeed upon the victor powers? Forging such a consensus would be difficult, even among the recent wartime allies, let alone with their defeated enemy. Yet the terms imposed upon Germany were the product of detailed negotiations at the Paris peace conference, so such questions should have been anticipated. Third, there must be a transformation of this specific instance of disarmament into the practices of a wider, 1

Philip Towle, Enforced Disarmament: From the Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 66–92.

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functioning international order, based on rules and accepted behaviours. In particular, this would have to include space for the international supervision of arms agreements, including through inspections, and mechanisms for their enforcement. There was much resistance to such an infringement upon national sovereignty, yet the creation of the League of Nations and the emergence during the 1920s of an international disarmament process opened previously unavailable avenues for change. Unfortunately, only the first of these three elements was ever realised, and that one in disputed fashion. By the end of 1922, Germany appeared under most measures to have been reduced to a second-rate military power – though French leaders remained troubled by their estimations of Germany’s latent strength. This chapter, concentrating largely on the first two steps, analyses why the technical triumph of German disarmament did not permit success in the equally important political and normative tasks: to establish mutual confidence between the former enemies that might permit a wider consensus about the operation of a new international order.2 First, the chapter reviews the technical process of disarmament. It then traces the absence of an underlying consensus about the meaning of German disarmament to the negotiations in Paris in 1919. Although British and French negotiators bridged their differences to administer the disarmament of Germany, they never translated this success into a shared approach to embedding disarmament in the international security order.

      The disarmament terms for Germany laid out in Part V of the Treaty of Versailles were specific and clearly defined.3 The German army was limited to 100,000 men, including a maximum of 4,000 officers, made up of long-service volunteers (twenty-five years for officers and twelve 2

3

On the larger political and strategic disputes over the importance of disarmament in the interwar period, see Andrew Webster, Strange Allies: Britain, France and the Dilemmas of Disarmament and Security, 1929–1932 (London: Routledge, 2020), esp. 17–96, 333–43. Part V of the Treaty of Versailles, 28 June 1919, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/partv.asp. Similar arms limitations were imposed by the Allied powers upon the other defeated powers under their respective peace treaties: in Part V of the treaties of St Germain (Austria), Trianon (Hungary) and Sèvres (Turkey) and in Part IV of the Treaty of Neuilly (Bulgaria). As with Germany, all their armies were cut drastically in size: Austria to 30,000 officers and men; Hungary to 35,000; Turkey to 50,000; and Bulgaria to 20,000. For all the treaties, see The Treaties of Peace, 1919–1923, 2 vols. (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924).

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years for enlisted soldiers). Conscription was abolished, as was the general staff and all paramilitary associations. All non-military organisations were forbidden any role in training men for armed service; the police, coastguard and customs services were all to be capped in size at their 1913 levels, to prevent them serving in clandestine military roles. The treaty also restricted the types of armaments that Germany could possess and its access to munitions. Germany was forbidden to manufacture or import tanks, armoured cars, heavy artillery and poison gas. The army was only permitted supplies of light weaponry and ammunition proportionate to its restricted size; all surplus equipment was to be destroyed.4 All other war materiel could only be manufactured in designated plants within Germany and could be neither imported nor exported. These requirements were subject to completion by a deadline set for 31 March 1920. The treaty limited the size and composition of the German navy in a long-service volunteer fleet of up to 15,000 personnel. Within two months of the treaty coming into force, the navy could comprise no more than six old battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers and twelve torpedo boats. No submarines were to be retained, or constructed or imported in future. New warship construction was allowed only for replacement, and only after twenty years for the battleships and cruisers, with the new battleships to be limited to 10,000 tons, cruisers to 6,000 tons, and the fleet as a whole limited to 108,000 tons. Finally, Germany was also forbidden to possess any military or naval aircraft, so there could be no German air force in future. Three inter-allied ‘control commissions’ would have free access throughout German territory to monitor the implementation of the land, sea and air provisions – with all their costs to be borne by Germany – and the German government was further required to cooperate with any League of Nations investigations of alleged non-compliance. Though German obstruction and bad faith were a constant source of complaint, by slow steps the three control commissions implemented the treaty terms.5 Germany’s air force was rapidly demolished, with massive quantities of equipment being destroyed. Despite some concerns about 4

5

Germany was allowed to retain 84,000 rifles, 18,000 carbines, 792 heavy machine guns, 1,134 light machine guns, 63 medium trench mortars, 189 light trench mortars, 204 light field guns (77 mm calibre) and 84 howitzers (105 mm calibre). For the following discussion on the monitoring of German disarmament in the early 1920s, see especially Richard J. Shuster, German Disarmament after World War I: The Diplomacy of International Arms Inspection, 1920–1931 (London: Routledge, 2006), 39–148. Also see David G. Williamson, The British in Germany, 1918–1930: The

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hidden materiel and systematic domestic resistance, at the start of 1921 the British Air Ministry informed the Foreign Office that ‘The aerial disarmament of Germany may be regarded as virtually accomplished and whatever material may still be concealed cannot be regarded as constituting a menace to the Allies’.6 Its work judged to be complete, the air commission disbanded on 5 May 1922. Nevertheless, extensive government subsidies to support civil aviation contributed to the survival of a German aviation industry. Indeed, Germany’s lead in civil aviation was such that, by 1927, its airlines flew greater distances with more passengers than their French, British and Italian competitors combined.7 Naval disarmament similarly proceeded in relatively rapid fashion. The bulk of the German High Sea Fleet (about seventy vessels) had been delivered into British hands on 21 November 1918: there it remained as hostage to acceptance of the Allies’ peace terms. As the final debates in Paris reached their climax, however, Vice Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, the local commander of the ‘Internment Force’, ensured that the ships under his command would not end up as spoils of war to the victorious enemy. On 21 June 1919, he ordered the scuttling of the fleet: ten battleships, five battlecruisers, five light cruisers and forty-six destroyers went to the bottom, ‘sunk undefeated in the harbour of Scapa Flow in a grave of its own choosing’.8 As a gesture of defiance it won acclaim in

6 7

8

Reluctant Occupiers (New York: Berg, 1991), 184–98, 252–59, 277–81; Andrew Barros, ‘Disarmament as a Weapon: Anglo-French Relations and the Problems of Enforcing German Disarmament, 1919–1928’, and Philip Towle, ‘Forced Disarmament in the 1920s and After’, both in Journal of Strategic Studies 29, 2 (2006), 301–21 and 323–44; Alan Sharp, ‘Mission Accomplished? Britain and the Disarmament of Germany, 1918–1923’ in Keith Hamilton and Edward Johnson (eds.), Arms and Disarmament in Diplomacy (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 73–90; Michael Salewski, Entwaffnung und Militärkontrolle in Deutschland, 1919–1927 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1966). Useful memoirs include Paul Roques, Le contrôle militaire interallié en Allemagne (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1927); Charles Marie Nollet, Une expérience de désarmement: Cinq ans de contrôle militaire en Allemagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1932); Lt.-Col. Stewart Roddie, Peace Patrol (London: Christophers, 1933); J. H. Morgan, Assize of Arms: Being the Story of the Disarmament of Germany and Her Rearmament, 1919–1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1945). Air Ministry memorandum, 6 January 1921, Documents on British Foreign Policy, series I, vol. 16, no. 575. Williamson Murray, The Luftwaffe, 1933–1945: Strategy for Defeat (Washington, DC: Air University Press, 1983), 4; Edward L. Homze, Arming the Luftwaffe: The Reich Air Ministry and the German Aircraft Industry, 1919–1939 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 32, 40–41. Ludwig von Reuter, quoted in Charles S. Thomas, The German Navy in the Nazi Era (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 27.

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Germany, with the legend of the undefeated navy joining that of the unbroken army in the Weimar imagination. Most attention was therefore over what to do with the remaining German warships. It was decided, over French objections, that they should be broken up, though as a small compensation the French were permitted to absorb five light cruisers, ten destroyers and ten submarines into their own fleet. While once again it was clear that some degree of evasion and obstruction was occurring, it was not significant; large warships simply could not be concealed. By the end of 1921 all the significant elements of the naval disarmament articles had been implemented, though political complications following the French occupation of the Ruhr delayed the final withdrawal of the naval control commission until 30 September 1924. From 1925 on, however, the character of the German navy’s building programmes changed, with development of ‘pocket battleships’, a new type of vessel. While publicly naval planners portrayed these new ships as designed for coastal defence and to achieve local superiority in the Baltic Sea (necessary to maintain the sea link to East Prussia), in launching this new class, officers sought to restore Germany’s maritime prestige and power. These ‘pocket battleships’ were large and sufficiently well-armed to be able to defeat any heavy cruiser built under Washington–London treaty restrictions, by which they were not bound, but small and fast enough to outrun any of the massive battleships possessed by the major maritime powers.9 The land disarmament clauses, predictably, provoked the most controversy and anxiety. Serious difficulties confronted the Allied inspectors on the Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (IMCC) trying to judge the good faith of a government, a military and indeed a society acting under duress. Their crucial tasks were to oversee the surrender and destruction of all excess war materiel, the dismantling of all specified fortifications, and the reduction in size of the army. The IMCC was in consequence by far the largest and most important of the three control commissions. It had twenty-two district committees under its three sub-commissions operating across Germany: eleven under an Armaments sub-commission, eight under an Effectives sub-commission and three under a Fortifications sub-commission. While its size decreased over time, its initial personnel

9

Gaines Post, The Civil–Military Fabric of the Weimar Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 243–44, 253–54; Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 251–52; Thomas, German Navy in the Nazi Era, 36–37.

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comprised 311 officers, 117 interpreters and 897 troops, equipped with 203 automobiles.10 German political and military leaders argued incessantly that they required a minimum 200,000 soldiers simply in order to protect the new Weimar state against the danger of Bolshevism. The German strategy of delay and denial finally produced a definite threat of Allied retaliation at the Spa conference in July 1920: unless Germany met its obligations, Allied forces would occupy German territory until they had verified absolute compliance. This spurred greater efforts to meet Allied demands and by mid-1921 the majority of the Versailles terms had been implemented to a reasonable degree. The German regime destroyed vast amounts of military equipment, dismantled its main border fortifications, reduced (after much protest) the Reichswehr more or less to the target figure of 100,000 men, and disbanded the major paramilitary groups, even in Bavaria, the most recalcitrant state of all. The IMCC had also inspected some 7,500 factories to ensure they could no longer produce war materiel.11 The inspectors on the IMCC managed to fulfil their basic purpose – German land forces had been rendered ineffectual – yet the lack of political consensus about the overall meaning of what had been done meant it would be almost another decade before they were completely withdrawn.

     The absence of consensus about Germany’s enforced disarmament had existed even before the peace conference in Paris. While in the first months of the war French leaders had declared that they would not make peace until they had broken ‘Prussian militarism’, their focus was really upon territorial guarantees and economic controls over Germany; no detailed plan of German disarmament was ever drawn up. In contrast, the British government took it for granted from as early as 1915 that Germany must be disarmed at sea. Yet it was also widely assumed in official circles that Germany would and should remain a strong continental land power after the war, as a balance to the strength of France and Russia. The arms limitation provisions contained in Part V of the Versailles treaty thus reflected British and French national interests that were competitive as well as complementary (the American delegation in Paris generally 10 11

Shuster, German Disarmament, 29. For detailed figures see Shuster, German Disarmament, 49, 99.

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remained on the side-lines over German disarmament). Britain took the primary role in designing the naval clauses whereas Britain and France had more equal roles in drawing up the land clauses. The interplay between the two made the settlement harsher than if any one of the victor powers had imposed it alone.12 The naval clauses were the simpler case. The British Admiralty succeeded in using the peace treaty to perpetuate the favourable strategic conditions created for itself by the armistice. When the German delegates signed the peace treaty on 28 June 1919, their navy went at a stroke from second to eighth among the maritime powers. Difficult as this was for Berlin to accept, it might easily have been much worse: the navy might have been abolished entirely, as was the air force. The land disarmament clauses also emerged from an accommodation between competing Allied interests and considerations of the future security order in Europe. Treaty limits on German armaments were not a particularly high priority for Clemenceau; his overriding concern was ensuring France’s control of the Rhineland and disarmament was thus not even mentioned in the first French outline of peace terms beyond envisaging the demilitarisation and occupation of the Rhine’s left bank. He was not alone in this: the Allied supreme commander Marshal Ferdinand Foch agreed that as long as Germany retained its industrial and demographic superiority, enforced disarmament could never confer genuine security. ‘Disarmament, one cannot repeat too often, gives us only a temporary, precarious, fictitious security’, he insisted. ‘Weakness, more or less pretended, in your adversary does not create strength in you.’13 Only a physical guarantee, in the shape of a French presence on the Rhine, could save France from permanent vigilance. In British 12

13

On the Versailles disarmament terms, see especially Lorna S. Jaffe, The Decision to Disarm Germany: British Policy towards Postwar German Disarmament, 1914–1919 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985); Lorna S. Jaffe, ‘Abolishing War? Military Disarmament at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919’ in Brian J. C. McKercher (ed.), Arms Limitation and Disarmament: Restraints on War, 1899–1939 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 43–59; David Stevenson, ‘Britain, France and the Origins of German Disarmament, 1916–1919’, Journal of Strategic Studies 29, 2 (2006), 195–224. See also Jere C. King, Foch versus Clemenceau: France and German Disarmament, 1918–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Victor H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); David Stevenson, French War Aims against Germany, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Quoted in King, Foch versus Clemenceau, 22; see also Jackson and Mulligan, Chapter 5 in this volume.

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thinking, by contrast, German disarmament would not only reduce security demands on themselves but also allow for large-scale French disarmament and weaken the case for French claims in the Rhineland. Lloyd George proposed that German forces be reduced at once to the minimum needed for internal order. The initial draft clauses put forward by the military commission (chaired by Foch) capped the German army at 200,000 conscripted men; the British military delegation had originally been willing to accept a cap of 400,000 men. When Lloyd George also insisted upon the abolition of German conscription, French military delegates objected that a long-service volunteer army would merely create a core of trained officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) available for rapid expansion later. As a compromise, it was agreed that Germany would have a volunteer army but that it was to be capped instead at 100,000 men. The effect of this Franco-British compromise was thus to ratchet Germany’s army down to a smaller size than either country’s military would have proposed on their own. This was crucial for all that followed: the terms of Germany’s enforced disarmament were not drafted to reflect long-term planning or agreed war aims, but rather were shifting improvisations made in the context of both the Armistice terms and the conference negotiations.14 It was all the more significant because the disarmament terms were framed as open-ended in duration. That is, they constituted an ongoing restriction on national sovereignty, to apply to the defeated powers alone, and as such were a more far-reaching imposition than anything from the preceding century. The 1814–15 peace settlements had placed France under temporary occupation, but not restricted its armaments. The 1856 Treaty of Paris had demilitarized the Black Sea, but the other major powers simply acquiesced when Russia repudiated this some fifteen years later. The Treaty of Frankfurt, imposed on France in 1871, contained no permanent disarmament provisions, nor did the Treaty of Brest–Litovsk (imposed on Russia in 1918). The closest comparable measure was the 1808 Paris military convention, in which Napoleon had capped the Prussian army at 42,000 men – yet here the Prussians had quickly circumvented the arrangement and rejoined the Coalition against Napoleon with a force several times larger. Recognising their severity, and in order to soften the reception of the stringent terms, the victors made the mollifying concession that they would also disarm in due course. The preamble to Part V of

14

See Sharp, Chapter 7 in this volume.

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the peace treaty stated explicitly that the measures of German disarmament were meant ‘to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of armaments of all nations’. Inducing the Germans to see their own forced disarmament not as a specific punishment but merely an advance step of a more general expectation was intended to make it more palatable.15 The differences in viewpoint between London and Paris became important as the former Allied governments argued at the end of 1922 over when and how to bring the work of the IMCC to a close, with the British advocating and the French resisting a speedy end to the inspections. French leaders insisted that German disarmament, despite the numbers of weapons and other materiel destroyed, was far from complete. Germany may have been a conquered country, the French Senate foreign affairs committee concluded in June 1920, but ‘she is a Germany able, no matter what the pretences made . . . if she is not watched, of preparing revenge which her power permits’.16 Marshal Foch in January 1921 still thought Germany capable of undertaking major military operations and insisted at a meeting of the French and British leadership that: the Allies could not say they were safe until they had received from the Germans the last gun, the last machine gun and the last rifle which had to be surrendered under the treaty. At present he was very far from being able to assure the Allied representatives that disarmament was complete. . . . In his view Germany could put quite a respectable army in the field in a short space of time.17

Since the Versailles terms had not been fulfilled in their entirety, French policy-makers insisted that Germany had to continue to be viewed as an armed nation. In any case, the physical disarmament of Germany was only part of the task in French eyes; it had to be accompanied by ‘moral disarmament’ to bring an end forever to German ‘militarism’. This approach reinforced the unremitting focus upon any evidence of non15

16

17

The formal response from the victorious powers to the objections from the German delegation in Paris reiterated this proposal. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1919: The Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1920), vol. VI, doc. 93. Senate foreign affairs report, 23 June 1920, quoted in Lamri Chirouf, ‘The French Approach to Disarmament, 1920–1930: Policy-Making, Process, Principles and Methods’ (PhD dissertation, Southampton University, 1989), 26. Notes of Allied Conference, Paris, 24 January 1921, Documents on British Foreign Policy, series I, vol. 15, no. 1. Those present at the meeting also included Aristide Briand, Lloyd George, Lord Curzon and Sir Henry Wilson.

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compliance and provoked exaggerated estimates of the extent of German duplicity, despite the relatively minor nature of most violations. The French commissioner in the Rhineland, Paul Tirard, even reported in 1922 on the teaching of singing in German primary schools. The process was important, he felt, since it provided instruction in the ‘mother tongue’, ‘useful’ exercise for the lungs, and the ‘popular songs’ were ‘an initiation into the legendary patrimony of this historic nation’.18 For British authorities, the critical issue was the simple, pragmatic question of whether Germany was now in practice incapable of waging aggressive war. In this regard, they considered that the vast amounts of armaments destroyed, in particular heavy artillery, meant that Germany was indeed essentially disarmed and that any outstanding items were of negligible importance. The real work had been done; Germany was no longer a military threat. With the size of the Reichswehr also reduced approximately to the treaty limits, the War Office concluded in January 1921 that Germany had ‘ceased to be a military danger to the Allies for a considerable period of time’.19 This relatively positive evaluation of the extent of German land disarmament accepted that compliance was incomplete but dismissed the French view of a massive, orchestrated campaign of German evasion. As Lloyd George told French premier, Raymond Poincaré, in August 1922: ‘Germany could not equip an army strong enough to stand up to Czechoslovakia, let alone France . . . Germany as a military power was broken, prostrate, and in the dust.’20 The Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr delayed any decision on the IMCC, however, as from early March 1923 the commission was forced to suspend its activities because local resistance had become so extensive and intense that it made inspections impossible. It was only in January 1924 that the IMCC tentatively resumed its work. The new Franco-British aim was to ascertain if, during the months that had elapsed, any illegal changes had been made to the previous state of German disarmament. After several months of German evasion and Allied indecision, prime ministers Ramsay MacDonald and Edouard Herriot sent identical notes to Berlin calling for cooperation to bring about an end to military controls. They stressed particularly that once the Allied demands had been met, they were ‘ready and anxious to see the 18 19 20

Archives Nationales, Paris, AJ/9/6178, no. 1323 IR C/5 ATRP, Tirard to Minister of Public Instruction, quoted in Barros, ‘Disarmament as a Weapon’, 312. War Office memo, 15 January 1921, TNA, FO 371/5854, C1271/13/18. Notes of Allied Conference, 7 August 1922, TNA, FO 371/7481, 11243/99/18.

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machinery of the Control Commission replaced by the rights of investigation conferred on the Council of the League of Nations by Article 213 of the Treaty’.21 At the end of June 1924, the Germans conceded that a final ‘general inspection’ should take place that autumn, after which, pending a satisfactory result, the work of the IMCC would be concluded. The IMCC’s concluding general inspection of German disarmament duly began in September 1924 and lasted for just over four months. Meanwhile, as indicated by MacDonald and Herriot, the League Council meeting in September 1924 debated plans drafted by its Permanent Armaments Commission for the establishment of commissions of investigation to oversee the continuing execution of the military clauses in all the peace treaties. In the case of Germany, this was based upon Article 213, which stipulated that ‘[so] long as the present Treaty remains in force, Germany undertakes to give every facility for any investigation which the Council of the League of Nations, acting if need be by a majority vote, may consider necessary’. Insisting on the absolute necessity that such commissions should be as effective as possible, foreign minister Aristide Briand expressed the continuing anxieties at work in Paris. ‘Countries which have suffered during the war, which have been invaded, ravaged, laid waste, fought over, also need to be given a sense of security. They wish to feel safe and, in their view, investigation must not be a mere formality. For them, it is not only a word, it is a question of life or death’, he insisted to a meeting of the League Council. Referring to the fraught negotiations over how to bring the work of the IMCC to an end, he went on: We are going through a difficult time which makes us want to get rid as quickly as possible of the task entrusted to us. We should like to say ‘No more control, no more investigation, all is well. A brotherly spirit has arisen, which will quickly make itself felt’. This atmosphere of confidence is very pleasant, but one day the clouds bank up, the lightning flashes and once more disaster is upon us.22

Reflecting the British unwillingness in particular to impose strict inspection upon Germany, however, the envisaged shape for the commission of investigation was not as a permanent standing body but rather as a panel

21 22

Documents on British Foreign Policy, series I, vol. 26, p. 1073. Briand speech to League Council, 23 September 1924, League of Nations, Official Journal, 5, 10 (October 1924), 1329. Also see Annex 681d: ‘Organisation with a view to the exercise of the right of investigation in the four states subjected to investigation by the treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Trianon and Neuilly’, 27 September 1924, LND C.541(1).189(1).1924.IX.

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of nominated experts to be summoned by the League Council on an ad hoc basis in order to carry out limited investigations of specific complaints. Though no such investigations ever actually took place, the fact that decisions of this sort which so clearly affected German security were being made in a forum where Germany still had no voice only bolstered the desire of its foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, to launch a new approach aimed at revising the German position in Europe. The debates over bringing an end to the Allied armaments inspections in Germany came to a head in early 1925, with the IMCC concluding its general inspection just as related arguments sprang up over the termination of the Allied occupation of the Rhineland, imposed in 1919 to guarantee Germany’s fulfilment of the Treaty of Versailles. Under the terms of the Versailles treaty (and reaffirmed in the Treaty of Locarno) the Rhineland was also to remain permanently demilitarised. The evacuation of the first zone of occupation, around Cologne, was due in January 1925, but dependent upon Allied acceptance that Germany had indeed met the treaty’s conditions. Since the recently agreed Dawes plan had supposedly settled the reparations problem, compliance with the military clauses of Versailles became the point at issue. The IMCC had begun its supposedly final ‘general inspection’ in September 1924; by the end of November it was apparent both that its report would not be complete before the end of the year and that the German position was unsatisfactory.23 Numerous examples of violations of the armaments and effectives clauses had been unearthed. The analysis in London of both the War Office and Foreign Office was that despite these disappointments, the German armed forces had not substantially increased in strength and capacity. Nonetheless, such was the weight of evidence produced by the IMCC that it was impossible not to back the far less forgiving French insistence on delaying evacuation. The British thus joined in demanding that withdrawal from Cologne had to be preceded by at least the commencement of German fulfilment of the outstanding items. A note on

23

For the following discussion, see John P. Fox, ‘Britain and the Inter-Allied Military Commissions of Control, 1925–1926’, Journal of Contemporary History 4, 2 (1969), 143–64; Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1929–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 47–59, 91–98; Anne Orde, Great Britain and International Security, 1920–1926 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), 80–83; Williamson, British in Germany, 282–323; Shuster, German Disarmament, 146–81. Also see the volume from the British official history of the war, Brigadier-General Sir James E. Edmonds, The Occupation of the Rhineland, 1918–1929 (1944; facsimile edition, London: HMSO, 1987), 267–99.

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5 January 1925 informing the German government of this decision produced an outcry in Berlin. This was followed by the presentation of the IMCC’s general report on 15 February, with its conclusion that German military power in terms of armaments had been slightly increased and its strength in effectives substantially enlarged. In the worst violations, the Effectives sub-commission reported that Germany was preparing cadres of officers and NCOs, enlisting short-term volunteers, giving youth military instruction, and had re-established an illegal general staff. The long list of unfinished disarmament tasks appeared to put withdrawal, of both the IMCC and the Allied forces in the Cologne zone, back by some time. Throughout the remainder of 1925, the British and French worked to pressure Germany into greater fulfilment while the Germans worked to oust the inspectors and occupying troops. Yet it was ultimately German political and military leaders who, driven by a desire to end the military occupation, bowed to necessity and began to cooperate more actively with the IMCC inspectors. French and British leaders continued to harbour different understandings of the relationship between disarmament, security and a stable European order. Briand absolutely refused to include the withdrawal of troops from the Rhineland in the developing discussions over a new Western European security pact; only after obtaining the Locarno guarantee was he willing to engage with the issue of withdrawal from the Cologne zone. But it was an issue he was prepared to make use of, for he saw the Rhineland occupation as a bargaining chip of diminishing value as the specified withdrawal date drew closer. Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain meanwhile began to assert in private that building an atmosphere of goodwill and understanding was a surer path to peace than military controls. Disarmament had been ‘fundamentally modified by the initialling of the Locarno treaties’, he told the British ambassador in Paris, and added his hope that minor issues between the IMCC and the German authorities ‘would not be allowed to interfere with the work of appeasement’.24 In Chamberlain’s view, the development of a functioning European security order was independent of military inspections and infractions of the Versailles disarmament regime. Indeed, on occasion he considered the IMCC an impediment to diplomatic progress. Only a political settlement would truly make Europe peaceful; in any case, Germany was effectively

24

Chamberlain to Crewe, 3 November 1925, TNA, FO 371/10710, C14018/21/18.

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disarmed to the point that it posed no military threat to a great power. The political consequences of condoning known arms breaches were not considered significant in London. The result was an ever-increasing rush towards the end of strict enforcement. Following a German government declaration of its intention to comply with Anglo-French demands over the conversion of factories from war production, the Allied leaders (also seeking to influence positively the difficult debate over the ratification of Locarno taking place in Germany) agreed to begin the withdrawal from Cologne on 1 December 1925. The last British, French and Belgian troops duly marched out of the first zone on 31 January 1926. But neither the occupation of the remaining two zones nor even the activities of the IMCC would come to an end for some time yet. The following year would see repeated Allied demands (mainly French) and German promises over the outstanding issues on German armaments – the organisation of the Reichswehr and police, the existence of paramilitary associations and new fortifications, and the passage of legislation on the import and export of war materiel – but little actual progress. German leaders temporised as they awaited admission to the League of Nations, which they believed would force the Allies at last to remove the IMCC in favour of the insubstantial League controls drafted in 1924. British policy-makers, in a similar vein, were determined not to allow strict enforcement to delay a complete end of military inspections and so poison the new era of goodwill. Following Germany’s entry to the League in September 1926, Chamberlain labelled the IMCC a ‘continual source of friction and an obstacle to the policy of mutual reconciliation instituted at Locarno’.25 In such a context, French hopes of obtaining satisfaction on remaining known German violations were slim. In any case, Briand was unwilling to oppose and possibly alienate Chamberlain merely to keep something he considered of limited use. The sequence of security preceding order was replaced by an uneasy acknowledgment on the part of Briand that order and security were mutually constitutive. The key to future French security was rather to be found in Franco-German reconciliation, because they could never match German economic and military potential. ‘You can never stop Germany from having a population of sixty million’, he told the Chamber foreign affairs commission. ‘And you can never stop such a

25

Chamberlain to War Office, 21 September 1926, TNA, FO 371/11290, C9950/436/18.

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country from being a very great power.’26 He did press for the creation of a permanent civilian commission of inspection in the Rhineland, however, to replace the troops of occupation once they were withdrawn – an idea first floated that autumn by France’s chief disarmament negotiator, the socialist politician Joseph Paul-Boncour – though his commitment to the idea was uneven. Such a body might remove the issue of supervision from a specific tie to the imposition of the punitive elements of Part V of the Versailles treaty and instead transform it into a regular, embedded element of European security calculations. In meetings held in Chamberlain’s room at the Beau Rivage Hotel in Geneva during the League Council meeting in early December 1926, the three ‘Locarno-ites’ worked out a final settlement. With many concerns now simply allowed to drop, Briand was adamant on obtaining satisfaction at least on two last points of importance to French military leaders: the import and export of war materiel and the German construction of new fortifications at Königsberg on its eastern border. A compromise of sorts was reached on 12 December: the Conference of Ambassadors would continue to discuss the two outstanding issues, with all further construction of fortifications in Germany prohibited until a final agreement was reached; in return, the IMCC was to be withdrawn on 31 January 1927, with the League Council instead authorised to resolve remaining issues of German disarmament. A tiny group of four military experts (one each from Britain, France, Belgium and Italy) would be attached to their respective embassies in Berlin to report on the final steps. Further dire warnings from military planners in Paris about the continuing existence of German military power were now irrelevant. Stresemann, meanwhile, conscious that time was increasingly on Germany’s side regarding the Rhineland, was able to put off any consideration of a permanent civilian inspection commission. In order to complete a final summary report, the last remnants of the IMCC stayed in Berlin until the end of February 1927, but with their departure the formal power of on-site inspection authorised by the Versailles treaty came to an end at last. The military experts attached to their respective embassies were not authorised to conduct on-site investigations and the German government consistently refused to permit these on a voluntary basis. A final end to all 26

Briand to Chamber Foreign Affairs Commission, 23 November 1926, quoted in Edward Keeton, Briand’s Locarno Policy: French Economics, Politics and Diplomacy, 1925–1929 (New York: Garland, 1987), 226.

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oversight seemed possible in July 1927, when the experts approved German compliance over the eastern fortifications issue and the Reichstag passed a law prohibiting the import and export of war materiel. Continuing German refusal to resolve other long-standing issues – in particular the organisation of the German police and the use of German military establishments – combined with evidence of new violations, some of them admittedly very minor, kept the remaining four military experts in place. The ability to conduct military inspections to assure the continued demilitarisation of the Rhineland remained an item of negotiation over the next two years, as Stresemann sought to have all Allied troops evacuated from the other two Rhineland occupation zones, on the grounds that Germany had completely fulfilled the Versailles treaty’s terms.27 Negotiations moved to the League, where French, British and German officials bargained over the terms of Allied evacuation from the Rhineland. Briand was able to secure a commission to ensure the continued demilitarisation of the Rhineland, but he attached little importance to the commission’s work. In 1931 the final report of the Conference of Ambassadors noted that Germany still had not fulfilled certain disarmament clauses, but they had no authority to enforce compliance and recommended no action.28

    The external supervision of German disarmament, and its monitoring via the mechanisms of international inspection, were reflected in a more universal form in a series of proposals that were part of the Leaguesponsored disarmament efforts during the 1920s. These were attempts to create generalised rules and structures around the inspection, supervision and verification of arms agreements that would apply to all signatory states, in order to answer a basic question of all such regimes of control: how were states to ensure that all signatories to any armaments agreement kept to their commitments? This question had in fact previously raised its head at the first Hague peace conference in 1899, where it had seemed impossible for delegates to envisage any limitation at all upon a

27 28

Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 9. Webster, Strange Allies, 97–112, 129–34, 168–71.

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state’s complete freedom of action in an area so vital to national security.29 At the Peace Conference in Paris, the divergence between French attitudes towards enforcement of international obligations and AngloAmerican approaches was evident in different approaches to the verification of disarmament. French delegates to the committee charged to create a new League of Nations organisation were defeated in their demands for a permanent League commission of verification or inspection to oversee the disarmament clauses in Article 8 of the League Covenant. While they sought simply recognition of the need for ‘some means of verifying the quantities of armaments produced by each nation’, they were defeated by President Woodrow Wilson’s adamant opinion that the only acceptable method for controlling armaments rested in ‘having confidence in the good faith of the nations who belong to the League’. At root was the deeper issue of the United States and Britain as victors not wishing to surrender sovereignty or to weaken themselves by revealing their planning and capabilities to a (presumed untrustworthy) body of international oversight. As the British delegate Robert Cecil asked: ‘Is it really conceivable that the League of Nations will have an intelligence system supervising the conduct of the world?’30 The scale of German infractions of the disarmament clauses even after the Locarno treaty suggests that French concerns about verification and enforcement were well-founded. Debates over verification remained a constant component of the League’s efforts between 1926 and 1933 to achieve a general disarmament agreement. Popular movements placed disarmament at the fore of debate about the future international order, but translating those expectations into policy prescriptions lay with the experts on the Preparatory Commission. The League created the Preparatory Commission to draw up a draft disarmament treaty (for consideration by a world disarmament conference)and regularly debated proposals for the creation of a ‘permanent disarmament commission’.31 Here the French in particular were adamant that there had to be an effective inspection system as part of such a regime – a permanent body of experts to monitor any disarmament 29

30

31

Fisher (Britain), First Commission: Second Sub-Commission, 1st meeting, 26 May 1899, quoted in J. B. Scott (ed.), The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conferences: The Conference of 1899 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 360. Comments by Wilson, 11 February 1919, and Cecil, 13 February 1919, in David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), vol. II, 287–97, and I, 244–52. See Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 and Bouchard, Chapter 12 in this volume.

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agreement – in order to provide confidence that states were abiding by their disarmament obligations. By contrast, the British and Americans would never agree to any form of truly substantive and institutionalised international control. They reached agreement at the final meeting of the Preparatory Commission in November 1930, but it was in the form of a relatively innocuous British proposal specifying that the commission’s members would be independent (and thus not commit their governments) and ruling out any provisions for a right of inspection. This Permanent Disarmament Commission would serve merely as a body to collate public information on armaments and expenditure. The French delegates accepted because, although it was weak, there was nonetheless sufficient scope in the proposal for future development of an effective supervisory body.32 However, the draft treaty drawn up by the Preparatory Commission, which contained these provisions, was never debated by the World Disarmament Conference that followed in 1932. This Anglo-French divergence of views also informed debates between 1928 and 1932 around a proposed ‘Model Treaty to Strengthen the Means of Preventing War’, a draft multilateral model treaty which provided that the signatory states should bind themselves in advance, in case of dispute, to accept and carry out any orders which the League Council might make to reduce tensions between them. Critically, the draft allowed for the possibilities that the Council might order the relocation of military forces away from potential ‘hot spots’ along frontiers and that it might appoint supervisory commissioners with the ability to carry out on-site inspections of the state of military forces in areas of tension. The potential in the draft treaty for the Council to insist upon such inspections of a state’s defensive positions greatly disturbed British military planners; French representatives, on the contrary, pressed for ambitious measures of verification through extensive rights of inspection by the Council. In the end, when these views were finally reconciled, the result was a weak set of draft regulations for the operations of ‘commissions of control’ that included nothing more than the right of observation and free movement.33

32

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Webster, Strange Allies, 33–40, 199–222; Richard Dean Burns, ‘International Arms Inspection Policies between World Wars, 1919–1934’, The Historian 31, 4 (1969), 586–98. Andrew Webster, ‘International Arbitration, the Pacific Settlement of Disputes and the French Security–Disarmament Dilemma, 1919–1931’, French History 24, 2 (2010), 236–61.

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The contested state of German disarmament throughout the decade that followed the Peace Conference meant it never functioned as a stabilising force in the post-war international order. The messy mix of political, strategic and legal concerns in this sphere was typical of the Anglo-French relationship in general during the 1920s. German attempts to evade the restrictions exacerbated divergent views in London and Paris. France’s (to British eyes) obsessive mistrust of Germany only reinforced attitudes in London that their neighbour’s sense of insecurity was fundamentally misplaced. Whatever the multiple French fears to the contrary, Germany had no ability to take any sort of offensive military action to overturn the new order. Meanwhile, the British refusal to back the many French attempts to bring the Germans to task for well-established violations frustrated those in Paris for whom a willingness to countenance any deviation from the strict enforcement of the terms of Versailles represented an attack upon its legally binding status and thus its very continued existence. Nor did the Versailles-mandated arms restrictions function to promote post-war reconciliation: German public and policy-makers never accepted the legitimacy of the restrictions; domestic political fears meant that French policy-makers could never concede that they be relaxed unless they received balancing concessions from Britain, in the form of new commitments to European security. As the other features of the Versailles settlement intended to control Germany evaporated, the levels at which German armaments were set became a feature of French security planning. In essence, they were a constant against which French military needs were calibrated, particularly in the public forum of the disarmament negotiations sponsored by the League of Nations. Furthermore, the operation of the Versailles arms restrictions upon Germany could never be transformed into a new rule within the post-war international order because no power (ultimately including even France) believed either that Germany could be the sole power subject to a permanent regime of inspection, or that international supervision was a principle that could be applied to themselves as general practice. Thus the IMCC did not institutionalise a new order in regard to armaments – through the provision of generalisable patterns or rules – but rather became yet another contested component of a problematic peace treaty.

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10 Planning for International Financial Order The Call for Collective Responsibility at the Paris Peace Conference Jennifer Siegel

[E]conomic and financial facts are very much more stubborn than facts about boundaries.1 Sidney Peel The solution of European difficulties is . . . above all a financial solution.2 French Delegation to the Supreme Economic Council

From January until June 1919, the world’s leading statesmen, minor functionaries and ‘experts’ met in Paris to hammer out a settlement of the war, with a declared eye towards constructing a peace that could endure.3 Despite the noted fact that economic and financial issues were 1 2

3

Sidney Peel, ‘Economic Reconstruction in the Treaties’ in H. W. V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, vol. V (London: Henry Frowde, 1924), 19. General Economic Situation of Europe (Note by the French Delegation for the Permanent Committee of the Supreme Economic Council), 20 September 1919, No. 290. Enclosure in James to Norman, 25 September 1919. TNA FO608/76/19183. The preface to the grand six-volume History of the Peace Conference of Paris prepared under the auspices of the Committee of the Institute of International Affairs describes with great acclaim the mélange of participants who intermingled at the conference: ‘Here were congregated under one roof trained diplomatists, soldiers, sailors, airmen, civil administrators, jurists, financial and economic experts, captains of industry and spokesmen of labour, members of cabinets and parliaments, journalists and publicists of all sorts of kinds . . . At meals, and when off duty, there was no convention to forbid discussion of the business in hand. A unique opportunity was thus given to every specialist of grasping the relation of his own particular question to all the others involved, and of seeing its place in the vast problem of reconstruction before the Congress. So great a diversity of minds has seldom been associated on a single task under one roof.’ Temperley, A History, vol. I, v–vi.

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integral to the war’s origins and conduct, and would be vital to any success the agreements made at Paris might enjoy, finance and economics were often placed on the back burner while political and military matters were pushed to the fore. Private citizens might have urged governments to ‘give complete and adequate attention to the economic factors which are so vital a part of world relationships and peaceful progress’.4 Journalists might have insisted: ‘Without some combined act on finance, neither the Peace Congress nor the League of Nations can do safe work.’5 Politicians might have urged the peacemakers ‘not to set principles, but to take action’ for the purposes of re-establishing global credit.6 But those cris de coeur were mostly for naught. As British diplomat Harold Nicolson later bemoaned in his famous memoir of the conference: ‘in general we did not take economic considerations into sufficient account’.7 The exclusion of finance was echoed in the British official history of the conference: there was often little or no opportunity for the financial point of view to be represented while a decision was still under discussion. It was left to the private initiative of financial delegates to pick out from the mass of papers which at one time or another passed under their eyes, questions whose financial bearing might be less obvious or seemed not to have been sufficiently considered. There was no recognised machinery or routine to ensure that a single, consistent policy in economics and finance should be reflected in all the different parts of the Treaty drawn up by specialists who were not economists or financial experts . . . the Treaty was never watched as a whole from the financial or economic point of view.8

The inclusion of financial matters had not even been a certainty at the outset of the conference. Despite the trumpeting in his Fourteen Points of themes like the primacy of free trade and the creation of a nondiscriminatory global trading system, US president Woodrow Wilson, for example, had had no expectations whatsoever that the peace conference should deal with economic questions. He came to the conference 4

5 6 7 8

J. George Frederick, ‘League of Nations’ Organization Plan’, Enclosure in J. George Frederick, President, The Business Bourse, International, Inc., New York to Arthur Balfour, 16 January 1919, TNA FO 608/242/1544. J. L. Garvin, The Economic Foundations of Peace: Or World-Partnership as the Truer Basis of the League of Nations (London: MacMillan, 1919), 148. Discours prononcé à la Chambre des Députés, le 28 décembre 1918, par M. Jacques Stern sur la Société Financière des Nations, TNA FO 608/242/3719, 25–26. Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919, Being Reminiscences of the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 130–31. Temperley, A History, vol. II, 62.

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with vague ideas about a revival of international trade based on laissezfaire principles, but thought that economics and finance should be handled separately by special committees to which the peacemakers and later the League would delegate such matters.9 And the agreements that ensued reflected this lack of emphasis on finance. So many of the discussions that did take place in the realm of economics tended to get bogged down in the details of reparations rather than rising to aspirational constructs of new credit regimes, common currencies, fiscal unions and the like.10 Veteran of the British Treasury delegation, John Maynard Keynes, offered a profoundly pessimistic assessment in his seminal Economic Consequences of the Peace: The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe – nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilise the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves; no arrangement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.11

For Keynes, the dearth of any blueprint provided in the treaty for a postwar economic order was unforgivable. Rather than focusing on the long-term economic rehabilitation of Europe, or a concerted effort to construct a new financial order, the bulk of what energies were devoted to economic matters revolved around the questions of reparations, indemnities, and war debts. While the treaties that came out of the Paris Peace Conference carefully avoided the term ‘indemnity’, scholars have argued that the majority of the reparations called for in the treaties were, in fact, indemnities.12 Of subordinate 9

10

11

12

See Stephen A. Schuker, ‘Origins of American Stabilization Policy in Europe: The Financial Dimension, 1918–1924’ in Hans-Jürgen Schröder (ed.), Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924 (Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1993), 383. See, for example, Sidney Peel’s dismissal of criticisms that the framers of the financial articles of the Treaties failed to enact any of these reforms in Southeast Europe. Peel, ‘Economic Reconstruction’, 17–19. ‘Pessimism’ is Keynes’ own characterisation of his state of mind. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 226. The first two of these terms often get lumped together, although, according to Grégoire Mallard, specialists of reparations insist that the distinction between the two is key, particularly vis-à-vis the ‘reparations’ clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. Those clauses, which outlined an ‘odious debt’ designed to sanction the defeated nation as much as extract payment, should, according to the contemporary literature on reparations, be classified as indemnities. Mallard, however, following the arguments of French

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interest at the conference were matters of customs, trade and industry.13 International finance received comparatively scant attention, as did any discussions of a restructured economic world order. Economic debates at the Paris Peace Conference were dominated by the principal question of by whom the costs of war and reconstruction should be met. While the need to re-establish a functioning and stable global financial and economic order was recognised, addressing that need was secondary to the more immediate questions of reparations and indemnities. This hierarchy has carried through into the historiography, which, for better or worse, has tended to focus on the post-war reparations burden in an attempt to understand the rise of National Socialism in Germany. This emphasis on reparations obscures the very deliberate and determined work that was undertaken at and around the conference to restore stability and construct a functioning international financial order, however scarred the system might be by the burdens of inter-allied indebtedness, the effects of wartime destruction, and the exclusion of a considerable portion of the pre-war system by the revolutionary upheaval in Russia, to name just of a few of the challenges faced.14 While it is true that none of these schemes came to fruition or were incorporated in any meaningful way into the treaties that emerged from the Paris Peace Conference, there were a number of significant proposals from various corners that attempted to push global finance towards a more cooperative, internationalist future. When the peacemakers met in Paris, it was clear, as the British delegation to the conference noted bleakly, that they were confronting an international economy in shambles: Before the war some 400,000,000 Europeans, by working their hardest, just managed to feed, clothe, and house themselves and perhaps amass six months capital on which to live. That capital has vanished; the complicated machinery of internal and external production is more or less smashed; production has to a great extent ceased. The largely increasing population of Europe has only been maintained by the increasing development and inter-connection of world industry and finance. If this is not only checked, but for the time being destroyed, it is

13

14

sociologist Marcel Mauss, challenges these traditional distinctions. See Grégoire Mallard, ‘“The Gift” Revisited: Marcel Mauss on War, Debt, and the Politics of Reparations’, Sociological Theory 29, 4 (2011), 225–47. See Elisabeth Glaser, ‘The Making of the Economic Peace’ in Manfred Boemeke, Gerald Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1998), 371–400. On negotiations about reparations, see Sharp, Chapter 7 in this volume.

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difficult to see how the population can be maintained at any rate during the very painful period of drastic readjustment.

They went on to assert: ‘By far the greatest difficulty is the financial one. The problem is unparalleled. Europe is without working capital.’15 The massive credit operations that had funded the costly war had produced a depreciation of the currencies of all of the debtor nations. One set of calculations counts the total war expenditure, or the increase in public spending over and above the pre-war norm, for Britain, France, Russia, the United States and their allies at more than $147.1 billion (approximately $2.4 trillion in 2021). The cost for the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany and the Ottoman Empire was $61.5 billion ($997 billion in 2021).16 These expenditures were paid for across the board through a combination of taxation, currency production and the issuance of short-term treasury bills (both of which ultimately stoked inflation), publicly issued and domestically purchased war bonds, and foreign borrowing from allies and neutrals. The four years of the war transformed Europe’s former creditor nations into debtor nations. For example, the German government managed to raise close to 100 billion marks (approximately $325 billion today) through domestic borrowing; however, that did not meet Germany’s total direct war-related expenses, which came to nearly 150 billion marks.17 The shortfall had to be covered somehow. Germany was unable to borrow from its allies but was instead obliged to serve as the Central Powers’ banker. But it did manage to borrow 3,200 million gold marks from neutral powers over the course of the war, including from its eventual opponents in the United States.18 France, which before the war was one of Europe’s principal creditors, ended the war owing more than 15 billion francs, nearly $4 billion of which was owed to the United States and approximately £620 million of which 15

16 17

18

Note Submitted by the British Delegates on the General Economic Position in Europe, Appendix 51, Supreme Economic Council: Eleventh Meeting [on 7 and 9 April 1919] Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. X, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1919Parisv10/d10 Harvey E. Fisk, The Inter-Ally Debts: An Analysis of War and Post-War Public Finance, 1914–1923 (New York: Bankers Trust, 1924), 325. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 125. See also Stephen Gross, ‘Confidence and Gold: German War Finance 1914–1918’, Central European History 42, 2 (2009), 223–52. Hew Strachan, Financing the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 165–66.

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belonged to the United Kingdom.19 France, in turn, was owed more than 15 billion francs by the rest of its allies. At least 6.5 billion of that sum was owed by Russia, whose overall foreign indebtedness increased by more than 7.23 billion roubles during the war.20 The British government borrowed from overseas a total of £1,365 million by the end of the financial year 1918/19.21 All of this extraordinary borrowing, so much of which came directly or indirectly from the United States, underscored the great transition of financial power that took place during the course of the First World War. In the period before the United States entered the war in April 1917, the Entente and its allies received credits from the United States totalling $2.4 billion.22 By the end of the war, the United States had extended over $10 billion in war loans to its allies, plus the not inconsequential funds raised in the United States by the Central Powers during America’s period of neutrality.23 While the United States basked in its newfound condition of financial authority, Europe found itself in acute financial difficulty, centred around the exchange crisis engendered by Europe’s disproportional currency depreciations. Cost of living had skyrocketed and in many areas of the continent money had ‘virtually ceased to be exchangeable’.24 Any chance of a workable peace settlement was threatened by financial volatility

19

20

21 22 23

24

For purposes of comparison, contemporary exchange rates were 30.66 francs = £1 sterling; $4.87 = £1 (from Ricardo, https://ricardo.medialab.sciences-po.fr/#!/exchange_ rates/sterling-pound?sortChoice=alpha¤cyFilter=). See Benjamin F. Martin, France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924: Illusions and Disillusionment (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 19–20. Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, ‘Was the Great War a Watershed? The Economics of World War I in France’ in Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 190; Hew Strachan, ‘Economic Mobilisation: Money, Munitions, and Machines’ in Hew Strachan (ed.), World War I: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 137. Stephen Broadberry and Peter Howlett, ‘The United Kingdom during World War I: Business as Usual?’ in Broadberry and Harrison, The Economics of World War I, 221. Gerd Hardach, The First World War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 147. James Lacey, Gold, Blood, and Power: Finance and War through the Ages (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute and US Army War College Press, 2015), 56. For a discussion of the costs of the war, see Hugh Rockoff, America’s Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish–American War to the First Gulf War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138–39; and John Maurice Clark, The Costs of the World War to the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1931). General Economic Situation of Europe (Note by the French Delegation for the Permanent Committee of the Supreme Economic Council), 20 September 1919, No. 290. Enclosure in James to Norman, 25 September 1919. TNA FO608/76/19183.

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brought on by four years of an expensive and destructive war. As the League of Nations later lamented, ‘the economic evils which have beset Europe may be summed up in the words uncertainty and instability’.25 That uncertainty and instability was exacerbated by the withdrawal from the international system of the former Russian Empire, which had been one of the system’s central pillars. The Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent separate peace signed between Russia and Germany at Brest Litovsk had been followed, in turn, by a multinational foreign intervention in the post-revolutionary Russian Civil War. By November 1918 there were more than 70,000 Japanese troops in Siberia.26 Thousands more British and American troops were sent to Arkhangel, Murmansk and Siberia, while French troops fought in Ukraine and Crimea.27 Foreign intervention in the Russian Civil War continued in some form until the end of 1919, and international recognition of the Bolshevik regime took many more years after that. The mood at the Paris peace talks was also notably hostile to Bolshevik Russia.28 This ongoing hostility was motivated in no small part by the new government’s immediate repudiation of the not inconsiderable debt accrued by the tsarist government in the decades before it collapsed.29 With no recognition of the new Bolshevik government – against which the Allied and Associated troops were actively fighting – and no recognition of the tsarist debt, Russia had no official presence at Paris. Yet Russia and the empire’s successor states still claimed reparations from Germany for the damage caused by the war, and those claims were considered legitimate.30 25 26 27

28

29 30

League of Nations, Work of the Financial and Economic Organisation (Geneva: Information Section, League of Nations Secretariat, 1924), 5. John Bradley, Allied Intervention in Russia (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1968), 24. For a discussion of the literature on the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, see Jennifer Siegel, For Peace and Money: French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1914), 178, fn. 50. See Donald I. Buzinkai, ‘The Bolsheviks, the League of Nations and the Paris Peace Conference, 1919’, Soviet Studies 19, 2 (1967), 257–63; and Charlotte Alston, ‘The Suggested Basis for a Russian Federal Republic: Britain, Anti-Bolshevik Russia and the Border States at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919’, History 91, 1 (301) (2006), 24–44. See Siegel, For Peace and Money, 169–78. Peace Conference. Fourth Sub-Commission of the Financial Commission Committee on Russian Questions (Financial Interests of the Allies in Russia). Scheme of Work Considered in the Initial Meetings. No date. TNA T 1/12303/13588; J. M. Keynes, summary of ‘Declarations des Principes et de Suggestions Qui s’Imposent pour assurer le retablissement des forces financières et économique de la Russie’ [Initial document

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‘The Russia question’, multifold though it might be, hovered over many of the discussions and debates at the Paris Peace Conference, not least of all those over trade and finance. Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s press secretary at Paris, later wrote: ‘Without ever being represented at Paris at all, the Bolsheviks and Bolshevism were powerful elements at every turn.’31 More poetically, Herbert Hoover called Russia ‘the Banquo’s ghost sitting at every council table’.32 No recognition and no presence in Paris also meant that the Russian economy could not be relied upon to participate in any solutions to the financial volatility wracking Europe. Nor could Russia be expected to play a role in any future constructed global financial order. In fact, for many, that order needed to be designed specifically to vanquish the threat from the Bolshevik Banquo – as great a potential peril in the future as German imperial Weltpolitik had been in the past. While the focus of the conference discussions very quickly became absorbed by strategic debates over reparations, there were some who tried to push for a broader rethink of the foundations of international economic engagement. The recent experience of Allied financial and economic cooperation during the war provided inspiration for those in search of a positive precedent. A form of allied fiscal union had even been floated as far back as the first tripartite meeting of inter-allied ministers of finance in January 1915.33 In the same period, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George had talked about the creation of ‘not only an alliance of military forces, but an alliance of financial forces’.34 The banner of inter-allied economic cooperation had then been taken up by the French minister of commerce from 1915 to 1919, Étienne Clémentel, who pushed for the institutionalisation of a system of shared resource allocation and a regularisation of the international economy in the post-war period that would continue the practices of wartime cooperation. Clémentel recognised and sought to reinforce the interconnected nature of Europe’s economies, although his proposal would deliberately depend upon a

31 32 33 34

drawn up by the Russian Political Conference in Paris], 22 February 1919, TNA T 1/ 1230/13588. R. S. Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, vol. II (New York: Doubleday, 1922), 64, as quoted in Buzinkai, ‘The Bolsheviks’, 257. Herbert Hoover, The Hoover Memoirs (3 vols., 1952), i. 41, as quoted in Alston, ‘Suggested Basis’, 24. See Siegel, For Peace and Money, 140–43. Lloyd George paraphrased by Jacques Stern, Discours prononcé à la Chambre des Députés, le 28 décembre 1918, TNA FO 608/242/3719, 19.

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modicum of ongoing state control over the means of production and resources;35 furthermore, he was motivated as much by an interest in containing future German economic power as he was in promoting international economic security.36 The ‘Clémentel Plan’, however, was not concerned with the financial aspects of the interconnected economy. That cause was taken up in early December 1918 by another Frenchman, Jacques Stern, a centrist deputy from the Gauche Radicale parliamentary group representing the BassesAlpes.37 Stern was a member of the French branch of a prominent banking family that, along with running its own bank, AJ Stern et Cie, had co-founded and was the biggest shareholder in the Banque de Paris, a precursor of BNP Paribas. Upon his election in 1914, he had assumed an unofficial role as parliamentary financial expert. His proposal for a ‘Financial League of Nations’ – presented to the Chamber of Deputies, supported by numerous fellow deputies from a myriad of political orientations, and covered extensively in almost all of France’s daily and weekly newspapers – offered a somewhat radical rethink of the way in which sovereign debt could be funded and guaranteed.38 Stern proposed, in principle, ‘to institute between the allied powers a financial league of nations, which would divide between them, proportionally to their populations and to their respective strength, the fiscal burdens that are necessary to cover the expenses incurred by the war’.39 This organisation would exist to ensure not only the reclamation of the appropriate reparations, restitutions and indemnities from the enemy, but the effective and fair distribution of those sums received to those, like France, to whom much was owed. Stern argued that such an organisation was not without historical precedent. He pointed to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration as an example where a nation’s debt was handled, as he put it, in the best interests of that nation and its predominantly European 35

36 37 38 39

See Marc Trachtenberg, ‘“A New Economic Order”: Étienne Clémentel and French Economic Diplomacy during the First World War’, French Historical Studies 10, 2 (1977), 315–41; Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 112–17; Georges-Henri Soutou, L’or et le sang: Les buts de guerre économiques de la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 765–72. Jackson, Beyond the Balance, 177. Journal officiel de la République française. Débats parlementaires. Chambre des députés: compte rendu in-extenso. 3 décembre 1918, 3241. See, for example, ‘La Liquidation des dépenses de la guerre’, Le Petit Parisien, 7 décembre 1918, 2. ‘La Liquidation des dépenses de la guerre.’

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creditors. Most significantly, those international creditors also served as the debt’s guarantors. This last feature Stern proposed to apply to the Financial League of Nations as well. The League, according to the plan, would accept the reparations paid by Germany (calculated by Stern to amount to 518 billion francs) and, in turn, issue an inter-allied loan, assigned in successive tranches to all the various participatory states according to their individual need, carrying 5 per cent interest, redeemable in fifty years, which would be ‘guaranteed in solidarity by all the allies’, this time according to their ability.40 Ultimately, Stern envisioned that neutral states and even the war’s defeated powers could be admitted to this Financial League of Nations, which would also serve as the foundation for the future organisation of international trade and exchange.41 In his lengthy presentation to the Chamber, Stern continually stressed the lack of novelty in his proposal. He did, however, modestly undervalue the innovation inherent in his plan. This level of international financial cooperation had never before been attempted on such a scale. The scaffolding of financial relations with a framework of mutual international guarantees of national debt was indeed radical. And Stern himself, as he allowed himself to get caught up by his own enthusiasm as his speech went on, admitted that he could see this scheme having repercussions far greater than simply the smooth regulation of reparations and repayments: ‘it will be able to constitute for the first time a large clearing house and clean up the foreign exchange market, for which there is a most urgent need’; and ‘[it could] set up subsidiaries, which will centralise not only currency questions, but questions of raw materials, questions of freight’. As Stern insisted, it was time to act: ‘international stability depends on us reestablishing global credit’.42 The Stern plan seems not to have been broadly discussed outside of France. Its components, however, are clearly visible in the next project that put forward a partial revision of the methods of conducting international financial relations, often referred to as the ‘Klotz Plan’. Lucien Klotz, French minister of finance during the conference, has not been treated kindly in the historical record.43 His proposal for a Financial 40 41 43

Discours prononcé à la Chambre des Députés, le 28 décembre 1918, TNA FO 608/242/ 3719, 1–14. 42 Ibid., 20. Ibid., 20, 25. Keynes, for example, ungenerously details in Dr. Melchior the verbal abuse that Klotz received at the hands of his peers: ‘Do you know Klotz by sight? – a short, plump, heavymoustached Jew, well groomed, well kept, but with an unsteady, roving eye, and his

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Section of the League of Nations did not fare much better, either at the time of the conference or in retrospect. On 4 February, Klotz presented his plan to the reparations committee, early drafts of which had been bouncing around for the previous month.44 At its most basic level, the purpose of Klotz’s proposed Financial Section was to prevent the evasion of any of the financial clauses of the peace treaties – principally, the reparations and indemnities clauses. (Klotz, who is credited, somewhat apocryphally, with saying that ‘Germany will pay’, could be seen to have been constructing a system to ensure just that.45) However, the plan also included provisions for the issuance of bonds on behalf of the states represented in the section, which, as in Stern’s project, would be guaranteed by all of the member states. And, although not explicitly outlined, there were provisions in Klotz’s plan that might allow for the pooling of debt responsibilities and even, perhaps, the cancellation of war debts.46 The machinery Klotz proposed to put in place was concerned more with enforcement than rehabilitation, and the plan foundered on Klotz’s push for sweeping authorities; it called for the exercise of ‘supreme and permanent control over all international commissions and organisations

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shoulders a little bent in an instinctive deprecation. Lloyd George had always hated him and despised him; and now saw in a twinkling that he could kill him. Women and children were starving, he cried, and here was M. Klotz prating and prating of his “goold”. [sic] He leant forward and with a gesture of his hands indicated to everyone the image of a hideous Jew clutching a money bag. His eyes flashed and the words came out with a contempt so violent that he seemed almost to be spitting at him. The antiSemitism, not far below the surface in such an assemblage as that one, was up in the heart of everyone. Everyone looked at Klotz with a momentary contempt and hatred; the poor man was bent over his seat, visibly cowering. We hardly knew what Lloyd George was saying, but the words “goold” and Klotz were repeated, and each time with exaggerated contempt. . . . M. Klotz would rank with Lenin and Trotsky among those who had spread Bolshevism in Europe . . . All round the room you could see each one grinning and whispering to his neighbor “Klotzky”.’ [John Maynard Keynes, Two Memoirs. Dr. Melchior: A Defeated Enemy and My Early Beliefs (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 61–62.] French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau also purportedly maligned his finance minister, declaiming: ‘I don’t stand a chance. I have only one Jew in my Ministry, and he knows nothing of Finance!’ [Physionomie de Paris. Bourse des Valeurs, Séance du mardi 24 Mars 1919. Paris, le 24 Mars 1919. Archives de la Préfecture de Police de Paris, Série B, BA1587; Barnett Singer, ‘Clemenceau and the Jews’, Jewish Social Studies 43, 1 (1981), 47–58.] See also Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 41–42; and Mallard, ‘“The Gift” Revisited’, 232. Projet d’une ‘Section Financière de la Ligue des Nations’, Présenté par M. L. L. Klotz. Annexe II in L. L. Klotz, De la Guerre à la Paix: Souvenirs et Documents (Paris: Payot, 1924), 197–200. 46 Trachtenberg, Reparation, 41–44. Klotz, De la Guerre, 200.

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for financial control which may be created by the Treaty of Peace’.47 The pushback was immediate. The Americans balked at anything resembling shared debt responsibility. As Albert Rathbone, assistant secretary of the US Treasury, wrote to French high commissioner Edouard de Billy: ‘the Treasury Department . . . will not consent to any discussion, at the peace conference or elsewhere, of a plan or project having for object the liberation, the consolidation, or new division of the obligations of foreign governments held by the United States’.48 There were even those on the British side, like Cecil J. B. Hurst, legal advisor to the British delegation, who questioned whether the League should be handling financial matters at all, particularly in an era of socialist and labour unrest: Expert advice on financial questions can be secured and, if necessary, even permanently provided for, by some much less ambitious scheme than the creation of a financial section . . . The League of Nations is now regarded as an instrument for preserving peace. If it is connected in any way with financial affairs is there not great danger that it may be characterised as an organisation for riveting the chains of capitalism upon the modern world?49

Furthermore, the discussions around Klotz’s proposal made clear that there was a distinct difference of opinion over what the mandate of such an organisation should be. Klotz, himself, recognised the divide, noting: ‘the French draft proposed to give the financial section administrative and jurisdictional powers, while the English and American drafts assigned to it a purely consultative role’.50 In the end, the section was to be stripped of its authority and consigned to an advisory role, although the League would be required to solicit that advice from the financial section, unless time was of the essence.51

47 48

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Financial Section – League of Nations/International Bureau of Finance. 28 January 1919. TNA FO 608/242/1011. Rathbone to de Billy, quoted by André Tardieu, ‘The Problem of Reparations’, Illustration, 20 October 1920, in Committee on the Judiciary, Loans to Foreign Governments (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 264–65. Minute by CJBH (Cecil J. B. Hurst). Draft Scheme for Financial Section. 28 January 1919. TNA FO 608/242/1011. Fourth Sub-Commission of Financial Commission. Meeting of 24 March. Minutes. No. 2. TNA FO 608/236/6393. For the British position, see Montagu’s Memorandum on Mr. Klotz’s Project for a Financial Section of the League of Nations. 24 February 1919. TNA FO 608/242/2973. Annex 2 B. Meeting of 26 March. Resolutions adopted by the Fourth Sub-Commission. TNA FO 608/236/6393. See also League of Nations. Scheme for a Financial Section. Draft Article to be inserted after IX. Enclosure in F. P. Walters to Sir W. Wiseman. 15 March 1919. TNA FO 608/242/2973.

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The Financial Section that emerged from Klotz’s plan was, without question, a watered-down version of what he had first proposed. It illustrates nevertheless the essential nature of financial discussions beyond the reparations debates. Klotz underscored the vital importance of institutionalising the settlement of financial questions: ‘it was not unusual to ascribe so much importance to financial questions; the taxpayers of every country realised their importance and they would no doubt form the underlying reasons of future conflicts’.52 The original proposal, prior to revision, is often dismissed for being, as Peter Jackson writes, ‘little more than a machine to collect reparations payments from Germany’.53 This assessment, however, privileges the reparations question and pays insufficient heed to the attempted restructuring of financial practice that was being pursued, small steps though they might have been. Like the Stern plan before it, the Klotz plan’s arrangements for international loans and jointly guaranteed debt obligations indicate a noteworthy spirit promoting international financial cooperation and international financial responsibility. As Klotz insisted: ‘The Allies must remain united economically, as they had remained united in the military sense.’54 This interest in international financial cooperation was not limited to the French. Keynes, who represented the British Treasury during the Paris Peace Conference, and who did so much in his Economic Consequences of the Peace to ensure that the reparations question dominated all others for decades to come, proposed his own plan for restructuring and restarting the European economy. The Keynes plan has received far more attention and publicity than any of its predecessors, not because it offered more innovation or had a greater chance of setting Europe on the road to financial recovery, but because of the notoriety that Keynes brought on himself with the publication of his scathing condemnation of the Treaty of Versailles. With The Economic Consequences, Keynes became recognised as the public authority on the conference, his view of reparations overshadowed all other issues, and, by extension, his proposed programme for financial restructuring has tended to obscure those earlier plans, even as he borrowed heavily from many of their key elements. While Keynes was later described by German banker Max Warburg, who had served as a 52 53 54

Fourth Sub-Commission of Financial Commission. Meeting of 24 March. Minutes. No. 2. TNA FO 608/236/6393. Jackson, Beyond the Balance, 266. ‘Oversea Correspondence. France – M. Klotz’s Declarations – Cost of the War – The Bourse – Bank of France’, Paris, 19 February 1919, Economist, 22 February 1919, 327–28.

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member of the German delegation, as ‘the most significant figure among the members of the inter-allied finance commission’, this post facto recognition had as much if not more to do with Keynes’ championing of the German cause and contribution to the post-Versailles reparations debate than his real primacy at the conference.55 Like the plans that had come before, Keynes focused on the need for financial relief, even more than the normalisation of trade relations or the distribution of resources. He claimed to offer a ‘bolder solution for the rehabilitation of the credit and economic life of Europe than is now available’.56 Keynes’ ideas were presented in two stages. His first proposal, in March, for the mutual abrogation of all inter-allied war debt, was contained in a Treasury memorandum shared with the US government entitled ‘The Treatment of Inter-Ally Debt Arising Out of the War’.57 In this memorandum, Keynes detailed all of the challenges to the functioning of the international economy that stemmed from interallied indebtedness, including the way in which the continuation of these debts fed unreasonable demands for German reparations. The debt burden, according to Keynes, could only be ‘a constant source of international friction and ill-will for many years to come’, not to mention grounds for financial instability. He called on the United States, in the name of common sense and the pursuit of international financial and political security, to join the United Kingdom in shouldering the financial burden that would come from the cancellation of the debts. And, although he recognised that the larger sacrifice would be made by the United States, he could not refrain from reminding the Americans that 55

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Warburg, in his memoirs, is quite rhapsodic when it comes to Keynes: ‘His narrow face was most impressive with deep, piercing eyes under an unusually high forehead. He spoke little and hardly moved his lips. Often he became so quiet that one could hardly understand him – but what little he said betrayed the most thorough knowledge, and when he asked a question, it always went sharply “to the point”. . . . It could happen that, among his dry, barren remarks, there was suddenly one that, with its brilliance, brought a completely new impetus to the negotiations.’ [Max M. Warburg, Aus Meinen Aufzeichnungen (New York: E. M. Warburg, 1952), 83.] Letter from Lloyd George to Wilson Enclosing and Explaining Keynes’ Financial Scheme, 23 April 1919. [The draft of this letter was penned by Keynes.] In Philip Mason Burnett, Reparation at the Paris Peace Conference from the Standpoint of the American Delegation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 1015. ‘The Treatment of Inter-Ally Debt Arising Out of the War’, in John Maynard Keynes, Collected Writings. Volume XVI (London: Royal Economic Society, 1978), 419–28. The draft of this memorandum was circulated much more broadly than Keynes had desired, and he demanded to know how these ‘very confidential papers not intended for circulation at all’ came to be sent around. See memo by J. M. Keynes, TNA FO 608/236/8068.

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their economy had thrived during and because of the war, while their relative war expenditures had been vastly inferior to those of the United Kingdom.58 Keynes might have been hoping that these last points would appeal to an American sense of justice. Instead, Wilson and his circle were irritated by the suggestion that their wartime sacrifice had not equalled that of their associates.59 Within two weeks, Keynes had withdrawn and reworked his plan. Rather than retreating, he presented what he called in a letter to his mother ‘a grand scheme’. His ‘Scheme for the Rehabilitation of European Credit and for Financing Relief and Reconstruction’ called for the issuance of vast sums of German, Austrian, Hungarian and Bulgarian bonds, at a reasonable rate of interest. The smaller or new states of Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Baltics also would be able to issue bonds under similar conditions. And, following on the spirit of international financial responsibility built into both the Stern and Klotz plans, all of these bond issues would be guaranteed by the victorious and neutral powers. A portion of the sums to be raised by the defeated powers would be used, first and foremost, to meet their reparations bills – but not all. Approximately 25 per cent would be reserved for the purchase of food and raw materials, in an attempt to jump start the economies of those who had lost the war, to make them sound trading partners for the victors, and to put the international system in order.60 As argued in the accompanying letter sent by Lloyd George to Wilson, which Keynes had himself drafted, there were only two possible courses: direct assistance and various forms of guaranteed finance . . . Every consideration of policy and interest indicates the superiority of the second . . . It cannot be supposed that the two great continents, America and Europe, the one destitute and on the point of collapse and the other overflowing with goods which it wishes to dispose of, can continue to face one another for long without attempting to frame some plan of mutual advantage.61

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The inequality of the wartime sacrifice between the United States and its European allies was, similarly, stressed by Stern vis-à-vis France. See Discours prononcé à la Chambre des Députés, le 28 décembre 1918, TNA FO 608/242/3719, 23. See Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (New York: Random House, 2020), 81. ‘Scheme for the Rehabilitation of European Credit and for Financing Relief and Reconstruction’ in Keynes, Collected Writings, 429–31. Lloyd George to Wilson, in Burnett, Reparation, 1017–18.

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Such a grand plan, dependent upon state intervention and not reliant upon private enterprise to pick up the slack, was, as Lloyd George insisted, the best way to fend off the scourge of Bolshevism and to bring about international well-being. To anyone who had been paying attention to Jacques Stern back in December and early January, the Keynes scheme should not have come across as particularly grand. Once again, internationally guaranteed bonds were at the centre of a plan that promised to put Europe back on its feet and to refresh global credit. And both of these plans recognised their dependence upon what Stern called ‘a considerable sacrifice’ by the United States as the principal guarantor of future debt issues, as it was the principal holder of existing war debt.62 The United States, however, wanted nothing to do with a scheme that would make it responsible for other nations’ debt – particularly with the very recent example of Bolshevik debt repudiation looming large. Although Keynes claimed that Wilson and his chief financial advisors in Paris, Norman Davis and Herbert Hoover, were initially well disposed towards the plan, the US Treasury was of an entirely different mind. As Keynes noted in a memo to his own Treasury: ‘[there] has been immediate and violent opposition on the part of Washington. I am informed that they have cabled many thousand words of criticisms and horror’.63 Perhaps less ‘violent’ was Wilson’s letter to Lloyd George, informing the British premier that, in the first instance, it would be impossible to obtain the necessary congressional approval for a federal guarantee of foreign bonds and, in the second, his government intended ‘to retire at the earliest possible moment from “the banking business”’.64 Two weeks later, Keynes wrote to his superiors at the Treasury and offered his resignation, in no small part in response to his disappointment over the failure of his bond scheme. While he did not, as Bernard Baruch memorialised years later, ‘burst out like a petulant and spoiled child against the whole Treaty’ because his recommendations had been rejected, Keynes did consider the crushing of his grand scheme ‘disappointing and depressing’.65

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Discours prononcé à la Chambre des Députés, le 28 décembre 1918, TNA FO 608/242/ 3719, 23. Keynes to Bradbury, 4 May 1919, in Collected Writings, 437–40. Letter from Wilson to Lloyd George Regarding Keynes’ Financial Scheme, 5 May 1919. In Burnett, Reparation, Vol. I, 1127–29. Bernard M. Baruch, Baruch, the Public Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 124; Keynes to Bradbury, 4 May 1919, Collected Writings, 437–40.

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Neither Keynes nor any who came before him should have been surprised by American opposition. Even before the armistice was in place, Hoover had made clear what United States policy should be, writing to Wilson: ‘[we] will not agree to any programme that even looks like interAllied control of our economic resources after peace’.66 The United States government was much more in favour of a reliance upon private actors to find solutions to the world’s financial challenges – of getting out of ‘the banking business’. As Patricia Clavin summarises the US position in Securing the World Economy: ‘The state was expected to return to its pre-war role of “nightwatchman” in a “hands-off” policy regime that was believed to have brought unprecedented international economic growth before 1914.’67 The British themselves had started from that position, as noted by the British delegation in April 1919, writing: ‘To whatever extent private enterprise can meet the problem, it should be left to do so.’ But they also recognised the private sector’s limitations: ‘Nevertheless, the problem of restoring Europe is almost certainly too great for private enterprise alone, and everyone’s delay puts this solution further out of court . . . (a) The risks are too great. (b) The amounts are too big, and the credit required too long.’68 Despite strong efforts by Keynes, Klotz and others, the United States refused to agree that a more activist, internationalist approach was advantageous. And without the United States, no financial plan could be implemented or could succeed, a fact that was universally recognised. As the French delegation to the Permanent Committee noted in September 1919: It is necessary that a current of credit should be able to develope [sic] in a continuous circuit throughout Europe. No European country can be the source of this current. Each of these countries is itself confronted with great difficulties, almost all are under the necessity of borrowing on their own account . . . To sum up, the supply of the greater part of Europe . . . cannot, it seems, depend on the European Powers in their present state for these Powers are all at the moment debtors.69 66 67 68 69

Hoover to Wilson, 7 November 1918, quoted in Trachtenberg, ‘New Economic Order’, 335. Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11. Note Submitted by the British Delegates on the General Economic Position in Europe, Appendix 51, Supreme Economic Council: Eleventh Meeting [on 7 and 9 April 1919]. General Economic Situation of Europe (Note by the French Delegation for the Permanent Committee of the Supreme Economic Council), 20 September 1919, No. 290. Enclosure in James to Norman, 25 September 1919. TNA FO608/76/19183.

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Similarly, J. A. Hobson described America’s choice between ‘national selfdependence or internationalism’, arguing that a stable financial order presumes that America is in the peace as much as she was in the war, that she has decided to link her destiny closely and lastingly with that of Europe, that she definitely accepts a proffered place as a member of the society of nations, and under circumstances which make an immediate call upon her economic and financial resources in a manner in which there can be no direct reciprocity.

American magnanimity, according to Hobson, would be rewarded by ‘the safety and the progress of humanity’.70 But the United States failed to see the advantages of government intervention and collective action to stabilise the international financial system.71 Stephen Schuker, in ‘Origins of American Stabilization Policy in Europe’, has dismissed both the Keynes and Klotz plans as designed, above all, to help Europe regain its pre-war position and therefore not in Washington’s interests; he condemns them both as schemes to get American taxpayers to fund German reparations and European debt.72 Shuker’s assessment echoes Norman Davis’ cutting observation in 1920: ‘While the Allies have never bluntly so stated, their policy seems to be to make Germany indemnify them for having started the war and to make us indemnify them for not having entered the war sooner.’73 Both Schuker and Davis overplay the mercenary nature of these proposals. More appropriately, Peter Jackson, looking at the French position, has stressed that the internationalist mobilisation of finance at the core of each of these plans had more to do with sharing the burden rather than shifting it.74 It was true that there was an interest in tethering the United States to Europe, by ensuring that US capital literally and figuratively remained invested in Europe’s future success and stability. But there were broader, more altruistic, more progressive motives at play as well. The proposals from Stern, Klotz and Keynes – as well as other, less fully formed projects and ideas that were floating about – were, in part, seeking to alter the framework for international financial relations, to formulate at least the outlines of an economic and financial order that was more

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J. A. Hobson, The Morals of Economic Internationalism (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), 37, 49, 60. For American opposition to joint management of Allied and American resources, see Martin, France. Schuker, ‘Origins’, 385. Norman Davis to Wilson, 21 February 1920, as quoted in Schuker, ‘Origins’, 386. Jackson, Beyond the Balance, 351.

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cooperative and collective and less competitive. These were not proposals to completely restructure the methods of finance or the global economic system. Particularly at a moment when the world was reeling from the fallout of the experiment taking place in the former Russian Empire, it is not surprising that the aims were limited in scope. These proposals were, however, innovative in their promotion of international collective financial responsibility. Their proponents saw these plans as the most effective means of securing not only financial stability but an enduring peace; as British editor of The Observer, J. L. Garvin, argued, for example: ‘to start that project [of the League of Nations] in real life with the moral endowment resulting from an unprecedented financial act of practical idealism would, after all, be a stroke of sagacious and not of romantic statesmanship’.75 Ultimately, oversight for the organization of international finance was kicked down the road and handed over to the League of Nations and its Economic and Financial Organization, which was created for the purpose of providing the League Council with technical advice – not to restructure international financial relations.76 The League’s tendency was, by its own admission, to be ‘cautious and tentative’, particularly in economic and financial matters: The League is a composite association which must take into account the wishes and interests of all its members; its business is to discover and to explore such common ground as exists; it has no power to impose a collective will, but only opportunities to elicit general consent; in short it provides not a form of government but a method of cooperation.

Characteristically, the League’s great self-proclaimed achievement at the first international financial conference that was held in Brussels in 1920 was to inspire finance ministers ‘to get their finances on to more orthodox lines’.77 While the conference was convened in response to an international petition calling for international financial cooperation, the focus of the discussions at a meeting that was always intended to be no more than an exchange of ideas pointed in a different direction.78 As the 75 76

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Garvin, Economic Foundations, 157. League of Nations, Work of the Financial and Economic Organisation, 7–8; see also Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 in this volume, on the League’s administrative capacity to manage economic affairs. League of Nations, Work of the Financial and Economic Organisation, 12–13. Clavin, Securing the World Economy, 16; Joseph S. Davis, ‘World Currency and Banking: The First Brussels Financial Conference’, Review of Economics and Statistics 2, 12 (1920), 349–50.

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League saw it, international action was not the key to an amelioration of the global economic situation – domestic internal reform was.79 Not for the League in its early days the reimagining of international collective financial responsibility that had excited Stern or Keynes. Only after great subsequent effort and a succession of financial crises did the League develop its more activist stance promoting and shaping global economic and financial relations.80 The fact that the more ambitious plans floated during the peace conference were not implemented or did not dominate the conference debates does not diminish their representation of the international idealism in the financial realm that existed during the Peace Conference. The attempted departure from traditional practices that permeated so many other questions at the conference are also visible in the attempts to internationalise financial responsibility in the pursuit of lasting order and peace. In February 1919, La Fédération Nationale des Coopératives de Consommateurs (the National Federation of Consumer Cooperatives) urged the peacemakers at the conference to remember what was at stake, and to take into account all that could be gained through a cooperative approach to international relations: do not forget that the causes of war have never been only political. Private international commerce has never given the world peace. It has given rise to thousands of conflicts because it is a form of struggle: the struggle for profit. This is why global cooperation has been, and will be a means to fortify permanent peaceful order.81

Had those advocates for an international financial order with cooperatively guaranteed debt at its core been heeded in 1919, peace might, in fact, have been better fortified to withstand the buffeting of the tumultuous decades that followed.

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League of Nations, Work of the Financial and Economic Organisation, 62. Although Patricia Clavin has demonstrated in Securing the World Economy that the League evolved into a far more ambitious tool for the exertion of economic and financial oversight and organisation, this evolution was slow to come to fruition, and bears little direct connection to the albeit narrowly focused schemes that were floated at Paris. Influence du Traite de Paix sur les Relations Économiques de Peuples et la Cooperation. Enclosure in Albert Thomas, Fédération National des Coopératives de Consommation, à M. Balfour. Paris, le 28 février 1919. TNA FO 608/76/3402.

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11 Raw Materials and International Order from the Great War to the Crisis of 1920–21 Jamie Martin

Disputes over the control and prices of raw materials were crucial to the making and unmaking of international order after the First World War – but not in ways that were fully anticipated during the war itself. The war’s outcome had been determined, in part, by the Allies’ ability to control scarce resources from across the entire earth. But the post-war period saw the very different problem of raw material glut take centre stage. More than shortages, it was glut and its deflationary effects that led to lasting innovations in the governance of the world economy. Waging the war had necessitated the mobilisation of primary commodities from around the world. Goods like nitrates from the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, tin from the Kinta Valley of British Malaya and oil from Mexico were fed into war machines that consumed vast quantities of geographically disparate inputs.1 Since the late nineteenth century, the strategic vulnerabilities posed by European dependence on far-flung sources of raw materials and foodstuffs had shaped British, French and German strategic planning for a future conflict.2 The Second Industrial

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The material history of the First World War in a global context still awaits full treatment. On specific raw materials, see, for example, Tyler Priest, Global Gambits: Big Steel and the U.S. Quest for Manganese (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Ronald Limbaugh, Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2010); Jamie Martin, ‘Globalizing the History of the First World War: Economic Approaches’, The Historical Journal 65.3 (2022): 838–855. See, for example, Ian Lesser, Resources and Strategy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989); Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1–60; William Mulligan, ‘Preparing for War in an Interdependent World: German Financial

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Revolution had dramatically augmented demand for a vast array of minerals and agricultural commodities, from molybdenum to palm products to rubber, which increasingly made access to them a goal of imperial strategy. The aim of controlling resource-rich territory was as old as empire itself. But never before had such a large number of resources and agricultural products – and from so many places – been required for civilian manufacturing, the production of armaments and domestic political stability. Nor had empires wielded the technological and military capacity to secure access to these goods in so many disparate sites all at once. After the outbreak of the First World War, each side targeted the import-dependence of the other with a strategy of economic blockade. In all of the major European belligerents, mitigating raw material shortages also involved the implementation of a suite of new state controls over imports and exports, purchasing and requisitioning, prices and domestic distribution. Over the course of the war, and particularly after the entry of the United States in April 1917, the Allied and Associated powers, in turn, created intergovernmental systems to purchase, transport and allocate some of these goods. These arrangements were seen by an array of public and private actors in Britain, France and, to a lesser extent, the United States as providing models for post-war international economic cooperation. While few of the most ambitious wartime plans for post-war international raw material controls were realised, questions of access to and control over raw materials were central to the efforts of powerful states, private actors and international bodies like the League of Nations to remake the rules and institutions of the post-war international order. Just as waging war in an industrialised global economy had turned on problems concerning the control of scarce resources, it seemed obvious that guaranteeing the peace would as well. Soon after the war came to an end, however, many of the worst fears about shortages that had shaped planning for its aftermath proved, by and large – and rather unexpectedly – to have been misplaced. Despite near-universal wartime predictions about the dangers posed by raw material shortages and inflation to post-war political and economic stability, prices for most raw materials began to plummet in 1920 – with devastating consequences for producers around the world. For much of the rest of the interwar period, the spectre of ‘‘overproduction’ loomed Preparations before 1914’, History Compass 17, 6 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1111/ hic3.12574.

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large. At key moments, the pressures that an overcapacity of primary goods put on prices proved to be as important to fundamental questions of international order as better-remembered competition over scarce strategic goods such as rubber and oil and the quest of the great powers for self-sufficiency in raw materials during the 1930s. This chapter will explain how plans for international raw material controls emerged out of the First World War, were transformed during the armistice period, and then again in the face of the severe global economic crisis of 1920–21. It argues that one of the most unexpected and important developments of the interwar period was the emergence of a persistent global problem of commodity price deflation, which spurred on the development of some of the earliest and most durable twentiethcentury international economic institutions. The deep origins of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), for example, are to be found in the institutional innovations of the interwar period. By focusing on the resource problems that occupied centre stage during this era, this chapter offers an alternative perspective on the economic dimensions of the peace settlement and the origins of institutions like the League of Nations – one that foregrounds the centrality of disputes over industrial and primary production to a history that has long been written mostly in terms of finance and trade. In doing so, it suggests a new materialist approach to writing the history of modern international order and global governance.3

   -  During the First World War, the problem of raw material shortages played an important role in shaping economic warfare, the coordination of resources among the Allies and post-war planning. In all of the major belligerents, governments developed far-reaching new powers to secure reliable access to raw materials, prevent the inflation of their prices and arrange their domestic allocation. In Germany, such controls were developed at the beginning of the war at the Raw Materials Department set up under the industrialist Walter Rathenau. In France, the Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Armaments similarly established controls over goods required for war-related and civilian production. The British 3

I develop some of these arguments in greater depth in The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).

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Ministry of Munitions developed similar powers and, as the war continued, promulgated plans for cementing imperial control over disparate sources of strategic minerals. All of these actions were premised on a fear of scarcity crippling the production of munitions and the restoration of post-war civilian production – as well as an assumption that zero-sum competition between the great powers over the world’s resources would continue long after the military conflict came to an end. A 1916 memorandum by the British War Office summarised this view neatly: [At war’s end] reserve stocks of raw materials imported from abroad will be depleted in all countries, and in enemy countries will be practically exhausted . . . In order to safeguard the industries of Allied countries and enable them to secure the most favourable start at the end of the war, it should be possible for the Allied governments either to purchase or to control the available supplies in such a way as to checkmate any endeavour of the enemy to forestall them.4

This vision of inter-imperial resource coordination played an important role in pushing the Allied empires and then the United States into ever closer forms of wartime cooperation. These efforts involved the establishment of a series of institutions to coordinate the purchasing, allocation and transport of primary goods. Allied economic cooperation began early in the war, opening with the creation of a joint purchasing bureau in 1914, the Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement, to pool orders for various goods in order to prevent competition from inflating their prices. In late 1916, an international consortium was created to make joint purchases of wheat for the European Allies at fixed prices.5 After the US entry into the war, an agreement was reached to establish a centralised shipping body in London to advise each state on its import programmes and allocate available Allied tonnage accordingly. This organisation, the Allied Maritime Transport Council, was designed to be a nerve-centre for the combined Allied economic war effort, allowing officials with ministerial authority from the major Allied countries and the United States to collectively decide import priorities and arrange transport. Its establishment also led to the creation of an array of executive bodies to set import programmes for various goods with the aim of economising on scarce

4 5

‘Memorandum on Control of Certain Raw Materials by the Allied Governments after the War’, 1 June 1916, The National Archives, Kew (hereafter, TNA) MUN 5/113. ‘An Agreement between Italy, France, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’, TNA T 1/12405.

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tonnage.6 A suite of executives and committees, with different powers and scope, were planned to purchase certain goods at fixed prices for the manufacture of munitions and food supply (though only a handful were created before war’s end). In the case of the Allied Maritime Transport Council, the style of technocratic intergovernmental coordination it embodied provided a model adaptable after the war to new experiments in international administration. The most notable was the League of Nations’ technical organisations.7 A generation of internationalists saw wartime Allied shipping cooperation as a remarkable innovation in international governance, which involved a supposedly non-political form of cooperation that did not require any ‘super state’ imposing its authority on national ministries.8 Yet many influential post-war accounts of Allied economic cooperation – written by some of the same British and French technocrats who had designed it – downplayed the powers wielded by the wartime raw material executives. They also sidestepped the controversies these executives generated when they arranged the purchase of strategic goods at fixed prices and intervened in the affairs of private firms and markets.9 During the war, however, it had been the joint Allied raw material controls – even more than Allied cooperation in shipping – that were seen as promising a new and lasting form of international cooperation. These hopes informed various post-war planning schemes. In France and Britain, there was a flurry of excitement from 1916 about adapting and expanding wartime systems of joint raw material purchasing and allocation for the long term. These generally focused on two aims. First, a system of post-war international raw material controls was promoted as a tool of economic coercion against Germany. This idea was advocated

6

7

8 9

Elizabeth Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Meighan McCrae, Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 186–236. Yann Decorzant, La Société des Nations et la naissance d’une conception de la régulation économique internationale (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011), 110–61; Wolfram Kaiser and Johan Schot, Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 64–67. H. R. G. Greaves, The League Committees and World Order (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). Arthur Salter, Allied Shipping Control: An Experiment in International Administration (London: Milford, 1921). On interwar internationalism, see Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

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most vocally by the French Minister of Commerce Étienne Clémentel. In 1916, Clémentel arranged an Allied economic conference in Paris to reach an agreement for a long-term system for sharing raw materials among the Allies at favourable prices and keeping them out of German hands, alongside other measures to weaken and isolate Germany. From this point through the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the idea was at the centre of post-war French economic and strategic planning. When these schemes were defeated at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the government of Georges Clemenceau opted for punitive reparations as another way to weaken Germany and restore the French economy.10 At the centre of Clémentel’s vision was the idea of combining the resource wealth of the Allied empires and the United States and transforming the wartime alliance into a long-term arrangement to cement joint spheres of influence over global supplies of scarce goods. Clémentel was prone to describing this idea in grandiose terms. ‘There is no agriculture without phosphates’, he told the British Minister of Shipping Joseph Maclay in late 1917 with characteristic flourish, and now we have all the phosphates to be found, whether in Algeria or in the United States. We have the sulphur of Texas and Italy and, without sulphur, viticulture is not possible. The entry of the United States brings in its economic wake the two Americas, and if we arrive at an accord on raw materials, nearly all of the Americas will be materially obliged to join this combination.11

Similar ideas were popular among various constituencies in Britain. The resolutions reached at the 1916 Paris Economic Conference for a longterm economic war against Germany were controversial in Britain, where they exacerbated existing conflicts between tariff reformers and free traders.12 But they were nonetheless instrumental in shaping post-war planning and provided ammunition to powerful voices calling for a protracted economic struggle against the Central Powers. In late 1917, an Economic Offensive Committee was set up to explore ways of 10

11 12

Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 9–28; GeorgesHenri Soutou, L’or et le sang: Les buts de guerre économiques de la Première Guerre mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989); Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). ‘Réunion avec Sir Joseph Maclay, Shipping Controller, tenue à l’Hôtel Ritz le 20 octobre 1917 à midi’, Archives nationales (hereafter, AN), Paris, F/12/7819. Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 249–58.

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extending the wartime blockade into the peace, protecting British industries that faced German competition, and cementing imperial and Allied control over raw materials.13 In the summer of 1918, this committee was reorganised and put under the Conservative War Cabinet member Austen Chamberlain with a broader portfolio.14 Debates about imperial preference similarly focused on how to ensure the empire controlled access to the raw material wealth of its constituent territories.15 The second popular aim for plans for international raw material controls was reconstruction and the prevention of mass unemployment. These ideas were important to the work of the official British reconstruction planning body set up by Prime Minister David Lloyd George in the summer of 1917 to neutralise working-class opposition to the wartime government. The actions of the Ministry of Reconstruction were premised on a new vision of the relationship of the British domestic economy and the world economy: the idea that ensuring post-war employment depended on mitigating what was explicitly described as a ‘world shortage’ of goods such as tin, lead, tungsten and molybdenum, whether by international or national means. The outlines of an embryonic post-war welfare state were thus linked to government plans to adapt wartime measures of resource control for long-term use – in part, to respond to the demands of a working class whose loyalty could not be taken for granted after demobilisation, certainly not in the wake of the successful Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. But the idea of continuing wartime resource controls into the future was not popular among businesses that resented government interference. This was true in Britain, France and the United States. At a 1918 conference of the British Ministry of Reconstruction, representatives of labour and industry quarrelled in characteristic terms: the latter offered sanguine pictures of a post-war return to normalcy once state controls were removed, while the former painted a desperate picture of a ‘scramble’ for scarce raw materials 13

14 15

Edward Carson, Memorandum on Economic Offensive, 20 September 1917, TNA CAB 24/4/6; Economic Offensive Committee, Interim Report No. 8, ‘Scheme for the Development of the British Dye Industry’, TNA CAB 24/4/38; Edward Carson, Committee on Economic Offensive. Memorandum 17 October 1917; Control of Raw Materials. Interim Report No. 5 of Economic Offensive Committee, 16 November 1917, TNA CAB 24/4/26; Minutes, War Cabinet Meeting, 27 November 1917, TNA CAB 23/ 4/57; David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 244–46. War Cabinet Meeting, 10 June 1918, TNA CAB 23/6/51. Roger Lloyd-Jones and M. J. Lewis, Arming the Western Front: War, Business and the State in Britain 1900–1920 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 282–95.

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leading to ‘chaos and anarchy’ if the state’s powers over imports and domestic allocation were hastily abandoned.16 In Britain and France, dire predictions about post-war scarcity leading to economic disruption found ready audiences in the Lloyd George and Clemenceau governments, though their support for proposed solutions to this problem did little to prevent the swift removal of state controls at war’s end in response to industry pressures. The idea of using national and international raw material controls to prevent unemployment, by ensuring factories had access to the scarce inputs they needed, also became a popular demand among a broad array of social movements and political parties in 1918–19, particularly on the left.17 As such, by war’s end, plans for international raw material controls offered a way of linking many disparate aims for the post-war international order: projecting British and French strategic power by containing potential rivals such as Germany and the Soviet Union, managing the domestic macroeconomy and reinvigorating the economic ties of empire. This new conception of international resource controls was critical to British and French proposals for a peacekeeping body, particularly for plans to equip the League of Nations with a form of economic sanctions. As the inter-Allied resource and shipping controls unfolded, they provided a concrete template for what this ‘economic weapon’ might look like and a common point of reference for this popular idea among League planners.18 Clémentel himself attempted to win over Woodrow Wilson to 16 17

18

Ministry of Reconstruction Conference, 1 August 1918, TNA RECO 1/720. Ministry of Reconstruction. Memorandum on the Problem of Raw Materials in the Transition Period after Peace, October 1917, TNA RECO 1/371. See also Paul Barton Johnson, Land Fit for Heroes: The Planning of British Reconstruction 1916–1919 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 68–77, 118–27; Peter Cline, ‘Winding Down the War Economy: British Plans for Peacetime Recovery, 1916–19’ in Kathleen Burk (ed.), War and the State: The Transformation of British Government, 1914–1919 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), 157–81; Anne Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction after the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 6. George Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy, Politics, and International Organization, 1914–1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Peter Yearwood, Guarantee of Peace: The League of Nations in British Policy, 1914–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 24–50; Roy MacLeod, ‘The Mineral Sanction’ in Richard P. Tucker, Tait Keller, J. R. McNeill and Martin Schmid (eds.), Environmental Histories of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 99–116; Philip Dehne, After the Great War: Economic Warfare and the Promise of Peace in Paris 1919 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).

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plans for continued Allied raw material controls by describing them as a tool for enforcing the peacekeeping efforts of the League of Nations, not for subordinating Germany.19 Others called for equipping the League with these powers to ensure the ‘peaceful intercourse’ of all member states, as the South African military officer Jan Smuts wrote in his influential 1918 blueprint for the League. Smuts saw the inter-Allied organisations as providing the foundation for an extraordinary new kind of international economic governance that combined the redistribution of resources among rule-abiding states with the sanctioning of ‘unauthorised belligerents’: ‘the practice of the Allies in controlling and rationing food, shipping, coal, munitions, etc., for common purposes’, Smuts wrote, ‘has led to the idea that in future a League of Nations might be similarly used for the common economic needs of the nations belonging to the League– at any rate for the control of articles of food or raw materials or transport in respect of which there will be a shortage.’20 But the Wilson administration opposed all European designs for combining the resource wealth of the Allied empires and the United States. Wilson himself saw the Paris Resolutions as threatening a further imperial militarisation of the world economy and as jeopardising US commerce and a return to non-discrimination in trade.21 Powerful US capitalists also fretted about arrangements designed for the sake of European governments that would force them to sell at non-market prices and prevent them from wresting customers and markets from foreign competitors. Expert advisers to the US government, moreover, were acutely aware of French designs to effectively disguise the Paris Resolution in the internationalist terms of the League idea to win US support for a system of international raw material controls before wartime enthusiasm for cooperation faded.22 At war’s end, US officials demanded the abandonment of the inter-Allied shipping and resource controls after the immediate tasks of relief were completed. They also rejected all plans for international raw material controls and demanded the removal of any fetters over Washington’s freedom of action in shaping the peace. 19 20 21 22

‘Question d’un contrôle international des matières premières’, AN, F12 F/12/7988. J. C. Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), 7–8. Patricia Clavin and Madeleine Dungy, ‘Trade, Law, and the Global Order of 1919’, Diplomatic History 44, 4 (2020), 554–79. ‘Differences between the United States, England and France concerning Economic Policy.’ Records of the Inquiry. Economic Division. RG 256. Box 107. Peace Conference Document 242. US National Archives and Records Administration.

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        Questions about raw materials did not take centre stage at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, despite the efforts of various European delegations and even some of the economic experts that Wilson brought to Europe.23 This was an unexpected turn of events, certainly from the vantage point of the many actors in the European Allied governments that assumed the peace settlement would include some new measures of resource cooperation. While Clémentel, president of the Economic Drafting Commission, continued to push for incorporating aspects of the Paris Resolutions into the settlement, and a special committee was appointed to consider raw materials questions, these plans were stymied by the Americans. They rejected the idea of granting foreign governments privileged access to US resources or perpetuating any arrangements that jeopardised US commercial expansion. This opposition was led by the US financier and head of the War Industries Board, Bernard Baruch, who just months before had overseen the creation of cooperative intergovernmental executives to purchase raw materials such as nitrates, tin and tungsten. While Baruch recognised the importance of inter-Allied purchasing to prevent competition for scarce goods from raising their prices, he became a fierce antagonist of such controls once in Paris.24 As Robert Cecil wrote in the diary he kept at the conference, Baruch sought ‘to sweep away all government control and direction, and encourage private individuals to work out their own salvation’.25 But it was not only US governmental opposition that prevented the realisation of plans for post-war international raw material controls. Business lobbying for decontrol was accelerating in Britain and France as well and finding sympathetic support in official circles.26 Meanwhile, the temporary relief body set up in early 1919, the Supreme Economic Council, which inherited the personnel and functions of some of the inter-

23

24

25 26

See, for example, Frank Taussig to Woodrow Wilson. Letter reprinted in Eugene Staley, ‘Taussig on “International Allotment of Important Commodities”’, American Economic Review 33 (1943), 877–81. J. Hurstfield, The Control of Raw Materials (London: HMSO, 1953); Jordan A. Schwarz, The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Cecil of Chelwood Papers, MS 51131. British Library Manuscripts Collection. Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 51–58.

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Allied councils, exercised little real power over raw material purchasing and allocation (despite exaggerated claims then and later that it had functioned as a kind of world economic government).27 As demands for continuing intergovernmental forms of cooperative purchasing, pricesetting, allocation and shipping fell out of favour with governments and business, raw material controls came to be advocated by civil society groups and political parties, particularly on the left, in Europe and the United States. Similar demands for pooling scarce goods between resource-rich and resource-poor countries were proposed and narrowly defeated at the first meeting of the International Labour Organization. Related schemes were also promoted by feminist internationalists and humanitarian associations, who lobbied the League of Nations to adapt wartime raw material controls for post-war use.28 There was discussion at the League’s Economic and Financial Organization of how to respond to these calls to rectify the unequal worldwide distribution of raw materials. These proposals found support among some British Labour-supporting and left-wing officials within and around the League (at least in order to prevent the League from looking like a ‘capitalistic’ organisation that ignored the needs of workers and the parties that represented them). But the idea of using intergovernmental powers to control the allocation of raw materials was antithetical to the broad enthusiasm at the League for returning to conditions of freer trade, abandoning price-fixing arrangements and removing wartime controls. Any suggestion that the League continue price-fixing arrangements or exercise monopsony purchasing powers threatened to prevent the United States from ever joining it. By the summer of 1919, the last official holdout for these ideas was the Italian government, which continued to push for the organisation to directly tackle raw material problems. At the Paris Peace Conference, Italian delegates had even drafted a version of the League’s Covenant empowering it to do so, though it received little attention. In 1920, Italian delegates to the League’s Assembly and Council attempted to ensure that whatever economic powers the League

27 28

Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement (Gloucester, MA: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922), vol. II, 335. Karl W. Kapp, ‘Memorandum on the Efforts Made by the League of Nations towards a Solution of the Problem of Raw Materials’, International Studies Conference, Tenth Session, 28 June–3 July 1937; David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant (New York: Putnam, 1928), vol. I, 272–73; David Hunter Miller, ‘The League of Nations and Raw Materials 1919–1939’, Geneva Studies 12, 3 (1941), 9–64.

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assumed included measures to control the global distribution of scarce raw materials and foodstuffs.29 These official Italian efforts were rejected by delegates from Britain and the Dominions, who claimed such proposals were incompatible with a return to freer trade and entailed an unacceptable form of foreign interference in the domestic affairs of resource-rich member states. The realisation of such plans, they argued, would all but guarantee the US government never joined the League.30 The Italians were offered a compromise when the Council agreed to hire the Italian statistician Corrado Gini to write a report on post-war raw material shortages, drawing on data from member states. Published in early 1922, Gini’s report on the raw materials problem – one of the first of many major economic reports published by the League – provided a bird’s eye view of global resource problems in the early post-war years, drawing on data from member states and private bodies such as the International Institute of Agriculture. What was particularly noteworthy about Gini’s report, however, was his own admission that the problem he had been hired to study – worldwide shortages – had, while he was working on the report, given way to different issues of financial and exchange instability. The fears of a devastating post-war raw material famine had failed to materialise. Europe’s resource problems now had much more to do with its widely fluctuating currencies and broader financial instability than a dearth of key industrial inputs. This left little reason to push for what Gini called the ‘socialist’ solution to the raw materials problem that his own government sponsors had advocated.31 By this point in the early 1920s, the League of Nations’ Economic Committee had also taken an explicit stand against such ideas. Alongside business lobbying groups, like the International Chamber of Commerce, it advocated removing such barriers to trade as import and export taxes and allowing a freer global exchange of raw materials to ameliorate the problem of unequal resource endowments. For the following several years, raw material scarcity was approached by institutions including the League as a problem of broader commercial policy, not through

29 30 31

Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. II, 247. League of Nations. The Records of the First Assembly. Plenary Meetings. 15 November– 18 December 1920, 178–79. League of Nations, Report on the Problem of Raw Materials and Foodstuffs (Geneva: A. Kundig, 1921).

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specific international measures to intervene in questions of global production, exchange and transport.32

   – As we have seen, fears of continued raw material shortages had led to wartime planning at high levels of all of the major European Allied governments for measures to coordinate continued access to them. After the war, such ideas quickly fell out of favour, in large part due to US and then British government opposition to them, shaped by private business lobbying. International measures to deal with raw material problems were then subsumed into broader efforts to facilitate a return to freer trade at institutions such as the League of Nations and the private bodies that operated in its penumbra, including the International Chamber of Commerce. But the early 1920s also saw a major transformation in global economic conditions, which had important implications for the politics of raw materials and international institution-building. After a brief downturn in the first months following the armistice in late 1918, the world economy underwent a dizzying period of inflation and a brief post-war boom. The prices for most major commodities shot up precipitously, seemingly confirming wartime fears that resource competition and scarcity would lead to a crippling global inflation. Continued shipping shortages also kept the costs of living around the world extremely high – particularly in the colonies of the Allied empires that had faced extreme shortages throughout the war. These economic conditions, in turn, precipitated the outbreak of revolts, riots and labour actions throughout the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere. In early 1920, moves to arrest the worldwide surge in prices were led by a succession of interest rate hikes by the banks of Japan and England and then the US Federal Reserve. This delivered a profound deflationary shock to the world economy.33 Production and employment slumped around the 32

33

Benjamin Bruce Wallace and Lynn Ramsay Edminster, International Control of Raw Materials (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1930), 322–25; C. K. Leith, World Minerals and World Politics: A Factual Study of Minerals in Their Political and International Relations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), 162–66. Susan Howson, ‘The Origins of Dear Money, 1919–20’, Economic History Review 27, 1 (1974), 88–107; Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (London: Penguin, 2014), 353–73; Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler, Central Banks and Gold: How Tokyo, London, and New York Shaped the Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015),

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world, and the prices of nearly every major raw material traded on global markets collapsed, including cotton, rubber, tin, lead, zinc and many others. Producers of raw materials and agricultural goods from Southeast Asia to the southern United States faced deflationary conditions of unparalleled severity. The global economic crisis of 1920–21 took many contemporary observers by surprise. When the International Labour Office began a major global study of production in 1920, for example, it was, like Gini’s report, interrupted by the outbreak of the crisis, which necessitated a change of its focus in medias res. Anticipated post-war shortages had given way to a collapse of prices worldwide, from Japan to New Zealand to South Africa, with an ‘unprecedented intensity’, its authors wrote.34 This crisis added a new dimension to international efforts to deal with raw materials, as the devastating collapse of their prices gave urgency, particularly in the British Empire, to the prospect of coordinating governmental means of stabilising them upwards. The solution was the creation of a new form of international economic governance that would prove, over the long term, to be more durable than wartime plans for resource pooling. This was a kind of intergovernmental commodity control that was designed to restrict production and trade in order to raise the prices of goods in chronic surplus, not to ensure access to goods that had become so scarce they were unaffordable. These new international institutions complemented the many private international cartels that had emerged since the late nineteenth century to divide up markets and occasionally set prices for primary and manufactured goods, like steel rails and chemical products. But, unlike cartels, these were intergovernmental bodies, controlled by representatives of the governments of sovereign states and colonies. They were empowered by these governments to oversee coordinated regulations designed to mandate limits on the production and export of certain goods. Their aim was to bring the global supply of the goods into a new equilibrium with what was estimated to be global demand for them. This new form of governance was promoted with urgency by the British Colonial Office, and later by its Dutch counterpart, and then by the governments of other countries that relied on the production and export of primary goods for revenues

34

94–101; Mark Metzler, ‘The Correlation of Crises, 1918–1920’ in Urs Matthias Zachmann (ed.), Asia after Versailles: Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order, 1919–33 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 23–54. International Labour Office, Enquête sur la production: Rapport général (Geneva: ILO, 1920), 15, 27.

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and employment, including many South American countries, the United States and members of the British Commonwealth such as Canada and Australia. The first attempts to innovate this new form of intergovernmental economic cooperation in the 1920s, however, ended in fiasco. The British attempted to bring the Dutch into a scheme to restrict the production of rubber in major South and Southeast Asian producing colonies – Ceylon, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. While rising rubber prices in 1919 had led to a massive expansion of acreage worldwide dedicated to the cultivation of this commodity of increasing strategic significance, the crisis of 1920–21 had been disastrous for rubber producers – not least due to a major slump in US automobile manufacturing. In British Malaya, well-organised producer groups pushed for the promulgation of a voluntary private agreement to cut production in order to artificially raise prices, while avoiding opening the Pandora’s box of government-enforced mandates. But the large number of smallholding rubber producers, who could evade these voluntary arrangements, demonstrated the necessity of binding producers through legal measures. In late 1921, Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for the colonies, backed a compulsory rubber restriction scheme in Ceylon and Malaya, as prices continued to fall.35 While this rubber restriction act, referred to as the Stevenson Plan, was designed to include producers in the Dutch East Indies as well, the Dutch government refused to join, leaving it to take effect only in Britain’s major rubber-producing colonies in late 1922. A scheme limited to the British Empire, and not put on an international footing, allowed producers in the Dutch East Indies to benefit from higher prices. As planters in the Dutch East Indies expanded production, rubber prices continued to fall into 1922. Over 1920–22, the workforce on rubber plantations in Malaya fell by 78,000. Many Chinese and Indian migrant workers were pushed off plantations into makeshift camps, where they were held before being repatriated.36 Among smallholding rubber growers in Malaya, the restriction scheme also generated enormous discontent, threatening what appeared to the colonial government to be the possibility of the first

35

36

John H. Drabble, Rubber in Malaya, 1876–1922: The Genesis of the Industry (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1973), 162–98; John H. Drabble, Malayan Rubber: The Interwar Years (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991). J. Norman Parmer, Colonial Labor Policy and Administration: A History of Labor in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya, c. 1910–1941 (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1960).

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full-scale peasant uprising in colonial Malaya.37 In the United States, heavily dependent on rubber imports, the Stevenson Plan was also furiously denounced. It led to new projects of US informal empire-building to secure exclusive US sources of this strategic good, including the further penetration of the Firestone rubber company into Liberia.38

      The failure of the Stevenson Plan, which was abandoned in 1928, nonetheless proved instructive for the British Colonial Office during the next great collapse of global commodity prices during the Depression. The key lessons were that enforcing restriction agreements in as many places as possible at once was necessary to prevent free riders from jeopardising the stabilisation of prices and that producer schemes that did not offer some form of representation to the governments of powerful importing countries could become sources of international friction. From 1931 onward, several new intergovernmental commodity organisations were established. These were first concentrated on goods produced heavily in British and Dutch Southeast Asian colonies: rubber, tin and tea. They were then followed by similar arrangements for sugar, wheat, coffee and, later, oil. These institutions functioned according to a logic of intergovernmental economic cooperation quite distinct from that of the Economic Committee of the League of Nations, which was generally committed to a return to freer trade. But they were nonetheless advocated by the League’s Economic and Financial Organization in the early 1930s as a way of addressing the problems faced by commodity producers around the world. While these new intergovernmental bodies represented an obvious public adaptation of the functions of private producer cartels, they were also designed for the sake of broader aims than profits and monopolistic market control. In the case of the British Empire, the first successful intergovernmental commodity organisations were instituted in response to the lobbying of rubber and tin producers, but also because these two 37 38

Lim Teck Ghee, Peasants and Their Agricultural Economy in Colonial Malaya 1974–1941 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1977), 146. Mark R. Finlay, Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 45–73. For a contemporary view, see Jacob Viner, ‘National Monopolies of Raw Materials’, Foreign Affairs 4 (1926), 585–600.

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export goods provided huge sources of US dollars that the British Treasury used to settle war debts and maintain the pound’s exchange rate. Stabilising tin and rubber prices was also thought to be crucial to preventing mass unemployment among Indian and Chinese plantation workers and miners in British Malaya from erupting into full-scale anticolonial and ‘Bolshevik’ resistance. The fact that these institutions were run by government officials and could be used for broader public aims was one of the reasons why so many liberal internationalists who were otherwise antagonistic to market-distorting private international cartels nonetheless advocated their use as a means of stabilising commodity prices. This was particularly true after the failures of the 1933 World Economic Conference, which demonstrated to many contemporary observers that some economic internationalism was better than none.39 These intergovernmental raw material controls were quite different from those that had been advocated during the First World War. They were designed to reduce glut, not ameliorate scarcity. By the time they began to appear, it was clear that wartime fears about raw material shortages had been exaggerated. Common anxieties at war’s end about an impending exhaustion of tin deposits in Southeast Asia, for example, were proven false as production expanded through the 1920s: in Malaya from 48,070 tons in 1925 to 69,370 in 1929, and in the Dutch East Indies from 31,240 in 1925 to 36,920 in 1929. Between 1927 and 1931, tin production in Burma rose by nearly 39 per cent and in Siam it nearly doubled. Far from prices continuing to rise as they had during the war, the 1920s were marked by persistent deflationary pressures after the immediate post-war inflation was overcome. Apart from a brief period in the mid-1920s, the years between 1920 and the early 1930s saw downward pressure on the prices of many commodities, which had profound economic, social and political effects around the world, not to mention on the governments that depended on their production and export for revenue.40 After the outbreak of the Second World War, the use of these intergovernmental commodity organisations were seen by many British and US government officials and post-war planners, including John Maynard

39 40

See, for example, H. V. Hodson, Slump and Recovery 1929–1937 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 230–57. John Hillman, The International Tin Cartel (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 55–70.

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Keynes, as useful to stabilise the prices of goods in long-term surplus.41 Before the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944, debate over a postwar international commodity body was central to Anglo-American discussions about the future world economy, though the controversies that these discussions involved prevented the creation of any international commodity organisation to complement the Bretton Woods institutions.42 However, the years after 1945 saw the promulgation of various new intergovernmental organisations covering specific commodities such as wheat and rubber. These efforts reached their pinnacle with the creation of OPEC in 1960. While OPEC is often referred to as a cartel, it was established as an international institution of sovereign states that was designed to depart from the methods of private oil cartels. OPEC inherited and adapted a style of intergovernmental economic cooperation born out of the 1920–21 crisis and realised in fuller form in the 1930s.43 During the interwar period, problems of raw material shortages and efforts to secure exclusive access to them did not disappear, of course. An accelerating global struggle over the sources of scarce goods like oil and rubber shaped the strategic planning of the so-called Have-Not powers of Germany, Japan and Italy during the 1930s, and preparation in many

41 42 43

For a statement of his views, see J. M. Keynes, ‘The International Control of Raw Materials’, Journal of International Economics 4 (1974), 299–315. Jamie Martin, ‘The Global Crisis of Commodity Glut during the Second World War’, International History Review 43, 6 (2021), 1273–90. P. Lamartine Yates, Commodity Control: A Study of Primary Products (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943); International Labour Office, Intergovernmental Commodity Control Agreements (Montreal: ILO, 1943); Joseph S. Davis, ‘Experience under Intergovernmental Commodity Agreements, 1902–45’, Journal of Political Economy 54 (1946), 193–220; Klaus Knorr, ‘The Problem of International Cartels and Intergovernmental Commodity Agreements’, Yale Law Journal 55, 5 (1946), 1097–126; Bernard Haley, ‘The Relation between Cartel Policy and Commodity Agreement Policy’, American Economic Review 36, 2 (1946), 717–34; Edward Mason, Controlling World Trade: Cartels and Commodity Agreements (New York: McGrawHill, 1946); John W. F. Rowe, Primary Commodities in International Trade (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 120–220. For a history of OPEC that correctly differentiates its functions as an intergovernmental organisation from those of private cartels, see Giuliano Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). On the later calls for these arrangements in the movement for a New International Economic Order, see, for example, Vanessa Ogle, ‘State Rights against Private Capital: The “New International Economic Order” and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962–1981’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 5, 2 (2014), 211–34.

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countries for the coming of another total war.44 During times of war and preparation for it, the international politics of raw materials were defined by fears of shortage and inflation. But in the different conditions of peacetime, the realities of overproduction and deflation formed a distinct problem of international politics – and one that was more effective in spurring on new forms of international economic cooperation. One of the principal reasons for this success was because businesses were more likely to support international measures that raised the prices of the goods that they produced and traded than measures that forced them into cooperative arrangements that reduced their profits. Against the background of the 1936 announcement of the Nazi Four-Year Plan for achieving German self-sufficiency in raw materials, British and US internationalists pointed out how the exaggerated claims of shortage that were being used to mask militaristic agendas fundamentally misdiagnosed world economic conditions: ‘The real problem is not scarcity but glut’, Norman Angell wrote, ‘not a disposition for the producer to keep his produce but to dispose of it too readily, too cheaply.’45 Yet among all of the great powers, memories of the blockades of the First World War were being used to justify new forms of ‘war economics’, wrote the influential US economic export Eugene Staley in 1937 (who was himself an influential proponent of intergovernmental commodity controls). The obsession with scarcity was not a uniquely German pathology, but one that had also long shaped British plans for imperial preference and efforts by the US government to ensure strategic self-sufficiency.46 It re-emerged with a vengeance during the Second World War. 44

45 46

Anand Toprani, Oil and the Great Powers: Britain and German, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). On international responses to the problem of renewed raw material competition in the 1930s, see Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 183–84; Mats Ingulstad, ‘Regulating the Regulators: The League of Nations and the Problem of Raw Materials’ in Andreas R. Dugstad Sanders, Pål R. Sandvik and Espen Storli (eds.), The Political Economy of Resource Regulation: An International and Comparative History, 1850–2015 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019), 231–58. Norman Angell, Raw Materials, Population Pressure and War (Boston, MA: World Peace Foundation, 1936), 12, 24. Eugene Staley, Raw Materials in Peace and War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1937), 8. See also Eugene Staley, World Economy in Transition: Technology vs. Politics, Laissez Faire vs. Planning, Power vs. Welfare (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1939), 263–65. On US mineral policy, see Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, however, this new era of violent global struggle over raw materials lay in the future. Over the course of the interwar period, international mobilisation around problems of raw materials did not focus primarily on ameliorating shortages. In large part due to the lobbying of powerful producers in the British and Dutch colonial empires, a quite different global collective problem became a target of international governance: arresting the collapse of raw material prices by using combined governmental powers to enforce binding restrictions in as many places as possible. This style of international cooperation first emerged in response to the unexpected challenges of a world economy that had been transformed by forces unleashed by the war itself. Technological innovations in extractive and agricultural technologies, the disruption of global supply chains and the emergence of new producers, and the new government subsidies, controls and tariffs erected in many places ensured that after the First World War the prices of goods being produced in truly unprecedented quantities would fluctuate dramatically – even as fears of shortages fuelled competition between the great powers and preparations for another total war.47 This was a form of international cooperation that was more amenable to the interests of powerful capitalists than the ideas promoted during the First World War to share goods at fixed prices among allied states in need. It is perhaps for this reason that it continues to exist today.

47

For a more recent view on ‘myths of scarcity’, see Robert Vitalis, Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt US Energy Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

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  ACTORS AND NETWORKS

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12 The Great Conversation A Discussion on Peace after the First World War Carl Bouchard

What I call the ‘Great Conversation’ was a broad-based discussion on international issues and world peace that took place beyond the traditional circles of power and of the intellectual elite at the end of the Great War. In a time of global instability and political innovation, the Great Conversation gave citizens, mainly in Western countries, the opportunity, the desire and the legitimacy to take a stand on international issues by virtue of a new interpretation of their political rights and their own agency. It was an unprecedented, unorganised, yet transnational movement, which questioned the meaning of citizenship in the context of democratisation of political life. Two unrelated anecdotes capture the essence of the Great Conversation. In January 1916, Arthur Balfour, First Lord of the Admiralty, submitted a note to the Cabinet entitled ‘Irresponsible Reflections on the Part Which the Pacific Nations Might Play in Discouraging Future Wars’.1 This short document contained, by its author’s own admission, ‘first thoughts’ on the conditions for a lasting peace after the conflict. At the beginning of 1916, discussions on this subject were far from being at the top of the agenda of the war cabinets; however, reflection on the post-war order had begun. For instance, a confidential report, entitled Proposals for the Avoidance of War (commonly known as the Bryce Report), had been circulating within the government since 1915. In belligerent countries as well as among the 1

The National Archives (hereafter TNA), FO 899/3, 454. Lord Balfour, ‘Irresponsible Reflections on the Part which the Pacific Nations Might Play in Discouraging Future Wars’, January 1916.

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neutrals, groups, individuals and even some politicians – one may think of Léon Bourgeois, or Woodrow Wilson after spring 1916 – had already publicly announced their support for a form of international organisation to guarantee peace, embracing ideas that had been promoted for several years within internationalist and pacifist circles.2 For Balfour, the establishment of some form of international structure to preserve peace raised many questions. Which states would form such a federation against war? How should the representation of states, large and small, be established? What role would be played by international public opinion, emerging as a new actor, with a diffuse power, but increasingly mentioned in discussions on the future world order?3 Would the power of a federation for peace rest entirely on arbitration or on some enforcement mechanism? All these questions highlighted a harsh reality: they were ‘much easier to put than to answer’, because they tackled a fundamental issue, perhaps the most fundamental in international politics. The building of peace, Balfour concluded, was ‘the greatest of all political problems’. May 1922. Six years after Balfour’s reflections, a disarmament project conceived by an Austrian pacifist, Erna Jüllig-Broda, arrived at the headquarters of the League of Nations. It was addressed to the Swiss William Rappard, director of the Mandates Section – the two protagonists had met the previous year at the International School in Salzburg.4 Shortly after receiving it, Rappard duly transferred the document to the Information and Disarmament Section, accompanied by a note justifying his decision to forward it to the appropriate section rather than to file it in the bulk of shelved ‘general correspondence’. For Rappard, even though Jüllig-Broda’s project was ‘adventurous’, he wrote politely, ‘the

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4

Jan Stöckmann, ‘The First World War and the Democratic Control of Foreign Policy’, Past & Present 249, 1 (2020), 121–66; Marc Sorlot, Léon Bourgeois, 1851–1925: un moraliste en politique (Paris: B. Leprince, 2005); Stephen Wertheim, ‘The League That Wasn’t: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914–1920’, Diplomatic History 35, 5 (2011), 797–836; Rémi Fabre, Thierry Bonzon, Jean-Michel Guieu, Elisa Marcobelli and Michel Rapaport, Les défenseurs de la paix: 1899–1917 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018). Stephen Wertheim, ‘Reading the International Mind: International Public Opinion in Early Twentieth Century Anglo-American Thought’ in Nicolas Guilhot and Daniel Bessner (eds.), The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the 20th Century (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 27–63; Daniel Hucker, Public Opinion and Twentieth-Century Diplomacy: A Global Perspective (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 4–6. The League of Nations Archives (hereafter LONA), R219, file 8/20534/20534.

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disarmament problem is so urgent and so difficult to solve that no serious project which claims to solve it should be immediately discarded’. Balfour’s and Rappard’s conclusions are remarkable to me. While the British politician experienced extreme uncertainty in the face of the complexity of the issues, for this very same reason, the Swiss senior official called for a collective reflection: no matter where it came from – even if it was the humblest of citizen proposals – no idea should be rejected a priori when it came to world peace. It is the emergence, and the intrinsic legitimacy, of this collective reflection that characterised the Great Conversation, a phenomenon little explored, or taken for granted, by historians, but whose originality and long-term significance in the history of international relations must be emphasised.

    For over fifteen years, I have explored what ‘ordinary people’ thought of lasting peace and world order in the unique context of the First World War and its aftermath. It is a difficult quest due to the disparity of the evidence and the indifference of the archivists at the time, who did not see fit to make a precise inventory of these unofficial sources; however, it is possible to unveil some of them. One project analysed over 3,500 letters written by French men and women to the American President Woodrow Wilson. This is an exceptional collection, first because of the number of letters sent – nearly 10,000 from various countries around the world arrived at Wilson’s office between November 1918 and June 1919. Its exceptionality comes also from the fact that the traditional social practice of writing to a politician was reinvented: there is no example of ordinary people writing en masse to a foreign politician before Wilson.5 The writing frenzy to Wilson testifies to a revolution in the practice of international politics and the construction of public opinion. It also encompasses the very essence of the ‘Wilson moment’ defined by Erez Manela, who described the American president as the first global politician, whose words were heard, taken up and (re)interpreted all over the world, because they fed and channelled

5

Carl Bouchard, Cher Monsieur le Président: quand les Français écrivaient à Woodrow Wilson (1918–1919) (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2015), on the phenomenon of writing to political authorities, see 273–80.

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various claims for emancipation.6 Another project examined hundreds of letters, projects and citizen proposals submitted to the League of Nations, including that of the pacifist Jüllig-Broda quoted in the introduction to this chapter. Unlike those sent to Wilson, these letters, scattered among the Geneva archives, deal almost exclusively with the raison d’être of the international organisation founded in 1919, namely international peace. These two studies follow earlier research published in 2004 on the projects for lasting peace elaborated during the First World War in France, Great Britain and the United States.7 I will draw on these sources in the following pages to analyse the essence of the Great Conversation. While examining these productions by ‘ordinary people’, the question of their effect – which, more generally, concerns the recurrent issue of correlation and causation in history8 – inevitably arises. It is true that, when examined individually, the content of these modest initiatives is of little heuristic value. This explains, to a large extent, why these sources have passed under the radar of historians of international relations for some hundred years: no letter, no project by an ‘individual without a mandate’, as they were called at the time, had the slightest impact on decision-making – if that had been the case, which politician would have publicly admitted it? On the other hand, these initiatives take on their meaning as soon as they are considered collectively. They cast light on the transformation of the world and the evolution of norms in the wake of the First World War, even though their direct influence on decision-making cannot precisely be assessed. Along with their individual actions, many ordinary men and women expressed their ideas through a collective framework. They usually combined their internationalist struggle with other causes, such as women’s right to vote, national independence or the emancipation of the working class9 – particular struggles based on a specific vision of society and of the world order. In this respect, engagement took many

6

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8 9

Manela, Chapter 15 in this volume; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Carl Bouchard, Le citoyen et l’ordre mondial, 1914–1919: le rêve d’une paix durable au lendemain de la Grande guerre, en France, en Grande-Bretagne et aux États-Unis (Paris: A. Pedone, 2008). Hucker, Public Opinion, 5. Imlay, Chapter 13 in this volume; Talbot Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 51–81.

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forms, involving individuals who, ‘on the one hand, engage[ed] locally with global networks and causes; on the other, mobilizi[ed] globally for localized aims’.10 Collective mobilisation, which is necessarily more organised than individual actions, also attracted the attention of researchers because it demonstrated the emergence of a ‘global civil society’ during the interwar years – or an ‘international communicative space’, to use Jürgen Habermas’ vocabulary11 – and long before the 1960s, contrary to what political science research often suggests. New conditions facilitated its formation: Rising educational levels, increased access to information, and new opportunities for social mobility drove more men and women to immerse themselves in associational life. The emergence of global civil society was facilitated by the ability of non-Western intellectuals to forge trans-local connections thanks to a common education in imperial and regional lingua franca such as French, English, standardized Arabic, Chinese, Swahili, or Malay.12

Daniel Gorman speaks of a ‘de-territorialization of world politics’ during the interwar period, when ‘international voluntary organizations, church groups, and international networks of academics, sportsmen, women, pacifists, humanitarian activists, and other private actors all took a leading role in the formation of international society’.13 Thomas Davies’ work on the mobilisation of citizens in favour of disarmament illustrates the transnational dimension of this new activism during the interwar period.14 The very existence of an international civil society is disputed by some researchers, who criticise its performative nature and point out the real difficulty of measuring its impact on the international scene.15 10 11

12 13

14 15

Andrew Arsan, Su Lin Lewis and Anne-Isabelle Richard, ‘Editorial – The Roots of Global Civil Society and the Interwar Moment’, Journal of Global History 7, 2 (2012), 161. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Arsan et al., ‘Editorial’, 162. Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2–7; Steve Charnovitz comes to the same conclusion in ‘The Emergence of Democratic Participation in Global Governance (Paris, 1919)’, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10, 1 (2003), 45–77. Thomas Richard Davies, The Possibilities of Transnational Activism: The Campaign for Disarmament between the Two World Wars (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2007). See Alejandro Colás, ‘The Promises of International Civil Society’, Global Society 11, 3 (1997), 261–77; Carl Bouchard, ‘Un nouveau pont entre deux rives? L’émergence d’une société civile transatlantique’, Études internationales 40, 2 (2009), 223–40; Virgile Perret, ‘Les discours sur la société civile en relations internationales: portée et enjeux pour la

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However, there are works that bear witness to the fact that women and men were aware that their activism expressed a new ‘form of political agency’.16 Associations leave more visible traces in the archives, and their initiatives are more likely to have an effect, which finally explains why collective mobilisation has received more attention than individual actions. But to get to the heart of the Great Conversation, to grasp its profound novelty, retracing the very words of ‘ordinary people’ seems even more significant to me, because they expressed a pre-political form of commitment, dictated by urgency; they felt, rather than rationalised, their emotions, provoked by the disasters of a war that was coming to an end and by the promise of a new world, emotions which, as Robert Frank put it, provided ‘a way of entering the world and perhaps a lever for changing it’.17

: ,   ? The end of the First World War was a period of intense turbulence. Recent historiography no longer attributes to the peace negotiations and treaties sole responsibility for the instability that characterised subsequent years.18 Indeed, disorder resulted from the war itself, so long and so deadly, so demanding on people and traditional powers, and therefore so disruptive.19 The nations gathered in Paris responded with a peace that was also unprecedented, but fragile, necessarily incomplete and to a great extent unsatisfactory. The treaties surely did not solve everything – far from it – and they created other problems: decisions that had serious consequences – the legal and moral guilt of the defeated, especially Germany, the contested territorial divisions and the continuation of

16 17 18

19

régulation démocratique de la mondialisation’, Études internationales 34, 3 (2003), 381–99. Colás, ‘Promises’, 262. Robert Frank, ‘Émotions mondiales, internationales et transnationales, 1822–1932’, Monde(s) 1, 1 (2012), 51. See Patrick Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 20–25; for the most recent account of the historiography, see Robert Gerwarth, ‘The Sky beyond Versailles: The Paris Peace Treaties in Recent Historiography’, Journal of Modern History 93, 4 (2021), 896–930. Hew Strachan, ‘The First World War as a Global War’, First World War Studies 1, 1 (2010), 3–14; Norman Ingram and Carl Bouchard, Beyond the Great War: Making Peace in a Disordered World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).

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colonial domination – and real innovations, such as the League of Nations, regional plebiscites in disputed regions, minority treaties and the right to petition included in the mandate system.20 When the fighting came to an end, the entire European continent, the empires and the beliefs of yesterday were shaken.21 Four empires did not survive the conflict; as a result, gigantic spaces had to be rebuilt and redefined. The negotiators of Paris had to reconcile the decisions taken at the conference with the realities on the ground, which were partly beyond their control, as witnessed in the Ottoman Empire, where the provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres were not implemented by Mustafa Kemal’s new regime, or in Central Europe, where some of the territorial divisions often endorsed a fait accompli.22 The victorious empires were not spared: conflict, somewhat contained during the war, escalated into demands for political transformation. In Egypt and Libya (two Ottoman regions respectively under British protectorate and direct Italian control), in Algeria, Ireland and Korea, people demonstrated and rose up to challenge imperial domination.23 In China, the recurrent humiliations by Japan as well as the diplomatic snubs in Paris led to popular outbursts and the refusal of the young republic to sign the Treaty of Versailles.24 As Mona Siegel has magnificently shown, the political upheaval was significantly embodied by women, in the West and elsewhere. Some fought for the generalisation of the right to vote, others for self-determination or revolution. All shared a common goal, that women’s voices be taken into account in a world that had to be reshaped. The Inter-Allied Women’s conference, from February to April 1919, which was held following the refusal of the Paris negotiators to consider women’s demands independently, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

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Marcus Payk and Roberta Pergher (eds.), Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). Isabel Davion, ‘Les sorties de guerre en Europe centre-orientale (1918–1921): comment les peuples ont eux aussi tracé les frontières’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 129–30, 3 (2018), 35–41. Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, ‘The Great War as a Global War: Imperial Conflict and the Reconfiguration of World Order, 1911–1923’, Diplomatic History 38, 4 (2014), 786–800. Tosh Minohara and Evan Dawley (eds.), Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment and a New Order in East Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020).

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conference in May of that year,25 testified to their determination. A similar counter-conference took place in the same days in Paris, this one composed of Afro-American and African delegates who, with the first Pan-African Congress, raised political claims for the colonial world.26 Ideological tension caused by communist movements and revolutions added to the transformative imaginaries. The revolutionary ideology frightened the victors because of its claim to radically challenge traditional order, but also because of its appeal among the working class of the industrialised nations and among a number of nationalist leaders under colonial domination, who perceived it as a roadmap towards emancipation. The political instability and violence that these discontents and hopes generated spread through the post-war period for many years and showed that the exit from the war was long, uneven and, in some cases, impossible.27 This combination of political disorder, violence, uprisings and popular demands forms the background of the Great Conversation. Speaking of the unique atmosphere of the year 1919, John Horne borrowed Zygmunt Bauman’s the metaphor of a ‘liquid world’, suggesting, with this beautiful image, a reality suddenly spinning out of control, but also evolving so rapidly that it seems impossible to grasp.28 While one may naturally fear turbulence in the face of a potential collapse of traditional reference points, some contemporaries, on the contrary, exalted in the wake of a new era, full of challenges, but above all of promise. War is of course a terrible force of destruction, causing suffering and death, but it also opens up new social, political and ideological potentialities – ‘a double moment, of disenchantment and re-enchantment of the world’, to use Horne’s words again.29

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Siegel, Chapter 14 in this volume; Mona Siegel, Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights after the First World War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Sarah Dunstan, ‘Conflicts of Interest: The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment’, Callaloo 39, 1 (2016), 133–50. Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (London: Penguin, 2016); Mulligan, Great War, 302–38; for an overview on the concept of ‘sortie de guerre’, Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau and Christophe Prochasson (eds.), Sortir de la Grande Guerre: le monde et l’après-1918 (Paris: Tallandier, 2008). Discussion during the study session in 1919 in Global Context, UCD School of History, Dublin, 22 November 2019. ‘Il n’y avait pas de plan de paix’, Entretien avec John Horne (propos recueillis par Béatrice Bouniol), La Croix, 2 October 2018, 20.

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This sense of vertigo can be observed among ‘ordinary people’ – sometimes through their words, sometimes from the general tone of their writing. On 14 December 1918, French officer Auguste Mangeot attended the birth of his first child at exactly the same time as US President Woodrow Wilson made his ceremonial entrance into the French capital, a few weeks before the opening of the peace conference. Mangeot could hear the crowd cheering the president from the hospital room occupied by his wife. That evening he wrote this poignant letter to Woodrow Wilson: When you arrived in France yesterday, I was in a room filled with all the suffering of a woman bringing a child into this world. Seeing my beloved wife, pale and defeated on her bed, hearing her complaints that her mouth contracted by effort could not shut, I couldn’t help but thinking that this spectacle embodied all that our poor humanity had just suffered for more than four years. In bringing together these two pains, that of a mother and that of mankind, I cannot help but believe that if mankind has suffered so much over the last years it is because . . . of a law of nature that birth takes place in the midst of suffering and spilled blood! Your arrival in France gives us hope of this prodigious rebirth.30

Mangeot’s words, elegantly combining private life and epochal history, with a gendered vision of the world to come, illustrate the sometimes eschatological tone of those who are fully aware of living history-in-themaking. It is tempting to consider these feelings as mere expressions of an emotional overflow, of a quasi-religious nature, as if hope was only a defence mechanism against a senseless war. Why not, on the contrary, take them seriously – that is to say, consider these testimonies as proof of a sincere belief, that of the re-enchantment of the world after a terrible suffering, which gave men and women the necessary motivation to invest in peace? Let’s examine another letter sent to Woodrow Wilson in the early days of 1919, written by the Italian Cesare Norsa from Paris: Circumstances prevented me to be what I only intend and can reasonably pretend to be: an anonymous unit in the cheering and greeting and welcoming crowds you met on your triumphal way . . .

30

Library of Congress (Washington), Woodrow Wilson Papers, series 5E, reel 445, Auguste Mangeot to Wilson, 14 December, 1918 (hereafter WWP, 5E, 445). On Auguste Mangeot, see Carl Bouchard, ‘Enfanter la paix: l’arrivée de Woodrow Wilson à Paris’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 129–30, 3–4 (2018), 16–21.

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One day may come when something more than cheers will be wanted for the sake of this faith. I feel it necessary for me to declare that, on that day, I will be personally ready to devote myself totally to it – ‘soul and body’ as we are used to say. I feel that nowadays millions and millions of men would take the same oath and I dream to see them grouped in a modern, open, beneficent, universal Masonry: the ‘Wilsonians’. I have no authority to become a founder of such a League but I shall try all in my power for its realization and for my joining it as the most modest but most active and good willing member. I am, Mister president, Yours very faithfully devoted.31

Norsa, an ‘anonymous unit’, impelled to write to Wilson because of the emotion he felt and the importance of the moment, spoke of the new ‘faith’ of the ‘millions of men’ who, like Mangeot and himself, believed in the birth of a new world. The Wilsonians, that he claimed to belong to, were less admirers of the American president than believers in the promise he embodied. It was in fact the image of Wilson, conscientiously constructed by the American propaganda machine, that they venerated.32 This is how Wilson was able to become one of the catalysts of the Great Conversation. From 1916 onwards, by embracing the increasingly popular project of an international peacekeeping organisation, and by making its realisation his primary objective at the Paris conference, the American president assumed the role of herald of peace. In the months leading up to the November 1918 armistice, his speeches took on an increasingly messianic tone, as he came to present himself as the only one who could, when the time came, channel the interests of humanity: ‘perhaps I am the only person in high authority amongst all the peoples of the world who is at liberty to speak and hold nothing back’, he asserted at the beginning of 1917 in his famous ‘peace without victory’ speech.33 It was also Wilson who, more than any other major politician, spoke of the weight of the ‘opinion of mankind’, which would have significant effects on the Great Conversation (assessed in the following section). One may rightly doubt the sincerity of the American president, whose policy was at the same time more contradictory and far less idealistic than what he had 31 32 33

WWP, 5F, 446, Cesare Norsa to Wilson, 7 January 1919. Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2009). Woodrow Wilson, ‘Address to the Senate of the United States: A World League for Peace’, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-senate-the-united-statesworld-league-for-peace.

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suggested, but his exceptional capacity to have sensed and politically exploited the post-war appetite for renewal must be acknowledged. He chose the right words so that he could be seen, from Paris, Yerevan, Cairo, Saigon, Seoul, Zagreb or Rome, as an ally of all emancipatory causes, while channelling towards him ‘the world’s yearning desire for peace’.34 His decisive influence in the creation of the League of Nations, the extraordinary novelty of which we no longer fully appreciate today, was for millions of souls the tangible sign of a shift into a new era. Despite all the weaknesses and the timorous nature of the Geneva organisation, the fact that politicians born in the nineteenth century and trained in diplomacy of force were able to endorse such a project, shows to what extent the era that was to come was exceptional. The year 1919 was the year of possibilities.

 ‘’ ’? On 27 January 1919, Richard Jennings, under the initials W. M., published an editorial in the British tabloid the Daily Mirror urging his readers to pay close attention to the works of the peace conference, which had opened two weeks earlier.35 For Jennings, it was vital that ‘plain people’ should take an interest in the first subject dealt with at the peace conference, the constitution of the League of Nations, because ‘it is representative of the plain people of the world – President Wilson’s name for them. Dull people? Silly people? People too idealistic, “unpractical”, “ignorant”?’ That’s how people who work to change the world have always been described, Jennings laments. However, the world had changed: ‘it will not do for the League, as last century, to be a governmental League, a Holy Alliance of merely directive diplomatic brains. The difference between 1919 and 1815 is just this – then the “benevolent

34 35

Ibid. This daily newspaper was the first in Great Britain to aim specifically at a female readership. It did not have, at the time, a clear political trend, though it leaned towards the left in the 1920s, then towards the increasingly confident right during the 1930s. Adrian Bingham, ‘Representing the People? The “Daily Mirror”, Class and Political Culture in Inter-War Britain’ in Laura Beers and Geraint Thomas (eds.), Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars (London: University of London Press, 2011), 109–128.

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despots” decide for the peoples; now the peoples must decide for themselves’.36 The editorial took up an idea that gained strength during the war and reached its climax in the first months of 1919, namely that of the ‘people’s peace’. It is a polymorphous expression, which adds to its performative force: it refers as much to the idea of national emancipation, as it had materialised since the nineteenth century, and had revived in the antiimperial and anti-colonial struggle, as to that of the workers in the capitalist world, but also – this is the meaning Jennings gives to it when using the term ‘plain people’ – as to the empowerment of ordinary people and to the idea that the politicians gathered in Paris should, above all, respond to popular aspirations and defend the interests of humanity as a whole. A short-lived French publication, La paix des peuples: Revue internationale de l’organisation politique et économique du monde, to which several prominent French and foreign peace promoters contributed, followed a similar creed in its Programme published in March of the same year: The old spirit of covetousness and oppression must be replaced by a new spirit of justice and liberty. The World can only be assured of peace by the people. The People can only ensure Peace if they know the conditions of the political and economic life of the World. – If opinion is, as President Wilson keeps repeating, the sovereign of the modern world, it is important that it should be widely informed of the great problems of War and Peace, as from the solution of these problems depend the life and happiness of men.37

Informed of international problems, opinion, now ‘the sovereign of the modern world’, would thus apparently be called upon to play a preeminent role in the conduct of the world, as if a new right, that of the ‘right to peace’, was emerging from the sacrifices that men and women had made over the previous five years. This was a political rather than a legal claim – different, therefore, from the right to peace as it developed after the Second World War around the issue of human rights:38 in 1919, it was mostly the right to take part in the peace in the making, that was

36 37 38

W. M. (Richard Jennings), ‘Attention for the Conference!’, Daily Mirror, 27 January 1919, 5. ‘Notre Programme’, La paix des peuples. Revue internationale de l’organisation politique et économique du monde, First year, 2, 10 March 1919, 2nd cover page. Philip Alston, ‘Peace as a Human Right’, Bulletin of Peace Proposals 11, 4 (1980), 319–29.

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claimed. This quasi-revolutionary demand was a direct response to the propaganda carried out by the belligerents themselves, particularly on the Allied side, which transformed the world conflict into a ‘people’s war’.39 The exact expression was used by Woodrow Wilson in June 1917, and commonly taken up in the months that followed, to the detriment of the meaning given to it by the American president: ‘This is a People’s War, a war for freedom and justice and self-government amongst all the nations of the world.’40 Finally, this idea is connected to the emergence of what David Englander calls a ‘citizen identity’ which, in modern armies, particularly those with conscription, had the effect of disrupting the traditional power relations between soldiers and commanders.41 Thus, in war as in peace, the extent of citizen’s rights was an object of debate, which raises, ultimately, the issue of sovereignty. Indeed, the First World War gave rise to a reflection on the fundamental question of where power should reside. Leonard Smith, in an enlightening work on the notion of sovereignty in the context of the Paris negotiations in 1919, defines it as ‘the right or the authority to set the parameters of political society’.42 Wilson’s use of the term ‘world public opinion’ – which Smith describes as ‘radical’ – undermined the foundation on which the concept of sovereignty had been built since the modern era, while, paradoxically, the American president constantly repeated that the primary aim of the new world order had to be to preserve the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states.43 For Trygve Throntveit, the meaning that Wilson gave to this expression was limited in scope: the League of Nations, a world deliberative body, would undoubtedly have to be based on the orientation dictated by a ‘world public opinion’, and it was up to the politicians to feel its pulse and to fulfil its aspirations, but it 39

40 41

42 43

Annie Deperchin, ‘Sortir de la Grande Guerre: Le droit des peuples et la construction de la paix’ in Serge Dauchy and Milos Vec (eds.), Les conflits entre peuples: De la résolution libre à la résolution imposée (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2011), 139. Woodrow Wilson, ‘Address on Flag Day’, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/206616. David Englander, ‘Discipline and Morale in the British Army, 1917–1918’ in John Horne, State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125–43. Smith, Chapter 3 in this volume; Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 9–15. Wilson mentioned this principle for the first time in his speech at the League to Enforce Peace on 27 May 1916: Woodrow Wilson, ‘Address delivered at the First Annual Assemblage of the League to Enforce Peace: “American Principles”’, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ node/206570.

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was out of the question to grant real power to public opinion, which was only the theoretical guarantor of international morality and, therefore, only had a normative power.44 Because of the American president’s reluctance to publicly detail his thoughts for fear of losing his political latitude, the expression ‘world public opinion’ took on a much more concrete meaning among the population. World public opinion, people’s peace: the right to peace that these two expressions subsume was perceived, from then on, as a new power that would allow citizens to act directly for peace and no longer only indirectly – that is, through the political channel that traditionally constituted national political representation – in the name of the imperative which humanity was facing.45 The Great Conversation feeds on this conceptual ambiguity: to take part in the discussion on world order, to give one’s opinion on how to build peace, was to carry out the aspirations of this new force on the international scene.

       The discussion about a ‘world public opinion’, in other words, the role that a citizen’s voice, reaching beyond national borders, could play, had already taken place during the war, especially within the elite and among associations campaigning in favour of the establishment of an international organisation. In the numerous essays dealing with the idea of a sustainable peace and on world order published during the four years of the conflict, the discussion evolved around the quantifiable issue of representation within the international organisation.46 The question is similar to the one raised by Balfour in 1916: would the future League of Nations be only an association of states or would it make room for citizens through specifically elected representatives? Positions regarding this important issue were nuanced, but it was generally acknowledged that the doctrine of national sovereignty was so pregnant that it was unrealistic to think that states would accept such a challenge to their power, 44 45

46

Trygve Throntveit, Power without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). For a discussion on how this interpretation led to disagreements between the French and the American delegations during the drafting of the League of Nations Covenant, see Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 265–75. Bouchard, Le citoyen et l’ordre mondial, 149–55.

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within a structure that would thus tend towards supranationalism. However, for contemporaries, recognising the limits of what states could agree to in the name of the common good did not mean that one should not learn the lessons of recent years – on the contrary. This is, for example, what Gilbert Murray did in his 1918 book: The League of Nations and the Democratic Idea. This Oxford professor of ancient Greek suggested that each state should send six members, chosen by the national governments, to the future international organisation, but added an explicit condition: that the delegates should not be career diplomats. Murray believed that the latter bore considerable responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, and therefore no longer had the credibility to embody the new international order, especially in a world that one wished to become increasingly democratic and where public opinion would play an increasingly important role.47 Such a disavowal of the traditional actors of international relations underlines the fact that the questioning of norms provoked by the world conflict was profound. During the war, however, the discussion remained largely confined to internationalist circles, that of the ‘promoters of peace’, internationalists active at the heart of the intellectual world and on the periphery of political circles – Murray being the archetype.48 Essays about lasting peace published during the war were proposals that aimed to participate in a common, but still theoretical and largely elitist, reflection on the role that states would, or would not, grant to citizens in the new world order.49 In contrast, the letters sent to President Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations symbolise the direct intervention of ‘ordinary people’ in the political sphere, that is to say their attempt – albeit vain – to steer decision-making and play an active role in redefining this new order.

47

48 49

Gilbert Murray, The League of Nations and the Democratic Idea (London: Oxford University Press, 1918), 22–24. This proposal bears parallels with that of the Union for Democratic Control. Bouchard, Le citoyen et l’ordre mondial, 66–67. Various projects submitted by citizens and sent directly to public authorities are available for consultation in the archives of the French foreign ministry and the British foreign office: Archives du ministère des affaires étrangères (AMAE), Papiers d’agent, 29, Léon Bourgeois, vol. 16, SDN, Projets et correspondances, 1916–19; Correspondance politique et commerciale, A. Paix, dossier général, vol. 7–11, 20–21; Travaux préparatoires de la Conférence, vol. 305; TNA, FO 800/400 Correspondence respecting to the League of Nations matters; FO 608/241 and FO 608/242 Peace Conference, British Delegation, General Correspondence, 1919.

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      :    In my research on the letters to Wilson, I focused on those sent from France, as they are the most common of the missives, due to Wilson’s physical proximity in Paris, where he resided for close to six months, and also because of the phenomenal appeal Wilsonism had in that country until spring 1919. It is necessary to point out that only a portion of the thousands of letters submitted to the American president address the issue of peace or post-war world order head-on. The majority rather express gratitude or various requests (for money or material aid, housing, the search for a soldier who disappeared during the war, etc.), evidence of the difficult situation for the French population during those months. The letters also reveal that American propaganda had skilfully instilled in the public sphere Wilson’s reputation for generosity and humanity: the mere fact of writing to the American president, in a mental universe where deference to ‘great men’ was the standard, was in itself remarkable. But even in the letters which do not directly address world peace, it is particularly striking to note how much space the prospects for peace and Wilsonian rhetoric occupied in the public but also in the private sphere. The letters confirm that peace and the Paris conference were discussed in cafés, in factories or in households during family dinners, and are proof that the Great Conversation about the future of the world took place even in the humblest of homes. While it is tempting to see ‘public opinion’ largely as a catchword invoked by elites and decision-makers to advance their own agenda (and it certainly looks like this if considering only their writings), letters from ordinary men and women offer a less cynical portrait and show that a broad public opinion is indeed emerging in the aftermath of the Great War.50 Perhaps the most revealing accounts come from French pupils and students, telling Wilson about their classroom discussions and educational initiatives about peace – one can, without exaggerating, claim that a new norm emerges when children in general schools are encouraged to speak out in class on a given subject. In February 1919, the young boys of the Montfaucon-du-Lot School presented their project for a ‘little republic’ to Wilson, a sort of school club where children would see to the ‘blossoming of [Wilsonian] principles in our ardent hearts, with a view

50

Wertheim, ‘Reading the International Mind’.

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to preparing our consciences and our young minds for the realisation of the League of nations’.51 A few weeks earlier, the members of the Rennes Student’s Association had sent a moving testimony of gratitude to the American president in which they stated that they had taken on the task of embodying and transmitting ‘the new ideas’ that Wilsonism advanced for renewing the world.52 Another letter, from Georges Brun, indirectly mentioned the discussion that took place in so many French schools: Brun told the American president that his grandchildren had spoken about Wilson and his ideas at school and then later at home.53 Citizens, more specifically, talked about their new right to discuss peace and, consequently, to share their opinions with the most powerful and prestigious interlocutor in the world. French women, who did not have the right to vote in their own country, spoke out, illustrating that the Great Conversation opened up unprecedented spaces for political action: one of these women, who presented herself as a countess and requested anonymity, submitted to Wilson an impressive 100-page memoir on peace and world order, which she modestly presented as her ‘little project for a League of Nations’.54 Joseph Vanpoulle wrote to the president on 12 December 1918: ‘I am only a humble private individual, with no special mandate, who has to work hard to earn a living for myself and my family: my opinion is therefore very personal, but nevertheless, I sincerely believe it to be representative of millions of other similar opinions.’55 This act of writing, by this refugee from the north, was that of a citizen concerned about the fate of his country and the world: would he have dared to make such a gesture thirty, twenty or even ten years earlier? And above all, would he have thought of addressing a foreign politician, and sharing with him his opinion on how to make peace? A citizen of the town of Blois, F. Dronne, who submitted to Wilson his vision of the international organisation, was surprised by his own audacity to write to such a great man: he confessed to him that he ‘had been incited by a group of friends to . . . briefly submit a few ideas, the subject of our discussions’.56 Between the lines of this missive, a social space appears, outside family circles, in which friends discussed their ideas 51 52 53 54 55 56

WWP, 5D, 431, Letter from the boys of Montfaucon-du-Lot to Wilson, 10 February 1919. WWP, 5D, 417, Letter from the Student association of Rennes to Wilson, 13 December 1918. WWP, 5E, 446, Georges Brun to Wilson, undated (December 1918 ?). WWP, 5E, 443, Comtesse de. . . to Wilson, 17 January 1919. WWP, 5D, 417, Joseph Vanpoulle to Wilson, 12 December 1918. WWP, 5D, 431, F. Dronne to Wilson, 18 February 1919.

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about international order. But it is perhaps Mr Ménand, writing to Wilson on 12 February 1919, who most explicitly expressed his desire to also take part in the Great Conversation: ‘Mr. President, from the right of people, which you affirm, derives unquestionably the right of citizens to express their opinions’, he asserted, skilfully using the argument of the right of peoples to justify the sending of his missive.57

        The most emblematic site of the new world order was the League of Nations. Throughout its twenty years of existence, the organisation received thousands of letters from men and women concerned about the fate of the world. This act reflects the hiatus caused by the competing concept of sovereignty mentioned earlier – can a ‘world opinion’ exist outside the framework of national representation? Indeed, the officials in charge of collecting letters from individuals regularly noted, when they acknowledged their receipt, that citizen’s reflections, or peace projects, however thorough they may be, should not be submitted to the League of Nations, as it was an organisation of states; if they were to be included in the agenda of international discussions, these proposals had to be transmitted to a national government.58 However, this is certainly not how the citizens who wrote to Geneva perceived the role of the international organisation: on the contrary, its very existence led them to believe that, when it came to world peace, the opinion of ordinary people should rather be expressed beyond national entities, and the League was viewed as the only disinterested international actor, the only one that could, for that matter, go beyond national interest that many suspected of being the source of conflicts between nations. However, the League’s own formal rule was not uniformly applied. As exemplified by the following case, officials participated in the dialogue with citizens, in part because of their personal belief, in part in the prospect of improving the organisation’s ‘transnational legitimacy’, to use Karen Gram-Skjoldager’s expression.59 The young Allister Mathews took the liberty of writing to the League on 1 May 1930: 57 58

59

WWP, 5D, 431, M. Ménand to Wilson, 12 February 1919. For a general overview, see Carl Bouchard, ‘Towards Peace and Reconciliation after the Great War: Letter-Writing to the League of Nations’ in Bruno Charbonneau and Geneviève Parent (eds.), Peacebuilding, Memory and Reconciliation: Bridging TopDown and Bottom-Up Approaches (New York: Routledge, 2012), 177–94. Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 in this volume.

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Sir, I and various young men of my generation (I am 23 years old), realising the insanity of war, wish to know how we may be of most service in the event of war being declared in the future. Under no conditions would we fight in any nationalistic army. However, we feel there would be much work to be done by internationally-minded and energetic people. Can you enlighten us? . . . In friendship, Alister Mathews60

Less than a week later, Alister Mathews received a personalised reply from none other than Konni Zilliacus,61 a well-known British internationalist working at the time in the League’s Information Section. In a pageand-a-half reply to the young man, Zilliacus asserts his obligation regarding circumspection as a member of the League’s Secretariat, but is still eager to advise him, advocating in particular education for peace and the involvement of the new generations. The tone of the letter reflects the particular attention that the League of Nations officials paid to certain letters: Dear Sir, It is a little difficult to know what reply to send to your letter of May 1st. We members of the Secretariat are supposed to be international officials confined to the prosaic job of serving League conferences and committees and purveying strictly objective information about the aims and activities of the League. When, therefore, you ask what advice to give to those of the post-war generation, you find me, I fear, compulsorily dumb as an official. There is nothing in the staff rules or the terms of reference of the Secretariat to supply an answer! However, as someone who belongs to the generation that went through the world-war I have strong views on the matter and I cannot resist the temptation of giving you them. But please understand that what I am about to say is purely personal for the reasons I have just given.62

When having to deal with these types of letters, public officials proceeded in the same way in which William Rappard dealt with the pacifist JülligBroda’s draft: they were read, annotated, summarised and forwarded to the relevant offices, sometimes even up to the office of the Secretary General, who personally replied to some. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that it was regularly reminded that it had no jurisdiction to take individual proposals into account and to make use of them, the League nurtured this practice of writing, particularly within the Secretariat, 60 61 62

LONA, R3576, file 50/5032/5032, Letter from Alister Mathews, 1 May 1930 (author’s emphasis). Archie Potts, ‘Zilliacus, Konni (1894–1967), internationalist and politician’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/55670. LONA, R3576, file 50/5032/5032, Letter from K. Zilliacus to Alister Mathews, 6 May 1930.

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composed of internationalists, who saw themselves as fully fledged actors in promoting the ideals of peace.63 On at least three occasions, the League encouraged a dialogue with citizens on international issues: first, in 1920–21, when the organisation considered proposals for amendments to the Covenant, in the late 1920s, indirectly, in the context of a competition on the League’s flag, and later in the early 1930s, at the opening of the General Conference on Disarmament. In May 1921, the American T. E. Cunningham transmitted, under the recommendation of the League of Nations, his proposals for amendments to the Covenant, as states also did when submitting various official proposals for debate in the Assembly. This American citizen’s letter (three introductory pages and then a twelve-page amended covenant) was sent to the office of the 3rd Committee on Amendments for examination, accompanied by a summary written by a League employee. In total, this individual’s amendment proposition passed through the hands of no fewer than nineteen people, working in six different sections; it is likely that some of them would have read it carefully. The records of the League of Nations show that many individual letters received a similar treatment. Although a standard acknowledgement was the norm, many, like Mathews or Cunningham, who submitted detailed, serious ideas, were honoured with personalised replies. This only reinforced their belief that they now had a role to play in world affairs, and that a sympathetic interlocutor welcomed the expression of their ideas. The second episode, that of the League of Nations flag, was an indirect form of dialogue in that the initiative did not originate from the Geneva body. However, it was a new expression of ordinary people’s commitment to the cause of world peace, even if its scope was largely symbolic. In 1929 and 1930, an international competition launched by the International Union of Associations for the League of Nations, based in Brussels, invited people from all over the world to submit their proposals for the design of a flag for the League of Nations – which it still lacked ten years after its creation – so that it could assert its international presence. More than 3,000 designs were submitted in total, and a few hundred were addressed wrongly to Geneva instead of Brussels. The letters accompanying the drawings, sketches and scale models are evidence of the way in which citizens perceived the role of the international organisation. Indeed, 63

Susan Pedersen, ‘The League of Nations as a Site of Political Imagination (The Nicolai Rubinstein lecture, 2017)’, doi: 10.7916/D80K3SK5; Gram-Skjoldager, ‘League of Nations’.

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for the citizens, the flag not only represented an international marker and the legal legitimacy of the international organisation, but also embodied the essence of the international community, what defined it and what it wished to project to the world. In its own way, therefore, this competition engendered the empowerment of citizens after the war; they considered themselves directly involved in international life through this joint effort to design an emblem for the institution.64 It is ironic that the Geneva competition led to no result, as the League of Nations never managed, during its short existence, to agree an official flag.65 The last episode involving the League of Nations took place at the opening of the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments in 1932, generally known as the World Disarmament Conference. The long-prepared and anticipated event attracted international attention and provoked an unprecedented mobilisation of pacifist associations.66 In many respects, it marked a turning point in the interwar period, especially as, for many pacifists, it was the last opportunity for states to demonstrate their willingness to take concrete steps for peace, not only in words or through timid actions. But the monumental failure of the conference marked, to use Zara Steiner’s words, the moment of ‘retreat from internationalism’ in a deteriorating international context.67 In the early months of the conference, thousands of letters from ‘ordinary people’ arrived in Geneva, encouraged by peace groups that, for their part, organised petition campaigns to put pressure on national delegations. In total, the petitions collected almost 10 million signatures. It is particularly striking to notice in the letters the sense of urgency, the worried optimism and the clear awareness of what was at stake: the act of writing intended to remind decision-makers that world public opinion, expressed in as many nations as were represented in Geneva, strongly supported disarmament and could not accept that the decisions made did 64

65

66 67

See Carl Bouchard, ‘Un drapeau pour la SDN : Rappeler ce qui unit et oublier ce qui divise’ in Michel De Waele and Stephan Martens (eds.), Mémoire et oubli: controverses de la Rome antique à nos jours (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2015), 105–21. An unofficial flag was produced in a rush in 1939, following the demand of the organisers of the New York World’s Fair that a flag should float over the League of Nations pavilion. Davies, The Possibilities of Transnational Activism. Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History, 1933–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Haakon Ikonomou, ‘The Administrative Anatomy of Failure: The League of Nations Disarmament Section, 1919–1925’, Contemporary European History 30, 3 (2021), 321–34.

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not live up to their expectations. The Secretary General of the conference and former Labour cabinet member, Arthur Henderson, acknowledged the ‘weight’ of opinion by putting it on display: he had the bulk of letters he had received and the millions of signatures on petitions placed along the corridor leading the national delegates to the conference plenary hall, as a reminder of their duty and of the gaze of men and women weighing upon them.68 The gesture was meaningful, but futile: as the months went by, the citizens witnessed less the disarmament efforts than the dilatory manoeuvres of the states, and the letters expressed the impatience and exasperation facing the dialogue of the deaf that dragged on in Geneva. The episode clearly showed the limits of ordinary citizens’ agency, and for many it led to their own ‘retreat from internationalism’, as the failure of the conference marked the end of their hopes regarding lasting peace.

 The Great Conversation that took place in the wake of the First World War did not directly influence international politics. However, a phenomenon did emerge at that time that can be seen as part of the evolution of contemporary international relations. As John Horne has argued, one of the ways in which the belligerent states mobilised their populations was by emphasising the transformative nature of the Great War: military victory became a step, certainly a crucial one, but not an end in itself, in the establishment of a world different from the one that had led to the 1914 conflagration, one that was fairer and more concerned with the rights of citizens and nations.69 In this way, some decision-makers skilfully managed to take the pulse of public opinion and provide a profound and salutary meaning to a deadly struggle. The main reason for Wilson’s immense popularity at the end of the war was that he had been able to see, as no one else had, beyond victory. Indeed, the American president came to Paris with a certain vision of peace, and although it wasn’t clearly legible, it was at least capable of opening up new possibilities, even if it meant making room for excessively high expectations. Clearly, the invocation of the ‘people’s peace’ remained a rhetorical device. Wilson’s main 68 69

LONA, R2456, file 31155/34690, Note from the General Secretary to the World Disarmament Conference, 16 February 1932. John Horne, ‘Guerres et réconciliations européennes au 20e siècle’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’histoire 4, 104 (2009), 3–15.

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goal at the Paris conference was to guarantee territorial integrity and national sovereignty, not to give ‘world public opinion’ anything more than a symbolic or a moral power over international relations. He was fearful of any abrupt change that might cause further disorder in a world already disrupted by war and confronted with popular and revolutionary uprisings, and he traded in his role of herald of peace for that of a negotiator – far more of a realist than one would like to admit. From the new world promised in 1919, only a League of Nations was born, an organisation that was resolutely innovative but still structured on the power foundations of international relations. The Great Conversation was the discursive manifestation of this appetite for renewal. Women and men truly believed in the transformative nature of war, especially when the events of the last months of the war showed that the social, political and ideological fever was gaining momentum. Moreover, the human toll of war became an argument in favour of a new legitimacy of citizens at the international level: giving ‘ordinary people’ a voice in redefining the world was a reward for their sacrifices. Political scientist Bertrand Badie has sought to trace the origins of what he describes as a paradigmatic shift in international relations: the ‘appropriation of foreign policy by the population’.70 For Badie, the signs of this appropriation can already be found in the nineteenth century, but it is only at the end of the following century, with the communications revolution and the resulting interconnectivity, that its real effects could begin to be seen. The political scientist refers to the role of Wilson and of the League of Nations in this process as a ‘path traced’, but ultimately with no real impact.71 As this chapter has shown, the Great Conversation was on the contrary the tipping point towards this involvement in international relations. The Great War gave citizens what I have called a ‘right to peace’, whose scope was not limited to national borders. It is precisely this gap between the demands of the citizen’s consciousness and the national limitations imposed by nation-states that led men and women to question the place of sovereignty and, consequently, the ‘democratic’ practice of international relations. Was Wilson’s famous expression, that the peace settlement would have to ‘make the world a safe place for

70 71

Bertrand Badie, ‘L’opinion à la conquête de l’international’, Raisons politiques 19, 3 (2005), 9–24. Ibid., 11.

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democracy’,72 sincere – in other words, was it really going to lead to a democratisation of international relations, and thus to a system that allowed the citizen’s voice to be heard beyond national boundaries? Was this not, in fact, the true meaning of self-determination? The Great Conversation raised fundamental questions about citizenship in the modern world and on the capacity of the international system to embrace new norms, and has thus laid the foundations of today’s ‘international civil society’. In April 1934, an American resident of Cuba, Frederick Norman, in a letter introducing the plan for global disarmament that he submitted to the League of Nations two months after the opening of the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, wrote the following: It was a private individual who invented the steam engine, the electric lamp; it was a private individual who discovered radium and the X-rays; it may perhaps be a private individual who finally shall succeed in finding a way to disarm because private individuals are more likely to regard the world as a whole than are officers, hired by governments whose principal duty consists of safeguarding the national interests.73

The interwar period thus offers a curious paradox. Ordinary people felt the need to take part in the great collective reflection on peace and world order; like Frederick Norman they claimed the need to go beyond national interests to consider the interests of humanity, and they demanded a right to peace which required the democratisation of international relations. However, the twenty or so years following the First World War also witnessed a full-scale attack on liberal-type democracy, from both the right and the left, and an increasingly clear retreat from internationalism as the 1930s progressed. The Great War did open up a world of possibilities, yet the ‘greatest of all political problems’ highlighted by Balfour remained unsolved.

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Woodrow Wilson, ‘Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War against Germany’, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/207620. LONA, R4223, file 7B1660/664, Letter from Frederick Norman to Arthur Henderson, 29 April 1934.

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13 An Alternative International Relations Socialists, Socialist Internationalism and the Post-War Order Talbot Imlay

One notable feature of the evolution of international history as a field of study since the early twentieth century is the growth in the number and types of actors. And perhaps nowhere is this feature more in evidence than in the voluminous scholarship on peacemaking after the First World War. Initially, historians focused on a small group of decision-makers, the Big Three or Four along with their closest advisors. The African-American historian W. E. B. Du Bois, who was in Paris during the peace conference, captured the appeal of this approach. ‘The destinies of mankind for a hundred years to come’, he reported, ‘are being settled to-day in a small room of the Hotel Crillon by four unobtrusive gentlemen who glance out spectacularly now and then to Cleopatra’s Needle on the Place de la Concorde.’1 Individuals in powerful positions, Du Bois recognised, can wield immense influence. At the same time, Du Bois’ very presence in Paris (as well as the mention of Cleopatra’s Needle), points to a more expansive cast of actors. Subsequent scholars have done much to enlarge this cast – as the chapters by Carl Bouchard (Chapter 12), Mona Siegel (Chapter 14) and Erez Manela (Chapter 15) among others indicate. Participants in Paris now include the experts serving on national delegations, the lobbyists for various causes and the small army of journalists covering the peace conference for diverse audiences at home. Growing attention has also been directed to actors outside Paris such as political 1

Du Bois is cited in Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 179–80. A focus on decision-makers remains popular, a prominent recent example being Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003).

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movements, trade unionists, military and paramilitary forces, and anticolonial militants, all of whom were active on the ground in Europe and beyond and of all whom sought to stamp their own imprint on the emerging post-war order in its local, regional and international articulations.2 Among the actors who have been drawn into this expanding cast are socialists. As early as the 1930s, Merle Fainsod, a pioneering scholar of Soviet history, challenged the prevailing view, which remains tenacious today, that the onset of war in 1914 dealt a fatal blow to the Second International as well as to a flourishing socialist internationalism – the well-established practice of consultation and cooperation across party lines.3 As Fainsod showed, European socialists worked from the outset to overcome deepening wartime tensions within and between parties, striving to renew contacts across the belligerent divide. In addition to gatherings in Zimmerwald in September 1915 and in Kienthal in April 1916, both dominated by anti-militarists opposed to the continuation of the war, a conference was planned for Stockholm in September 1917 that aimed to be more representative of the cross-currents of wartime socialism. Although the conference never took place, the extensive preparations for it underscore the ongoing commitment of European socialists to socialist internationalism, even if they also point to major disagreements concerning the meaning and purpose of this internationalism.4 Given this

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Representative examples are Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917–1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2016); Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Erik Goldstein, Winning the Peace: British Diplomatic Strategy, Peace Planning, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). For an overview, see Jay Winter, ‘The Second Great War, 1917–1923’, Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar 7 (2018), 160–79. For two recent studies of pre-1914 socialist internationalism, see Elisa Marcobelli, L’Internationalisme à l’épreuve des crises: la IIe Internationale et les socialistes français, allemands et italiens (1889–1915) (Nancy: Arbre bleu, 2009); Nicolas Delalande, La lutte et l’entreaide: l’âge des solidarités ouvrieres (Paris: Seuil, 2019). Merle Fainsod, International Socialism and the World War (New York: Octagon Books, 1966 ed.). For subsequent scholarship, see Andrea Beneditti, ‘L’Internationale et la paix: les stratégies des socialismes scandinaves et l’échec de la conférence de Stockholm, 1914–1918’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 279 (2020), 13–30; William Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 217–18; David Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution: International Socialism at the Crossroads 1914–1918 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986); R. Craig Nation, War on War: Lenin, the Zimmerwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989); Agnes Blänsdorf, Die Zweite

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commitment, it is not surprising that soon after the armistice on the western front, socialists from both the victorious and defeated states met in Berne in February 1919. It is tempting to frame this chapter in terms of international history’s ever larger cast of actors. Beginning with the run-up to the Berne conference, the chapter would examine socialist internationalism, defined as the international and transnational activities of socialists, integrating these activities into the larger story of peacemaking. The goal would be to contribute to a richer and more inclusive history. However tempting such a framing, this chapter proposes something different: to consider socialist internationalism not as one element of a more complex and multifaceted history, but as a separate phenomenon. Or, more precisely, to approach socialist internationalism as an experiment in international relations – one meant to offer a distinct and even alternative form of international relations to the one dominated by state actors. Admittedly, the result is somewhat artificial, akin more to a controlled laboratory experiment than to the this-world analyses of most historical scholarship. It is difficult to isolate socialists and socialist parties from the national political settings in which they were embedded. And some parties were close to and sometimes in government. It is also true that one purpose of the Berne conference was to influence the proceedings underway in Paris. Writing in January 1919, the German socialist Victor Schiff, soon to be appointed Vorwärts’ foreign policy editor, exhorted socialists to mobilise in Berne to ensure a ‘just and democratic peace’. The ‘peace conference looms before us’, he added, and ‘the International must collectively be victorious.’5 Nevertheless, the experiment is arguably less artificial than it might first appear. The purpose of the socialist internationalism, after all, was never simply instrumentalist in a directly political sense. By the end of the nineteenth century, institutionalised cooperation between socialists across party and national lines had become a fundamental characteristic of socialism, contributing to the creation of an international socialist community. While no consensual definition of community exists, one recurring aspect in discussions of the subject is separation, though not

5

Internationale und der Krieg: Die Diskussion über die internationale Zusammenarbeit der sozialistischen Parteien 1914–1917 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979). Victor Schiff, ‘Die Frage der Kriegschuld in Bern’, Die Glocke, 25 January 1919, 1342–47.

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necessarily isolation.6 Communities separate themselves from others through a variety of means, including membership rules, subcultures and identities. The pre-1914 Second International employed all three: clear criteria for admission; a culture with its own lexicon, rituals, historical references and doctrinal sources; and a shared identity involving mutual expectations and obligations.7 As a community, moreover, socialist internationalism, the institutional expression of which was the International, functioned as a site for socialists (and socialists alone) to consult on issues of common concern and to work out ‘socialist’ positions on them. If this endeavour affirmed and reaffirmed the collective commitment to the community, it also actualised the hope of identifying policy positions distinct from those of non-socialists and especially of nonsocialist governments. It is in this sense that socialist internationalism constituted a parallel – and potentially alternative – form of international relations to the one dominated by interstate diplomacy.8 To be sure, socialists were not alone in practising a parallel or even alternative international relations. Anti-colonial militants, anarchosyndicalists, feminists, academics and moral reformers were among the groups engaged in what Atom Getachew recently called ‘worldmaking’ – the act of collectively imagining an international relations that would be less hierarchical, less patriarchal and less unequal. In the case of middle class women, Leila Rupp argues that their sustained international cooperation, the formal and informal structures they built, the ‘collective consciousness’ they forged and the meanings of feminism they grappled over, together ‘served as a model of what society might be’.9 What makes socialists particularly interesting in terms of an alternative international 6

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For discussions of community, see Graham Day, Community and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2006); Adrian Little, The Politics of Community: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002); Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). For examples, see Delalande, La Lutte et l’entreaide; and Kevin Callahan, ‘“Performing Inter-Nationalism” in Stuttgart in 1907: French and German Socialist Nationalism and the Political Culture of an International Socialist Culture’, International Review of Social History 45 (2000), 51–87. A comparable analysis is Vernon Lidtke’s study of the social-democratic milieu in pre1914 imperial Germany: The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labour in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 207–29. Also see Siegel, Chapter 14 in this volume.

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relations is, paradoxically perhaps, their rootedness in national politics, which arguably injected a strong dose of practicality into the practice of socialist internationalism. Like other non-state internationalisms, socialist internationalism potentially constituted an alternative form of international relations because it was self-consciously separate (the work of socialists and socialists alone), and also because its purpose was to demonstrate that socialists, working together across party and national lines, could come up with different and better solutions to pressing international issues. At the same time, because socialists were deeply embedded in national politics and, indeed, sought to form national governments, their internationalism remained closely attuned to local conditions while also ranging widely in scope. Socialist parties simply could neither limit their attention to single issues nor side-step the imbrications between international or national politics. The socialist version of international relations comprised two interrelated elements. One consisted of socialist policy positions, which themselves were dual natured: the principles or guidelines of international policy on the one hand and positions on concrete policies on the other. The other element involved what Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann termed the ‘mechanics of internationalism’: the structures, both formal and informal, which made possible the prolonged practice of cooperation between socialists from different parties and states.10 The rest of this chapter explores socialist internationalism in the immediate post-war years from 1918 to 1923, when the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) was founded. The first section examines the principles of socialist internationalism, a subject rendered fraught by the Bolshevik surge beginning in 1917. If the Bolsheviks’ peculiar version of socialist internationalism provoked considerable dissent, the stakes involved for socialists cannot be reduced to a simple choice between revolution and reform. Indeed, European socialists formulated at least two non-Bolshevik versions of socialist internationalism, both of which embodied oppositional aspects: a nationalist reformist one and a revolutionary non-Bolshevik one. It was these two versions that combined in 1923 to create the LSI. Moving from principles to policy, the chapter’s second section explores the extent to which this combined version of 10

Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially Moira Donald, ‘Workers of the World Unite? Exploring the Enigma of the Second International’, 177–203.

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socialist internationalism can be considered as an experiment in an alternative form of international relations by considering the concrete issue of reparations. Working together, non-Bolshevik socialists succeeded in fashioning a distinct socialist position on the issue, one, incidentally, that prefigured aspects of the Dawes Plan.

   By the time armistice on the western front came into effect in November 1918, the very bases not simply of socialist internationalism but also of the socialist understanding of international relations had been profoundly shaken. The roots of this upheaval lay in the immediate pre-war years. Before 1914, the broad guidelines of socialist thinking about international politics seemed fairly well-established: support for the pacific resolution of interstate conflicts through arbitration, anti-militarism reflected in calls for sharp reductions in armaments spending as well in the preference for militias over professional armed services, an end to territorial expansion coupled with significant reform of colonial practices, and liberalised international exchanges. To be sure, Jean Jaures’ famous statement that ‘capitalism carries war within itself as clouds carry the storm’ pointed to a more oppositional stance towards the existing political and economic order at home and abroad. Within the Second International, however, the dominant parties were reformist, participating in national (and subnational) politics and envisaging an electoral route to political power. Presumably, as socialist parties gained electoral strength in more and more countries, they would be well placed to blunt the competitive and aggressive proclivities of national (bourgeois) governments, resulting in a progressive pacification of international relations. It is no secret that the Second International’s reformist ethos did not command a consensus. Individuals, groupuscules and some member parties militated for a more oppositional stance, arguing that socialists should actively work to overthrow the existing order instead of cherishing misguided hopes that it could be reformed out of existence. At the same time, in the immediate pre-war years the International was increasingly preoccupied with the menace of war. The response was a politics of deterrence: the International organised grand displays of socialist unity and solidarity in the hope of dampening the bellicose ardour of governments by fostering doubts about the willingness of the working masses to support national war efforts. Deterrence politics generated tensions among socialists who disagreed on what could and should be done if

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deterrence failed and a general war occurred.11 Still, the emphasis was on displaying the combined strength of international socialism, resulting in vaguely worded resolutions, such as those at the Basel conference in November 1912. Describing the pageantry of the conference, the French socialist Jean Longuet rhapsodised about the ‘unforgettable and grandiose gathering’ of over 500 delegates who formed a ‘community of thought and action . . . that cannot but impress any attentive observer of the international socialist movement’.12 If this emphasis led many government officials (and some socialists) to exaggerate the movement’s coherence and determination, it also arguably hampered the further development of socialist thinking about international relations.13 The experience of war upended socialist thinking on international relations. Socialist politics – both within and between parties – polarised over the question of whether to support the nation at war. A growing and vociferous minority of socialists, which by 1918 threatened to form the majority within several parties, clamoured for an end to the war through negotiations, decisively breaking with government policy that insisted on peace through military victory. Although this wartime minority extended well beyond the Bolsheviks, it was the latter who raised the political stakes, not only because of their uncompromising embrace of revolutionary defeatism, but even more so because of their successful coup d’état in Russia in late 1917.14 From the beginning, moreover, a mix of desperation and conviction transformed the Bolsheviks into fervent proselytisers, straining to impose their model of revolutionary politics – and of socialist internationalism – on the larger international socialist community. The divisions within international socialism would be evident in February 1919 when some eighty socialists from twenty-one different parties gathered in Berne. An editorial in the Daily Herald, a newspaper close the British Labour Party, extolled the conference as ‘one of the most 11

12 13

14

For two classic studies, see James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968 ed.); Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Les Socialismes français et allemands et le problème de la guerre, 1870–1914 (Geneva: Droz, 1953). Jean Longuet, Le mouvement socialiste international (Geneva: Minkoff, 1976 ed.), 6, 72–73. For a plea for more serious debate among socialists on foreign policy, see Rudolf Hilferding, ‘Der Parteitage und die auswärtige Politik’, Die Neue Zeit 49 (1911), 799–806. For the single-minded determination of the Bolsheviks, see Laura Engelstein, Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914–1921 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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important events in the world’s history’, a testimony to ‘the courage and loyalty of international Socialists the world over’.15 As mentioned, the conference did bring together participants from the victor and defeated states, an element, socialist observers proudly announced, that distinguished Berne from the peace conference then underway in Paris. Indeed, the presence of German socialists at Berne stoked the suspicions of French intelligence officials, who feared that international socialism would become an instrument of German policy.16 Yet beneath the expressions of unity lurked considerable tensions. The Bolsheviks were absent, as were the Belgian socialists who refused to meet their German counterparts face-to-face. More generally, the participants agreed on very little, whether in terms of precise issues (territorial questions, the nature of a League of Nations) or in terms of the bases of post-war international order (the relationship between democracy, dictatorship and revolution). Any unity achieved at Berne, a well-informed British Foreign Office report concluded, ‘was a very hollow one’.17 At the Berne conference, the participants did agree to work for the rapid reconstitution of an International. The existence of several competing versions of socialist internationalism, though, posed problems. Certainly the most eye-catching version was that of the Bolsheviks. In the wake of their coup in Russia, the Bolsheviks made clear their intentions to recast socialist internationalism in their own image, a goal embodied in the creation of the Comintern (Communist or Third International) in Moscow in March 1919. Its creation marked a sharp break not only with the pre-war Second International but also with the efforts manifest in Berne the month before to reconstitute the Socialist International on a fairly broad basis. Speaking at the Comintern’s founding congress, Grigory Zinoviev contemptuously dismissed Berne as the product of ‘bourgeois patriotism and social chauvinism’. These so-called socialists, he thundered, ‘refused to see that the primary guilt for the war rests with capitalism, finance capital of both coalitions, and their

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‘Berne’, Daily Herald, 15 February 1919, 7. Archives diplomatiques, La Courneve [ADLC], MAE, Série Y Internationale 1981–1940, Box 395, ‘Après la conférence socialiste internationale’, EMA-2 to MAE, no. 3242, 25 February 1919. The National Archives, Kew [TNA], FO 608/237, ‘The International Socialist Conference at Berne of February 1919 and Its Outcome’, 7 April 1919. For the proceedings, see Gerhard A. Ritter (ed.), Die II. Internationale 1918/1919: Protokolle, Memoranden, Berichte und Korrespondenzen (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1980), vol. I, 179–570.

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social-democratic lackeys’.18 Zinoviev reiterated his censure of the ‘Yellow Second International’ at the Comintern’s subsequent congress in July 1920: ‘We break with the hated traditions of the Second International, which snubbed with haughty disdain all the revolutionary minded workers and who dared to raise criticisms.’19 Put simply, the socialist internationalism on offer at Berne stood accused of reproducing rather than challenging the existing international order. As is well-known, the Bolshevik’s alternative, what Leonard Smith in Chapter 4 terms the ‘Bolshevik imperium’, centred on revolution. The Comintern’s pressing task was not only to rally all socialists in support of the revolution in Russia, now engulfed in a vicious and confusing civil war, but also to spark similar revolutions abroad in order to smash the forces of bourgeois reaction. Viewed from Moscow, the situation in Germany, in the throes of military defeat and the fall of the imperial regime, appeared particularly promising in this regard. In its self-declared and titanic battle with reaction, the Comintern figured as the revolution’s general staff, directing the communist armies on the different national fronts. The Comintern’s twenty-one conditions for membership, drawn up for its second congress in July 1920, aimed to transform socialist parties into effective instruments of revolution. The model, predictably enough, was the Bolshevik party: a highly disciplined, committed, hierarchical and centralised organisation under Moscow’s leadership. One notable condition was the purging of those deemed insufficiently devoted, a category that included ‘all elements which continue to act in the spirit of the Second International’.20 For the Bolsheviks, there existed only one version of socialism internationalism, their own. The twenty-one conditions, together with the Bolsheviks’ uncompromising posture, provoked passionate and bitter debates within socialist parties on the nature of socialism – and of socialist internationalism. Often enough, those advocating for adherence to the Comintern betrayed considerable guile or wishful thinking in their arguments, for example that the Bolsheviks would surely become more flexible over time. But what now appears as deceit or naiveté can blind us to the immense appeal the Bolsheviks enjoyed in the immediate post-war years due to a 18 19 20

John Riddell (ed.), Founding the Communist International: Proceedings and Documents of the First Congress, March 1919 (New York: Pathfinder, 1987), 192–98. John Riddell (ed.), Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 (New York: Pathfinder, 1991), vol. II, 798. ‘Theses on the basic tasks of the Communist International adopted by the Second Comintern Congress’, 19 July 1920, reproduced in ibid., 113–27.

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combination of unhappiness with the wartime record of the major socialist parties, judged to have been too supportive of national war efforts, and admiration for their achievements. After all, the Bolsheviks had succeeded in seizing power in Russia, a deed that endowed their proffered formula with a certain credibility – a credibility that the fraught political and economic situation in much of Western and Central Europe, apparent in the impressive spike in strike activity in several countries, only reinforced. Even many socialists who questioned the formula’s applicability to countries other than Russia admired the Bolsheviks’ boldness, vigour and insistence on action rather than deliberation.21 What was needed, went the oft-repeated phrase at the time, was an International ‘capable of action’ (aktionsfähig). Contemporary assessments aside, there remains the question of the Bolsheviks’ approach to international relations. Like the pre-war Second International, the Bolsheviks, notwithstanding their universalism, focused initially on the national sphere: the aim was to provoke revolution in neighbouring countries and beyond. Unlike with the Second International, this approach entailed the disappearance of international relations as the international and national spheres eventually collapsed into one another. Presumably, once the revolution had succeeded in all states there would no longer be any purpose for national borders, a relic of the bygone age of bourgeois nationalism. In the meantime, the Bolsheviks offered a binary of vision of international relations characterised by elemental hostility between the Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik camps, tempered only by tactical concessions determined by short-term cost–benefit calculations. It was a vision of enduring suspicion, tension and conflict, interrupted by the occasional truce, before the victory of revolution everywhere announced the advent of perpetual peace. Louis de Brouckère, a Belgian socialist who would enjoy a long career in international socialist circles, understandably qualified the Bolshevik vision as one of despair.22 Yet there was more to this vision than doom and gloom. The defeat of revolution in the more industrially developed countries of Europe, especially Germany, fostered notions of a civilisational divide in Europe along East–West lines – a divide whose roots can

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For the spike in strike activity, see Charles Tilly, ‘Introduction’ in Leopold H. Haimson and Charles Tilly (eds.), Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 433–48. Institut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, Antwerp [AMSAB], POB, ‘Séance du Conseil général du 17-5-1922’, Louis de Brouckère.

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be traced back to the eighteenth century.23 For many non-Bolshevik socialists, Bolshevism belonged to the East and not to the West. Partly in response to the failure of revolution to spread beyond Russia, the Bolsheviks looked to the colonial world, championing national independence as a means to weaken the imperial powers. In June 1920, they organised a congress of ‘peoples of the east’ in Baku, at which the Comintern pledged to fight for colonial liberation. ‘There must be no colonies’, one Bolshevik announced at Baku. ‘All nations have equal rights.’ In addition to contrasting this stance with that of the Second International, the ubiquitous Zinoviev sketched out an international relations structured along a North–South axis as much as if not more than along an East–West one. The Comintern, he insisted, ‘is sure that under its flag will rally not only the proletarians of Europe but also the mighty mass of our reserves, of our infantry – the hundreds of millions of peasants who live in Asia, our Near and Far East’.24 From early on, Bolshevism was global in its orientation, far more so than the pre-war Second International – or either of the two non-Bolshevik versions of socialist internationalism that emerged after 1918. In castigating the pre-war International, the Bolsheviks directed much of their scorn at the ‘social patriots’ – those socialists who had supported their governments during the war. Afterwards, it was principally these socialists who elaborated what can be called a national-reformist version of socialist internationalism that was increasingly at odds with the Bolshevik one. Early on, the national-reformist socialists agreed that the post-war Second International must be made a more effective political instrument than its pre-war predecessor. As a memorandum submitted to the Berne conference by the majority French socialists explained: ‘If the International is reborn tomorrow, it cannot merely consist of gatherings of member parties grouped around the same inoperative formulas.’ The proposed statutes of a revamped Second International, drawn up in 1919, reflected this sentiment, envisaging international socialism as a federation with considerable authority vested at the federal (international) level.25 23 24 25

Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). John Riddell (ed.), To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920 – First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993), 50, 154. Pierre Renaudel, L’Internationale à Berne: Faits et documents (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1919), 15; and Arbetarrörelsens Arkiv och Bibliotek, Stockholm [AABS], Ssa, Socialistiska Internationalen, vol. 9, ‘Projet de statuts de l’Internationale proposé par le Comité d’action’, undated but 1919.

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At the same time, the statutes accorded sizeable importance to deliberative democracy within the International, an emphasis magnified by a comparison with the Bolsheviks. Writing in March 1920, Arthur Henderson, the Labour Party leader, explained: In the British Party there is no belief in dictatorship as a principle of action, nor have we any desire to incorporate it in our vocabulary as a synonym of democracy. Taking this view, we do not desire to compromise with the advocates of this doctrine by using their language about Soviets, Revolution or Dictatorship.26

The more pronounced the emphasis on democracy, however, the stronger became the pull towards a return to the pre-war International – what Henderson described as one based on ‘freedom of tactics, mutual toleration, and liberty of thought’. No less importantly, the emphasis on democracy worked to reaffirm the reformist, gradualist impulses, already powerful among these socialists. If ‘each Socialist group’ within the International should possess the ‘freedom to work in accordance with its Socialist goal’, a Labour circular affirmed several months later, ‘it must in no way reject (as is being attempted in some quarters) but unequivocally support, the democratic method’.27 Socialism and democracy were indissociable. In terms of policies, national-reformist socialists again remained close to pre-war experience, endorsing arbitration, disarmament and a remodelled colonial practice in line with notions of trusteeship. But it was on the issue of the League of Nations that their reformist predilections manifested themselves most clearly. Despite fears that the League amounted to little more than an alliance of the victorious states, these socialists preferred to view the new institution as a potentially useful instrument for the negotiated revision of the peace treaties, judged by all socialists to be unjust, as well as, more generally, for a more cooperative international relations. Echoing the International’s pre-war position, Henderson, addressing an international gathering in August 1919, recognised that a ‘completely satisfactory world-peace, founded on justice and international right, cannot be achieved so long as reactionary politicians remain in control of national policy’. But until socialism was triumphant at the national level among the great powers, socialists should strive collectively ‘to bring the utmost possible pressure to bear upon the 26 27

Henderson to Camille Huysmans, 17 March 1920, reproduced in Vie Socialiste, no. 2, 10 July 1920. British Library of Political and Economic Science, London [BLPES], ILP, 6/12/2, Labour circular, 30 December 1920.

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existing Governments in order that we may secure through the machinery of the League of Nations an immediate revision of those territorial, economic, and political clauses in the Treaties which violate the working class conception of a just and durable settlement’. Accordingly, the resolution voted on by the majority of participants welcomed the League of Nations as the ‘seed of a global legal framework’ whose ultimate purpose was to eliminate armed conflict.28 Given the reformist bent of this group of socialists, it is tempting to view socialist internationalism as a variant of liberal or Wilsonian internationalism. After all, there were several similarities between the two, most obviously in their attachment to democracy. That said, the reformist socialists’ understanding of democracy encompassed a socio-economic dimension often absent from that of liberal democrats. The debates on the ‘socialisation’ of industry at an international socialist conference in Geneva in the summer of 1920, for example, testify to the enduring hold of Marxist frameworks on these socialists – as well as to the reality that a reformist orientation did not necessarily exclude the possibility of farreaching changes to the domestic political order.29 Also pertinent here was the belief, equally rooted in pre-war Marxism, in the interdependent nature of socialist politics in different countries – and hence the need for an International. As the Swedish socialist Hjalmar Branting intoned in Berne in 1919: ‘The time has arrived when we in various countries have to indicate how we want to implement our longstanding demands. This requires international cooperation, detailed explanatory discussions and an exchange of experiences.’30 In the end, though, what arguably most set this internationalism apart was its exclusive nature. For national reformist socialists, socialist internationalism as a practice was always confined to socialists, even if they defined this category more inclusively than the Bolsheviks. Conflating socialist internationalism with liberal internationalism, viewing the latter as merely a sub-set of the former, misses this essential feature. Social

28

29

30

‘Konferenz der Internationalen Permanten Kommission in Luzern, 2. bis 9. August 1919’, reproduced in Ritter (ed.), Die II. Internationale, 610–11, 657. For debates on the League, see Ulrich Hochschild, Sozialdemokratie und Völkerbund: Die Haltung der SPD und SFIO zum Völkerbund von dessen Grundung bis zum deutschen Beitritt (1919–1926) (Karlsruhe: Verlagsgesellschaft Karlsruhe, 1982). Kongress-Protokolle der Zweiten Internationale: Ergänzungsheft: Bericht vom zehnten Internationalen Sozialistenkongress in Genf 31. Juli bis 5. August 1920 (Berlin: J. H. W. Dietz, 1979), 23–31. Ritter (ed.), Die II. Internationale – Branting, at 199.

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scientists of a constructivist bent tend to emphasise the self-reinforcing dynamics of group cohesion at work in prolonged interactions – the fostering of a sense of ‘we-ness’.31 From this perspective, socialists, in practising their internationalism with other socialists before 1914 and after 1918, generated a shared identity, culture and framework of mutual expectations and obligations. That said, this perspective arguably downplays the tensions surrounding this practice among socialists, tensions fostered and exacerbated over time by the juxtaposition of different interests and viewpoints.32 But the more pertinent point in terms of the immediate post-war period is that socialists cultivated their own internationalism, with its own functioning, referents and power dynamics. In a bid to impose a monopoly, the Bolsheviks insisted that they alone represented socialism, relegating other self-identified socialists to the bourgeois, capitalist camp. In his two magisterial studies of peacemaking, the historian Arno Mayer extended this binary understanding, framing international politics as a battle between Wilsonism and Leninism.33 If this binary understanding is arguably unfair to national reformist socialists, it is even more so to another version of post-war socialism made up of non-Bolshevik revolutionary socialists. In February 1921, delegates from several parties (among them the Independent Labour Party, ILP, the USPD/independent German Socialists; the post-Tours SFIO/French Section of the Workers’ International and the Austrian Socialist party/ SPÖ) gathered in Vienna to form the ‘International Working Union of Socialist Parties’ or Vienna Union.34 The expressed goal was to create not another International but rather a ‘working group’ dedicated to the mission of reuniting all socialists, the Bolsheviks included, in one single International. As Friedrich Adler, the Austrian socialist and driving force behind the Vienna Union, explained

31

32

33

34

Jeffrey T. Checkel, ‘Why Comply? Social Learning and European Identity Change’, International Organization 55 (2001), 553–88; Thomas Risse, ‘“Let’s Argue!”: Communicative Action in World Politics’, International Organization 54 (2001), 1–39. For more on this aspect, see Talbot C. Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Arno J. Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959); Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (New York: Knopf, 1967). Protokoll der internationalen sozialistischen Konferenz in Wien vom 22. bis 27. Februar 1921 (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1921). Also see André Donneur, Histoire de l’Union des partis socialistes pour l’action internationale (1920–1923) (Sudbury, ON: Librairie de l’Université Laurentienne, 1967).

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soon afterwards, a united International must be a fusion of social reform and social revolution.35 In reality, though, Adler initially leaned noticeably towards the Bolsheviks, repelled by the wartime collaboration of numerous socialists with the nation at war. Wartime socialist internationalism failed, he lectured Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s point man on the issue of the International, ‘because the majority of the proletarian parties, instead of maintaining their Socialist convictions, allowed themselves to be pressed into the service of the imperialist will to come out victorious’. It was this failure, moreover, which ‘enabled Lenin to rush, on his own responsibility, without coming to an understanding with the representatives of the class-conscious proletariat of other countries, into one of the most fateful experiments for Labour [socialism], not only in Russia, but of the whole world’. The future of the international socialist community, Adler accordingly contended, depended on two endeavours: the reintegration of the Bolsheviks and a genuine commitment on the part of socialists to cure themselves of their lingering ‘Social Patriotism’.36 The Vienna Union’s self-assigned mission was to work towards both goals. The Vienna Union’s existence was short-lived, lasting a little over two years, which undoubtedly helps to explain its neglect by scholars. The Bolshevik Karl Radek’s dismissive sobriquet, the ‘two and a half International’, certainly did not help matters. In any case, the Vienna Union’s version of socialist internationalism is worth considering. Even more than with national reformist socialists, the ethos of its members was socialist and internationalist to the core. Years later, in exile in Switzerland, Arthur Crispien, a prominent USPD leader, remarked that ‘it was only as an internationalist [in meiner internationalen Gesinnung] that I could find personal satisfaction’. That this was not simply nostalgia is evident from an article he wrote in June 1920: ‘In our endeavours, we international class fighters do not recognise French, English, Russians, Italians, etc., we only recognise brother and sister workers, comrades-inarms. We shake hands across national borders and together are strongly

35

36

Protokoll der Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiterpartei Deutschösterreischs. Abgehalten in Wien vom 25. bis 27. November 1921 (Vienna: Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1921), 197–205. TNA, James Ramsay MacDonald Papers, PRO/30/69/1165, Friedrich Adler to MacDonald, 10 February 1921. Also see Friedrich Adler, ‘Was trennt uns von der zweiten Internationale’, Die Freiheit, 2 March 1921, 1–2.

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confident of victory.’37 And Crispien was not alone. An ILP pamphlet the same year declared that the party ‘has been Internationalist in its outlook’ from ‘its earliest days’, combating with foreign comrades against ‘the common enemy which keeps them [workers] in poverty, which enslaves their weaker brothers, and which set them periodically at each other’s throats. That common enemy is Capitalism’.38 For the Vienna Union’s members, socialist internationalism was not simply one element (however important) of their activity. It was at the very centre of their identity as socialists. The Vienna Union’s socialist internationalism was also more oppositional than that of the Second International. Whatever the particular issue – disarmament, the League of Nations, colonialism – Vienna Union socialists consistently adopted more militant and more ambitious positions than their non-revolutionary counterparts. The purpose of socialists was not to cooperate with bourgeois governments but to demand and to militate for immediate change. As the invitation to the Vienna Union’s founding conference declared: The proletariat must oppose the world domination of capital with its own global politics. It must be the task of this policy to vigorously defend Soviet Russia against the attacks of the imperialist Western powers, to thwart the counterrevolutionary intrigues of French imperialism in Central Europe, to free the revolutionary movements in Eastern and Central Europe from the shackles that Western European imperialism has imposed on them, to support the nationalities and colonial peoples fighting for their freedom against the system of rule of capitalism, and thus to unite all revolutionary forces of the world against the rule of imperialism.39

Such declarations irritated national reformist socialists like MacDonald, who deemed them adolescent. And, admittedly, the Vienna Union socialists’ talk of revolution was frequently vague regarding both methods and ultimate aims, a point the Bolsheviks never tired of making. At the same time, the Vienna Union’s positioning (or posturing) held up a mirror to all non-Bolshevik socialists, one which prodded them to live up to their oftexpressed internationalist ideals. Pointing to the Vienna Union’s moral force, Pieter Troelstra, a Dutch socialist, insisted to MacDonald that the 37

38 39

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bonn [FES], AdsD, NL Arthur Crispien, 1/ACAA000001, ‘Ein Proletarierleben für das Proletariat’, 10; and Arthur Crispien, ‘Unser Ziel’, Die Freheit, 4 June 1920, 1–2. BLPES, ILP, 5/1920/7, Fenner Brockway, How to End War: I.L.P. View on Imperialism and Internationalism (London: ILP, 1920), 2–4. Protokoll der internationalen sozialistischen Konferenz in Wien, 5–8.

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International must embrace ‘a strict oppositional standpoint’ towards the ‘imperalistic powers’.40 The Vienna Union also offered something of a model in its emphasis on grass-roots democracy. For Adler and others, if the wartime and post-war soldiers and workers’ councils that had sprung up in various belligerent countries provided one possibility, others included coops and bipartite (workers and employers) or tripartite (with state officials) corporatist arrangements at the factory and industry levels. Additional indications of the Vienna Union’s socialist vision comes from the Austrian party’s (SPÖ) administration of ‘Red Vienna’ up to 1934, which featured an ambitious programme of social provision and education.41 More generally, the Vienna Union socialists envisaged the widening and deepening of democracy through multiple and multifaceted experiments. Socialist parties would not only encourage and guide these experiments, but would also draw inspiration and lessons from them. No less importantly, the assumption was that these experiments would occur simultaneously in several countries, eventually merging together in a transnational process from which a truly socialist revolutionary democracy would be forged. And here the International was important not so much as a formal institution but as the embodiment of this process. While there was certainly a good deal of wishful and imprecise thinking in all of this, the Vienna Union’s attempt to carve out political space for a revolutionary non-Bolshevik socialism set it apart from both the Bolsheviks and the national reformist socialists. The Vienna Union’s short life-span should not be taken as a final judgement on the political viability of its version of socialist internationalism, for the latter would live on within the LSI. Although the former Vienna Union socialists were less numerous than the national reformist socialists, several of them, Crispien among them, would occupy prominent positions within the reconstituted International, working to infuse the latter with their thinking. And in so doing they functioned as a counter-current to more reformist elements, helping to maintain the LSI’s independence or separation from other nonsocialists – and thus its interest as an experiment in an alternative form of international relations.

40 41

International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam [IISH], Pietre Jelles Troelstra Papers, 535, Troelstra to Ramsay MacDonald, 24 December 1920. For Vienna, see Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working Class Culture, 1919–1934 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Werner Michael Schwarz et al., Das Rote Wien 1919–1934: Ideen, Debatten, Praxis (Vienna: Birkhauser, 2019).

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    In 1923, the Vienna Union and the Second International combined to form the LSI, simplifying somewhat the confusing situation created by the emergence of multiple post-war versions of socialist internationalism. In some ways this was a defeat: the international socialist movement would never regain its pre-1914 unity; worse still, relations between Bolsheviks and non-Bolshevik socialists would fester for much of the interwar period, precluding a truly combined response to the fascist threat in the 1930s. That said, there was no missed opportunity in the immediate post-war years. It was never likely that the Bolsheviks and national reformist socialists would join forces, despite the hopes of Adler and like-minded Vienna Union socialists. Neither the Second International nor the Comintern sincerely sought an accord during the tripartite negotiations that occurred between 1921 and 1923. Instead, each side manoeuvred to shift responsibility onto the other for their pre-programmed failure.42 One side-development of these negotiations, though, was the emergence of a practice of cooperation on concrete issues between the Vienna Union and the Second International that would continue under the LSI’s aegis. And it is this practice that can be viewed as an experiment in an alternative form of international relations – one in which socialists worked together to find ‘socialist’ solutions to pressing international problems. One such problem was the issue of reparations, which moved to the fore of international politics in the opening months of 1921. In imposing the principle of reparations on a defeated Germany, the peace treaty had left the total amount uncertain until January 1921, when the Allies announced a figure of 226 billion gold marks, eventually reduced to 132 billion by the London agreements in May 1921. The intergovernmental negotiations generated considerable bitterness on all sides, with the Germans and the Allied powers (especially the French and British) clashing over Germany’s capacity to pay as well as the methods of payment.43

42 43

For the negotiations, see Robert Sigel, Die Geschichte der Zweiten Internationale, 1918–1923 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1986). For the intergovernmental negotiations, see Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 193–206; Bruce Kent, The Spoils of War: The Politics, Economics, and Diplomacy of Reparations 1918–1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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It is in this tense general climate that French socialists took the lead in placing reparations on the agenda of international socialist politics. Although the SFIO had voted to leave the Second International and join the Vienna Union, party leaders desperately sought a fusion of the two organisations, largely in order to dampen internal feuds over the nature of socialism. After the majority of French socialists opted to join the communists (PCF) at the famous Tours congress in December 1920, the much-reduced SFIO remained fragile, its precarious unity vulnerable to renewed division. In this context, the division of non-Bolshevik socialists into two international organisations constituted an existential threat. Accordingly, at the Vienna Union’s founding congress in February 1921, French socialists pleaded for a policy of cooperation with the Second International, singling out reparations as a promising issue. Soon afterwards, the SFIO, ignoring Adler’s hesitations, invited the ILP and the independent German socialists to a conference in Amsterdam in April 1921 to consider ‘practical solutions’ to the problem of reparations. An editorial in Die Freiheit, the USPD’s newspaper, welcomed the initiative as an opportunity for socialists to come together ‘to fight imperialism, militarism and capitalism – this trinity of evil – in their countries and to prepare a common front of international socialism against international capitalism’.44 As soon the Second International learned of the initiative, it decided to organise its own gathering in Amsterdam on the issue. Initially, the idea was to forestall a separate Vienna Union gathering by inviting the latter to participate, but the manoeuvre failed, resulting in separate conferences.45 Significantly, though, the two independent gatherings produced similar reparations plans. Both plans recognised Germany’s responsibility to pay some reparations for material damages in France and Belgium as part of a more extensive international effort to reconstruct Europe. Looking further, both framed reparations as an opportunity to tighten the bonds of economic and financial interdependence not only between European countries but also with the United States. More concretely, both plans

44

45

‘Sozialistiche Wiedergutmachung’, reproduced in Nachrichten der Internationalen Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sozialistischer Parteien: Organ der II ½ Internationale Wien April 1921 – Juni 1923 (Glashütten im Taunus: Verlag Detlev Auvermann, 1973), April 1921, 1–5; and ‘Sozialistische Wiedergutmachung’, Die Freheit, 13 March 1921, 1–2. National Museum of Labour History, Manchester [NMLH], LPA, LSI 10/7/1, Camille to Huysmans to Ramsay MacDonald, 12 March 1921.

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called for an international loan, guaranteed by the international community (the League of Nations perhaps), which would kick-start a virtuous cycle of payments and growing general prosperity. No less importantly, both plans sought to depoliticise reparations by handing contentious issues – Germany’s capacity to pay, the distribution of funds, oversight of the international loan – to non-governmental bodies comprising of financial and economic experts. Although the Vienna Union alone demanded that workers also be represented on such bodies, neither plan envisaged reparations as a means to transform international economic relations. The emphasis was on practical proposals.46 The similarities in the two reparation plans reinforced the appeal of further cooperation. Once again, French socialists took the lead, with Paul Faure, the SFIO’s secretary-general, writing to Adler in December 1921 to propose a meeting of socialist parties from Western Europe to discuss ‘question of burning [international] relevance’, reparations prominent among them. Although Adler would have preferred them to bide their time, waiting patiently for the moment when the Second International’s member parties had cured themselves of social patriotism, Faure successfully lobbied other parties for support. Having obtained the Vienna Union’s official endorsement, French socialists then worked with the ILP and Labour to organise such a meeting.47 Reflecting the gulf between the Bolsheviks and non-Bolshevik socialists, Labour leaders insisted as a condition for their participation that communist parties not be invited, placing SFIO leaders in a delicate position within their own party. Although strongly anti-Bolshevik himself, Faure feared that the exclusion of the communists would provoke some French socialists. Fortunately for Faure, the Comintern’s decision to hold its own conference on the subject provided a welcome solution.48 The resulting conference in Paris in February 1922 proved disappointing, as railway strikes prevented both majority and independent German socialists from attending. Accordingly, it was decided to convoke another

46

47 48

For the Vienna Union’s plan, see BLPSE, ILP Papers, 2/4, ‘Joint Manifesto on Reparations’, undated but April 1921; for the Second International’s plan, see the documents attached to IISH, LSI (London Secretariat) 2/51, ‘Sitzung des Executivkomités der 2. Internationale mit dem Bureau des Internationalen Gewerkschaftsbundes am 1.IV 21. . .’. BLPSE, ILP Papers, 1921/3/8, Faure (SFIO) to Adler (Vienna Union), 1 December 1921. Joachim Schröder, Internationalismus nach dem Krieg: Die Beziehungen zwischen deutschen und französischen Kommunisten 1918–1923 (Essen: Klartext, 2006), 140–45.

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conference, this time in Frankfurt, for the end of the month. That an agreement could be worked out was far from self-evident. French and Belgian socialists faced considerable domestic political pressure to support maximum reparations from Germany, while German socialists came under similar pressure to oppose any and all reparations. Labour, meanwhile, was divided between those who, like MacDonald, wanted to denounce reparations in principle, and others, vocal within the party’s Advisory Committee on International Questions, who evinced some sympathy for French demands.49 After lengthy discussion, though, the participants arrived at an agreement in Frankfurt. Generally speaking, it reaffirmed the compromise worked out the year before in Amsterdam: a significant reduction in the total reparations bill with payments used exclusively for the reconstruction of devastated regions. Facilitating this accord was Labour’s decision to call for Britain’s renunciation of reparations, a position that also soothed differences within the party. More generally, the published reparations plan, based on an amalgam of SFIO and Labour drafts, closely resembled those of the year before: the close linkage between reparations and the reconstruction of devastated regions; international loans to kickstart the payment process; and the creation of an international organisation to oversee the whole matter. At the same time, the new agreement underscored the need for a broader perspective, one that integrated reparations into an ambitious European and international project of post-war reconstruction of the devastated regions in which German payments (in money, materials and labour) would be one element of a larger framework of economic exchange. All the participants promised to promote the plan at home.50 Reviewing the conference, a Labour Party report emphasised the collective desire to cooperate. ‘The artificiality of the present disunity [among socialists] was exposed by the debates, since whenever differences of opinion were revealed, it was not found that parties ranged themselves on one side or another according to their respective Internationals.’51 49 50

51

Labour Party, Report of the Twenty-Second Annual Conference Held in . . . Edinburgh, One June 27th, 28th, 29th and 30th 1922 (London: Labour Party, 1922), 188–93. NMLH, LPA, LSI, 11/4/13, ‘The Five Party International Conference . . . Frankfurt, 25th, 26th and 27th February, 1922. Report’, undated; ‘Die Reparationsdebatte auf der Fünflandkonferenz’, Vorwärts, 5 March 1922. The mention of reparations in labour and in kind echoed the Wiesbaden agreement signed by French and German ministers in October 1921. NMLH, LPA, ACIQ minutes, ‘The Five Country Conference . . . Frankfurt . . . 1922’.

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No less importantly, socialists also championed the reparations plan as a sign of the vigour and pertinence of (non-Bolshevik) socialist internationalism. The plan, announced the SFIO’s Longuet in Le Populaire de Paris, demonstrated that socialists, when working together, could find ‘vigorous and subtle formulas’ to concrete problems – a success he contrasted with governments that remained ‘irremediably [and] stupidly divided’. Similarly, an article in Die Glocke, a mouthpiece for the German majority socialists, trumpeted the plan as ‘evidence that as soon as socialist sentiment and goodwill bring Germans, French, Belgians, English and Italians together, they will quickly arrive at tangible results’.52 The consensus on reparations forged in Amsterdam and reaffirmed in Frankfurt would soon come under strain when, in January 1923, Germany’s failure to meet its payments obligations prompted a FrancoBelgian military occupation of the Ruhr. The resulting Ruhr crisis stoked nationalist sentiment in all the countries involved, with French and German socialists, in particular, coming under renewed domestic political pressure to adopt harder-line positions more in tune with dominant public opinion. Nevertheless, European socialists remained united, publicly restating their commitment to the reparations plans fashioned in Amsterdam and Frankfurt.53 Equally significant, the Belgian, British, French and German parties all agreed to press their national governments to compromise, publicising the socialist reparations plan as a basis for negotiations.54 The Ruhr crisis, as is well known, ultimately produced the Dawes plan: an international agreement on reparations. The plan, it is worth remarking, resembled that of the socialists in several notable respects, perhaps most obviously in the effort to depoliticise reparations. To be sure, the plans contained important differences, perhaps the biggest one being the role accorded to private bankers, which was vital to the Dawes plan but not to the socialist one. Socialists envisaged a more corporatistcentred approach overseen by intergovernmental organs in which various constituencies, including workers (trade unions and socialist parties) would be consulted. Nevertheless, the socialist and Dawes plan both sought to transform reparations from an explosively politicised issue into

52 53 54

Longuet, ‘L’Internationale pour la paix du monde’, Le Populaire de Paris, 2 March 1922, 1; Hermann Wendel, ‘Der Aufbau der Internationale’, Die Glocke, 7 March 1922, 1455. IISH, LSI (London Secretariat), 60, ‘The Situation in the Ruhr’, undated but March 1923. For details, see Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism, 82–90, 113–20.

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a largely technical one best left in the hands of experts, though differing on the question of who constituted experts. To some extent, the similarities between the two plans undoubtedly reflected the lack of feasible alternative solutions. But it also true that socialists had been actively publicising their plan in the months preceding the occupation of the Ruhr. During the crisis, moreover, French and German socialist leaders in particular pressed their governments both in public and behind the scenes to propose something similar. And in January 1924, Labour formed a minority government in Britain with Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister, though by then the contours of an agreement had been established. The question of socialist influence on governmental policy aside, reparations had a dual function for socialists: as the anvil on which the fusion of the Vienna Union and the Second International was hammered out; and as proof that collectively they could come up with ‘socialist’ solutions to pressing international problems. The founding of the LSI of 1923 is noteworthy for at least two reasons. One concerns socialist internationalism: the dominant version not only excluded the Bolsheviks but also comprised an amalgam of elements (and people) from the Vienna Union and the Second International. It would prove to be a shifting amalgam, its precise form at any time dependent on several factors, including the evolving balance of forces within the LSI. The second reason is that, with the LSI, socialists possessed the unified institutional means to pursue their experiment in an alternative form of international relations begun with issue of reparations. Over the next several years, socialists would attempt to forge collective ‘socialist’ positions on issues as varied as disarmament, security guarantees, colonialism and plebiscites in contested border regions. Their success in this endeavour is certainly debatable but that socialists sought to construct their own sphere of international relations is evident. If this sphere can be integrated into a larger history of international relations, it can also be approached separately, as an experiment in international relations. Doing so helps us to better understand what was unique about socialist internationalism: its separate formal and informal structures, its prolonged practice, its pragmatic but no less critical stance towards intergovernmental diplomacy and its core assumption that socialist principles differed from capitalist (or liberal capitalist) ones. But it can also help us to think about how international relations might have unfolded differently. Often enough, historians, eager to emphasise contingency, are tempted to engage in counterfactuals, almost always to

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indicate the possibility of paths not taken and of presents not realised. But counterfactual analysis is studded with pitfalls.55 This being so, another possible approach is to frame the activities of distinct groups of actors as real-life experiments in alternatives to the mainstream or dominant ways of things. This can be in terms of lifestyles, professional activities and social relations, but it can perhaps also be a means of studying the history of international politics.

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For a discussion of some of these pitfalls, see Talbot C. Imlay, ‘Exploring What Might Have Been: Parallel History, International History, and Post-War Socialist Internationalism’, International History Review 31, 3 (2009), 524–29.

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14 The Paris Peace Conference and the Origins of Global Feminism Mona L. Siegel

Historians of the Paris Peace Conference who have immersed themselves in the foreign ministry archives at La Courneuve or Kew know what it must have felt like to walk into an exclusive gentlemen’s club of a century past. One can almost smell the tobacco and brilliantine wafting off the pages. Of the thousands upon thousands of memos, agendas, notes and reports generated by the male corps of diplomats who gathered to negotiate the peace terms at the end of the First World War, a few dozen at best recognise the existence, let alone acknowledge the concerns, of women.1 Generations of historians following this archival trail have produced a sprawling and contentious historiography of the Paris Peace Conference that nonetheless unites around one central belief: in 1919, Paris was a man’s world. In most accounts, this gendered representation is not so much analysed as assumed. From the Quai d’Orsay to the Palace at Versailles, in women’s absence, powerful statesmen and their attachés worked in tandem to recreate a male-dominated world order that reflected their values and left men firmly in charge for decades to come. The problem with this masculinist interpretation of the Paris Peace Conference is that women were not absent in 1919, neither from the formal negotiations nor from the expansive field of public diplomacy and influence-making that shaped the peace terms. Female activists were 1

Glenda Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination: A Gender Rereading of “the Apogee of Nationalism”’, Nations and Nationalism 6 (2000), 497. This chapter is a distillation of Mona L. Siegel, Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights after the First World War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). I wish to acknowledge the generous funding of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Sacramento State Research and Creative Activity Faculty Awards programme.

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everywhere: calling out from lecterns, marching in the streets, lobbying the peacemakers, and capturing global headlines. Weeks before the conference opened, women were working every connection to demand a seat at the negotiating table.2 Weeks later, they were still persistently trying to get a foot in the door. And when Allied diplomats proceeded to draft the peace terms without them, feminists were among the first to warn the Versailles treaty spelled disaster. This chapter seeks to restore female agency to the history of the 1919 peace negotiations and re-centre analysis of the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference on women and their (largely) unmet demands. Male peacemakers’ resistance to women’s concerns in 1919 set the world on a perilous path, but the focus here is less on men and the peace they forged and more on the women angered by the peacemakers’ failure to live up to their own promises of democracy and self-determination. I argue that the democratic potential inherent in the 1919 peace negotiations empowered women to speak out; it encouraged them to sharpen their ideas in dialogue with one another, and it led many of them to commit to the long-term struggle for national and international women’s rights. White, Western feminists played an important role articulating demands for gender equality, but the sweeping scope of the negotiations spurred a broad and diverse cross-section of the global female population to act, including women from colonised and subjugated regions of Asia and the Middle East who melded racial, religious, economic and national concerns to their overarching appeals for women’s rights. The entrenchment of global feminism – as evidenced by a growing and intersecting network of feminist partnerships, coalitions and organisations dedicated to advancing women’s equality and dignity around the world – was thus a direct legacy of the peace negotiations at the end of the First World War.

 ? Women’s experiences during the First World War and their expectations of the peace to follow were the driving catalysts behind the explosion of global feminist activism in 1919. The First World War upended the lives of women on multiple continents, most dramatically in the belligerent countries of Europe but also in states drawn into the conflict through colonial ties or voluntary alliances. A vast historiography now testifies 2

‘Women at Peace Table’, New York Times, 19 November 1918; ‘Women and the Peace Conference’, Common Cause, 20 December 1918.

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to the ways European women contributed to their respective national war efforts, from harvesting the crops that fed armies to nursing the wounded and manufacturing weapons.3 Governments heaped praise on these female volunteers and workers for their willingness to sacrifice for the fatherland, and women who had not been politicised before the war began seeing themselves as capable and worthy citizens. Western suffragists, already dedicated to female enfranchisement, overwhelmingly rallied to their respective flags, confident that their patriotic devotion in wartime would prove women’s political fitness once and for all.4 Pacifist suffragists, very much in the minority from 1914 to 1918, forwarded a different line of argument: women must be enfranchised to temper men’s aggression and prevent the world from spiralling into another cataclysmic confrontation.5 Women in French and British colonies were neither untouched nor indifferent to the First World War. From Senegal to Egypt, and from India to Indochina, everyday life became increasingly difficult as colonial authorities conscripted male subjects to serve as soldiers, porters and labourers and as they requisitioned subsistence crops such as Indian wheat and African yams to feed their far-away armies. The attendant scourges of hunger and disease hit women, who were responsible for feeding and caring for their families, particularly hard.6 In the face

3

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6

The literature on women’s experience in the First World War is too large to survey here. For one recent and helpful overview, see Susan R. Grayzel and Tammy M. Proctor (eds.), Gender and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Ellen Carol Dubois, Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 223–24, 242, 247; Christine Bard, Les filles de Marianne: Histoire des féminismes 1914–1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 82–85; Johanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–28 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 60–64; Alison S. Fell and Ingrid Sharp (eds.), The Women’s Movement in Wartime: International Perspectives, 1914–19 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Aletta H. Jacobs, Memories: My Life as an International Leader in Health, Suffrage, and Peace, ed. Harriet Feinberg, trans. Annie Wright (New York: City University of New York, 1996), 80–84; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 257–61; David S. Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York: Routledge, 2008), 24–25; Anne-Marie Saint-Gille, ‘Les feministes allemandes actrices du pacifisme pendant la Première guerre mondiale’ in Patrick Farges and AnneMarie Saint-Gille (eds.), Le premier féminisme allemand, 1848–1933: un mouvement social de dimension international (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion), 63–76; Anne Wiltsher, Most Dangerous Women: Feminist Peace Campaigners of the Great War (Boston, MA: Pandora Press, 1985). Richard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Amiya Kumar

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of economic adversity and stringent colonial control, African and Asian women suffered, and in the years to come, some would openly revolt.7 Few existing documents testify to colonised women’s political sentiments during the conflict, but Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi would later trace her own political awakening to the war years, recalling how she and her brother would heatedly debate whether a Turkish or Allied victory would more quickly hasten Egyptian independence from British rule.8 Such aspirations were a direct consequence of the war, but they were also fed by the sweeping pronouncements that global leaders issued about the principles and provisions of the peace to follow. Woodrow Wilson, in particular, spoke in visionary terms of a world ‘made safe for democracy’: a new international order in which global leaders would pay heed to the weak as well as to the powerful and borders and laws would be guided by respect for people’s right to self-determination.9 Colonial nationalists responded to such language with alacrity, but they were far from alone.10 Women from both sides of the colonial divide were similarly electrified as suffragists’ longstanding demands for female enfranchisement and popular sovereignty were finally being reflected, or so it seemed, in the wartime pronouncements of some of the most powerful men in the world. In January 1919, with the war finally over and the peace negotiations opening in Paris, Wilson and his fellow peacemakers would have ample

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Bagchi, ‘Indian Economy and Society during World War One’, Social Scientist 42, 7/8 (July–August 2014), 5–27; UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa. General History of Africa, ed. Boahen A. Adu, vol. VII. Africa under Colonial Domination, 1880–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 135–41. Jennifer Anne Boittin, Christina Firpo and Emily Musil Church, ‘Hierarchies of Race and Gender in the French Colonial Empire, 1914–1946’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 37 (Spring 2011), 60–90; Benjamin N. Lawrance, ‘La Révolte des Femmes: Economic Upheaval and the Gender of Political Authority in Lomé, Togo, 1931–1933’, African Studies Review 45, 1 (April 2003), 43–67; Marc Matera, Misty L Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent. The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 88, 157–60, 198. Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879–1924, trans. Margot Badran (London: Virago Press, 1986), 107. Sharp, Chapter 7 and Bouchard, Chapter 12 in this volume; Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (New York: W. W. Norton 1986); Carl Bouchard, Cher Monsieur le Président: Quand les Français écrivait à Woodrow Wilson (1918–1919) (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2015). Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Colonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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opportunity to make good on such pledges. Women, for their part, prepared to hold the men to their word.

’       Western suffragists, many of whom had become savvy political strategists in the pre-war years, understood the importance of acting quickly and decisively if women were to be represented in the upcoming negotiations. Because Paris played host to the 1919 peace conference, French women led the charge. On 18 January, the very day the peace negotiations opened, Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger, president of the Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (UFSF), the largest suffrage organisation in France, sent a letter to Wilson calling on him to use his ‘immense influence for introducing Woman Suffrage together with other world questions necessary to discuss at the Peace Conference’. She also informed the American president that the UFSF would soon be convening an Inter-Allied Women’s Conference composed of leading suffragists from the victorious powers to better empower women to intervene in the negotiations. She closed by requesting an appointment at his earliest convenience.11 Over a dozen female activists from Great Britain, Italy, Belgium, the United States, British South Africa and New Zealand responded to the French appeal. This coterie of inter-allied suffragists would ultimately meet for two months straight, from 10 February to 10 April 1919, determined to seize the extraordinary diplomatic moment to advance women’s representation at the national level and ‘especially in international political life’.12 As the weeks progressed, dozens of sympathetic supporters from other organisations – including the International Council of Women and the National Women’s Trade Union League of America – would support the effort, making the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference the primary feminist lobbying body in Paris in 1919. The suffragists’ first goal was to secure a role for women in the negotiations. This was the message they delivered to Woodrow Wilson 11

12

Marguerite de Witt Schlumberger to the Honorable Woodrow Wilson, 18 January 1919, Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress, Series 5, Sub-Series B, Reel 390. My thanks to Carl Bouchard for sharing letters from this collection. Union française pour le suffrage des femmes, ‘Programme de la conférence des femmes interalliées de l’Alliance international pour le suffrage des femmes’, 10 February 1919, Fonds Cécile Brunschvicg, Centre des archives du féminisme, Angers (hereafter FCB/ CAF), 1AF164.

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on 10 February, when the female delegates sat down face to face with the American president. Specifically, they called for the establishment of a Women’s Commission to the peace conference, much as already existed for organised labour, to be staffed by competent female leaders and tasked with advising the peacemakers on all matters relating to women’s and children’s interests.13 Wilson hesitated, then obliged, bringing a variation of this proposal before the Supreme Council three days later.14 It was promptly rejected. The women did not give up, continuing to meet personally with dozens of peace delegates. At each meeting, they asked male diplomats to commit to the idea that women should be allowed a voice in shaping the new world order.15 Bowing to the suffragists’ tenacious lobbying, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau brought the question of women’s representation before the Supreme Council again on 11 March, this time proposing to allow the ‘ladies’ an opportunity to ‘state their case’ before two of the conference commissions: Labour and the League of Nations.16 To this, the Supreme Council gave its nod of approval. ‘Women’s hour has struck’, reported foreign correspondent Constance Drexel in the Los Angeles Times, ‘perhaps not with the resounding whack for which some of us had hoped, but it struck men’s hearts.’17 Women, who in most of the world had limited education and no political voice, would be heard in the most influential international policy arena in the world. The women in Paris had been preparing for such an opportunity for weeks. ‘If we are going to present our ideas to the most competent men in the world’, French suffragist Ghénia Avril de Sainte-Croix had cautioned, ‘we must be prepared to produce serious and authoritative work.’18 To such ends, the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference met in subcommittees from mid-February onward, each studying an international issue of

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15 16 17 18

Suzanne Grinberg, ‘Les femmes et la conference de la paix’, La Renaissance politique, littéraire, economique, 29 March 1919. Woodrow Wilson altered the proposal to call for a Women’s Commission to be staffed by male delegates who would confer with female leaders. US Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. III, 1022–23, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/FRUS .FRUS1919Parisv03 ‘Conférence des femmes alliées, La Française, 8 March 1919. FRUS, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. IV, 326, https://history.state.gov/histori caldocuments/frus1919Parisv04/d17 Constance Drexel, ‘Women Gain Victory at Paris Conference’, Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1919. Minutes to the meeting held 10 February 1919 at the Lyceum Club, FCB/CAF, 1AF165.

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particular female interest: labour, public health, law, morality, suffrage and peace. It is not surprising that labour headed their list. Women’s paltry wages and deplorable work conditions had long been a matter of concern in international feminist circles, and the labour subcommittee to the InterAllied Women’s Conference was a particularly active one. Led by two prominent French labour feminists, Jeanne Bouvier and Gabrielle Duchêne, labour subcommittee meetings drew in collaborators from Denmark, Sweden, Romania, Poland, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States.19 Thanks to the committee’s hard work, the women, who appeared before the Labour Commission on 18 March 1919, were able to present a detailed list of policy recommendations, including the establishment of identical work conditions and labour laws for both sexes, mandatory paid maternity leave for working mothers, and equal pay for equal work. The Labour Charter, the women said, must also officially recognise women’s right to help shape future policy decisions at the International Labour Organization (ILO), the international government body to be charged with regulating work conditions around the world.20 The Labour commissioners professed sympathy with the women’s demands and agreed to place maternity leave on the upcoming ILO conference agenda. On the question of women’s representation, however, they were only willing to go so far. The Labour Charter they drafted encouraged member states to appoint female advisors to ILO conventions, but only in a non-voting capacity and only when ‘questions specifically affecting women were to be considered’.21 As a result, when the ILO first convened in Washington, DC in November 1919, not a single participating nation opted to appoint a woman as a voting delegate. Labour feminists were determined not to be side-lined. In the autumn of 1919, the National Women’s Trade Union League of America invited working women and their allies to assemble in Washington, DC. It is 19

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Comité feminin française du travail, Charte internationale du travail (Paris: Secrétariat du CFFT, 1919), 7, https://archive.org/stream/charteinternatio00comi#page/n1/mode/2up; ‘Compte rendu de la séance du 18 février’, FCB/CAF, 1AF165. Maria Vérone, ‘Notre reception’, Le droit des femmes, April 1919. See Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, 200–36; Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 15–76. Dorothy Sue Cobble, ‘“The Other ILO Founders”: 1919 and Its Legacies’ in Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker and Susan Zimmermann (eds.), Women’s ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards, and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present (Boston, MA: Brill, 2018), 33.

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time, their invitation said, for working women ‘to assume responsibilities for the affairs of the world’.22 Over 200 labour feminists from Europe, North America, South America and Asia responded to the call, convening in late October to lay out their demands, including equal representation for men and women in all future ILO conferences, mandatory paid maternity leave, and a ban on night work for men and women alike. It fell to the twenty-three women appointed to serve as non-voting advisors to bring these concerns to the all-male ILO delegates. In the Commission on Women’s Employment and in ILO plenary sessions, labour feminists managed to push through the pathbreaking Maternity Protection Convention (1919), calling for a minimum of twelve weeks’ paid maternity leave, with free medical care for mothers and infants, as a baseline standard of social justice for working women around the world.23 The convention’s passage was a tangible victory with far-reaching repercussions, but its success was predicated not on a commitment to equality but instead on men’s continued vision of working women as mothers first and foremost. Woodrow Wilson’s bout with the Spanish flu delayed women’s second appearance at the peace conference, but on 10 April 1919 seventeen Allied women were summoned to the Hôtel Crillon where they were given half an hour to state their case before the League of Nations Commission. There, the women laid out an authoritative vision of what today might be called ‘feminist international relations’.24 They insisted the League of Nation’s mandate must extend beyond arbitration of national conflicts to include the management of public health, promotion of education and pursuit of general disarmament. They also insisted that 22

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The First International Congress for Working Women, Call, 5 August 1919, Millicent Garrett Fawcett Papers, Women’s Library, London School of Economics (hereafter MGF) 7MGF/A/203. See also Dorothy Sue Cobble, ‘A “Higher Standard of Life for the World”: U.S. Labor Women’s Reform, Internationalism, and the Legacies of 1919’, Journal of American History 100, 4 (2014), 1064–65. Ulla Wikander, ‘Demands on the ILO by Internationally Organised Women in 1919’ in Jasmien van Daele (ed.), ILO Histories: Essays on the International Labour Organisation and Its Impact on the World during the Twentieth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 86; Cobble, ‘The Other ILO Founders’, 41. J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True, ‘A Century of International Relations Feminism: From World War I Women’s Peace Pragmatism to the Women, Peace and Security Age’, International Studies Quarterly 62, 2 (2018), 221–33; Jan Stöckmann, ‘Women, Wars, and World Affairs: Recovering Feminist International Relations, 1915–1939’, Review of International Studies 44, 2 (2018), 215–35; Victoria Scheyer and Marina Kumskova, ‘Feminist Foreign Policy: A Fine Line between “Adding Women” and Pursuing a Feminist Agenda’, Journal of International Affairs 72, 2 (2019), 57–76.

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peace required more than the absence of war and that global stability would be an illusion if it failed to assure women’s security. They called on the League of Nations to combat violence against women, challenge incapacitating marriage laws, and end international sex trafficking. The League, they said, should put muscle behind such demands by admitting as members only those states ‘that undertake to give the women of their country new and better conditions’.25 In justifying this sweeping vision of global governance, the women cited the peacemakers’ own rhetoric: ‘After having established the first principle of human justice, that the people have the right to free self-determination, do you not feel the higher duty affirming that every human being, man and woman, has the right to freely choose his own destiny?’26 Representation mattered too, and at every turn, the female delegates drove home the central point that in a new international order, women must be accorded full participation in political life. They insisted all bodies of the League of Nations be open to women and men on an equal basis; they asked that women be explicitly included in all post-war plebiscites; and they called upon the League to push for women’s enfranchisement on the national level ‘as quickly as the degree of civilization and the democratic development of each country allows’.27 In sum, the interallied delegates redefined calls for self-determination into a moral argument for women’s autonomy and the institutionalisation of female enfranchisement in the post-war world.28 To this eloquent plea, Wilson and the other male peacemakers professed sympathy; yet they declined to act on most of the suggestions. Women’s political, economic and civil rights, Wilson told the inter-allied delegation, were ‘details to be filled in by experience rather than by our forecasting of what is wanted’.29 Such a message was disappointing, but thanks to careful behind-the-scenes diplomacy between two powerful British figures – the head of the International Council of Women, Lady Aberdeen, and British plenipotentiary Sir Robert Cecil – the Commission

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27 29

‘Speeches’, Jus Suffragii, May 1919, 105–6. ‘France: The Inter-Allied Conference in Paris’, Jus Suffragii, May 1919, 104–5. For further analysis, see Sluga, ‘Female and National Self-Determination’, 500–1; Karen Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 596–601. 28 ‘Speeches’, Jus Suffragii, May 1919, 105. Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this volume. M.-L. Puech, ‘Le Conseil international des femmes et la Conférence des femmes suffragistes reçues à la commission de la Société des nations’, La Française, 26 April 1919.

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was prepared to give way on one crucial point.30 All positions in the new world government would be open equally to women and men. Newspapers from Sydney to Chicago hailed this achievement, enshrined as Article 7 of the League Covenant, as a victory for female equality.31 In the interwar decades, this opening would allow a small number of talented women to gain valuable policy-making experience and to legitimise women’s role in international affairs. Nevertheless, in the League’s short history, only in the Social Section – considered to be appropriately suited to women’s skills and interests – would female appointees ascend to highlevel posts. Politics, mandates, disarmament and foreign relations remained carefully cordoned off as overwhelmingly male preserves.32 The patriarchal international order crafted by the peacemakers in 1919 thus bore a strong resemblance to the world that came before it, but this outcome was decidedly not a result of men’s inability to imagine international relations in any other form. The delegates to the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference brought their demands for representation and rights directly to the doorstep of the Paris Peace Conference, challenging world leaders to act on their own rhetoric and accept women as full partners in global reconstruction. Regardless of whether they were sympathetic or hostile to the women’s pleas, male peacemakers uniformly agreed that women’s rights and empowerment were incidental to the establishment of a democratic, stable and peaceful world order. Such short-sightedness weakened the foundation of the peace crafted in Paris.

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Lady Aberdeen arrived in Paris in mid-March 1919 and attached both her own name and that of the ICW to the inter-allied lobbying effort. On Cecil’s intervention, see Michel Marbeau, ‘Les femmes et la Société des nations (1919–1945): Genève, la clé de l’équalité?’ in Jean-Marc Delaunay and Yves Denéchère (eds.), Femmes et relations internationales au Xxe siècle (Paris: Presses Sorbonne nouvelle, 2006), 167. In addition to publicly announcing the principle of women’s equality in the League, Wilson also informed the inter-allied delegation that post-war plebiscites would include women. See Karen Knop, Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 281–99. ‘They Got Equality for Women in the League of Nations’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 29 April 1919; ‘Inter-Allied Women’s Conference in Paris’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 May 1919; ‘Suffragists Hail News from Paris’, New York Times, 28 March 1919. On women and the League, see Madeleine Herren, ‘Gender and International Relations through the Lens of the League of Nations (1919–1945)’ in Carolyn James and Glenda Sluga (eds.), Women, Diplomacy, and International Politics since 1500 (London: Routledge, 2016), 182–201. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 48.

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It also ignored the growing chorus of female voices calling out for representation and democracy as well as justice and freedom across the world.

   When the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference delegates spoke before the League of Nations Commission in April 1919, they did so not only in the name of women from the victorious Allied nations or even on behalf of Western suffragists like themselves. The delegates spoke, they claimed, for women across the world, including those from China, Japan, India and the ‘Muslim countries’ where, in their words, ‘the law of man, the stronger, is exercised in all its horror’. They recognised the risks in raising such concerns before an international commission that included male delegates from the countries in question. ‘Nevertheless’, the women said, ‘our duty as we saw it was to plead the cause of those who did not have a voice and who could not make themselves heard.’33 The inter-allied delegates spoke, in other words, as imperial feminists: women from powerful colonising nations who saw it as their duty to help ‘save’ Eastern women from ‘barbarous’ laws and customs far more horrifying than anything endured in the West. Such reasoning reflected longstanding suffrage arguments employed by British and other European women whose campaign for the vote rested, in part, on the claim that female voters could better protect powerless ‘Oriental’ women from abuse.34 In assuming the right to speak on behalf of non-Western women, the inter-allied delegates thus rested their demands for a new gender order, in part, on old and increasingly disputed racial and imperial hierarchies. The irony of such imperial feminist claims is that the same conditions that led white, Western women to seize the diplomatic initiative in 1919 were propelling women across Asia and the Middle East – Armenians, Indians, Koreans, Chinese, Syrians, Egyptians and others – onto the national and international stage. These women pursued democracy, equality and social justice with the same tenacity as white suffragists after the First World War, but their historical experience of oppression 33 34

‘Speeches’, Jus Suffragii, May 1919. Grinberg, ‘Les femmes et la conférence de la paix’, 11. The literature on imperial feminism is too vast to summarise here. For one historiographic review see Antoinette Burton, ‘Some Trajectories of “Feminism” and “Imperialism”’ in Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy and Angela Woolacott (eds.), Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 214–24.

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dictated different priorities and forms of engagement. Empowered by the experience of public activism and frustrated by men’s stubborn resistance to gender equality, after 1919, Asian, Middle Eastern, Pan-African and other global feminists would organise in ever-expanding numbers. Unsurprisingly, as the circle of global feminists grew in size and diversity, the common ground uniting them narrowed; nevertheless, in the aftermath of the First World War, one driving goal helped women transcend the boundaries of ethnicity, race and imperial status: the firm conviction that a just, sustainable and peaceful world order demanded women’s full participation. Rallying around this principle, women of colour from the United States and across the Global South sought to inject anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-patriarchal concerns into the ‘Great Conversation’ about global peace at the end of the First World War.35 By the early twentieth century, evidence of ‘women’s awakening’ could be found in many countries of Asia and the Middle East, where cosmopolitan cities like Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, Colombo and Beijing offered elite and middle-class women new forms of sociability, access to an expanding literary culture, and growing educational and professional opportunities.36 Social transformation bred political consciousness and, before long, pioneering female intellectuals and activists from India, China and beyond began to propose, and then demand, a more expansive role in public life.37 The peace negotiations following the First World War further fuelled nationalist and feminist aspirations across Asia and the Middle East.38 Among colonised, marginalised and stateless peoples, as historian Erez Manela has persuasively argued, disillusionment with the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference heralded ‘the emergence of anticolonial

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Bouchard, Chapter 12 in this volume. Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986). Sumita Mukherjee, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 28–39; Louise Edwards, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 84. Feminist was not a label that most women from Asia or the Middle East embraced in 1919, although many would in the decade that followed. Following Jayawardena, I use the word in the broader sense to describe women who engaged in struggles for liberation, equality and representation within the societies in which they lived. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism, 2.

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nationalism as a major force in world affairs’.39 Diplomatic historians have noted that in early anti-colonial demonstrations, women could often be found among the protestors, but these women are generally described as secondary players in male-dominated movements.40 One must turn to feminist scholarship, and back to the archives, to understand the farranging nature of women’s anti-colonial engagement as well as the distinctly feminist vision of liberation embraced by female nationalists. Given the monumental promise of the negotiations in Paris, it is hardly surprising that women from colonised states and oppressed minorities were closely following global affairs. What is more unexpected is the number of female activists from subjugated and stateless populations who voyaged long distances to the French capital to lay their views before the international community. Armenian feminist Zabel Yesayan was among the first to stake her claim on diplomats’ attention, arriving in Paris in January 1919, having narrowly escaped the wartime genocidal campaign launched by the Ottoman Turks. Yesayan came to Paris to help her co-nationalists build a case for an independent Armenian state and to seek international aid for Armenian victims of war.41 Her stories of Armenian girls and women raped by Turkish guards during their forced march through the Syrian desert stunned the Inter-Allied Women’s Conference delegates, who listened in horror as Yesayan testified before them in late February.42 This appeal from a Christian Armenian female refugee reinforced Western feminists’ suspicion of ‘Muslim lands’ and hardened their resolve to campaign on behalf of women who endured wartime violence, forced labour and other forms of abuse.43 39 40

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Manela, The Wilsonian Moment, 4–5. Ibid., 134, 143–44. Some recent studies have sought to integrate women’s anti-colonial ideas and activism. See, for example, chapters by Caesar E. Farah and Marilyn Booth in Adel Beshara (ed.), The Origins of Syrian Nationhood: Histories, Pioneers and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 210–52. Arzu Öztürkmen, ‘The Women’s Movement under Ottoman and Republican Rule’, Journal of Women’s History 25, 4 (2013), 258; Lerna Ekmekcioglu, ‘The Armenian National Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and “The Role of the Armenian Woman during the War”’, World War I in the Middle East and North Africa, https:// blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/world-war-i-in-the-middle-east/seminar-participants/ web-projects/lerna-ekmekcioglu-the-armenian-national-delegation-at-the-paris-peaceconference-and-the-role-of-the-armenian-woman-during-the-war/ Mrs. Zahel Essayan, ‘La liberation des femmes et des infants non-Musulmans en Turquie’, typed report, 8 pp., FCB/CAF, 1/AF/166. The Inter-Allied Women’s Conference asked the Commission on War Responsibilities to set up a mixed-sex body to investigate the report. See ‘Resolution adopté avec la Conférence des femmes suffragistes des pays alliées et des Etats-Unis’, n.d., Papiers

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African American women did not face the same dangers as Yesayan did during the war, but they were acutely aware of how easily racial and ethnic prejudice could give way to violence, having suffered the indignities of segregation and the terror of lynching in Jim Crow America. These threats, coupled with deep concerns about the effects of colonialism in Africa, drew several prominent African American women to Paris in 1919. At least three came specifically to attend the post-war PanAfrican Congress, an event co-chaired by the towering Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois and the equally respected French Senegalese legislator Blaise Diagne. Under these men’s leadership, nearly sixty delegates from North America, Europe, the West Indies and Africa met for three days in mid-February in the hopes of bettering the fate of Africans and the global African diaspora in the peace negotiations. Solidarity of race, not sex, defined the Pan-African agenda, and women were very much in the minority; nevertheless, African American feminists left a strong mark on the historic gathering. The congress owed its very existence, in no small part, to the quiet labours of an unassuming woman named Ida Gibbs Hunt, who had lived throughout First World War in the south-eastern French city of St Etienne with her husband, the American consul. A long-time critic of imperialism – the pernicious effects of which she had witnessed first-hand while stationed with her husband in French Madagascar – Gibbs Hunt wrote to Du Bois just weeks after the armistice, urging him to come to Paris to press the peacemakers to address the ‘colonial side’ of global relations; the peace terms, she said, must be drafted ‘in the interest of the natives as well as of Europe’.44 Gibbs Hunt took charge of much of the planning of the Congress: indispensable labour for which Du Bois gave her very little credit.45 Such entrenched patriarchal attitudes explain why the only woman of colour invited to address the 1919 congress, African American suffragist Addie Waites

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André Tardieu, Ministère des affaires étrangères, Centre des archives diplomatiques, la Corneuve, 166PAAP/462. Gibbs Hunt to Du Bois, 23 November 1918, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries (hereafter WEBDB), https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums312 Adele Logan Alexander, Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)Significance of Melanin (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 178. For more on Ida Gibbs Hunt’s role in the Pan-African Movement, see Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, 51–90.

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Hunton, chose to emphasise ‘the importance of women in the world’s reconstruction’.46 Politically conscious women in the colonised and subjugated states of Asia and the Middle East were similarly melding anti-colonialist and nationalist passions with budding feminist aspirations in 1919.47 Already during First World War, Indian suffragists had begun to demand the British Parliament authorise female suffrage, arguing that as power devolved to the people of India, women must be enfranchised alongside men. In late summer 1919, poet Sarojini Naidu and mother–daughter team Hirabai and Mithan Tata travelled to London, where Parliament was debating the terms of Indian home rule. Thanks to their tireless efforts, the final wording of the 1919 Government of India Act left open the possibility of female enfranchisement.48 Similar anti-colonial and feminist sentiments fed the ambitions of the first generation of Korean feminists, many of whom participated actively in the 1 March uprising against Japanese colonial rule.49 In this popular revolt, radicalised schoolgirls played a prominent role. Demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of international power relations, one underground female society sought, unsuccessfully, to get a woman appointed to the unofficial Korean delegation leaving to appeal for national selfdetermination at the Paris Peace Conference.50 Soon after, teenage activist Yu Gwan-sun would be imprisoned and tortured by the Japanese for her active role in the uprising.51 Linking nationalist and feminist aspirations, a number of the young women who protested in March would go on to establish a Korean New Woman movement in the 1920s.52

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W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Pan African Congress’, The Crisis, April 1919, 273. See also Dunstan, Chapter 2 in this volume. Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 55. The Government of India Act left the decision whether to accord women the vote to the provincial legislative councils in India. This was less than Indian suffragists had hoped for, but beginning in 1921, Madras and Bombay set the precedent by enfranchising women on the same terms as men. See Mukherjee, Indian Suffragettes, 51–68. Manela, Chapter 15 in this volume. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism, 222. ‘Overlooked No More: Yu Gwan-sun, a Korean Independence Activist who Defied Japanese Rule, New York Times, 28 March 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/obitu aries/overlooked-yu-gwan-sun.html Kwon Insook, ‘“The New Women’s Movement” in 1920s Korea: Rethinking the Relationship between Imperialism and Women’, in Sinha et al. (eds.), Feminisms and Internationalisms, 37–61.

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Another dramatic expression of women’s growing nationalist and feminist consciousness could be found in Egypt, where, in March 1919, anti-colonial leaders launched a national revolt against British rule. As was often the case in colonised states, male elites led the movement for national sovereignty, but out of an abundance of caution, some of these men included their wives in the planning.53 In mid-March, British colonial authorities did deport some movement leaders to Malta, including the popular leader Saad Zaghlul. The night of his arrest, Zaghlul’s wife Safiyah – dubbed Umm al-Masriyin or Mother of Egyptians – announced her home would remain open as a revolutionary headquarters in her husband’s absence.54 A week leader, the prominent philanthropist and budding feminist Huda Shaarawi laid plans for Egyptian women’s first mass public demonstration in support of national liberation. Over the months that followed, Egyptian women would organise marches, stage protests, circulate petitions and enforce boycotts, helping drive the movement for Egyptian independence. With impressive diplomatic savvy, they aimed their demands at Allied leaders in Paris and Cairo, referencing global leaders’ public support for democracy and self-determination. One petition – signed by over 100 Egyptian women including Shaarawi and Zaghlul and delivered to American diplomatic offices in Cairo – read, ‘We beg you to send our message to America and to President Wilson personally . . . We believe they will not suffer Liberty to be crushed in Egypt.’55 Egyptian women worked side-by-side with their husbands, brothers and sons to demand an end to British rule. They were to be bitterly disappointed four years later, when Egypt won the right to establish a constitutional monarchy, and male legislators refused to enfranchise women, ignored most of their concerns and sought to circumscribe their role in public life. For women like Shaarawi who had ‘fought concurrently as feminists and nationalists’ in 1919, this rejection came as a severe blow.56 On 16 March 1923, the fourth anniversary of women’s initial public demonstration, Shaarawi founded the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), which adopted a sweeping programme to help women 53 54 55 56

Shaarawi, Harem Years, 116. Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 81. ‘To the United States Diplomatic Agent in Egypt, March 24, 1919’, Records of the Department of State relating to internal affairs of Egypt, 1910–19, reel 2, 883.00/135. Margot Badran, ‘Dual-Liberation: Feminism and Nationalism in Egypt, 1870s–1926’, Feminist Issues 8, 1 (1988), 16.

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‘attain political and social equality with man in regard to customs and laws’.57 Throughout the interwar decades, the EFU led feminist organising efforts in the Middle East and work to develop a pan-Arab feminist movement dedicated to the joint pursuit of national and individual emancipation. Less than two months after Huda Shaarawi led Egyptian women onto the streets of Cairo to demand national sovereignty, China too erupted in public demonstrations. Provoked by news that the diplomats in Paris had decided to award Shandong Province to Japan, several thousand Chinese secondary school and university students gathered in angry protest in Beijing on 4 May 1919. Demonstrations quickly spread to other cities and drew in a broader cross-section of the population. One of the remarkable features of the May Fourth Incident, according to the North China Herald, was ‘the large part now taken by the women of China. They are as keen as their brothers in the desire for the betterment of their country’s welfare’.58 Equally extraordinary were the events set in motion in Paris by China’s twenty-eight-year-old female peace delegate Soumay Tcheng (Zheng Yuxiu), the only woman appointed by any Allied government to serve in a representative capacity in at the Paris Peace Conference. American and European journalists were stunned by China’s young, female delegate, but they quickly learned that despite her young age, Tcheng came to Paris with an impressive set of credentials. As a teenager, Tcheng had pledged herself to the republican cause, smuggling bombs for Dr Sun Yatsen’s Revolutionary Alliance. When the Qing dynasty fell, Tcheng continued to press for republican governance, and she joined with other Chinese suffragists in demanding women’s political enfranchisement.59 By 1913, Tcheng’s activism got her in enough hot water that her family sent her abroad to Paris, where she enrolled at the Sorbonne to study law. When war broke out, Tcheng advocated for her country to join in the Allied fight for democracy, arguing that wartime engagement would help the young Chinese republic reclaim its right to national sovereignty, which had been seriously eroded by European and the 57 58

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Céza Nabaraouy (Saiza Nabarawi), ‘L’évolution du féminisme en Égypte’, L’Égyptienne, March 1925, 45; Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation, 66 and 91–108. ‘Chinese Women Students’, North-China Herald, 7 June 1919. See also Wang Zheng, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 150–51, 266, and 292–93. Tang Dongmei, Chuan yue shi ji cang mang: Zheng Yuxiu zhuan (Across the Boundless Century: A Biography of Zheng Yuxiu) (Beijing: Zhongguo she hui chu ban she, 2003), 157–64. Thanks to Xiaoliang Sun for the translation of this biography.

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Japanese imperialists in the nineteenth century. At war’s end, Tcheng would be appointed to serve as media spokesperson for China’s peace delegation and to represent Chinese women in the negotiations.60 Tcheng eagerly returned to Paris in the spring of 1919, assuming that much of her time would be spent championing women’s rights alongside other international feminists. Other priorities quickly intervened. ‘I gave up all idea of doing anything for the women of China’, she would later explain, ‘as soon as the [Shandong] award was made to Japan.’61 From 4 May to the end of June, Tcheng threw her energies into organising Chinese students and workers abroad to appeal to peacemakers to reverse their decision.62 When diplomatic efforts failed, Tcheng rounded up concerned compatriots and occupied the temporary French residence of chief delegate Lu Zhengxiang, preventing him travelling to Versailles to sign the humiliating treaty.63 Nationalism, not feminism, defined Soumay Tcheng’s diplomatic interventions in Paris, but for China’s sole female peace delegate, as for other female activists from subjugated states and embattled ethnic minorities, national liberation and female emancipation represented two sides of the same coin. Tcheng’s feminism came through clearly in 1919 in the interviews she gave to Western journalists, in which she repeatedly held out women’s liberation as a sign of China’s political maturity.64 In the late 1920s, as China’s first female lawyer and judge, Tcheng would help draft a new, republican civil code: a revolutionary document that would help enshrine equal rights for women in inheritance, divorce and marriage in Chinese law.65 By necessity, non-Western and non-white women like Soumay Tcheng, Huda Shaarawi, Ida Gibbs Hunt, Yu Gwan-sun, Sarojini Naidu and Zabel Yesayan waged separate battles from Western suffragists in 1919. Their struggles for national self-determination, often fought alongside men, were nonetheless defined by a desire to advance the principle of 60 61 62 63 64

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For a fuller account of Tcheng’s activism, see Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, 163–99. ‘Chinese Portia Indignant at Award’, Evening Tribune, 18 November 1919. ‘Chinese to Appeal to American Senate’, New York Times, 11 May 1919; ‘Chinese to Ask America for Aid’, Los Angeles Times, 11 May 1919. Yu-hsiu Cheng Wei, My Revolutionary Years: The Autobiography of Madame Wei Taoming (New York: Charles Scribner, 1943), 119–25; Siegel, Peace on Our Terms, 181–84. Andrée Viollis, ‘Miss Cheng of China, What Her Country Wants, a Vicious Advocate’, Daily Mail, 16 April 1919; ‘A Chinese Portia’, New York Times, 1 June 1919; ‘Chinese Woman in U.S. to Aid Countrymen’, Los Angeles Evening Herald, 3 December 1919. Margaret Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early TwentiethCentury China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 12, 68, 145–46.

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individual self-determination: the ability for all people, regardless of their sex, to help shape the laws, policies and customs that structured their lives. In a post-war world where men continued to dominate, if not monopolise, political power, this unifying goal continued to serve as a magnet, drawing women together across the many divides that defined their lived experience.66 It did not erase disagreements or power imbalances within international feminist organisations, but it would continue to propel woman to build alliances and networks in the ongoing struggle for democracy and equality, social justice and peace.

         Pre-existing international feminist organisations – including the International Council of Women and International Woman Suffrage Alliance – would play an important role drawing women together in the post-war era, but they would increasingly compete for membership with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), a new organisation born of the calamity of the First World War and of women’s efforts to shape a more just international order in its aftermath. In the interwar decades, the WILPF, even more than the older international organisations, would work to weave diverse female voices and movements into the tapestry of global feminism. From the beginning, the WILPF reflected women’s desire for inclusivity: specifically, of pacifist suffragists’ determination to bridge the wartime animosities that had eroded female solidarity in Europe. Against all odds, more than 100 such women from twelve belligerent and neutral states managed to travel to The Hague in 1915 amid the global cataclysm to raise their voices against the ‘madness and horror of the war’. Although women’s appeals for a mediated peace went unheeded, female pacifists vowed to reconvene at war’s end to assert ‘women’s voice in the peace settlement’.67 Unlike the suffragists who travelled to Paris for the InterAllied Women’s Conference, pacifist feminists insisted on a neutral location for their meeting so that women from the Central Powers could 66

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As Martin Thomas writes in Chapter 6 in this volume, the war and its aftermath brought together oppositional voices in new ways. This dynamic was certainly at work in feminist circles in 1919 and after. ‘Resolutions Adopted at the Congress at The Hague 1915’, Report of the International Congress of Women, Zurich, May 12 to 17, 1919 (Geneva: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, [1919]), 280–85.

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participate. They settled on Zurich, where, from 12 to 17 May 1919, nearly 150 women from fifteen nations would assemble as the International Congress of Women. Given the late start date, the Zurich Congress would have little ability to influence the terms of the peace agreement, but it did afford women the opportunity to weigh in on the settlement’s merits or failings before any other organised body in the world. ‘It was a coincidence’, reported the New York Times, ‘that the women’s first sessions found the ink on the peace terms hardly dry.’68 To the feminist pacifists in Zurich, there was little doubt that the Versailles treaty spelled disaster. ‘Idealism’, lamented one WILPF delegate, has ‘never received such a blow as it has received from those wellmeaning statesmen who have not had the courage to do the right thing.’69 The women fired off telegrams to Paris condemning the treaty’s shortsightedness and decrying the disastrous ‘hunger blockade’ of Central Europe. They also drafted a ‘Women’s Charter’, which they delivered into the hands of the peacemakers, asking that all signatories to the peace settlement recognise that ‘the natural relation between men and women is that of interdependence and cooperation’. Many of the specific issues the Zurich delegates enumerated echoed those laid out earlier by the interallied suffragists, including recognition of equality between men and women in marriage, in the workforce and at the ballot box. The Zurich delegates went further, however, in demanding international acknowledgement of the principle that a mother should never be deprived of the ability to feed her children in times of conflict.70 Determined to champion pacifist and feminist interests over the long haul, the Zurich delegates established themselves as a permanent organisation, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, to be headquartered in Geneva, at the doorstep to the League of Nations. In so doing, the WILPF staked out a space for women in the growing sphere of international politics and policy-making.71 In the interwar decades, the WILPF would effectively function as a non-governmental organisation before the term was invented, working as a private, transnational group of citizens to sway decision-makers to enact policy in the interests of gender equality, social justice and lasting peace.72 68 69 71 72

‘Women as “Permanent Peacemakers”’, New York Times, 22 June 1919. 70 Report of the International Congress of Women, 61–62. Ibid., 246–48. Gram-Skjoldager, Chapter 8 in this volume. On the WILPF’s policy work in the interwar decades see Jo Vellacott, ‘Feminism as if All People Mattered: Working to Remove the Causes of War, 1919–1929’, Contemporary European History 10, 3 (2001), 386–92; Laura Beers, ‘Advocating for a Feminist

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More than other international feminist organisations, the interwar WILPF strove to confront issues of racial inequality and imperialism.73 This willingness derived in part from the radical sympathies of some of the organisation’s European members and in part from African American WILPF members who repeatedly demanded the organisation recognise the centrality of racial equality to the broader goals of peace and freedom. African American suffragist and civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell, the only delegate of colour to attend the 1919 Zurich Congress, placed the matter flatly on the organisation’s agenda when she asked the delegates to endorse racial equality as a foundational principle.74 Terrell reiterated the point in a plenary address, where she flatly told the resoundingly white audience, ‘lasting peace is an impossibility as long as the colored races are subject to injustice’.75 The WILPF did not transform into a racially integrated organisation overnight, but it would attract a fair number of prominent African American members in the interwar decades, including many of the women of colour who had been active in Paris in 1919. Ida Gibbs Hunt, who had organised the Pan-African Congress, would join the WILPF. So too did Addie Waites Hunton, who was one of two African American women selected by the WILPF to travel to Haiti for a 1925 factfinding mission. Upon return, Hunton helped draft a blistering report condemning the United States’ military occupation of the Black Republic.76 Indian and Egyptian women seeking to challenge colonial rule and demand women’s rights also saw the WILPF as an ally. In November 1919, when the British Parliament refused to enfranchise women outright in the Government of India Act, the British branch of the WILPF organised a public protest. Two years later, when Madras and Bombay became the first Indian provinces to enfranchise women on the same terms as

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Internationalism between the Wars’ in James and Sluga (eds.), Women, Diplomacy, and International Politics, 202–21. Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 30. ‘Resolution A VII. – Race Equality’, Report of the International Congress of Women, 110. ‘Mary Church Terrell (U.S.A.)’, Report of the International Congress of Women, 212–17. Melinda Plastas, A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics in the Women’s Peace Movement (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 34–83; Joyce Blackwell, No Peace without Freedom: Race and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1975 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 7 and 67.

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men, British WILPF members sent their hearty congratulations.77 In 1921, Egyptian feminists sent their own telegram to WILPF headquarters asking for support in protesting the ‘merciless enforcement of the British government’s reprisals’ against Egyptian nationalists. In response, both the British WILPF section and the Geneva office sent stern telegrams to the British foreign minister.78 Armenian women similarly benefited from the WILPF’s campaigning when it joined with other international women’s organisations to press the League of Nations to look into the fate of women and children deported from Ottoman Turkey during the war. In direct response, the League produced, ‘one of the first and most comprehensive reckonings of the situation faced by survivors of the Armenian Genocide’.79 As it approached its second decade, the WILPF began to emphasise broader global collaboration with women outside the West, and in late 1927 it arranged for a delegation of two women, Edith Pye of Great Britain and Camille Drevet of France, to travel to Indochina, China and Japan on a mission of friendship and inquiry. When the WILPF delegates arrived in southern China, they were greeted by a familiar face: that of Soumay Tcheng.80 Tcheng would introduce Pye and Drevet to some of the most influential women in China, including Soong Mei-ling, still transitioning into her new identity as Madame Chiang Kai-shek. By then, Tcheng was making waves of her own. Shortly after the WILPF delegates returned for home, the Nationalist government again sent Tcheng on a diplomatic mission back to Europe. In the meantime, Egyptian feminists celebrated Tcheng’s professional achievements in their newsletter, L’Egyptienne, and Indochinese nationalist Phan Boi Chau began holding her up as a role model for Annamite schoolgirls seeking to challenge traditional gender roles.81

77 78

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Mukherjee, Indian Suffragettes, 63 and 66. Press release, ‘Protest of Egyptian Women against the Merciless Enforcement of British Reprisals’ [1921]; telegram to Jane Addams ‘on appeal of Egyptian women’; ‘Le différend anglo-égyptien’, La Suisse, 12 December 1921, all in Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Records, Special Collections, University of Colorado, Boulder Libraries, First Accession, III-7-2. Keith David Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927’, American Historical Review 115, 5 (2010), 1323. Mona Siegel, ‘Feminism, Pacifism and Political Violence in Europe and China in the Era of the World Wars’, Gender & History 28, 3 (2016), 646. ‘Les grandes figures féminines de l’orient’, L’Égyptienne, October 1927, hors texte; Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism, 203–4.

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The WILPF delegation’s Asian mission would also spur public interest in feminism in Indochina. Pye and Drevet’s arrival triggered deep alarm among French colonial authorities, who suspected the women were undercover communists.82 Young Vietnamese men and women, in contrast, took a lively interest in the WILPF delegates, praising Drevet in the pages of Phu Nu Tan Van (Ladies’ News).83 Drevet, for her part, was so disgusted by the racism and misogyny displayed by French colonists that she returned home an outspoken proponent of Vietnamese independence.84 Women from oppressed minorities and the Global South would forge strategic partnerships with Western feminists in pursuit of democratic, educational, civil and professional rights, but faced with recalcitrant racism and Orientalism among many of their Western ‘sisters’, they also built their own alliances that could better address intersecting feminist, nationalist, anti-racist and anti-imperial goals. At the most basic level, minority and oppressed women wrote about each other’s experiences. Huda Shaarawi’s 1919 standoff with British colonial authorities, for example, served as the subject of an admiring article in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s The Crisis.85 Tunisian women similarly wrote of Shaarawi’s actions and praised her willingness to demand ‘the rights accorded [to women] by our religion but which men’s selfishness and women’s ignorance have denied them’.86 Feminists who had the means to travel met with women in countries that had yet to develop feminist movements and encouraged them to challenge oppressive colonial laws and local customs. During visits to Sri Lanka (1922) and South Africa (1924), for example, Indian feminist Sarojini Naidu would inspire budding feminists to embrace activism and public life.87 The All-Asian Women’s

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84 85 86 87

Mona Siegel, ‘The Dangers of Feminism in Colonial Indochina’, French Historical Studies 38, 4 (2015), 661–89. Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, 204; Thach Lan, ‘Bà Camille Drevet’, Phu Nu Tan Van [1929], 20, WILPF Papers, IV-1-26. Thanks to Matthew Berry for translating this article. Siegel, ‘The Dangers of Feminism’, 687. Jessie Fauset, ‘Nationalism and Egypt’, The Crisis, April 1920, 313. Mademoiselle G. Charoni, ‘L’Évolution du feminism en Egypte’, La Petite Tunisie, 10–15 February 1935. Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism, 128; Patricia van der Spuy and Lindsay Clowes, ‘Transnational Mentoring: The Impact of Sarojini Naidu’s 1924 Visit to South Africa on Cissie Gool and Women’s Leadership’ in Francesca de Haan, Margaret Allen, June Purvis and Krassimira Daskalova (eds.), Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives from the 1890s to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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Conference in Lahore, India (1931), the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (founded in 1922), the Little Entente of Women (founded in 1923), the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (founded in 1930) and the Arab Feminist Union (founded in 1945) all spoke to growing feminist collaboration beyond the bounds of the major international feminist organisations.88 Latin American women would benefit from these expanding feminist networks and would soon establish Central and South America as a dynamic centre of women’s rights activism. In the aftermath of the Second World War, feministas americanas would play a vital role in inscribing women’s rights and equality in the United Nations Charter and international law.89 Feminist alliances after 1919 could be fleeting or enduring, binational, regional or global. They took coherent shape in international conferences and gave rise to permanent organisations. As their networks grew, feminists registered important victories, like the League of Nation’s establishment of a Committee for the Study of the Legal Status of Women (1937) – a predecessor to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women after the Second World War. It would take many more decades for the UN to make gender equality an international priority or for feminists to organise on a truly global scale.90 These modern accomplishments, however, can all be traced back to 1919, when, in the shadow of the Paris Peace Conference, female activists from across the world thrust their way into the political and diplomatic spotlight, laid out a sweeping women’s rights agenda, and stridently insisted the international order would never know peace or stability until women had a voice in its making.

88 89 90

For essays on a number of these regional movements, see Karen Offen (ed.), Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2010). Katherine M. Marino, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Eileen Boris, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

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15 Colonial Nationalists and the Making of a New International Order Erez Manela

Among the hundreds of petitions and memoranda submitted to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was a fifteen-page document entitled ‘Memorandum on the Claims of the Kurd People’. Its author, Sherif Pasha, had been a high-ranking Ottoman diplomat, serving for a time as Istanbul’s ambassador to Sweden. But he later broke with the Young Turks, criticised the wartime killings of Armenians by Ottoman forces, and by the war’s end had joined the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan, a Kurdish nationalist organisation dedicated to the establishment of an independent Kurdish state in eastern Anatolia. Addressed to the world leaders in Paris, who had taken on ‘the task of remapping the globe on the basis of nationality’, the memorandum detailed the geographic boundaries and demographic character of the territories it claimed for the future Kurdish state, citing Western scholarly authorities on the history and ethnography of the region to support its assertions. It concluded that by ‘virtue of the Wilsonian principale [sic] everything pleads in favour of the Kurds for the creation of a Kurd state, entirely free and independent’. The Turkish government, having accepted President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, could not deny Kurds that right.1 * This chapter is a revised version of one that was published under the title ‘The Wilsonian Uprisings of 1919’ in David Motadel (ed.), Revolutionary World: Global Upheaval in the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 1 Sherif Pasha, Memorandum on the Claims of the Kurd People (Paris: A.-G. L’Hoir, 1919). To the arguments from demography and history Sherif added an economic one, noting the ‘national wealth of the Kurds being almost entirely derived from cattle-raising which requires, on account of the climate, Winter and Summer pastures, we urgently request that these pastures shall not remain outside the frontiers assigned to Kurdistan’.

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The year 1919 is often remembered as the year in which peace was restored to Europe after the cataclysm of the Great War. But the peace, as recent scholarship has emphasised, was only partial, and major fighting continued in much of Europe and the Middle East well into the 1920s. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia, then fighting for its survival against opposition from within and without, inspired numerous uprisings in East and Central Europe, notably in Germany and Hungary. Across the territories of the collapsed empires of the Habsburgs, the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns and the Ottomans, competing claimants struggled for power, legitimacy and recognition through a combination of diplomatic negotiations and bloody military clashes.2 Out of the ashes of these fallen empires, new nation-states were emerging to stake their claim to sovereignty and self-determination.3 The upheavals of this era, however, were not limited to Europe or Anatolia, even if it was in those places that they were the bloodiest. In North Africa, Egyptians rose in revolt against British control and Tunisians demanded the restoration of the constitution from their French overlords. Indians, too, rose up against British rule, launching a concerted campaign that year for Indian self-determination. Across East and Southeast Asia, in China, Korea, Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, growing opposition to imperialism transformed polities and societies. Africans and people of African descent also mobilised. A Pan-African Congress in Paris in February of that year convened fifty-seven delegates from fifteen countries, and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association reached some 2 million members.4 Thus, 1919 saw the outbreak of a global revolt against an imperial world order, one that would eventually lead, in the ensuing decades, to the replacement of empires with nation-states as the dominant political formation not only in Europe but across the globe. Peoples living under authoritarian or alien regimes had, of course, contested such rule throughout history. The revolution of 1919, however,

2

3

4

Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela (eds.), Empires at War, 1911–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016). On the origins of this new language of diplomacy, see the classic account by Arno Mayer, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959). Sarah Claire Dunstan, ‘Conflicts of Interest: The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment’, Callaloo 39, 1 (2016), 133–50; Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

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Colonial Nationalists & Making of a New International Order 363 was not simply about resisting specific tyrannies; rather, it was an uprising against imperialism as a long-established global principle of legitimacy and order. This revolution, like others, involved violent clashes across vast parts of the world, from Berlin, Budapest and Anatolia to Cairo, Amritsar, Beijing and Seoul. At its heart, however, was a challenge to the legitimacy of imperial rule, one that placed the principle of selfdetermination at the centre of the debate over the post-war order.5 That principle, introduced into the debate over Allied war aims by the Russian Bolsheviks, was then taken up by other statesmen, most notably US President Woodrow Wilson, who incorporated it into his wartime rhetoric and so brought it into the centre of global attention. To the extent that Wilson’s adoption of that rhetoric was belated, ambivalent, and, to a significant extent, misconstrued by unintended audiences, the role of what I have elsewhere called the ‘Wilsonian moment’ in galvanising movements against empire must count as one of the great ironies of the Great War.6 At the peace table itself, most of the discussion about remapping was focused on the territories of the defeated empires in East-Central Europe and Western Asia. It was there that the peacemakers constructed what Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, called a ‘laboratory over a vast cemetery’.7 In this laboratory, they devised and tested various instruments for determining and managing post-imperial sovereignty. Instruments such as successor states, plebiscites and population transfers were all designed to ensure a better fit between nations and states or (as in the case of minority treaties) to manage situations where such a fit could not be achieved. The peace negotiators in their laboratory also weighed the principle of self-determination against numerous other interests: military, political, economic. They thus honoured it in the breach as much as in the observance even in Europe. For the territories outside Europe a different instrument was invented, that of the League of Nation’s Mandate, designed more to extend the reach of empire than to transcend it. Still, in the end this instrument, like those implemented

5 6

7

See also Dunstan, Chapter 2, Smith, Chapter 4 and Thomas, Chapter 6 in this volume. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The idea of selfdetermination had a long career after 1919 and evolved in new directions. See Brad Simpson, ‘The United States and the Curious History of Self-Determination’, Diplomatic History 36, 4 (2012), 675–94; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). This quote is borrowed from Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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within Europe, served to engineer a transition from empires to nationstates.8 All told, the process led to the creation of many new states, most of which can still be found, in one form or another, on the world map today. The revolutions of 1919 saw a broad mobilisation in the name of selfdetermination, one that went far beyond the territories officially discussed in Paris or the peoples formally represented at the peace table there. Among the authors of the hundreds of petitions and memoranda that flooded into Paris, whether official or not, recognised or not, were Chinese, Koreans and Indians, Armenians, Assyrians and Kurds, Arabs and Jews, Egyptians and Tunisians, Catalans, Basques, Irish and many others.9 In each of these cases there were local forces – political, economic, social, cultural – reflected in these mobilisations. But they were all also tied to expectations for the ‘remapping of the globe’ in the aftermath of the war and they all relied, to one extent or another, on an appeal to the principle of self-determination to demand a greater measure of selfrule. It was the first time in history, though not the last, that this principle was invoked simultaneously by numerous claimants in distant parts of the globe to challenge a world order based on imperial formations. After 1919, the imperial world order would never regain the relative stability and legitimacy it had once possessed.

    The notion of a right to national self-determination was introduced into the international debate over war aims by the Russian Bolsheviks in mid1917. The Bolshevik leadership viewed support for national selfdetermination, defined as a right of secession from imperial rule, as a useful tool for undermining imperial regimes in Russia and elsewhere and gaining the support of subject peoples for the revolution.10 In March 8 9

10

Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Many of these appeals are discussed, often quite briefly, in Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002). In addition, on the Kurds, see Bejtullah Destani (ed.), Minorities in the Middle East: Kurdish Communities, 1918–1974 (Slough: Archive Editions, 2006), vol. I; on the Assyrians, see Bīth Shamūʼīl, al-Āshūrīyūn fī Muʼtamar al-S ̣ulh, Bārīs 1919 (Dahūk: n. _ p., 2000). V. I. Lenin, ‘The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination’ in V. I. Lenin (ed.), Collected Works, 45 vols. (Moscow: Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 1960–72), vol. XXII, 143–56 (first published in October 1916). See also Jeremy Smith,

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Colonial Nationalists & Making of a New International Order 365 1917, therefore, even before the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin declared that when the Bolsheviks ruled Russia their peace plan would include ‘the liberation of all colonies; the liberation of all dependent, oppressed, and non-sovereign peoples’.11 The Bolshevik call for a settlement based on national selfdetermination, though phrased in universal terms, was initially aimed at the left in Europe, especially in Britain, France and Germany, where Lenin hoped to help spark a revolution.12 It was the fear that the Bolshevik declaration would sway European public opinion that led first the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and then US President Woodrow Wilson to incorporate the promise of ‘self-determination’ into the rhetoric of the Western allies.13 Wilson had already long advocated for a post-war settlement based on ‘the consent of the governed’, but by 1918 ‘selfdetermination’ had largely supplanted the former term in his public rhetoric, obfuscating the distinction between Lenin’s revolutionary agenda and Wilson’s liberal reformism. Wilson, who saw autocracy and militarism as the main causes of the war, envisioned a stable peace as one based on the longstanding republican principle of government by consent. Lenin, whose immediate concern was toppling the Russian Empire and gaining the support of its subject peoples as well as undermining the German and Austrian crowns, defined national self-determination as a right of secession from a multinational empire.14 Thus, the Bolshevik declarations invariably spoke of the right to ‘national’ self-determination and deployed the phrase as a call for the overthrow of imperial rule. Wilson, on the other hand, seldom if ever described the right to self-determination as specifically ‘national’. Instead, he understood it as akin to the Enlightenment notions of

11 13

14

The Bolsheviks and the National Question, 1917–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1999), 8–20; Jean-François Fayet, ‘1919’ in Stephen A. Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 109–24. 12 Mayer, Political Origins, 248 and 298–303. Ibid., 385–87. Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 143. See also George W. Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy, Politics, and International Organisation, 1914–1919 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 57–59. The full text of David Lloyd George’s address where he first declared support for the principle of self-determination is in British War Aims: Statement by the Prime Minister, the Right Honourable David Lloyd George, on January 5, 1918 (London: HMSO, 1918). Borislav Chernev, ‘The Brest–Litovsk Moment: Self-Determination Discourse in Eastern Europe before Wilsonianism’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 22, 3 (2011), 369–87.

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government by consent that underlay the American Revolution and US political traditions. Like many political thinkers in the West at the time, he also saw it as linked to stages of political development. So while in his wartime speeches he couched the phrase in universal terms, he also saw it as immediately applicable only to ‘advanced’ (that is, largely European) peoples.15 Such fine distinctions, however, were not always readily apparent to observers at the time; indeed, the apparent flexibility of the term and its interpretation was one of its primary attractions. The term ‘self-determination’ itself was not found in Wilson’s famed Fourteen Points address of 8 January 1918, though it was arguably implicit in several of the points, such as those calling for the resurrection of Poland, the evacuation of Belgium, and the ‘autonomous development’ of the peoples of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.16 Wilson’s first public utterance of the phrase itself came the following month, in February 1918, when he declared: ‘“Self-determination” is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.’17 It is notable that in his draft of the address – he composed his speeches himself – Wilson had placed the phrase ‘self-determination’ within quotes, suggesting that he was consciously incorporating a novel term into his lexicon. The new phrase may not have much changed the essence of Wilson’s vision in his own mind, but it did lend his pronouncements a more radical tone, amplifying their impact as they echoed around the world.18

15

16

17 18

Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 125–43; N. Gordon Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics: America’s Response to War and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 247–51. Address to a joint session of Congress, 8 January 1918, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (hereafter PWW), ed. Arthur S. Link et al., 69 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966–94), vol. 45, 534–39. Address to Congress, 11 February 1918, PWW, 46, 321. Trygve Throntveit, ‘The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination’, Diplomatic History 35, 3 (2011), 445–81; Michla Pomerance, ‘The United States and Self-Determination: Perspectives on the Wilsonian Conception’, American Journal of International Law 70 (1976), 1–27; Allen Lynch, ‘Woodrow Wilson and the Principle of “National Self-Determination”: A Reconsideration’, Review of International Studies 28 (2002), 419–36. For more on the origins of Wilson’s international thought see Trygve Throntveit, Power without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

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Colonial Nationalists & Making of a New International Order 367 Neither the Allies nor the Bolsheviks at this time saw the subject peoples of the colonial world as the audience for their declarations. Their rhetoric, however, echoed far beyond the confines of Europe. By the time of the armistice in November 1918, nationalists across the world had adopted the language of self-determination, adapted it to their own needs and circumstances, and mobilised to bring their claims to the peace conference and the world leaders assembled there. One Indian observer, noting the rapturous reception Wilson encountered upon his arrival in Europe in December 1918, wrote: ‘Imagination fails to picture the wild delirium of joy with which he would have been welcomed in Asiatic capitals. It would have been as though one of the great teachers of humanity, Christ or Buddha, had come back to his home.’19 Wilson did not travel beyond Europe, but his rhetoric did.20 Within a few months, it became evident that the victorious powers had no intention of applying the principle of self-determination to their own possessions. Even with the territories of the defeated empires, those lying outside Europe would move towards self-determination only at a glacial pace, if at all. But in early 1919 those outcomes still lay in the future. Besides, noted Lala Lajpat Rai, an astute observer and leading voice in the Indian independence movement, even if the world outside Europe was not on Wilson’s mind when he spoke of self-determination, ‘ideas have a knack of rubbing off all geographical limitations’. Wilson’s words would thereafter be ‘the war cry of all small and subject and oppressed nationalities in the world’.21 The principle could be detached from its source and deployed in ways that he had neither necessarily intended nor anticipated; the significance of Wilson’s rhetoric was to be found not in what he had intended but in how his words were disseminated, received, interpreted and mobilised. *** The rapid spread of news about the war and the declarations of wartime leaders around the world depended on the rapid expansion in communication technologies – the telegraph and mass print media – across much of the globe. By the time of war, India, for example, had hundreds of newspapers in English and vernacular languages that reached millions of subscribers. In China, a political press that first appeared in coastal 19 20 21

D. V. Gundappa, ‘Liberalism in India’, Confluence 5, 3 (1956), 216–28, 217, quoting V. S. Srinivasa Sastri’s introduction to an Indian edition of Wilson’s selected speeches. Erez Manela, ‘Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919’, American Historical Review 111, 5 (2006), 1327–51. Lajpat Rai cited in Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 90.

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cities in the 1890s had burgeoned in the first decades of the twentieth century.22 Across much of the Middle East and North Africa, print media had developed and spread, publishing news about international affairs. European papers, too, were often available in major urban centres to those who could read them.23 These new venues of mass communications were often the targets of US wartime propaganda carried out by the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The goal of the CPI propaganda efforts abroad, wrote its chairman, the journalist George Creel, was ‘to drive home the absolute justice of America’s cause, the absolute selflessness of America’s aims’.24 Creel made creative use of the recent technologies, such as wireless communications and the moving picture, in his campaign to advertise America’s peace plans.25 The CPI mass-produced and distributed innumerable texts and images that celebrated the successes of the American war effort both within the United States and in many places abroad, most especially in Latin America and East Asia.26 Wilson’s wartime pronouncements, and most especially the text of the Fourteen Points address, became linchpins of American propaganda abroad. By mid-1917, American missionary volunteers were translating Wilson’s speeches into Chinese and circulating these translations free of charge to the Chinese-language press or publishing them in pamphlet form. In autumn 1918, around the time of the armistice, a volume containing the full text of Wilson’s wartime speeches in Chinese became a bestseller in China and went through several printings.27 A bilingual 22

23

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25 27

Leo Lee and Andrew J. Nathan, ‘The Beginnings of Mass Culture’ in David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan and Evelyn S. Rawski (eds.), Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 368–78; Joan Judge, Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). On the rise of a modern press in Egypt specifically see P. J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak, 4th ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 179–88. George Creel, Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1920), 1. On the CPI’s international operations see Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 189–209. 26 Creel, Complete Report, 2. Ibid., 4. George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (New York: Harper, 1920), 362; Hans Schmidt, ‘Democracy for China: American Propaganda and the May Fourth Movement’, Diplomatic History 22, 1 (1998), 1–28.

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Colonial Nationalists & Making of a New International Order 369 edition of Wilson’s speeches, with the original English text side by side with the Chinese translation, circulated in Chinese schools as a textbook for English instruction.28 Carl Crow, the journalist, ad-man and ‘China hand’ who headed the CPI operation in the country, also ordered 20,000 large photographs of Wilson to distribute among students at missionary schools, as well as buttons and engravings carrying the president’s image.29 It is hard to gauge the impact of CPI propaganda efforts in China or elsewhere. Other major belligerents, including the British, French and Germans, also had extensive international propaganda operations.30 What is clear is that by the time of the armistice enthusiasm for the new world order that President Wilson appeared to promise ran high among many in China, as it did in Europe and elsewhere around the world.31 Animated by the anticipation of a new era in international affairs and, no less importantly, by hints that Wilson would support China’s claims at the peace table, the Chinese delegates in Paris, as well as politically aware Chinese at home and abroad, hoped to see their country claim what they saw as its rightful place among the world’s nations.32 Across the Middle East and North Africa, where the CPI was not directly active, Wilson’s rhetoric nevertheless echoed widely, reportedly causing a stir ‘even in the remotest villages’.33 The spread of the telegraph in the region and the ubiquity of Reuters News dispatches meant that readers there were well-informed about the US role in the war. The texts of Wilson’s wartime speeches, including the Fourteen Points, were widely available in Arabic translation.34 By mid-1918, expectations emerged that the post-war order would reflect Wilson’s rhetoric. Throughout North

28 29 30 31 32

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Creel, How We Advertised America, 362. Schmidt, ‘Democracy for China’, 11–12. For a recent reconsideration of this topic see Troy Paddock (ed.), World War I and Propaganda (Leiden: Brill, 2014). See, e.g., Tang Zhenchang, Cai Yuanpei zhuan (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1985), 159. Cai was the president of Peking University at the time. Koo to Lansing, 25 November 1918, in Record Group (RG) 03–12 (Archives of Chinese Embassy in Washington), box 8, fol. 2, 477, at the Waijiaobu (Foreign Ministry) Archives, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. Ronald Wingate, Wingate of the Sudan (London: John Murray, 1955), 228 and 232. James D. Startt, ‘American Propaganda in Britain during World War I’, Prologue 28, 1 (1996), 17–33; Peter Buitenhuis, ‘Selling the Great War’, Canadian Review of American Studies 7, 2 (1976), 139–50.

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Africa, across the Fertile Crescent to Persia and into the Arabian Peninsula, demands for self-determination were on the rise.35 In India, too, the local press reported widely on Wilson’s utterances and his vision for a new era in world affairs.36 One prominent campaigner for Indian home rule wrote an open letter to Wilson after his war speech to the Senate in April 1917, expressing the hope that the US president would convert the British government, too, to his ‘ideals of world liberation’.37 Another nationalist leader published an editorial that thanked the president for his Fourteen Points, which, he said, were bound to ‘thrill the millions of the world’s “subject races”’.38 Many others shared that sense. If Wilson’s principles were to be the basis for the peace conference, noted numerous editorial writers, then the British authorities, even despite themselves, would at the very least have to reform the Government of India in line with those principles.39 In the initial months after the armistice, then, the peace conference gathering in Paris seemed to many poised to reshape world order. The US president, whatever his deficiencies, appeared to be the most powerful advocate for a new order present at the table. The Russian Bolsheviks, after all, were excluded from Paris and mired in civil war, and the other major victors – Britain, France, Italy and Japan – were clamouring for the

35

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38 39

‘Abd al-Rahman Rafi‘i, Thawrat sanat 1919: Tarikh misr al-qawmi min sanat 1914 ila sanat 1921 (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda al Misriyya, 1968), 57; ‘Abd al-Khaliq Lashin, Sa‘d Zaghlul wa-dawruhu fi al-siyasah al-Misriyyah (Beirut: Dar al-‘Awdah, 1975), 126–27; Stuart Schaar, ‘President Woodrow Wilson and the Young Tunisians’, The Maghreb Review 31 (2006), 129–44; Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonisation, and the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 20–22; Oliver Bast, ‘Putting the Record Straight: Vosuq al-Dowleh’s Foreign Policy in 1918/19’ in Erik Jan Zurcher and Touraj Atabaki (eds.), Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernisation under Atatürk and Reza Shah (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 260–81. Swaminath Natarajan, A History of the Press in India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962), 183. Subramanya Aiyar to Woodrow Wilson, 24 June 1917, in the National Archives of India, New Delhi (hereafter NAI), Home Department/Political Branch, Deposit File, February 1918, file no. 36, ‘Action taken in regard to a letter sent by Sir Subramanya Aiyar to the President of the United States of America invoking his aid in obtaining Home Rule for India’, 3–6. Also see India Office Library, London (hereafter IOL), V/26/262/9 (Hunter Committee Report), 7:3. ‘Editorials’, Young India, 1, 3 (March 1918), 1–3. Editorials to this effect appeared, e.g., in Mahrátta (6 October 1918), ‘Bombay Press Abstract, 1918’, IOL, L/R/5/174, 19; Tribune (Lahore), 20 December 1918, ‘Punjab Press Abstract, 1919’, IOL, L/R/5/201, 3; Hindi Brahmin Samachar, 25 November 1918; Kesari (Poona), n.d., IOL, L/R/5/200, 596.

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Colonial Nationalists & Making of a New International Order 371 retrenchment and expansion of the imperial world order.40 Wilson appeared, at least until the late spring of 1919, the most powerful figure committed to a settlement that would promote an international order based on, or at least attentive to, the principle of self-determination.

    In the months after the armistice, those who wished to advance their case for self-determination mobilised to influence the peacemaking process underway in Paris.41 In December 1918, the Indian National Congress (INC) convened in Delhi for its annual session and resolved to demand the application of the principle of self-determination to India. The country, it urged, must be represented at the peace table by elected delegates, not ones appointed by the colonial government. The INC nominated three men to serve in that position: prominent home-rule activist Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the Muslim leader Syed Hasan Imam and Mohandas Gandhi, recently returned from South Africa and then just beginning his rise on the Indian political scene.42 In a coordinated campaign, dozens of local ‘self-rule leagues’ sprouted throughout India to petition the peace conference to grant India self-determination.43 The British government, however, rejected the INC demand to select India’s delegates to the peace conference, instead sending a delegation made up of supporters of British rule. Nevertheless, Tilak, a scholar and journalist already widely known across India for his advocacy for home rule, travelled to London. There he launched a campaign for Indian selfdetermination that was aimed at the gathering peace conference in the hope of putting pressure on London to bend to Wilsonian principles.44 Confident that the peace conference would take up the question of India, he believed it was up to Indians themselves ‘to see that the decision is in our favour’.45 He also appealed directly to Wilson, writing that ‘the 40

41 42 43 44 45

On the discussions surrounding the possibility of including the Bolsheviks in the peace conference, see David W. McFadden, Alternative Paths: Soviets and Americans, 1917–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. chs. 8 and 9. See also Bouchard, Chapter 12 and Siegel, Chapter 14 in this volume. Thirty-third INC session, Delhi, December 1918, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (hereafter NMML), All-India Congress Committee, file 1, part 2, 347. Numerous such documents are found in the National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), FO 608/211, fol. 126–36. Memorandum, dated London, 11 December 1918, enc. in Tilak’s letter to Khaparde, 18 December 1918, NAI, G. S. Khaparde Papers, file 1, 1–2. Tilak to D. W. Gokhale, London, 23 January 1919, NAI, Khaparde Papers, file 1, 4–7.

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world’s hope for peace and justice is centered in you as the author of the great principle of self-determination’.46 For Tilak, Wilson may not have been an ideal ally, but he seemed to offer the best chance of putting Indian demands for self-determination on the international agenda. Unlike India, recognised in Paris only as a constituent part of the British Empire, China was represented there as a sovereign state, even if its sovereignty was circumscribed by a battery of long-standing ‘unequal treaties’ with the major powers. Among other things, these treaties compromised Chinese control over the tariffs levied at its ports and the foreigners living within its borders. China had declared war on Germany in August 1917 in order to secure a seat at the peace table, and Chinese at home and abroad felt that the time had come to demand real equality for China in the international arena: the abrogation of the unequal treaties and the restoration of full Chinese sovereignty over its territory.47 Chinese activists both in China and abroad produced an avalanche of petitions and memoranda calling for a new international order based on Wilson’s wartime messages and demanding the application to China of the principles of self-determination and the equality of nations.48 When it became clear that the peace conference would not deal with treaties that long predated the war, the Chinese focused on the status of the German concession territories in Shandong Province, which Japan had occupied during the war and now wanted to keep. The Shandong Question, as it was known, became the crucial test for what the post-war order would mean for China. The members of the Chinese delegation in Paris – and it was largely they, rather than the weak and divided government in Beijing, who guided Chinese policy in Paris – believed that the United States would side with China at the conference.49 The two most prominent among them, V. K. Wellington Koo (Gu Weijun) and C. T. Wang (Wang Zhengting), had both been educated in the United States. They wanted to see China 46 47

48

49

Close to Tilak, 14 January 1919, quoted in T. V. Parvate, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1958), 463. On China’s wartime policy and experience, see Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War: China’s Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Reinsch to Lansing, 8 November 1918, US National Archives and Records Administration (hereafter USNA), RG 256, 893.01/1. Also see excerpts from the Peking Leader, 3–5 November 1919, enclosed in RG 256, 893.00/5; and Foreign Minister of Canton Government to Lansing, 23 January 1919, RG 256, 893.00/18. Wunsz King, China at the Peace Conference in 1919 (Jamaica, NY: St John’s University Press, 1961), 3.

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Colonial Nationalists & Making of a New International Order 373 emerge from its state of weakness to take its rightful place among nations, and they saw in Wilson’s principles their best chance to achieve that goal. In a co-authored pamphlet, they compared what they described as President Wilson’s vision of international harmony to that of the ancient Chinese sage Confucius. Both men, they contended, saw the danger of war and therefore worked to establish ‘a new order of things which would ensure universal peace’.50 The Wilsonian project of fashioning a harmonious international order, they suggested, was the culmination of thousands of years of Confucian teachings, and the establishment of a League of Nations would fulfil the Confucian ideal. Koreans, too, mobilised to seize the moment. A colony of Japan, Korea had no formal representation at the peace table, and an unofficial delegation to Paris sent by exiled activists arrived late, remained unrecognised and achieved little. But a manifesto posted by a group of students along the main street of Seoul in the early hours of 1 March 1919 reflected the spirit of the time. After describing the suffering of the Korean people under Japanese rule, it concluded: ‘Since the American President proclaimed the Fourteen Points, the voice of national self-determination has swept the world. . . . How could we, the people of the great Korean nation, miss this opportunity?’51 The same morning, a ‘Declaration of Independence’ signed by thirty-three prominent leaders and asserting Korea’s right to liberty and equality within the world of nations was read aloud in downtown Seoul in front of hundreds of cheering students. Those gathered then streamed into the streets of the city to cheer Korean independence. Over the following months, more than a million people participated in protests across the peninsula. The March First Movement, as it came to be known, was the first mass uprising in the history modern Korean nationalism, involving men and women of every region, faith and class on the peninsula and marking a watershed in the history of Korean nationalism.52 The arc of upheaval that emerged in 1919, then, which in Europe famously stretched from the Baltics to the Balkans, had a much greater span outside the continent, reaching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean and beyond. As events in Korea were unfolding, a group 50 51 52

V. K. Wellington Koo and Cheng-ting T. Wang, China and the League of Nations (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919). Cited in Chong-sik Lee, The Politics of Korean Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963), 112. Ibid., 113–18; Carter J. Eckert and Ki-baek Yi, Korea Old and New: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 278.

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of prominent men in Egypt, then a British protectorate, formed a delegation and demanded to head for Paris to stake a claim there for selfdetermination. When the group, headed by veteran politician Sa‘d Zaghlul, later celebrated by Egyptians as the ‘father of the nation’, was refused permission to travel, it mobilised protests in the streets and launched an international campaign for its cause. The usually sleepy US diplomatic office in Cairo was deluged with petitions protesting the British position and demanding that the United States support Egyptian self-determination.53 The flood of petitions came from a cross-section of Egyptian elites – legislators, government officials, local politicians, merchants, lawyers, physicians and army officers – all calling for the support of the US president for their bid for self-rule.54 By early March, as protest filled the streets of Cairo, the British authorities decided to move against its leadership. They arrested Zaghlul and three of his colleagues and deported them to internment on the Mediterranean island of Malta.55 According to a biographer, one item found on Zaghlul’s person when he was arrested and searched was a clipping from the newspaper Daily Express listing President Wilson’s Fourteen Points.56 The arrests, however, failed to calm the streets. Instead, they sparked a wave of strikes and demonstrations across Egypt, precipitating what came to be known as the ‘1919 Revolution’. Here, too, the uprising included men and women from all walks of life: students and urban workers, professionals and rural residents. Members of religious and ethnic minorities – Copts, Jews, Greeks – expressed solidarity with the movement, and large numbers of women took to the streets with unprecedented visibility. As violent clashes proliferated and railway and telegraph lines were sabotaged, London countered with martial law. Over the next months some 800 Egyptians were killed in clashes and many more wounded. Sixty British soldiers and civilians also died.57 The 1919 Revolution marked a watershed in the Egyptian struggle 53

54 55 56 57

A few examples among many include a petition from Leon S. Farhj, an official at the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture, 11 December 1918, and a petition from members of the ‘Egyptian National Delegation’, 12 December 1918, enc. in Gary to secretary of state, 30 December 1918, USNA, RG 256, 883.00/4 and FW 883.00/30. See examples enclosed in Gary to secretary of state, 30 December 1918, USNA, RG 256, 883.00/4; Gary to DOS, 19 December 1918, RG 256, 883.00/3. Ismaʻil S ̣idqi, Mudhakkirati (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1991), 46–49; Gary to the secretary of state, 10 March 1919, USNA, RG 256, 883.00/37. Lashin, Saʻd Zaghlul, 128. See PID reports in UKNA, FO 371/4373, 35, 51. Also Gary to the secretary of state, and 10, 11 and 16 March 1919, USNA, RG 256, 883.00/37, 41 and 53.

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Colonial Nationalists & Making of a New International Order 375 against British rule, and the violence unleashed then cast a long shadow over the subsequent history of the region.58 The British response to the Indian campaign for self-determination followed the same playbook as in Egypt, working to prevent any discussion of the issue in Paris while suppressing protests on the ground. When Tilak, citing his appointment by the INC as a delegate to the peace conference, applied for a passport to travel to Paris, his application was denied. At the same time, the Imperial Legislative Council in Delhi passed the ‘Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act’, known as the Rowlatt Act, extending the government’s wartime powers of internment without trial.59 Indians, who had expected the war to be followed by an immediate push toward self-government, were incensed. Gandhi, who during the war had campaigned to recruit Indians for the imperial war effort, now emerged as a leader of the resistance to these ‘Black Acts’, calling for civil disobedience and a nationwide strike.60 The colonial authorities responded with violence, most infamously with the killing on 13 April 1919, of some 400 unarmed civilians gathered in Jallianwala Bagh, in the Punjab city of Amritsar.61 The Amritsar Massacre, as it soon became known, came to symbolise British oppression in India and augured a new era in the history of Indian resistance. In Korea, too, the Japanese colonial authorities engaged through the spring and summer of 1919 in a campaign of suppression that left thousands of casualties.62 They, along with the Japanese press, saw US influence behind the events, and most specifically that of American Protestant missionaries: more than half of the thirty-three signatories to

58

59

60 61 62

Rafi‘i, Thawrat sanat 1919, 5. Tahrir (or Liberation) Square in Cairo, which stood at the heart of the Arab Spring protests of 2011, first acquired its name as a result of the upheaval of 1919, when it also served as a centre for protests. Tilak to D. W. Gokhale, 6 February 1919, NAI, Khaparde Papers, file 1, 8–10; Tilak to D. W. Gokhale, London, 23 January 1919, NAI, Khaparde Papers, file 1, 4–7; Unsigned memorandum titled ‘How We Get On II’, enc. in Tilak’s letter from London, 20 March 1919, NAI, Khaparde Papers, file 1, 13–14. Gandhi to Chelmsford, 24 February 1919, and 11 March 1919, NMML, Chelmsford Papers, roll 10. Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre, 1919–1920’, Past & Present 131, 1 (1991), 130–64. Report from British Consulate-General in Seoul, 13 May 1919, TNA, FO 262/1406, f. 158-160; see also Eckert and Yi, Korea Old and New, 279; Lee, Politics of Korean Nationalism, 122–23.

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the Declaration of Independence were Korean Christians.63 The missionaries, charged the authorities, spread subversive Wilsonian propaganda in Korea, encouraging revolt. They even suspected President Wilson of direct complicity: according to a Japanese police report, an American missionary named Shannon McCune had travelled to the United States in October 1918 and met with President Wilson, reached an understanding with him about the future of Korea, and upon his return encouraged Koreans to revolt in order to demonstrate to foreign countries that they rejected Japanese rule and thus bring their case before the peace conference. Such, concluded the colonial police, ‘was the secret viewpoint of the “mystical president”’.64 There is no evidence that such a meeting occurred, but the Japanese inclination to see Wilson’s hand in the events in Korea was telling of his global resonance at that moment. By that time, however, it was becoming clear that the Paris Peace Conference, rather than constructing a new world order based on selfdetermination, was largely aiming to restore the old imperial one, at least outside Europe. In early May, it emerged that, in order to secure Japanese membership in his League of Nations, Wilson had agreed to award Japan the former German concessions in Shandong. On 4 May, after students in Beijing learned of this decision, they took to the streets in violent protest. The students, who not long before had filled the streets to chant their admiration for President Wilson, now saw the American president as a liar, his promise of a new world exposed as a mere illusion. Street protests and strikes spread throughout the country over the next weeks, with merchants and workers soon joining the students in protest. A contemporary pamphlet summed up the prevailing sentiments: ‘Throughout the world like the voice of a prophet has gone the word of Woodrow Wilson strengthening the weak and giving courage to the struggling. And the Chinese people . . . looked for the dawn of this new Messiah; but no sun rose for China.’65 Like the other upheavals across the 63

64

65

US Mission in Tokyo to secretary of state, 8 March 1919, USNA, RG 59, 895.00/587; Morris to secretary of state, 15 March 1919, RG 59, 895.00/572. Also see news report in TNA, FO 262/1406, f. 414. Report cited in Lee, Politics of Korean Nationalism, 107; see also Timothy L. Savage, ‘The American Response to the Korean Independence Movement, 1910–1945’, Korean Studies 20 (1996), 195. George Shannon McCune was an educator and expert in ‘Eastern affairs’ (see NYT, 6 December 1941, p. 17), but PWW shows no record that he met with Wilson. Schmidt, ‘Democracy for China’, 16. See also Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 92–93.

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Colonial Nationalists & Making of a New International Order 377 colonial world in the spring of 1919, the May Fourth Movement galvanised hitherto inchoate strands of political, social and cultural discontent and marked a defining moment in the evolution of Chinese resistance to the imperialist world order.

 Like the news of the war and of wartime proclamations, reports of the upheavals that followed circulated worldwide.66 In the summer of 1919, in the provincial Chinese city of Changsha, a young activist surveyed the recent developments in the international arena. China, he noted, was not alone in having entertained high hopes for a new world order only to be disappointed. ‘India’, he wrote, ‘has earned herself a clown wearing a flaming red turban as representative to the Peace Conference’ – this referred to the Maharaja of Bikanir, selected by the British to represent the Indian princely states – but ‘the demands of the Indian people have not been granted . . . So much for national self-determination!’67 In India itself, a young Cambridge-educated Brahmin lamented that the war, which ‘was to have revolutionized the fabric of human affairs’, had ‘ended without bringing any solace or hope of permanent peace or betterment . . . The “fourteen points”, where are they?’68 But even as Wilson and his principles stood defeated, the two young writers, Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru, saw the winds of change only getting stronger. Russian Bolshevism, Mao wrote, was making headway in Asia, and the Chinese must now take its ideas seriously if they were to make progress toward liberation. Nehru, too, noted ‘the spectre of communism’ now on the horizon in Asia.69 For both Mao and Nehru, as for countless other colonial nationalists across the world then and 66 67

68

69

See, e.g., Shibao (23–26 and 29 April 1919), for numerous reports of ‘riots’ and ‘chaos’ in India, as well as in Egypt and Korea. In India, see, e.g., Mahratta, 19 October 1919. Mao Zedong, ‘Afghanistan Picks Up the Sword’ and ‘So Much for National SelfDetermination!’, Xiangjiang pinglun (14 July 1919) in Stuart R. Schram (ed.), Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912–1949, 7 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992–), vol. I, 335 and 337; see also Mao Zedong, ‘Poor Wilson’, Xiangjiang pinglun, 14 July 1919, in Schram (ed.), Mao’s Road to Power, vol. I, 338. Incomplete and unpublished review of Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1918), undated but written sometime in the summer of 1919. Jawaharlal Nehru Papers, Writings and Speeches, serial no. 21, NMML. Russell, Roads to Freedom; Mao Zedong, ‘Study of the Extremist Party’, Xiangjiang pinglun (14 July 1919), reprinted in Schram (ed.), Mao’s Road to Power, vol. 1, 332.

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later, the interest in Lenin and his message, as in Wilson, was informed by their desire to find a path toward self-determination for their peoples. So, even as the peace settlement of 1919 allowed the victorious empires to expand their domains as never before, it also marked the beginning of the end for the imperial world order. After 1919, empire as a principle of international order and legitimacy faced a series of challenges of growing scope and intensity. The League of Nations Mandate System, almost despite itself, entrenched for the first time in the international arena the idea that progress towards self-determination should be the goal of colonial rule and the yardstick against which it is measured. Within this new international framework, Egypt, which continued to resist British rule, won partial sovereignty in 1922. Iraq followed a decade later, joining the League of Nations. The Shandong concessions, whose transfer to Japan at Versailles launched the May Fourth Movement, were restored to China at the Washington Conference in 1922, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s the Chinese government chipped away at the unequal treaties that circumscribed its sovereignty. In India, resistance to British rule entered a new era, posing a challenge to the legitimacy of empire far more radical than any that came before the war. In 1929, the Indian National Congress asserted for the first time the goal of complete independence, one that would sever India’s connection to Britain entirely. The resistance to the imperial order continued to spread and strengthen through global depression and war, culminating with the radical restructuring of international society in the waves of decolonisation in the decades after the Second World War. By then, the illegitimacy of imperial rule, which had not long before served as a pillar of international order, had become an iron principle of international relations. The revolutionary idea of 1919, that of an international order predicated on notionally equal, self-determining nation-states, was codified in the structure of the United Nations. Power, of course, remained at the centre of international order and power relationships in the international arena remained anything but equal. But the remapping of a world of empires into one of nation-states over the course of the past century has transformed power’s territorial configurations, modes of operation and discourses of legitimacy in far-reaching ways.70

70

For more on this, see Charles S. Maier, Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

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  COUNTERPOINT

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16 The Persistence of Old Diplomacy The Paris Peace Settlement in Perspective T. G. Otte

A Task so great needed politicians not of the usual type . . . . Supermen were needed – men who possessed wide vision, with a calm judgment raised above revengeful passions of the moment. [. . .] Such men did not appear. James Bryce, 19221

To many in 1918–19 the gathering of peace delegations at Paris appeared as the irenic opening of a new era. This was the moment when a new international system pushed through the softened carapace of the dying order of old Europe. ‘New Diplomacy’, it seemed, offered a universal panacea for the ills that had afflicted international relations for too long. Already in the spring of 1918, as the German high command gambled on one last roll of the dice in the West, the League advocate Gilbert Murray detected traces of a ‘growing spirit of international honesty’ among all the fighting and intrigues: ‘And when the Philistine world is driven by sheer self-interest to that [acceptance of peace and a League-style organisation], the believers in international arbitration and cooperation and mutual help will come into their kingdom.’2 In the bird’s eye view of the short twentieth century and its vicissitudes such idealism may well invite reveries on man’s penchant for self-delusion. The kingdom, after all, did not come. And yet Murray’s optimism reflected the catalytic effect of the 1914–18 war. It gave rise to new ideas and in its 1 2

James Viscount Bryce, International Relations: Eight Lectures Delivered in the United States in August 1921 (London: Macmillan, 1922), 41. Gilbert Murray, ‘Why the League Must Come’, League of Nations Society, Monthly Report for Members 3 (1918), 2 and 5.

381

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wake emerged new movements that shook, and sometimes shattered, the established order and swept away the traditional elites. Even where they stayed in power, the political and social environments at home and abroad had changed in significant ways. In the international sphere, the core of diplomacy remained unaffected by these changes, but a range of new concepts, instruments and methods were added to the diplomatic toolkit. Further, two revolutions, both ideological and international in nature, the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia and the United States’ entry into international politics, weakened the system of great power politics and the assumptions of European superiority that had underpinned it.3 *** If, at the time the fighting ended, there were high expectations of the forthcoming peace congress, there were equally unprecedented challenges that overshadowed the deliberations at Paris. The war itself, of course, had been fought for contending visions of a future peace order.4 But its sudden end and the collapse of three multi-ethnic empires in Eastern, Eastern Central and South Eastern Europe and the Near East left the leaders of the victorious Allied and associated powers with a task, the magnitude of which ‘staggers the imagination’ even at the distance of a century.5 Within a matter of weeks they had to turn themselves from war leaders into peacemakers. They were not unaware of the responsibilities this entailed, nor were they blind to the challenges that lay ahead. But they had to tackle the unresolved problems that had plunged Europe into the cataclysm of war in 1914 as well as the situation created by four years of conflict. They had grasped that the demise of the Habsburg, Osmanli and Romanov empires tore open current and potential future geopolitical fault lines. Yet recent experiences were too immediate, and domestic and international pressures too strong, for them to take the long view. The Paris peace conference was something of an experimental laboratory for the creation of a new international order with an organisational framework and shared norms, rules and understandings about relations between states, appropriate for a new, seemingly ineluctably more 3

4 5

Therein lies the real significance of the year 1917. For the spectre of revolution, see Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968). For this aspect of the First World War see the stimulating reinterpretation offered by W. Mulligan, The Great War for Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). Zara Steiner’s pertinent observation, in The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15.

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democratic age.6 Its scale was remarkable, too, though it did not exceed that of the 1815 Vienna Congress. Among the bubbling and hissing testtubes of fifty-eight separate committees, some 10,000 people, from presidents and prime ministers to envoys extraordinary, expert advisers and external lobbyists, sought to shape the outcome of the ‘Great Experiment’.7 Beyond the official peace delegations a cosmopolitan fringe congregated in the antechambers of the mighty, representatives of Cossack hetmans who emerged from the rubble of the Russian Empire, officials from the Zionist Organization or men like Ho Chi-Minh, future leaders of later twentieth-century national liberation movements, all of them inspired by the ‘Wilsonian moment’ and anxious to force the attention of the peacemakers onto the problems of Africa and Asia.8 Perhaps inevitably, the contrast between high expectations and actual achievements was stark. The Paris laboratory was a high-pressure environment in which demands of domestic politics, heightened by wartime propaganda and immediate post-war electioneering of the ‘lemon-squeezing’ variety, influenced calculations of the national interest at a time when the dislocation of the international order made it possible to contemplate a new international regime.9 The resulting peace treaties did not proclaim the triumph of morality and principle over narrow national advantage but rather affirmed the claims of state sovereignty and national egotism. The intense pressure at Paris, the convulsions in the vanquished countries, and the chaotic methods of the four principal decision-makers, Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and 6

7

8 9

I am following broadly Paul W. Schroeder’s definition of the international system, see especially his ‘“System” and Systemic Thinking in International History’, International History Review 15, 1 (1993), here esp. 133–34. My own views diverge from Schroeder’s analysis in significant ways, however, see T. G. Otte, ‘A Janus-Like Power: Great Britain and the European Concert, 1814–1853’ in W. Pyta (ed.), Das europäische Mächtekonzert, 1815–1853: Friedens- und Sicherheitspolitik vom Wiener Kongress 1815 bis zum Krimkrieg 1853 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 125–54. See the eponymous memoirs of one of the leading League advocates, R. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, A Great Experiment: An Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941). The British government spent some £205,000 on staffing, hotels, travel and sustenance, see Sally Marks, ‘Behind the Scenes of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919’, Journal of British Studies 9, 2 (1970), 178; for the Vienna jamboree see Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the Origins of AntiColonial Internationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141–75. Not just in Britain, see Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy after World War I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 80–108; Jean-Marie Mayeur, La vie politique sous la Troisième République, 1870–1940 (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 253–59.

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Woodrow Wilson, were not conducive to quiet, calm deliberation; and many a knot thus remained entangled. Matters were compounded by revolution and near-civil war in Germany, Austria and Hungary, which turned an inter-allied preparatory conference into the actual peace conference. It was only during the final stages of the proceedings at Paris that a German delegation was admitted, followed by representatives from the other former Central Powers. That the German treaty was the cornerstone of any overall settlement, and that the other European treaties would follow in its wake, was evident from the outset. And from the beginning it was obvious that effective decisionmaking was impossible if it involved plenary sessions attended by all twenty-seven Allied governments. The substance of key aspects of the treaties was thus usually settled by the Council of Four. But here, too, problems swiftly emerged, not least because there were fundamental differences between the United States, France and Great Britain. Wilson’s prioritising of the League could not easily be reconciled with France’s quest for military security against Germany or Britain’s aim of maintaining a functioning balance of power while weakening the global position of defeated Germany. Under these circumstances, room for manoeuvre and scope for compromises were curtailed from the outset. The emergence of new states in Eastern Europe and the somewhat hasty recognition of an independent Poland, prior to any delimitation of the new polity’s frontiers, further restricted any latitude the major powers might have had in settling matters in the locale.10 There were further complications. Wilson’s month-long absence from the conference from mid-February onwards created a vacuum, which Clemenceau sought to exploit to drive a wedge between the two AngloSaxon powers to extract further concessions for France with regard to German reparations.11 If the president’s leaving had caused problems, his return on 15 March did not help matters either: ‘We are wondering what Wilson is prepared to do tomorrow and in the course of the next fortnight. Unless he acquires the habit of thinking quickly and of speaking forcefully, the conference may drag on till finally the outbreak of other

10

11

Piotr Wandycz, ‘The Polish Question’ in Manfred Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds.), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 313–35; François G. Dreyfus, 1919–1939: L’engrenage (Paris: Fallois, 2002), 41–56. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Clemenceau (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 746–58.

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wars [in Eastern Europe] make it superfluous.’12 If anything, disputes escalated and the ‘Big Four’ ended up negotiating alone, aided only by a solitary interpreter. As a member of Lloyd George’s entourage noted, ‘no four kings or emperors could have conducted the conference on more autocratic lines [. . .] and the doings of the Council of Four have been shrouded in mystery’.13 This was a far cry from the transparency the American president had proclaimed in his latter-day, enlarged decalogue; and Wilson himself had undergone a remarkable conversion from apostle of ‘open diplomacy’ to harbouring ‘an obsession with security that bordered on paranoia’.14 The Council was the core decision-making forum at Paris. It was here, over the course of 148 meetings, that by the middle of April Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George agreed on the essential elements of a peace settlement.15 The compromises thus made secured two important points: the outlines of the post-war order were determined, and the conference could now proceed to its final phase by inviting Germany to attend. There was an obvious tension between these two intermediate outcomes. With the fundamentals of the settlement established, there was nothing for the German delegation but to accept or to reject what was presented to it.16 This placed a double burden on the peace treaty. Inter-allied conflicts of interest meant that the compromises of mid-April 1919 were unlikely to endure. Too many of them had resulted in contradictory or incomplete arrangements, and negotiations with the vanquished powers threatened to unravel this edifice of compromises and temporary patches. Wilson was willing to make far-reaching concessions in order to secure the League of Nations as the foundation of the new international

12 13

14 15 16

A. W. A. Leeper to R. W. A. Leeper, 13 March 1919, Leeper MSS, Churchill College Archive Centre, Cambridge, LEEP 3/8. Riddell diary, 9 April 1919, Lord Riddell, Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After, 1918–1923 (London: Gollancz, 1934). More positive, [MP] Lord Hankey, Diplomacy by Conference: Studies in Public Affairs, 1920–1946 (London: Ernest Benn, 1946), 28–29. William Keylor, ‘Versailles and International Diplomacy’, in Boemeke et al. (eds.), Treaty of Versailles, 483. Howard Elcock, Portrait of a Decision: The Council of Four and the Treaty of Versailles (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), 165–216. See Max Weber’s trenchant comment that the treaty ought to be rejected ‘at whatever danger’, Weber to Oncken, 25 March 1919, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 1890–1920 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1974), 343; Hinnerk Bruhns, ‘Un successo della pace duraturo? Max Weber nella guerra mondiale’, Scienza & Politica 32, 63 (2020), 82–86.

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architecture.17 He readily conceded to British demands to eliminate Germany as a naval and colonial power by dispersing the German colonies between Britain and France. This was no old-style imperial carve-up in which territorial possession conferred legitimacy. On the contrary, the creation of mandates held on behalf of the League marked an important step towards the internationalisation of colonial societies. Although it drew on mid-Victorian British liberal notions of imperial trusteeship, it was an innovation in that it implied equality in principle between colonial populations and their rulers. The arrangements of 1919 thus sowed the seeds of later twentieth-century decolonisation. In the more immediate future, however, they created fresh tensions, not least because the three major powers had declined to accept the notion of racial equality, as proposed by Japan, for a combination of imperial reasons (Britain and France) and considerations of domestic politics (United States).18 If on this matter the three principal powers at Paris were in agreement, more often their conflicting interests and the power imbalances between them led to shifting combinations in the talks. Neither Wilson nor Lloyd George wished to see French hegemony on the continent. They therefore usually joined to block Clemenceau’s more excessive territorial demands,19 though this still entailed an Anglo-American promise to continue the wartime alliance as a general security pact beyond the end of the war. In the question of reparations, by contrast, British and French interests aligned against American lenience. Translating what had, by late 1917, become an effective warfighting coalition into a coherent political alliance for peacemaking purposes turned out to be a difficult endeavour. Only by making often painful compromises, by accepting the provisional nature of the arrangements, and by so sacrificing the inner coherence of the settlement did the leaders salvage a peace treaty. But in doing so they moved away from the original Wilsonian basis on which the Imperial German government had sought an armistice in November 1918, and

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Melvyn Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 3–18; for Wilson’s wobbling on reparations prior to the conference see Georges-Henri Soutou, L’or et le sang: Les buts de guerre économique de la Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 836–40. Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Race Equality Proposal of 1919 (London: Routledge, 1998); also Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Attempts to End War (London: John Murray, 2001), 107–18. Walter McDougall, France’s Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914–1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 34–96.

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therein lay a significant part of the legitimacy deficit of the subsequent peace settlement. Equally, the hybrid nature of French policy, which sought securité d’abord through realpolitik mixed with juridical means and increased economic linkage to tie Germany to a renewed European comity of nations, lent a degree of incoherence and fluidity to Western policy that weakened the arrangements made.20 There were other aspects to the legitimacy deficit. Implementing the principle of national self-determination swiftly got caught in the interlacing ethnic thorn-hedges of continental Europe. Nor was the principle applied consistently – there was no referendum in Alsace-Lorraine, for instance, because the outcome of such an exercise was deemed too uncertain;21 and where it was applied, the methods and results were frequently contradictory. This created the potential for future conflict that could be manipulated by external forces, and it was soon to give rise to ideologically heightened fantasies of aggressive revisionism and violent expansionism.22 Various territorial flashpoints, from Eupen and Malmédy to Fiume and from the Saar and the Ruhr to Danzig and Teschen, acquired totemic status, invested with symbolic significance and so emotionally highly charged for victors, vanquished and squabbling successor states alike. In turn, they both affirmed and undermined the concept of the nation-state as a polity defined by ethnic nationality and loyalty. Poles from Grudziądz looked upon their home town with different eyes than a German neighbour contemplating the fate of their native Graudenz. After Paris, nation-state, League principles and the rights of ethnic minorities coexisted uneasily. Much more than any of the great peace congresses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Paris peace settlement claimed to create a new international order. Its five constituent peace treaties contained a much denser body of rules than any previous treaties.23 Some of these implied a willingness to interfere with the sovereign rights of states, otherwise affirmed by the treaties. Internationalising

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21 22 23

See Jackson and Mulligan, Chapter 5 in this volume; and further Peter Jackson’s important reinterpretation of French security policy, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Alison Carrol, The Return of Alsace to France, 1918–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 53–80. Antony Lentin, ‘Decline and Fall of the Versailles Settlement’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 4, 2 (1993), 358–75. Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1–14.

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the Ottoman capital, arraigning the ex-Kaiser ‘for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties’,24 prohibiting the Anschluss of the German-Austrian Republic or forcing the (indubitably necessary) minority rights treaties on some of the newly independent states in Eastern Central Europe, deviated from previous international practice.25 No less important a departure from precedent was the omission of the ‘oblivion’ clause that had previously been a feature of peacemaking. As a contemporary mnemonic poem summarised in restrained hexameters, the 1648 peace treaty of Osnabrück, Articulis Septem & Denis pax Svecica constat Primus amicitiae conjungit foedere partes. Praeteriti immemores laesos vult esse Secundus.26

There was no such restraint in 1919. Far from pledging the contracting parties to spread a veil of benevolent forgetfulness over the disputes that had caused the war, by inserting ‘war guilt clauses’ into the Paris peace treaties the victorious powers invested past disputes with explosive significance for the future. No doubt, these clauses were a necessary legal device to lend legitimacy to any reparations regimes still to be finalised.27 Further, the notion, implicit in the ‘war guilt clauses’, of war as a crime 24

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27

Art. 227 of the Versailles Treaty, H. W. V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1920–21), vol. 3, 212; for the background see William Schabas, The Trial of the Kaiser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 198–223. Sending Napoleon Bonaparte into exile set a precedent, however. Smith, Sovereignty; and Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). ‘Of seven and ten articles the Swedish treaty does consist./ The first through a friendship pact the parties joins./ Past injuries forget makes the second’ [my translation], G. Lanus, Mausoleum Saxonicum Tripartium, seu Panegyrici Parentales, Anniversarii, quibus Serenissimorum et Potentissimorum Electorum Saxoniae, Lineae Albertinae, Vita, Mors et Res Gestae (Leipzig, 1695), 198. Art. II of the treaty promised all past grievances and transgressions ‘perpetua sit oblivione sepultum’ (‘shall be buried in eternal oblivion’), Konrad Müller (ed.), Instrumentum Pacis Westphalicae: Die Westfälischen Friedensverträge 1648 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1966), 13. For an examination of ‘oblivion clauses’ in peacemaking see Jörg Fisch, Krieg und Frieden im Friedensvertrag: Eine universalgeschichtliche Studie über Grundlagen und Formalrecht des Friedensschlusses (Stuttgart; Klett-Cotta, 1979), 92–123. Bruce Kent, The Spoils of War: The Politics, Economics, and Diplomacy of Reparations, 1918–1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 66–82; Peter Krüger, Deutschland und die Reparationen, 1918/19: Die Genesis des Reparationsproblems in Deutschland zwischen Waffenstillstand und Versailler Friedensschluss (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1973).

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and breach of international morality evolved from nineteenth-century transatlantic liberal ideas, reflected prominent themes of Allied war propaganda, and articulated genuine hopes for a peace that would be more durable, for a more rational and legal rather a mere post-conflict readjustment of power, as measured in territorial possessions and control of resources. And yet in criminalising the former enemy the Paris peace treaties placed a considerable burden on the new European order by injecting a moralising and emotional element into post-war politics. Especially in the reparations question assumptions of moral guilt and calculations of financial debt became inseparably enmeshed as a matter of crime and punishment. As the chief historical adviser to the British Foreign Office noted after the conclusions of the German and Austrian treaties, ‘it seems to me that when the time comes to put the [Austrian] Treaty into force it will be found that many of the clauses in it are either unintelligible or impossible, and personally I still maintain that the whole legal basis of the Treaty is faulty’.28 The Paris peace settlement consisted of a series of tortuous and complex compromises, disappointing to the victors and resented by the defeated. Here, too, the appeal to democratic principles and transparency caused practical problems. For, in contrast to earlier peace conferences, in 1919 leaders did not barter over strips of territory around a green baize conference table shielded from the public gaze. They had to respond to internal pressures and they had to communicate the awkward compromises to their domestic audiences – and this complicated foreign policymaking for all parties. This circumstance and the many inconsistencies inherent in the treaties explain the limited durability of the Paris peace settlement. It neither preserved nor replaced the previous pentarchy of dominant European great powers. The Habsburg Empire had disintegrated and a viable regional successor organisation, whether economic or political, lay outside the realm of practicable politics in 1919.29 For the moment, Germany and the Soviet Union were excluded from international politics, while the 28 29

Headlam-Morley to Namier, 28 August 1919, Headlam-Morley MSS, CCAC, HDLM Acc. 688/2. This did not go unnoticed at the time: ‘everyone in Central Europe is bent on erecting a zareeba of the stoutest thorns round his particular plot of ground with the final idea that he will prosper in it’, Lindley to Curzon, 7 November 1919, Curzon MSS, The National Archive (Public Record Office), Kew, FO 800/152; T. G. Otte, ‘“A Strong and Independent Austria as a Barrier to Germany”: Grossbritannien und der Zerfall der Habsburgermonarchie’ in Ulfried Burz (ed.), Die Republik (Deutsch-)Österreich im

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United States shrugged off the mantle of leadership that had descended on American shoulders in 1917–19. This left Britain and France contemplating the prospects of a rather precarious victory. The settlement was more brittle still because of the rather unrealistic assumption underpinning it, that all states would accept the treaties. Defeated countries have no moral obligation to accept permanently the consequences of their defeat. In the Near East and East Asia, Turkey and China rejected all or parts of the treaties and began to pursue their own revisionist objectives. In Europe, Germany and Hungary accepted their peace treaties only in the face of considerable pressure, and immediately set about revising or evading them. In so far as the victorious powers were concerned, Italy was left disappointed with the fruits of its pace mutilata and embarked on a somewhat haphazard expansionism of its own, while Britain and France were frequently at loggerheads in the Levant and elsewhere. In the historical retrospective, the faults of the 1919 peace treaties appear glaring. In the context of the situation in 1918–19, the settlement was nevertheless a remarkable achievement. In the face of manifold disputes between the victors, continued violence in Eastern and South Eastern Europe and the disintegration and domestic instability in the defeated countries, the treaties were the maximum possible. Had the peacemakers failed in their efforts, further large-scale violence, war and revolutions would likely have flared up once more. Nor can it be said that the arrangements were unduly harsh, whatever the resentment in the defeated nations. Versailles, in particular, was no Punic peace. Carthage, after all, was not destroyed but left intact to vie for continental hegemony twenty years later; and if the new order failed to live up to its Wilsonian ideals, it was less cavalier than Bismarck’s reordering of Germany in the years between 1864 and 1871.30 What the peacemakers achieved with the Covenant of the League of Nations, the mandate system

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ersten Nachkriegsjahrzehnt: Innen- und Aussenperspektiven (Vienna: New Academic Press, 2020), 100–24. Further, the stipulation of a plebiscite in North Schleswig in the 1864 Treaty of Prague was quietly dropped by Bismarck in 1878. In general, Gerhard L. Weinberg’s reflections on the 1919 settlement remain apposite, see Germany, Hitler and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–22. Recent German historians seem to have reverted, at least partially, to older positions in their criticisms of the treaty, see Jörn Leonhard, Der überforderte Frieden: Versailles und die Welt (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018), 858–60; also, though more nuanced, Holger Afflerbach, Auf Messers Schneide: Wie das Deutsche Reich den Ersten Weltkrieg verlor (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2018), 276–91, who blames the Entente for prolonging the war.

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and the separate treaties enshrining ethnic minority rights was an agreed framework, not of one single design but the result of awkward compromises, of institutions, mechanisms and norms within which the peace treaties could evolve further. As Lord Robert Cecil explained when the draft Covenant was laid before the plenary conference: ‘We are not seeking to produce for the world a building finished and complete in all respects. To have attempted such a thing would have been an arrogant piece of folly. All we have tried to do . . . is to lay soundly and truly the foundations upon which our successors may build.’31 An assumption of impermanence was therefore inherent in the 1919 treaties from the beginning. They marked neither the end nor the beginning of an international order, but they were an important landmark in international politics and in the development of diplomatic method since the end of the Thirty Years’ War. *** Placing the arrangements of 1919 in a longer term perspective helps to throw into sharper relief its wider significance. Modern international relations are generally, if somewhat lazily, thought to have commenced with the Peace of Westphalia as the foundation stone of the modern or ‘Westphalian system’ of sovereign state actors.32 The Instrumenta Pacis of 1648, in fact, consisted of three separate but connected treaties, signed in a complex and carefully choreographed sequence, just as the war had in reality been a series of different but overlapping conflicts.33 Their significance for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century great power politics was also more complex than the ‘systemic’ shorthand implies. Leaving aside the fact that the Franco-Spanish War was not formally terminated for another eleven years, the treaties of Münster and Osnabrück remained in force for only a limited period of time, and no third parties adhered to them (with the exception of the Papal Curia). The grand perpetuity clauses in the opening articles notwithstanding, the two guaranteeing 31

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R. Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, The Way of Peace: Essays and Addresses (London: P. Allan & Co., 1928), 8; see also Payk, Chapter 3 in this volume, for the lack of coherence in understandings of international law. The concept of a ‘Westphalian system’ is a product of the 1940s; for a discussion of some of the IR theory debates see Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003), especially 1–12 and 238–48. Peter Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years’ War (London: Penguin, 2009).

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powers, France and Sweden, resorted to military force, and frequently for offensive rather than status quo purposes, in the case of Sweden by the late 1650s and from the 1660s onwards on a massive scale in the case of France. Indeed, the nearly seven decades after Westphalia were amongst the most bellicose in European history.34 Nor did the peace treaties of 1648 institute the equality of state actors in international practice. An acute sense of hierarchy and precedence among the monarchies and republics continued to shape the conduct of diplomacy, but non-state organisations, such as the Hanseatic League, now in terminal decline, were recognised international actors.35 The Westphalian settlement did not establish a new European system, but it brought about important and lasting changes in great power politics. Notions of internal and external sovereignty steadily gained currency, and relations between states became more formalised, subject to and regulated by international law, in aspiration at least if not always in practice.36 In parallel, religious confession as a political force declined. Neutralising and depoliticising the religious fault-lines of Europe was one of the significant achievements of the Westphalian peace. Religious divides after all had been fire accelerants in the past, and after 1618 confessio had helped to fuse wars between states with wars within them into one great, quasi-ideological war.37 They did not disappear altogether, especially not as a source of domestic political legitimacy, but they no longer 34 35

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John A. Lynn, Les guerres de Louis XIV, 1664–1714 (Paris: Perrin, 2010). Fritz Dickmann’s Der Westfälische Frieden (Münster: Aschendorff, 1959) remains the locus classicus of modern studies of the peace settlement. For contrasting recent analyses see Johannes Burkhardt, ‘Das grösste Friedenswerk der Neuzeit: Der Westfälische Frieden in neuer Perspektive’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 49 (1998), 592–618, and Heinz Duchhardt, ‘Westfälischer Friede und internationals System im Ancien Régime’, Historische Zeitschrift 249, 1 (1989), 529–43. See, for instance, the debate at the Ratisbon diet in 1725 as to whether Britain was a guaranteeing power of the 1660 Peace of Oliva, Plettenberg to Elector Joseph Clemens of Cologne, 2 May 1725, Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Rheinland, Duisburg, Kurköln VII, No. 5; for general reflections see Heinz Duchhardt, ‘Droit et droit des gens – structures et metamorphoses des relations internationals au temps de Louis XIV’ in Rainer Babel (ed.), Frankreich im europäischen Staatensystem der frühen Neuzeit (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1995), 179–90. Fritz Dickmann, Friedensrecht und Friedenssicherung: Studien zum Friedensproblem in der neueren Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 7–35. It is important to avoid simplistic judgements. The foreign policy of the Counts Palatinate in the late sixteenth century was clearly driven by religious fervour, see Claus Peter Clasen, The Palatinate in European History, 1555–1618 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 5–19. But French policy during the Thirty Years’ War was subject to more complex strategic calculations with the aim of establishing ‘le contrepoids de la puissance de la

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entrenched existing antagonisms. When French diplomats identified ‘l’ancienne jalousie de la Maison d’Autriche à l’égard de la Maison de Bourbon’ as the principal feature of European politics,38 such enmity – mutual at any rate – was shaped by dynastic and strategic considerations and it cut across religious affinities – both dynasties after all were the preeminent Catholic houses in Europe – as did Austria’s ‘Engeländische und Holländische allianz’.39 When the grand monarque’s grandson and the Habsburg foreign minister, Count Kaunitz, decided to cast aside AustroFrench enmity in the ‘diplomatic revolution’ of 1756, they did so on the basis of calculations of political advantage.40 But just as on the other side Frederick II of Prussia, the Francophile and francophone roi philosophe at Potsdam, soon acquired the unlikely accolade of ‘Protestant hero’ in the great European and overseas war that now ensued,41 so it suited the courts of Vienna and Versailles to present their alliance as ‘the only necessary and purposeful one for our holy religion, for the benefit of Europe and for our dynasties’.42 Such sentiments were an echo of a distant past, useful for pamphleteering but rarely, if ever, decisive on their own. Reason rather than religion shaped post-Westphalian international practice. The peace treaties of the

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France’ against the Habsburg powers, A. du Plessis de Richelieu, Maximes d’état et fragments politiques, ed. Gabriel Hanotaux (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1880), no. 144. Amelot to Boisseux, 7 August 1740, in G. Livet (ed.), Recueil des Instructions données aux Ambassadeurs et Ministres de France, xxviii, 2, Les États Allemands: L’Électorat de Cologne (Paris: Ministère des affaires étrangères, 1963), XXXVIII; for the religious aspects of French policy see also Jeremy Black, From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great Power (London: UCL Press, 1999), 17–18. Leopold I to Hoess, 26 April 1701, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna, Staatskanzlei, Diplomatische Korrespondenz, England Karton 34; see also Jeremy Black, A System of Ambition? British Foreign Policy, 1660–1793 (London: UCL Press, 1991), 167–69. The renversement des alliances was of long gestation, but Kaunitz’s policy was driven by strategic concerns about an ongoing Prussian threat to the Habsburg lands, see memo. Kaunitz, ‘Meynungen des Graffen Kaunitz über das auswärtige System’, 24 March 1749, repr. in R. Pommerin and L. Schilling, ‘Denkschrift des Grafen Kaunitz zur mächtepolitischen Konstellation nach dem Aachener Frieden von 1748’ in Johannes Kunisch (ed.), Expansion und Gleichgewicht: Studien zur europäischen Mächtepolitik des ancien régime (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986), 165–239; Tibor Simányi, Kaunitz, Staatskanzler Maria Theresias (Vienna: Amalthea, 1984), 14–42; M. Antoine, Louis XV (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 672–81. Manfred Schlenke, England und das Friderizianische Preussen, 1740–1763: Ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von Politik und öffentlicher Meinung im England des 18. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1963), 171–265. Maria Theresa to Marie Antoinette, 9 September 1778, in W. Fred (ed.), Briefe der Kaiserin Maria Theresia, 2 vols. (Munich: Georg Müller, 1914), vol. II, 273.

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seventeenth and eighteenth centuries followed the pattern established at Westphalia. Mediators explored the scope for a settlement by offering their bons offices to the belligerents; negotiations took place by means of formal written communications rather in the form of plenary conferences; and the contracting parties paid at least lip service to the idea of making peace ‘in perpetuity’. No attempt was made to formalise the laws of war, however, and the business of diplomacy remained ensnared in the brambles of ceremony and protocol.43 These constrained diplomatic exchanges and confirmed gradations of hierarchy, though they also allowed minor powers to elevate their own positions by means of carefully prescribed ceremonial.44 Whatever the flummeries of diplomacy, contracting parties were in principle equal actors in post-Westphalian great power politics. International diplomacy became more rational in other respects, too. When Louis XIV pontificated on a permanent Austro-French antagonism, he also noted that ‘[o]n ne peut élever l’une, sans abaisser l’autre’ (‘one cannot raise one without diminishing the other’).45 Accepting corresponding shifts in the respective positions of the emperor and the French king implied the existence of a more or less functioning balance of power. By the middle of the eighteenth century a ‘system of preponderating powers’ had taken shape, resting on the doctrine of a European equilibrium, in circulation since the War of the Spanish Succession and more deeply engrained by the peace congresses and conferences since Utrecht.46 It is telling that Frederick II, whose preventive war brought about the enemy coalition he had sought to avert in 1756, eventually reverted to a 43

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M. S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1494–1919 (London: Routledge, 1993), 128–48; Lothar Schilling, ‘Zur rechtlichen Stellung frühneuzeitlicher Kongreszstädte’ in H. Duchhardt (ed.), Städte und Friedenskongresse (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 83–107; David Onnekink and Renger de Bruin, De Vrede van Utrecht 1713 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2013), 62–82. See, for example, ‘Extractus Prothocolli vom Chur-Cöllnischen Cammer-Fourier Matthiae Biber’, 17 April 1720, LANRW, Kurköln II, No. 123; for protocol at the Vienna court, Klaus Müller, Das kaiserliche Gesandtschaftswesen im Jahrhundert nach dem Westfälischen Frieden (1648–1740) (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid, 1976), 116–43; further C.-G. Picavet, La diplomatie française au temps de Louis XIV (1667–1715): Institutions, Mœurs et Costumes (Paris: Alcan, 1930), 236–40. Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV et vingt millions de Français (Paris: Fayard, 1966), 54. Heinz Duchhardt, Gleichgewicht der Kräfte, Convenance, europäisches Konzert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), 70 et passim for a discussion of the rise of the nuances of the balance of power doctrine; this should be read in conjunction with Georges Livet, L’équilibre européen de la fin du XVe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1976).

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defensive warfighting strategy since ‘un malhereux quart d’heure peut établir pour jamais dans l’Empire la tyrannique domination de la maison de l’Autriche’ (‘an unfortunate quarter of an hour could establish for ever the tyrannical domination of the house of Austria in the [Holy Roman] Empire’),47 and after the war pursued a positional diplomatic strategy to preserve the European balance and the internal equilibrium of the empire.48 In a similar vein, British diplomacy sought closer ties with Russia ‘to maintain the general peace of Europe, and that of the North in particular’.49 At the end of the eighteenth century it had become accepted that ‘alliances and the ballance [sic] of power [were] best calculated to preserve the peace of Europe’ and that ‘a general System of tranquility, and pacification’ could only be ‘founded in a judicious ballance [sic] of interests and of powers’.50 Such thinking was raised to a new level of sophistication following the experience of nearly a quarter of a century of war and revolution at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The post-Napoleonic settlement was no mere restoration of eighteenth-century precepts in a tighter and more cooperative format. Rather, it was an attempt to establish a durable European security order on a more secure footing with clearly defined norms and effective mechanisms of conflict solution and arbitration through the Concert of Europe. Preservation of peace and prevention of revolution went hand-in-hand. Of course, Napoleon’s prior cartographical cleansing of Central Europe had helped to consolidate the 47

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Frederick II to Wilhelmine Margravine of Bayreuth, 13 July 1757, Correspondance de Frédéric II, Roi de Prusse (Berlin, 1856) xii, 1, no. 324; the controversy about Frederick’s preventive strike has been effectively dispatched by Erika Bosbach, Die ‘Rêveries Politiques’ in Friedrich des Grossen Politischem Testament von 1752 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1960), 130–36. Johannes Kunisch, ‘Der Historikerstreit über den Ausbruch des Siebenjährigen Krieges’ in Friedrich des Grosse in seiner Zeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008), 48–105; Edmond Dziembowski, La guerre de Sept Ans, 1756–1763 (Paris: Perrin, 2018), 261–75; essential for Frederick’s post-war diplomacy are Wolfgang Stribrny, Die Russlandpolitik Friedrichs des Grossen, 1746–1786 (Würzburg: Holzner, 1966), and Frank Althoff, Untersuchungen zum Gleichgewicht der Mächte in der Aussenpolitik Friedrich des Grossen nach dem Siebenjährigen Krieg (1763–1786) (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995). Rochford to Cathcart, 17 February 1769, Malmesbury MSS, Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, 9M73/G1476/2; see also Hans Bagger, ‘The Role of the Baltic in Russian Foreign Policy, 1721–1773’ in Hugh Ragsdale (ed.), Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36–72. Memo. Stewart, n.d. [c. 1791–92], Londonderry MSS, Durham County Record Office, D/Lo/F418; for some of the background se Jeremy Black, ‘The Coming of War between Britain and France, 1792–1793’, Francia 20, 2 (1993), 69–108.

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hitherto often weak polities of the German lands, thereby enabling them, singly and collectively, to play a regular role in post-war international politics, not least in furnishing the new settlement with those ‘buffer zones’ that were so vital to keeping the great powers physically apart.51 Similarly, whatever their military or moral exhaustion from the war, all the powers, including France, could consider themselves at least temporarily saturated and their most pressing security needs satisfied. Dissatisfaction with some details of the settlement notwithstanding, the Allied powers broadly agreed with Viscount Castlereagh that it was ‘not our business to collect trophies [from France], but to try to bring the world back to peaceful habits’.52 Even during the final phase of the war the Allies did not prioritise military victory but rather maintaining unity despite their conflicting views on details of the final settlement.53 Therein lay the innovative, indeed revolutionary, aspect of Article VI of the Treaty of Chaumont of March 1814, which pledged the members of the anti-French coalition to continue their habits of consultation and cooperation into peacetime. In this way they arrived at a broad consensus on the outlines and principal contents of any peace treaty as well as a clear appreciation of the means of achieving and preserving it. Like the peace treaties of the eighteenth century, but unlike most of Napoleon’s peace treaties and in sharp contrast to those of 1919, the Vienna settlement was a negotiated peace, one, moreover, concluded not at the tip of a bayonet but gradually matured since 1813: the terror of revolution could not be fought with

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See Castlereagh’s observations on Prussia’s role in maintaining the Dutch buffer against France, to Clancarty (private and confidential), 20 September 1815, TNA, Kew, FO 92/ 35; for the ‘buffers’ see P. W. Schroeder, ‘The Lost Intermediaries: The Impact of 1870 on the European System’, International History Review 6, 1 (1984), 4–10. The Napoleonic interlude fostered both continental nationalisms and a sense of European identity, see Federico Cellina, L’Europa di Napoleone e l’Europa: L’organizzazione e la concezione napoleonica dell’Europa all luce dell’europeismo (Trieste: Rassegna Europea, 1961), 103–24. Castlereagh to Liverpool (private and confidential), 17 August 1815, Marquess of Londonderry (ed.), Memoirs and Correspondence of Viscount Castlereagh, 12 vols. (London: Colburn, 1848–53) vol. 10, 484. Notably in the Polish–Saxon dispute during which Metternich threatened to treat Prussian aspirations on the whole of Saxony ‘comme un déclaration de guerre’, Metternich to Merveldt, 13 January 1815, HHStA, Staatskanzlei, Diplomatische Korrespondenz, England, Karton 154.

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force.54 It was only a small step, then, from negotiated peace to formalising a European pentarchy in 1818.55 No less important was the affirmation of the principle of ‘legitimacy’ at Vienna. On this matter, too, deliberate policy choices were made. Far from simply restoring pre-modern concepts of the divine rights of monarchical rulers, the Congress changed the notion of ‘legitimacy’ in a subtle but profound manner. It acknowledged the legitimate possession of a throne as a proprietary right, conferred on its owner by international recognition as a member of the international states system. The shunting of various German princelings onto the thrones of Greece and Belgium in the 1830s or Bulgaria and Albania at the close of the long nineteenth century, always backed by international recognition, and invariably reflecting regional and wider European concerns, illustrates this point.56 The innovation was anti-revolutionary, of course, and also antiBonapartist, at least in its intention, but it implied the rule of law, and so tied together international politics and the domestic arrangements of individual states in the interest of preserving the external and internal status quo. In retrospect, its flexibility and suppleness were the most remarkable features of the 1815 settlement. Even so, by 1848 it was hollowed out, and had lost its power of assimilating change. Sclerotic status-quo-fixated Metternichianism was swept aside by the rising forces of constitutionalism and nationalism and the social and economic transformations in the wake of rapid industrialisation. Even Lord Palmerston was shaken by the outbreak of the revolution in France: ‘I fear it must lead to war in Europe and fresh agitation in England. Large republics seem to be essentially and inherently aggressive, and the aggressions of the French will be resisted by 54 55

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See the pertinent observation by Beatrice de Graaf in Tegen de terreur: Hoe Europa veilig werd na Napoleon (Amsterdam: Promotheus, 2018), 393. An important point not appreciated sufficiently in 1918–19, see Charles K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (London, 1920) (= Foreign Office Peace Handbook No. 153), 3–10. The ongoing negotiations since the autumn of 1813 helped to weaken Napoleon by winning over some of the smaller powers, see Max I Joseph of Bavaria to Wrede, 24 September 1814, in Klaus Müller (ed.), Quellen zur Geschichte des Wiener Kongress, 1814/1815 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986), no. 16; and Torvald T. Höjer, Carl Johan I den stora koalitionen mot Napoleon: Sverige och kongressen i Châtillon (Uppsala: Uppsala universitets årsskrift, 1940), 5–8. Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg’s acceptance of the kingship of the Belgians made it necessary to find a new candidate for the Hellenic throne, Palmerston to Dawkins, 26 September 1831, Dawkins MSS, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich, MC 124/141. The situation in Belgium was anything but calm, Adair to Lamb, 3 October 1832, Panshanger MSS, Hertfordshire Record Office, Hertford, O/ELb/O15/2/2.

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the rest of Europe, and that is war.’57 The disturbances on the continent vitiated against concerted action by the powers, and 1848 produced a stalemate of sorts between the forces of order and those of change. The new republican foreign minister in Paris, Alphonse de Lamartine, showed himself more a disciple of Talleyrand’s doctrine of pas de zèle than of Dumouriez’s fervour for exporting the revolution. His country’s republican constitution, he averred, ‘n’a changé ni la place de la France en Europe ni ses dispositions sincère à maintir ses rapports de bonne harmonie avec les puissances . . . et la paix du monde’ (’changed neither the place of France in Europe nor its sincere disposition to maintain good relations with the powers and the peace of the world’).58 Coordinated efforts by Britain and Russia, the two powers left ‘les seules restée debout’ (‘the only ones left standing’),59 meanwhile, were sufficient to maintain the essential elements of order, but this was a far cry from the close relations after 1812, their growing conflicts of interest in Central Asia having weakened their capacity for cooperation. Agreement between London and St Petersburg exhausted itself in blocking calls for a new European congress. For both held true what Lord John Russell, the British prime minister, observed of his own country: ‘It is . . . not . . . expedient for us to proclaim the invalidity of the treaties of 1815. . . . But neither ought we to go on clinging to a wreck if a safe shore is within reach.’60 Thus, self-preservation, fear of war and the lack of suitable crisismanagement instruments prevented coordinated measures by the powers. The 1848 revolutions revealed the essential brittleness of the Vienna system – Britain’s recognition of Napoleon III four years later further underscored the extent to which notions of legitimacy had been eroded – and this cleared a path for renewed conflict, first in the Crimea and then in the wars in Italy and Central Europe in mid-century. In this context, it is worth noting that the formation of an Italian or a kleindeutsche nationstate suited Britain’s policy with its now more prominent aim of securing 57

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Palmerston to Normanby, 28 February 1848, Palmerston MSS, Broadland Archives, University of Southampton, GC/NO 446. Palmerston was also fearful that the French example might incite imitators at home. Circular Note, 27 February 1848, in Charles H. Pouthas (ed.), Documents Diplomatiques du Gouvernement Provisoire et de la Commission du Pouvoir Exécutif, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1953–54), vol. II, 1; for Lamartine’s strategy see Lawrence Jennings, France and Europe in 1848: A Study of French Foreign Policy in Time of Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 71–95. Nesselrode’s grandiloquent appeal for Anglo-Russian intervention, Nesselrode to Brunnov, 17/29 March 1848 (copy), TNA (PRO), FO 65/357. Memo. Russell, 10 May 1848, Russell MSS, TNA (PRO), PRO 30/22/7C.

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free trade arrangements.61 This – to nineteenth-century liberals – progressive objective further enfeebled the 1815 order. The relative absence of systemic institutions, norms and rules that might have provided a framework à la Vienne was the basic conundrum of European politics since the Crimean War.62 Bismarck exploited this deficiency in pursuit of his Greater Prussian ambitions, but thereafter, given the absence of a new foundational consensus, resorted to an increasingly complicated system of temporary measures and conjuring tricks to stabilise the post-1871 status quo. There was a kernel of truth in the German chancellor’s sarcastic aside that he had ‘always found the word “Europe” used by those politicians who demanded from other powers something they did not dare call for in their own name’.63 At the same time, Bismarck himself set his face against any attempts to restore the Concert system with its restraining sets of norms and understandings lest he lose his freedom to pursue whichever options suited German interests best.64 What was a gain for him also meant that French revanchisme and Russian revisionism in the East remained features of international relations. European politics were more stable, to no small degree because of Bismarck’s efforts, but they were not consolidated.65 Europe’s relative stability was not entirely Bismarck’s work, however. Two

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More positive assessments are offered by J. R. Davis, Britain and the German Zollverein, 1848–1866 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997); and Peter T. Marsh, Bargaining on Europe: Britain and the First Common Market, 1860–1892 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Already before the war various powers sought to form ad hoc alliances; see the Prussian attempts in December 1852 to conclude a pact with Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands against France, Johan C. Boogman, Rondom 1848: De politieke ontwikkeling van Nederland, 1840–1858 (Bussum: Uniboek, 1983), 123. Memo. Bismarck, 9 November 1876, in Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht MendelsohnBartholdy and Friedrich Thimme (eds.), Die grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914, 40 vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1922–26), vol. II, no. 255; for Bismarck’s efforts to terminate the war, see Eberhard Kolb, Der Weg aus dem Krieg: Bismarcks Politik im Krieg und die Friedensanbahnung (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989), 195–357. Hence his obsessive hatred for Gladstone and his internationalism; see W. N. Medlicott, Bismarck, Gladstone and the Concert of Europe (London: Athlone Press, 1956). It is worth noting that Austria until 1870 and Denmark at any time after 1864 explored every European crisis for openings to revise the 1864 and 1866 settlements, Heinrich Lutz, Österreich-Ungarn und die Gründung des Deutschen Reiches: Europäische Entscheidungen, 1867–1871 (Frankfurt: Propylaen, 1979), 449–69. Some Danish veterans of 1864 volunteered to fight on the French side in 1870, see Tom Buk-Swienty, 1864: Slagtebank Dybbøl, 2nd ed. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2008), 305.

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quasi-structural factors vitiated against further large-scale disturbances of international peace. In the first place, the various ‘national questions’ that had bedevilled great power politics in the 1860s had now been settled or, as in the Polish question, had lost much of their potential for disrupting relations between the powers. Further, since at least the Franco-German War the risk of any conflict between two great powers escalating to engulf others was generally understood. Indeed, this was the expectation already in 1870. The French government embarked on a war against Prussia, but in anticipation of Austrian and Italian assistance.66 In this semi-stable state of affairs, what was left of the Concert had atrophied from a mutually restraining great power directorate into a distribution mechanism for contested or unclaimed territories, as the Berlin Congress of 1878, the Congo conference of 1884–85 or the Balkan conferences of 1912–13 showed.67 Less tangibly, the aristocratic dominance in international diplomacy also helped to smooth relations between states. In most European countries, though to varying degrees, the higher civil and diplomatic services remained the preserve of the nobility. Ancestral, familial and marital transnational connections opened doors to the ministerial antechambers that remained closed to non-nobles; and they fostered a pan-European identity, a sort of ‘aristocratic internationale’ that transcended, but did not eliminate, narrow national considerations.68 It also had more practical consequences for the daily conduct of international relations, as Disraeli put into the mouth of one of his fictional characters: The first requisite . . . in the successful conduct of public affairs is a personal acquaintance with the statesmen engaged. It is possible that events may not depend now so much as they did a century ago on individual feeling, but, even if promoted by general principles, their application and management are always coloured by the idiosyncrasy of the chief actors. The great advantage which your Lord Roehampton . . . has over all his colleagues in la haute politique, is that he 66

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The aggressive French response of the crisis was not conditioned by bellicose public opinion, see Jean Stenger, ‘Aux origines de la guerre de 1870: Gouvernement et opinion publique’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 34, 4 (1956), 701–47. See also Peter Krüger, ‘“Von Bismarck zu Hitler”: Die Agonie des europäischen Staatensystems 1938/9’ in Peter Krüger (ed.), Kontinuität und Wandel in der Staatenordnung der Neuzeit: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Internationalen Systems (Marburg: Hitzeroth 1991), 84–85. T. G. Otte, ‘“Outdoor Relief for the Aristocracy”? European Nobility and Diplomacy, 1850–1914’ in Markus Mösslang and Torsten Riotte (eds.), The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23–58.

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was . . . at the Congress of Vienna. There he learnt to gauge the men who rule the world. . . . Metternich and Pozzo [di Borgo] . . . set about affairs with him in a totally different spirit from that with which they circumvent some statesmen who have issued from the barricades of Paris.69

A century on, in 1914, the Concert system was no longer capable of resolving, or at least containing, great power crises. By then, perhaps lulled by the long absence of major wars, too many politicians and diplomats had lost any sense of the potential fragility of international stability.70 *** The war provided a powerful stimulant for the resurgence of internationalist thinking, but the 1919 settlement could not consolidate international politics. Compared with earlier post-war periods, the international situation between 1919 and 1925 was unusual in that there was neither a hegemon nor a functioning equilibrium; and the Geneva system could not fill that vacuum. There was not inconsiderable enthusiasm for the League idea in the immediate aftermath of the Paris peace conference. To some diplomats, such as Harold Nicolson, the new structures were preferable to the ‘separatist alliances and combinations’ that had failed so catastrophically in 1914.71 The lofty ideals of the League, however, sat awkwardly with the affirmation of state sovereignty in the various peace treaties and the new institution’s Covenant. The League was empowered by sovereign states, and could only ever act to the extent that they wished to act through it: ‘It was an experiment in internationalism at a time when the counterclaims of nationalism were running powerfully in the opposite direction.’72 Geneva was not intended as a substitute for great power politics; it became an appendix to them. Under the League’s auspices a 69

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Romantic and conceited, of course, but not without merit, Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion [1880], Beaconsfield’s Works, 6 vols. (London, new ed., s.a. [c. 1890]), vol. II, 184. Lord Roehampton is generally thought to have been modelled on Palmerston, though he did not attend the Congress of Vienna. Baron Sergius seems to be a composite figure based on Talleyrand and the Comte de Flahault, the long-serving French ambassador at London. T. G. Otte, July Crisis: How the World Descended into War, Summer 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 523–24. Nicolson to Tilea, 9 December 1919, Tilea MSS, Ratiu Family Charitable Foundation, London, box 67; see Ephraim Maisel, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1919–1926 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 1994), 58–59. Steiner, Lights That Failed, 349; Zara Steiner, ‘The League of Nations and the Quest for Security’ in R. Ahmann, Adolf Birke and Michael Howard (eds.), The Quest for Stability:

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host of new institutions emerged, such as the International Labour Office or the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, fostered by and in turn catering for the increasing internationalisation of matters which had previously been left to national governments – they also offered employment for aristocrats in League diplomacy.73 The Geneva system as a whole provided a new mechanism for conducting multilateral diplomacy, but its success depended on the willingness of member states to use it. A special responsibility fell upon the shoulders of Britain and France, but there was a tacit understanding between them to confine the League to matters of little political significance. There was little inclination certainly in Whitehall ‘to take the initiative in referring important questions to the League’.74 There are ‘a good many of my colleagues’, noted Lord Robert Cecil in 1924, who were ‘intellectually favourable to the League but who are not prepared to take any really active or efficient steps in its support’.75 Traditional forms of international politics gradually reasserted themselves. Intriguingly, reforms of national foreign policy apparatuses often preceded the Paris peace conference but otherwise took little notice of it. War rather than peace provided the necessary stimulus. In Britain, the amalgamation of the Foreign Office and the diplomatic service, often proposed since the 1860s and invariably stalled, eventually took place in 1918–19, and further departmental reforms followed.76 In Germany,

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Problems of West European Security, 1918–1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 35–70. The cases of Count Bernadotte in the Middle East or Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah, Aga Khan III, as League president spring to mind; see also, from an Anglo-Saxon perspective, Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’UNESCO oubliée: La Société des Nations et la coopération intellectuelle (1919–1946) (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 1981). Hankey to Drummond (private and personal), 21 October 1921, Lloyd George MSS, Parliamentary Archives, House of Lords, F/25/2/35. Sir Eric Drummond, a career diplomat rather than a political figure, took a low-key approach to his role, see James Barros, Office without Power: Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond, 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Cecil to Churchill, 12 February 1924, Cecil of Chelwood MSS, British Library, Add. MSS. 51073. Memo. Hardinge, ‘On the Reorganisation of the Office’, 22 January 1920, Foreign Office Librarian’s Department, Correspondence and Memoranda, General, vol. 6, 1919–30; Christina Larner, ‘The Amalgamation of the Diplomatic Service with the Foreign Office’, Journal of Contemporary History 7, 1–2 (1972), 107–26; Zara Steiner and Michael L. Dockrill, ‘The Foreign Office Reforms, 1919–21’, Historical Journal 17, 1 (1974), 131–56.

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the confluence of revelations of professional incompetence at envoy level, the so-called ‘Luxburg affair’ in 1917, and a more assertive Reichstag tilted the internal balance in favour of reform before the end of the war. But the reordering of the German foreign service and its opening to middle-class entrants under the Schüler reforms was of limited duration. By 1921, the old imperial elites had regained their previous influence, reformers resigned and the Auswärtiges Amt returned to its old groove.77 In Britain, too, the Foreign Office managed at least temporarily to halt and, indeed, to reverse the decline of its influence. Foreign ministries recovered their initiating powers, and so reverted to traditional interstate diplomacy, as the councillor of the German embassy noted in the spring of 1920: ‘we meanwhile are having lively transactions with the Foreign Office and . . . the for us principally important man, Sir Eyre Crowe, is so far very accommodating’.78 The real sources of instability in Western Europe were the impasse in Anglo-French relations over a security guarantee and Germany’s determination to resist the execution of the reparations agreements since 1919. Diplomacy offered perspectives for adjustment, and even where it failed, it paved the way for an eventual settlement. This was the significance of the Genoa conference of 1922. Its failure quashed hopes for reconciliation, heightened in some respects by Germany’s subsequent opting for a treaty with the Soviet Union, and it pushed open the gates to the Ruhr occupation. But ‘this distressing controversy’ and the ensuing stalemate over the Ruhr,79 changes in key personnel in Berlin, London and Paris, and, from 1924, Germany’s steady economic recovery created the conditions for a fresh accommodation.80 France’s ersatz alliances with smaller Eastern Europe states, moreover, were not sufficient to secure Paris 77

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Kurt Doss, Das deutsche Auswärtige Amt im Übergang vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 155–72 and 292; Kurt Doss, Reichsminister Adolf Köster, 1883–1930: Ein Leben für die Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), 91–92. Schubert to Haniel, 3 March 1920, in Peter Krüger (ed.), Carl von Schubert (1882–1947): Sein Beitrag zur internationalen Politik in der Ära der Weimarer Republik. Ausgewählte Dokumente (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2017), no. 4. Min. Crowe, 14 March 1923, in W. N. Medlicott and R. Butler (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, 23 vols., 1st ser. (London: HMSO, 1947–83) vol. 16, no. 145, n. 4; also Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 20–29. Carole Fink, The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy, 1921–1922 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Renata Bournazel, Rapallo, ein französisches Trauma (Cologne: Markus Verlag, 1976), 185–205; Gilbert Ziebura, Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik, 1922/24–1931: Zwischen Rekonstruktion und Zusammenbruch (Frankfurt:

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leverage over Germany or to offer an effective substitute for a British security guarantee. France’s position, indeed, was reminiscent of that of Metternichian Austria, and the petite Entente was no more effective than the Austrian chancellor’s ‘Holy Alliance’.81 This was the moment for realism. Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann and Sir Austen Chamberlain were deft realists who appreciated the opportunities of the current situation; they understood that the League could be used to advance their national interests and to meet the challenges of post-war Europe. Between them the Dawes Plan and the Locarno treaty provided a framework for settling European problems. To an extent it was a restoration of the European Concert, albeit with, at least in part, different actors, as the British Foreign secretary was startled to discover: I came into office with clear ideas of what must be done & with confidence that I knew how & how only it could be done. A little later Webster’s ‘Castlereagh’s foreign policy’ was published & I found that I had been talking Castlereagh (adapted to the XXth century) without knowing it. And I like to think that there is a continuity of British foreign policy.82

Locarno embedded the 1919 settlement, at least in so far as Western Europe was concerned. Historians have rightly stressed the fact that the arrangements of 1925 left the door open to German revisionism in the East.83 But this is a partial misreading of both the short-term and longterm consequences of Locarno. In the short term, it marked ‘la

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Suhrkamp, 1984), 83–107; Stephanie Salzmann, Great Britain, Germany and the Soviet Union: Rapallo and After, 1922–1934 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 19–76. For French policy in the East see Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘L’impérialisme du pauvre: La Politique économique du gouvernmente français en Europe Centrale et Orientale de 1918 à 1929’, Relations Internationales 7 (1976), 219–39; Kalervo Hovi, Alliance de revers: Stabilization of France’s Alliance Policies in East Central Europe, 1919–1921 (Turku: Turun yliopisto, 1984). Chamberlain to Hilda and Iva, 28 November 1925, Chamberlain MSS, Birmingham University Library, AC 5/1/370; Peter T. Marsh, The Chamberlain Litany: Letters within a Governing Family from Empire to Appeasement (London: Haus Publishing, 2010), xi–xiii. Chamberlain insisted on Castlereagh’s portrait being hung for the occasion of the signing of the Locarno treaty, see his remarks at Webster’s inaugural lecture as Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, The Times, 9 March 1933. Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1925–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 128–39; Peter Krüger, Die Aussenpolitik der Republik von Weimar (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), 269–300; David Cameron and Anthony Heywood, ‘Germany, Russia and Locarno: The German-Soviet Trade Treaty of 12 October 1925’ in Gaynor Johnson (ed.), Locarno Revisited: European Diplomacy, 1920–1929 (London: Routledge, 2004), 122–45.

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consolidation de la paix par la perspective d’une détente entre la France et l’Allemagne qui en etait la condition essentielle’ (‘the consolidation of peace through the prospect of a détente between France and Germany, which was its essential condition’).84 It also encouraged attempts to find similar solutions for German–Czechoslovak and German–Danish disputes in parallel with the now prevailing spirit of the ‘Geneva tea parties’.85 But in the longer term, the separate recognition by Germany of the new frontiers in Western Europe and Britain’s guarantee of them, but not those in the East, had the effect of grading borders according to their geopolitical significance. Locarno thus had the unintended effect of undermining both the Versailles treaty and the Covenant of the League. It encouraged the belief that, unless confirmed in subsequent treaties, the 1919 peace treaties lacked force, and that governments were not obliged to defend the frontiers of ‘far away countries’ in which they had no interest. A decade later, the seeds of Locarno bore their terrible Munich fruit. It was political intent, however, rather than the inherent logic of diplomacy that propelled Europe along the road to renewed war. At the time, there were grounds for hope, tempered by realism. As one young British diplomat observed at the beginning of the Ruhr crisis: I have no delusions about this particular form of the League sans Germany, sans Russia and sans America: it is very nearly useless for practical purposes except as a symbol and a beacon. But . . . it would be a mistake to break up the League because it hasn’t reformed the world within five years of its institution. So long as it is there, it can be vivified and widened and altered as you will – but destroy it and the last shred of idealism in politics is gone and only the naked beast left.86

Taming that beast was the task of statecraft and its diplomatic handmaiden in the decade after Locarno, and in that they failed. By the summer of 1940, Joseph V. Stalin could boast that their ‘desire to get rid of the equilibrium had created the basis for the rapprochement’

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Jules Laroche, Au Quai d’Orsay avec Briand et Poincaré, 1913–1926 (Paris: Hachette, 1957), 215; for the economic aspects see Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 481–578; Anne Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction after the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), 246–65. Manfred Alexander, Der Deutsch–Tschechoslowakische Schiedsvertrag von 1925 im Rahmen der Locarno-Verträge (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970), 150–66; M. JessenKlingenberg, ‘Nord Locarno – Anton Schifferers und Otto Scheels “nordische Reise” im Oktober 1927’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Schleswig-Holsteinische Geschichte 96 (1971), 309–39. Harvey to Emrys-Evans, 22 March 1923, Emrys-Evans MSS, BL, Add. MSS. 58267.

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between him and Adolf Hitler, and that the restoration of the ‘old equilibrium’ and a return to the order it represented were now impossible.87 *** Neither the Paris peace conference nor the settlement to which it gave its name marked a new beginning in international politics. ‘New Diplomacy’ proved to be a short-lived blossom grafted onto an older, hardier rootstock in the hothouse atmosphere of 1918–19. Old diplomacy persisted, its essence – the management of relations between states – unaltered but now carrying accretions that bore outwardly the stamp of Geneva. Pace Wilson and the nineteenth-century liberals who inspired him, openness and democratic ideals did not lend themselves to peacemaking but rather complicated international relations. The settlement was indeed not ‘a building finished and complete in all respects’. More than that, it did not rest on stable foundations and, in erecting it, the peacemakers had undermined the primacy of order; and into the crevices thus created seeped malign ideas and narrowly defined interests which, ultimately, brought down the building.

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‘Notes on conversation with Stalin’, n.d., encl. in Cripps to Collier, 16 July 1940, TNA (PRO), FO 371/24845/N6526/30/38 (I am grateful to Macgregor Knox for bringing this document to my attention); for the background see Keith Neilson, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 285–317.

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Afterword New Histories of International Order Glenda Sluga

When historians look back on how the world tackled global crises in the early twenty-first century, there can be no doubt that the differences from a century earlier will be unambiguously stark. In 1919, peacemakers managing the challenges of a world ravaged by war invented intergovernmental bodies such as the International Labour Organization with its commitment to social justice, and the League of Nation’s Health Organization for the global coordination of pandemics and public health standards. Although the existence of these intergovernmental organizations was at least partly due to victor liberal governments’ preferences for fending off social upheaval – against the background of revolution in Russia in 1917 – social historians have shown that these same organizations manifested relatively widespread political support for fixing the world.1 By contrast, in 2019, even the more enduring of the intergovernmental bodies so painstakingly conceived by peacemakers 100 years earlier were relatively inert in the face of neglect, or maligned and sidestepped in favour of vociferously national solutions. Some of the international ambitions and institutions embraced in 1919 might still resonate 1

See the literature on the League of Nations associations, including, for example Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Carl Bouchard, Le citoyen et l’ordre mondial (1914–1919): Le rêve d’une paix durable au lendemain de la Grande Guerre (France, Grande-Bretagne, États-Unis) (Paris: Pedone, 2008); Sandrine Kott, ‘Towards a Social History of International organisations: The ILO and the Internationalisation of Western Social Expertise’ in Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro (eds.), Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World (Cham: Palgrave, 2018), 33–57.

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in global summiteering about climate change, economic development, debt forgiveness or human rights; however, these days, effective action on international let alone global grounds seems more elusive. Instead, in the midst of both familiar and unprecedented existential crises, we face the disorder of a world in which global-scale problems find few globalscale solutions; vaccine nationalism trumps the interconnected efforts required to successfully see off the Covid pandemic; multinational fossil fuel companies manipulate national responses to planetary imperatives. If the breadth of discussion remains, the sense of possibilities feels diminished. It is as if there is more readiness now to abandon the global as well as international, to resort to strategies centred on states or exclusive networks, such as the EU or NATO or the World Economic Forum, or ‘coalitions of the willing’.2 It is also true that the decline of international norms and institutions imagined in 1919 is occurring in obverse proportion to the popularity of the ‘international order’, and the ‘international’ per se, as subjects of scholarly analysis.3 Indeed, the studies collected here point to a renewed social-scientific and historical interest in understanding the highs and lows of the political purchase of the institutions, norms and practices of the international and its ordering, as we know it. What do we know? Much like the dissolving international order confronting us, the concept of an international order is neither easily graspable nor predetermined, but it has provoked a range of theories and methods often depending on the international disciplines – law, politics, history – vedi the necessary length of this volume’s introduction. That said, while international relations scholars – whose own craft can be traced back to 1919 – became the proponents of its importance, historians in general have tended to avoid the term ‘international order’ altogether. Why have historians not directly and systematically engaged

2

3

For an example of recent IR reflections on the international order, see Stephanie Hoffman, ‘Is the Liberal International Order in a State of Terminal Decline?, LSE EUROPP, https:// blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2020/01/07/is-the-liberal-international-order-in-a-state-of-ter minal-decline/ cf. my own historical take: ‘Anfänge und Ende(n) der Weltordnung’, Geschichtskolumne Merkur, 816 (2017), 72–81 (also published in English, as ‘The Beginnings and Ends of International Orders’, E-IR, May 2017, http://www.e-ir.info/ 2017/05/22/the-beginnings-and-ends-of-the-international-order/ This is based on text-mining evidence. For more on the use of digital methods in the study of conceptual history, see Pasi Ilhainen and Antero Holmila (eds.), Internationalism and Nationalism Intertwined: A European History of Concepts beyond the Nation State (Oxford: Berghahn, 2022). For an example of the new interest in the ‘international’, see Annabel Brett, Megan Donaldson and Martti Koskenniemi (eds.), History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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with the past of international order, or even the idea that it has a past? We can speculate the effect of international history’s roots in the study of foreign policy, or Primat der Aussenpolitik, which presumed nation-state contexts, as well as the transhistorical determinism of a ‘realist’ international system of anarchy populated by self-interested states and regulated by the distribution of power. Notably, there is no shortage of historical studies of ‘orders’ or of the ordering that constitutes a nation/ state – even though such studies are rarely referred to in the specific language of ordering or orders. Equally, to the extent that historians provide useful accounts of international orders, these are the consequence of tangential studies, with only the occasional reference to order. Ultimately, the substantive relative difference in how historians (like other social scientists) have thought about and written about orders and their social conditions and consequences rests in the framing adjective, national or international. When historians have implicitly addressed international order, they have tended to focus on the reinventions of political norms and institutions at the end of major wars. As some of the chapters here note, in 1919, among the experts European and US governments brought with them to Paris to help decide the terms of peace that would bring the Great War to a formal close to a formal close were historians of foreign policy and diplomats who – alongside geographers, economists and psychologists – reflected on the significance of the past. These included, in the British team, Charles Webster (historian) and Harold Nicolson (diplomat). In searching for a template for the reinvention of international order in 1919, both men placed great store in the methods of peacemaking invented a century earlier at the end of the Napoleonic wars.4 Webster and Nicolson’s histories of peacemaking plot 1814 as the point of origin of a newer model for doing politics between states in 1919. Although neither resorted to the specific language of international order, both wrote their histories as guides for peacemakers in 1919, and then again 1945, determined to bring the past to bear on their present. Of course, Webster and Nicolson are not alone among the twentiethcentury historians whose narratives have picked up long-abandoned

4

Charles K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (London: Foreign Office Historical Section, 1919) also published as The Congress of Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919); Charles K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 1814–15, and the Conference of Paris, 1919 (London: n.p., 1923); Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–1822 (London: Constable, 1946).

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threads of historical continuity, weaving them into new social and political contexts. As we address in the Introduction, in the 1990s, Paul W. Schroeder looked back to the peacemaking of 1814 in order to study what happened then, how politics between states was done, and the enduring transformative consequences of those innovations for the logic of modern international politics.5 Schroeder’s approach, too, helped cement the idea that the best practices had their origin almost 200 years earlier, when European statesmen prioritized relations between nations/ states, diplomatic protocols and permanent peace as objectives of peacemaking. Schroeder was intrigued by these statesmen’s changed thinking, how they came to ponder ‘that something else even more fundamental to the existence of ordered society as they knew it was vulnerable and could be overthrown: the existence of any international order at all, the very possibility of their states coexisting as independent members of a European family of nations’.6 As many of the studies here prove, this was not the end of the story of how this international history has been approached. Histories that look back to new ideas and practices of peacemaking instituted in the early nineteenth century, or before, constitute only one version of changing historical approaches to understanding international order. The other major development in the historiography of international order as an implicit theme looks forward. This trend coincided with broader questioning of methodological nationalism in the historical profession in the 1990s, in the wake of the Cold War, and resulted in expanding historical interest in the pertinence of the international as a space of political experience and ambition. Here the influence of the Harvard-based historian Akira Iriye was pivotal. Iriye, who specialized in American and Japanese foreign policy, raised the stakes by focusing on the historical importance of ideas of global community or international society, even if they were only aspirational. Books such as Cultural Internationalism and World Order (1997) and Global Community (2002) kick-started a new historical venture, linking cultural and political historical methods and objectives, and sketching out a new historiography of the social and cultural as well as political significance of (liberal) internationalism. Among the implications of this new international history was a focused historical attention on the social dimensions of the processes of ordering 5 6

Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Ibid., 802.

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that took place in both 1814 and 1919 and that neither Webster nor Nicolson, or even Schroeder, noticed – that is, the broader public cohort of actors who embraced the possibility of politics between states, what could be done in that space, and what this space and politics was for. In the case of both 1814 and 1919, this social history perspective has made it easier to see how non-state actors of all kinds engaged in peacemaking and imagined an ambitious political agenda.7 The explosion of work on the end of the First World War alone has captured a rapidly expanding landscape of intergovernmental bodies and international thinking, acknowledging the wide horizon of expectations that are part of this political history.8 Some of the consequences of a forward-looking interest in the international are reflected in this volume, in chapters that explore how, in 1919, peacemaking was both the formal work of a handful of European empires and a keenly engaged public filling the halls of Versailles and determined to have a say, to make international ordering a public process – as photographic evidence from the period underscores. The extent of this political engagement, carried along by the ebb and flow of the possibilities of international politics, forced women’s self-determination and racial equality onto the statesmen’s negotiating agenda. Even though the all-male delegates of the victor powers who assumed the political authority to decide the terms of the new international order preferred to defer women’s equality and race equality as principles of the new international order, it is as important that they did so in the face of the determined formal petitioning of women, colonial subjects and nonEuropean statesmen. In other words, this is a history of choices made, to make gender and race ordering the preserve of national sovereignty.

7

8

On 1814, see Glenda Sluga, The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021); Brian Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). See for example, in the anglophone literature, my ‘Internationalisms in the Age of Nationalism’ in Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan (eds.), Europe’s Internationalists: Rethinking the Short Twentieth Century. Histories of Internationalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Maartje Abbenhuis, The Hague Conferences in International Politics 1898–1915 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); in the Francophone, Sandrine Kott, Organiser le monde (Paris: Seuil, 2021); and in German, Madeleine Herren, Internationale Organisationen seit 1865: Eine Globalgeschichte der internationalen Ordnung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009).

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It is a history of ‘ordering’ that belongs to a genealogy that continues through the twentieth century.9 Schroeder and Iriye represent two distinctive relatively recent historiographical strands that have nurtured methodological and conceptual shifts in international history, and, by implication, have led to the historical focus on international orders on display in this volume. They also mark the difference between historical and IR approaches to the past. The historians connected to Iriye’s innovations, his drawing in of the cultural and social strands of developments in historical methodologies, are attentive to the range of international orders that have been imagined, by whom and how, as well as the possibilities and limitations of transformative ‘ordering’ moments – who missed out and why – and even as points of comparison with the present. Even as these international histories evade the term ‘order’, they document the processes of ordering implicit in international orders; whether they focus on the glance backward or future-oriented ambitions, they prompt us to think of the past not simply in terms of continuity and change, but as the sum of renewal and reinvention through choices – made by historians and publics, as well as statesmen. Among the implications, then, of this volume on peacemaking and ordering in 1919 is the evidence that national and international orders alike exist and intersect, shaping our lives and the possibilities for living. When we look at them through a historical lens, it is obvious that international as much as national orders have had to be imagined, invented and reinvented or renewed. In the interest of historical stocktaking, it is worth a final reflection on the fact that social scientists as much as historians – regardless of where they stand on the question of methodological nationalism – have rarely commented on this overlap and intersection of international and national ordering.10 This is despite the fact that both national and international scales of ordering concern the organization of political authority and governance in principles, norms and structures, and both scales address the impact of laws and conventions on how we live our lives as citizens. However, these overlaps and intersections do inform a number of the chapters in this volume. They show how, in international and national contexts alike, the ordering element manifests 9 10

Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, ch. 3. I elaborate on this in ‘Methodological Nationalism as a Useful Concept of Historical Analysis’, in Cemil Aydin et al., ‘Rethinking Nationalism’, American Historical Review 127, 1 (March 2022), 311–71.

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(for example) in the extent to which norms and institutions might give more rights to men over women, adults over children, white skins over brown, rich over poor, healthy over sick. In the transnational ordering that took place in 1919, peacemakers drawn from victor states linked the principle of nationality (or national self-determination) to the invention of an intentionally supranational League of Nations, entangling the political orders of nation-states and the international relations between them. National and international scales of ordering were also closely intertwined in majority decisions about the non-inclusion of race equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations, and unanimous confirmations of the national rather than international provenance of the political status of women.11 Finally, the historical question of what is old and what is new in the history of international order/s is much less pertinent than the historical question of how the past is worked into the present, how renewal and reinvention take place. While the contemporary fate of ‘international order’ as a term and idea may not be the common concern of historians, like other social scientists, even historians can influence its popularity, or otherwise, if they decide to emphasize its importance as a shaping concept; certainly it is history titles and content that impact the prevalence (or otherwise) of the term international in textual surveys that track it back to the early twentieth century, or further, and forward through to the early twenty-first. These suggest that, namely the First and Second World Wars. Significantly for how we think about the contemporary international order, the relatively recent escalation of textual references to that specific idea occurs only in English, and even then, against the background of the same idea’s relative political impotence across languages. This fact might imply the rise of interest in international order is more often simply epistemological, reflective of scholarly studies rather than public discussion, and, at the least, it suggests that even then not every society is busy studying the past or present of international orders. Why should they? One reason is to restore the thickness of our understanding of the politics of the past, and to bring that to bear on our expectations of the present. In this context, we consider this volume an exercise in both history and memory-making. As part of an historical longue durée, the studies collected here do the work of memory-making for a new generation, traversing the spectrum of politics and political 11

I discuss this in detail in Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology and International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).

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actors engaged in the international sphere, men and women strategizing cooperation, its necessary institutions and its underlying ideas, and their relative influence. Placed back into the oscillating history of the popularity of international as a political frame of reference, Peacemaking and International Order after the First World War recovers the extent of ambitions attached to ordering on world scales, and the importance of recognizing that the history of international order reconnects the politics of state and non-state actors, political ideas and social movements, even imperial and anti-colonial imperatives. At the same time, we make obvious the spatial and cultural limits of the early twentieth-century international imaginaries that clamoured for legitimacy. In 1919, assumptions about the universality of international order still hinged on the military, political and cultural power of Western empires and their tenuous relationships with Eastern powers such as Japan and China, on the power of men who joined in networks across these borders to agree and insist that political authority over the status of women defined the authority of their respective nations in this international order, even when they disagreed on how equal they were racially, or not. May we suggest that, for all the work done here, more international histories of the scope of political ambitions, even when defeated, are necessary. It is those ambitions for inventing new means of international politics, and for imagining the breadth and scope of the politics between states that is at stake in our present predicament. While the texture of our memories of the history of international order are only thin, the importance of the international order in our present will remain at the least unaddressed, at the most unambitious.

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Index

Abbenhuis, Maartje, 120–1 Aberdeen (Lady), 345 Abyssinia, 82, 170 Acharya, Amitav, 5–6, 11 Adler, Friedrich, Vienna Union, 326–7, 329, 330–2 Advisory Committee on International Questions, 333 Africa, 141, 142, 154, 158, 159 Agamben, Giorgio, 110 AJ Stern et Cie, 254 Åland Islands, 58–9 Allen, James, 210 Allied Council, 117 Allied Maritime Transport Council, 32, 269, 270 Allied Supreme Economic Council, 146 Allied Supreme War Council, 213 American Revolution, 366 American Union against Militarism, 181 Amritsar Massacre, 375 Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes, British India, 171, 375 anarchy, international relation theory, 7 Anzilotti, Dionisio, 208 Arab Feminist Union, 360 aristocratic internationale, 400 Ashmawi, Shafiquah bint Muhammad, 52 Australia, 156, 280 Aubert, Louis, 128, 130 Auer, Paul de, 55–6 Austrian Socialist party/SPÖ, 326, 329

Austro-Hungarian Empire, 77, 106, 127, 160, 362, 366, 382, 389 Badie, Bertrand, 311 Baker, Newton, Secretary of War, 50 Baker, Ray Stannard, 253 balance of power, 3, 9–12, 28, 71, 80, 92, 114–19, 122–6, 132, 149, 179–81, 188, 384, 394 Balfour, Arthur, 185, 186, 289, 302 Balkan conferences (1912–13), 400 Balkan Wars (1912/13), 85 Bank of International Settlements, 32 Baruch, Bernard, 261, 275 Barzanji, Shaykh Mahmud, 171 Bauer, Otto, 146 Bauman, Zygmunt, 296 Becker Lorca, Arnulf, 93, 94 Bell, Duncan empire peace thesis, 152 on international society, 162 Beneš, Edvard, 111 Benjamin, Walter, concept of montage, 38, 107 Berlin Congress (1878), 400 Bermann, Nathaniel, 37–8 Berne conference, socialist internationalism, 315, 319–21, 325 Bernstorff, Johann von, 144 Berthelot, Philippe, 128 Berthet, Alice, law treatment of women, 57 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 66 Big Four, 134. See also ‘New Diplomacy’

415

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416 Big Three, 139 Billy, Edouard de, 257 Bismarck, Otto von, 399 BNP Paribas, 254 Boemeke, Manfred, 14 Bolsheviks, 319–24 Congress of Peoples of the East, 175 imperium, 99–106, 112, 321 Revolution, 40, 41, 252 Russia, 104, 362 Bolshevism, 101, 106, 108, 377 Bouchard, Carl, 20, 313 Bourgeois, Léon, 68, 80, 181, 216, 290 Bouvier, Jeanne, 343 Bowman, Isaiah, on diplomacy, 201 Branting, Hjalmar, 325 Brest Litovsk conference, 102. See also Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Bretton Woods Conference, 2, 283 Briand, Aristide, 31, 237, 239, 241, 242, 404 Brierly, James Leslie, 60 Briggs, Cyril, 45 India as colony of, 156 treaties with Japan and France, 139 wartime propaganda, 86–7 British Admiralty, 233 British Air Ministry, 230 British East African Federation, 168 British Labour Party, 319 British Ministry of Reconstruction, 272 British War Office, 269 Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich von, 144–5, 147 Brooke, Rupert, 109 Brouchère, Louis de, 322 Brun, Georges, 305 Brussels Congress against Imperialism (1927), 158 Bryce, James, 381 Bryce Report, 289 Buat, Edmond, 130 Bulgaria, 85, 161 Burroughs, Williana, 158 Burundi, 168 Buzan, Barry, concepts of order, 5–6, 11 Calvinism, 198 Cameroon, 169 Canada, 156, 280

Index Canning, George, 124 Caribbean, 158 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 49, 62 Carr, Edward, 82, 148, 149 Carta, Caterina, 204 Carthaginian Peace, 13 Catt, Carrie Chapman, 47 Cecil, Robert, 146–7, 187, 188, 243, 275, 345, 391, 402 Central Powers, 27, 124, 250 Chamberlain, Austen, 31, 239, 240, 241, 272, 404 Chiang Kai-shek, Madame, 358 China, 157 Germany and, 372 intellectual tradition, 5–6 international affairs, 369 Churchill, Winston, 171, 280 citizen mothers, notion of women as, 57–8 civic nationalism, 96 Clavin, Patricia, 262 Clémentel, Étienne, 253–4, 271 Clémentel Plan, 254–5 Clemenceau, Georges, 30, 32, 44, 129, 140, 185–8, 190–1, 199 as decision-maker, 383–4 German armaments, 233–4 international law, 69 language of negotiations, 130 on naturalisation, 43 on punitive reparations, 271 raw material controls, 273 reparations, 196–7 security priority, 183 suffrage movements, 54 Wilson and Lloyd George, 132–8 on women’s representation before Supreme Council, 342 Cleopatra’s Needle, 313 Coe, Brook, 174 Cohrs, Patrick, 10, 18 Colban, Erik, 216 Cold War, 38, 100, 104 collective consciousness, 316 collective design, concept of, 9 collective mobilisation, 293 collective nationalism, 79 collective violence, 175 colonial subject status, after First World War, 153–4

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Index Comert, Pierre, 219, 222 Comintern (Communist or Third International), 27, 105, 320, 321, 332 Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement, 269 Commission on Ports, Waterways and Railways, 77 Commission on Women’s Employment, 344 Committee on Public Information (CPI), 368 Communist International. See Comintern Concert of Europe, 12, 118, 223, 395 Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, 309, 312 Conference of Women Suffragists of the Allied Countries, 54 Congo (Belgian), 155, 165, 169, 172 Congo conference (1884–85), 400 Congress of Soviets, 41 Congress of Vienna. See Vienna Congress Conze, Eckart, 19 Cooley, Alexander, 6 Council of Five, 186 Council of Four, 20, 31–2, 70, 73, 74, 135, 143, 146, 186, 385 Council of Ten, 26, 53 COVID-19 pandemic, 112, 408 Creel, George, 368 Crimean War (1853–56), 118, 399 Crisis, The (National Association of Colored People), 359 Crispien, Arthur, 327–9 Crow, Carl, 369 Crowe, Eyre, 403 cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm his religion), legacy of doctrine of, 92 Cunningham, T. E., 308 Curzon, George, 141 Czechoslovakia, 77, 111 Dáil Éireann, 171 Daily Express (newspaper), 374 Daily Herald (newspaper), 319 Daily Mirror (newspaper), 299 Darfur, 159 Davies, Thomas, 293 Davis, Norman, 261, 263 Dawes Plan (1924), 150, 334, 404 decolonisation, 173 Denmark, 55, 343

417

Depression. See Great Depression Derlugian, Georgi, great revolutionary projects, 157–8 Diagne, Blaise on fraternité of mankind, 51 peace negotiation leadership, 350 Sengalese troops, 43–4 Die Freiheit (newspaper), 331 Die Glocke (newspaper), 334 discursive logics, new international order, 28–31 Djibouti, 159 Drevet, Camille, WILPF and, 358, 359 Drexel, Constance, 342 Dronne, F., 305 Drummond, Sir Eric, 203. See also Secretariat bilateral legitimacy, 208–12 international public opinion, 31 multilateral legitimacy, 212–18 new international civil service, 206, 208 Du Bois, W. E. B. African Americans as guardians, 45–6 NAACP and, 46 on peacemaking, 313, 350 self-determination, 46 Duchêne, Gabrielle, feminist leader, 343 Dunstan, Sarah, 95, 107 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The (Keynes), 13, 14, 186, 248, 258 economics. See international finance Egypt, 157, 374, 378 Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU), 352–3 Wafd Women’s Committee in, 26 Eich, Stefan, 108 empires, First World War and, 155–63 Engels, Friedrich, 101 Engestrom, E. Maxson, 61 Englander, David, 301 Eritrea, 159 Ethiopia, 159 ethnicity, 96, 99, 106–7, 111, 170 ethno-nationalism, 95 European peace settlement, power and principle in, 127–38 exploitative governance, 20 Factories Act (1934), 164 Fainsod, Merle, 314 Faure, Paul, 332

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418

Index

Federal Reserve, 137 Feldman, Gerald, 14 feminist activists. See also global feminism Paris Peace Conference, 337–8 peace negotiations, 26 finance. See international finance Financial League of Nations, Stern, 254, 255 First World War, 15, 16, 19, 21–4, 33, 57, 60, 67, 89, 90, 106, 110, 121–4, 133, 155, 251, 362 aftermath of, 1 colonial subject status, 153–4 crisis of power politics, 122–7 empires and, 155–7 global aftermath of, 151–4, 172–5 peacemaking after, 111–13 raw materials and international order after, 266–8 raw material struggle, 285 self-determination, 38 Westphalian system of state sovereignty, 94–5 Fiume (Rijeka), 183, 193–4 Foch, Ferdinand, 184, 199, 233, 234, 235 Forced Labour Convention, 163, 164 Ford, James, 158 Formalists, international lawyers, 7–8 Fosdick, Raymond B., 208 France, 55 hybrid nature of policy, 387 policy on peacemaking, 32, 68–9, 130–4, 184, 190–1, 232–4 relations with Russia, 92 treaties with Japan and Britain, 139 Francis Joseph (Emperor-King), 102 Franco-German War, 400 Franco-Spanish War, 391 Frank, Robert, 294 Frederick II (Prussia), 393, 394 French Citizenship Law of 1916, 43 French National Assembly, 43, 44 French Revolutionary Wars, 115, 117, 179 friend-enemy distinction, Schmitt, 148 Fromageot, Henri, 72 Gandhi, Mohandas, 371 Garvey, Marcus, Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 45, 48, 362

Garvin, J. L., 264 Gauche Radicale (parliamentary group), 254 Geertz, Clifford, 38 gender equality, 338 feminism and peace negotiations, 337–8 peace and self-determination, 46–53 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 226 Geneva World Population Conference (1927), 160 Gentili, Alberico, 6 George V (King), 93 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, 104 Germany, 25, 55, 65–6, 92, 106, 108, 116, 127 air force disarmament, 229–30 Austria and, 84 conflicting understandings of disarmament, 232–42 disarmament terms in Treaty of Versailles, 228–32 disempowerment, 227–8 invasion of Belgium, 155 land disarmament, 231–2 London treaty (1839) and, 66 naval disarmament, 230–1 peace agreement with, 76 strategy of powerless (1919), 143–7 war expenses, 250 weakening of, 69 Gerwarth, Robert, 18, 24 Getachew, Adom, 41, 59, 63, 170, 316 Geyer, Martin, 317 Ghervas, Stella, 18 Gibbs Hunt, Ida national self-determination, 354 Pan-African Congress, 357 pressing peacemakers, 350 Gilpin, Robert, 3 Gini, Corrado, 277 Glaser, Elisabeth, 14 global civil society, emergence of, 293 global feminism, 337–8 activism of, 347–55 importance of 1919, 338–41 international feminist organisations and (after 1919), 355–60 Paris Peace Conference, 337–8

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Index women’s lobbying at Paris Peace Conference, 341–7 Gorman, Daniel, 293 Gram-Skjoldager, Karen, 306 Great Conversation, 20, 289, 310–12 between war and peace in letters to Wilson, 304–6 defining, 291–4 League of Nations and, 306–10 mapping the, during the war, 302–3 order, disorder, or rebirth (1919), 294–9 people’s peace, 299–302 Great Depression, 32, 165, 166, 201 Great Migration, 155–6 Great Moravian Empire, 106 Greece, 85, 92, 194, 397 Grey, Edward, 181 on memoirs of Great War, 91 metaphor of light, 111 Grotius Society, 55 Gwan-sun, Yu imprisonment of, 351 national self-determination, 354 Habermas, Jürgen, 293 Hadj, Messali, 44 Hague Conference (1915), 355 Hague Codification Conference (1930), 81–2 Hague Peace Conferences (1899/1907), 71, 79–81, 91, 120, 121, 202, 242 Hall, Ian, 152 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 225–6 Hankey, Maurice, 207 Hanseatic League, 392 Harukazu, Nagaoka, 73 Headlam-Morley, James, 192 Henderson, Arthur, 310, 324 Herriot, Edouard, 236–7 High Court of International Justice, 81 Hindenberg, Paul von, 143 historiographical context, 13–19 Hitler, Adolf, 111, 406 Hobson, J. A., on America’s financial choice, 263 Ho Chi-Minh, 383 Holy Alliance, 404 Hoover, Herbert, 261, 262 Horne, John, 123, 296, 310 Horthy, Miklós, 107, 111 House, Edward, 180, 186

419

Howland, Douglas, Meiji regime, 93 Hudson, Manley O., 70, 78 Hull, Isabel, 106 Hungary, 55, 112 Hunton, Addie Waites, working with YMCA, 51 Hurst, Cecil J. B., 72, 257 idealism, feminism and, 356 Ikonomou, Haakon A., 221–2 ILP. See Independent Labour Party (ILP) Imam, Syed Hasan, 371 Imlay, Talbot, 105 Imperialism (Lenin), 100 Imperial Legislative Council, 375 imperial overstretch, 9 INC. See Indian National Congress (INC) Independent Labour Party (ILP), 326, 331, 332 India, 157 India Act, Government of, 351, 351n48, 357 Indian National Congress (INC), 26, 371, 375, 378 India Tea Association, 164 Indochina, 93 Institut de Droit International, 63 Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, 402 institutions, international relations, 13 Inter-Allied Military Control Commission (IMCC), 231–2, 235, 237–41, 245 Inter-Allied Women’s conference, 295, 341, 342, 343, 346, 347, 349, 355 intergovernmental commodity controls, 281–5 International Chamber of Commerce, 277, 278 International Civil Service Advisory Board, 226 International Congress of Women, 356 International Council of Women, 54, 345, 355 International Council of Women of the Darker Races, 360 International Criminal Court (1998), 87 International Federation of League of Nations Societies, 220 international finance Clémentel plan, 253–5 credit operations funding war, 250–1 economic and financial issues, 246–8

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420

Index

international finance (cont.) economic rehabilitation of Europe, 249–50 Keynes and, 258, 260–2 Klotz plan, 255–8 oversight of, 264–5 Paris Peace Conference, 248–9, 258 Russian Empire, 252 Russia question, 252–3 United States and authority, 251–2 International Health Office, 207 international history, field of study, 313–18 International Institute for Agriculture, 277 Internationalism, socialist, 314–18 International Labour Office, 279, 402 International Labour Organization (ILO), 1, 26, 27, 163–4, 226, 276, 343–4 international law revising, 195–6 scholars of, 6–7 understandings of, 67–75 International Law (Oppenheim), 61 international lawyers, 7 International League of Darker Peoples, 46 International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 87 international norms, legally sanctioning violations of, 86–8 International Office for Public Hygiene (1907), 119 international order, 1–2 bounded, in 1919, 169–72 experiencing war, thinking peace, 21–4 imperial crisis and, 157–63 new sites of, 31–3 peacemaking and, 27–8 politics of new, 25–8 post-1918, 19–21 power politics and, 115–22 problem of, 2–13 stabilisation of, 83–6 term, 11 international relations (IR), 2 definition of concept, 3 English School of, 4–5 formalisation of, 79–83 future regime in, 75–9 institutions of, 13 logics of, 12–13 power, 12

international socialism, 27, 162, 319, 320, 323, 331 international society, 4–7, 172, 179, 181, 293, 378, 410 International Telegraph Union, 119, 206 International Trade Union Committee for Negro Workers, 158 International Union of Associations, League of Nations, 308 International Union of Customs and Tariffs (1890), 119 International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 355 International Working Union of Socialist Parties, 326. See also Vienna Union Internment Force, 230 Iraq, 25 Ireland, 65, 153, 295 Italian Chamber of Deputies, 96 Italy, 55, 92, 116, 139, 183 Ius Publicum Europeaeum, 88 Jackson, Peter on international finance, 263 legitimacy and power, 95 on reparations, 258 trans-Atlantic order, 10 Japan, 55, 386 control over Shantung, 69–70 Paris conference, 182, 195 Twenty-One Demands, 139 Jaurès, Jean, 318 Jaywardena, Kumari, 40 Jennings, Richard, 299–300 Joffe, Adolph, 102 Jüllig-Broda, Erna, 290, 292 Jünger, Ernst, 109 Kahlert, Torsten, 209 Kahlil, Hamidah, 52 Kant, Immanuel, 21 Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 82, 150 Kemal, Mustafa, 194, 295 Kennedy, David, 79 Kennedy, Paul, 9 Kenyatta, Jomo, 158 Kerr, Philip, 132 Keynes, John Maynard, 13, 179, 186–7 grand scheme of, 260–2 international commodity, 282–3 pessimistic assessment of, 248

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907750.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Khaled, Emir, 44 Kissinger, Henry, 9 Klotz, Lucien, 255, 255–6n43 Klotz Plan, 255–8 Korea, 373 New Woman movement, 351 Wilsonian propaganda, 375–6 Korovin, Evgeny, 162 Koskenniemi, Martti, 94 Kouyaté, Garan, 158 Labour and Socialist International (LSI), 317, 330, 335 Labour Charter, 343 Labour Commission, 26, 343 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 398 Lansing, Robert, 110, 185, 186, 199 Hague legalism, 71 November pre-armistice note, 182 reparations, 196 Lapradelle, Albert de, 63 law and justice, discourses of, 29 Law on French Nationality (1927), 56 League against Imperialism, 158 League Assembly (1920), 210 League Council, 80–1, 206, 213 League of Nations, 1, 2, 15, 18, 19, 20, 26, 27, 31, 39, 49, 71, 75, 78, 129 approaching the League Secretariat, 203–5 backbone of post-war international order, 202–3 bilateral legitimacy, 203, 208–12 Commission of Jurists, 59 Confucian teachings, 373 Covenant of, 37, 54–5, 58, 71, 74, 76, 95, 98, 163, 390–1, 401 Economic and Financial Organization, 264–5, 276, 281 Economic Committee, 281 establishing independence, 205–8 establishment of, 6, 228, 373 feminist international relations, 344, 347–55 foundation of new international order, 385–6 German disarmament, 242–5 Great Conversation and, 306–10 as great experiment, 89 Japan and, 140, 376 Mandate, 59, 166–9, 363, 378

421

multilateral legitimacy, 203, 212–18 as Panopticon of world peace, 97 Paris Peace Conference and, 275–8 Permanent Commission, 167 Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), 168 perspectives of, 223–6 plebiscites, 54 raw materials, 275–8 rights of ethnic minorities and, 387–8 Secretariat, 203, 205–12 socialist internationalism and, 324–5, 328 Supreme Council, 55, 213, 216, 342 transnational legitimacy, 203, 218–22 League of Nations and the Democratic Idea, The (Murray), 303 League Secretariat, 203–8 League to Enforce Peace, 182 legitimacy, principle of, 397 L’Egyptienne (newsletter), 357 Lenin, V. I., 29, 59, 105 Marxist revolutionary, 100 revolutionary agenda, 365 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 103 vision of self-determination, 41, 42 Leninism, 326 Lentin, Antony, 14 Leonhard, Jörn, 19 Le Populaire de Paris (Longuet), 334 Lester, Seán, 223 Liberal institutionalists, 4, 8 Liberalism, 95, 198–9 Liberia, 170, 281 Lights that Failed, The (Steiner), 15 Little Entente of Women, 360 Lloyd George, David, 30, 185, 186, 199, 260, 261 Britain’s war aims, 184 as decision-maker, 383–4 determined air of antagonism, 190 financial forces, 253 on prosecution of Kaiser, 87 raw material controls, 273 reconstruction, 272 reparations, 196–7 self-determination, 365 speech (1918), 180 on tension between French and American delegations, 128–9 Wilson and, 41–4, 132–8, 260, 261

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907750.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

422

Index

Locarno. See Treaty of Locarno logics, international orders, 12–13 Loi Jonnart, 44 London Report, 226 Longuet, Jean, on international socialism, 319, 334 Los Angeles Times (newspaper), 342 Louis XIV (King), 394 LSI. See Labour and Socialist International (LSI) Ludendorff, Erich von, 143 ‘Luxburg’ affair, 403 Luxemburg, Rosa, 102 McAdoo, William, 128 McCarthy, Helen, 48 McCune, Shannon, 376 MacDonald, Ramsay calling for end to military controls, 236–7 on socialist internationalism, 327, 328, 333, 335 Maclay, Joseph, 271 Macmillan, Margaret, 14 Madagascar, 165 Maharaja of Bikanir, 377 Maier, Charles, 14 Mair, Lucy Philip, 62 Makino Nobuaki, 139–40 Malta, 374 Manchuria, 82, 105 Manchurian Crisis (1931–33), 215 Mandates system, 27, 37, 151, 162. See also League of Nations minorities and, 166–9 Manela, Erez, 16–17, 63, 97, 291, 313, 348–9 Mangeot, Auguste, 297–8 Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, 123 Mao Zedong, 377 March First Movement, 373 Marks, Sally, 14 Marxism, 325 Masaryk, Tomáš, 363 Mathews, Allister, 306–7 Mayer, Arno, 10, 99, 326 May Fourth Movement, 377, 378 Mazower, Mark, 111 Metternichianism, 397 Middle East, 151, 168 Mill, John Stuart, 95

Miquel, Pierre, 14 Modernism, 37 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 109 Monnet, Jean, 208 montage, concept of, 38, 107 Monthly Summaries of the League of Nations, 220 Mosler, Hermann, 7 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 189 Müller, Hermann, 147 Murray, Gilbert, 303, 381 Musa, Nabawiyya, 53 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 46, 359 Naidu, Sarojini as female suffrage, 351 feminism and, 359 national self-determination, 354 Napoleon, 191, 396 Napoleonic code (1804), 56 Napoleonic Wars, 115, 117, 179 Napoleon III, 398 National Federation of Consumer Cooperatives, 265 nationalism, 118, 373 nationality gender in, 39 remapping globe on basis of, 361 National Race Congress, 45 National Socialism, 249 National Urban League, 45 National Women’s Party, suffrage group, 47 National Women’s Trade Union League of America, 341, 343 natural dynamic equilibrium, 8 Nazi Four-Year Plan, 284 Nazi Germany, 18 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 377 ‘New Diplomacy’, 179, 199–201, 381, 406. See also peacemaking conundrum of liberalism and guilt, 198–9 Fiume, Smyrna, and Shandong, 193–5 international public opinion, 218–22 new international architecture, 187–9 reparations, 196–7 revising international law, 195–6 self-determination, 189–93

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907750.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Wilson’s ‘program for the peace of the world’, 180–2 new international order, 377–8 discursive logics of, 28–31 glimpse of, 364–71 mobilisation of, 364, 371–7 politics of, 25–8 New York Call (newspaper), 45 New York Times (newspaper), 356 Nexon, Daniel, 6 Nguyen Ai Quoc, 45 Nicolson, Harold, 180, 186, 247, 401 Niemeyer, Theodor, 63 Nitobe, Inazo, 208 Nitti, Francesco Savario, 126, 138 Noblemaire, Georges, 210 Noblemaire Report, 210, 217 Nobuaki, Makino, 54, 186 Noel-Baker, Philip, 202–3, 223 Norman, Frederick, 312 Norsa, Cesare, 297 North Africa, self-determination, 369–70 North China Herald (newspaper), 353 Noske, Gustav, 146 Observer, The (newspaper), 264 October Revolution (1917), 100 open diplomacy, 179 Oppenheim, Lassa, 61 order, conceptions of, 29–30 Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 268, 283 Orlando, Vittorio, 129, 133–8, 183, 185, 187, 199 as decision-maker, 383–4 Osmanli empire, 382 Otte, T. G., 20, 91 Ottoman Empire, 78, 92, 106, 118, 127, 160, 161, 250, 295, 349, 358, 362, 366 Ottoman Public Debt Administration, 254 Ottoman Syria, 175 pacification, 171 pacifisme juridique, French policy, 68 Padmore, George, 158 paix de droit, 68, 88 Palmerston, Lord, 397 Pan-African Congress, 296 Panama Canal, 77 Pan-Pacific Women’s Association, 360 paramilitarism, 175

423

Paris Economic Conference (1916), 271 Paris Peace Conference, 4, 45, 66, 72, 87–8, 107, 114, 161–2, 179, 185–7, 202–3, 205, 206, 243, 248, 249, 253, 271, 337–8, 386 experimental laboratory for new international order, 382–4 including women in forging peace, 47–8 Inter-Allied Women’s Conference and, 346 League of Nations and, 275–8 Mandate system, 97, 98 raw materials, 275–8 self-determination, 39 Supreme Council of, 97–9 understandings of international law, 96 US delegation to, 47 women’s lobbying at, 341–7 Paris Peace Settlement (1919/20), 65, 90 historiographic context, 13–19 impact on international law, 86–8 Paris Resolutions, 274 Pasha, Sherif, 361 Pashukanis, Evgeny, 162 Patterson, William, 158 Paul, Alice, 47 Paul-Boncour, Joseph, 241 Paulmann, Johannes, 317 Peace Congress, 51, 247 Peacemakers (Macmillan), 14 peacemaking alternative visions, 182–5 conceptions of order, 29–30 experiment in, 33 Mandates and minorities, 166–9 outside Europe, 138–43 in Paris, 185–7 principle of, 30See also ‘New Diplomacy’ Peace of Westphalia (1648), 91, 391–4 peace settlement, 153 absence of legal protection for colonial populations, 163–6 formalisation of international relations, 79–83 legal sanction, 86–8 normative coherence of, 79–88 stabilisation of international order, 83–6 Pedersen, Susan, 168 Peel, Sidney, 246 Pelt, Adrianas, 222 Percy, Eustace, 188

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907750.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

424

Index

Permanent Armaments Commission, 237 Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), 25, 80–1, 99, 205 Permanent Disarmament Commission, 244 Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC), 168, 169 Perpetual Peace (Kant), 21 Pétain, Philippe, 130 Phan Boi Chau, 358 Phillips, Andrew, 3 Piłsudski, Józef, 111 Pipes, Richard, 104 plain people, term, 299–300 plebiscites suffrage and question of capacity, 53–8 use of, 84 Poincaré, Raymond, 68, 184, 199, 236 Poland, 55, 77, 111, 112 political equilibrium, 117 political orders, evolution of, 9–10 political responsibility, Weber’s ethics of, 109 Political Theology (Schmitt), 110 politics of new international order, 25–8 Politis, Nicolas-Socrate, 60–1, 63 post-war planning, raw materials and, 268–74 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 46 power politics, 114–15, 147–50 crisis of, 147, 149 in European peace settlement, 127–38 extra-European settlement and, 138–43 Great War and crisis of, 122–7 international order (1860–1914) and, 115–22 status of power, 114–15 strategy of powerless (Germany 1919), 143–7 Preparatory Commission, 243, 244 Principal Allied and Associated Powers, 72 Projet de paix perpétuelle (Abbé de Saint Pierre), 21 Proposals for the Avoidance of War (Bryce Report), 289 public opinion, League of Nations, 218–22 Pye, Edith, 358, 359 Quezon, Manuel, 50 Racial equality, 26, 139, 182, 188, 357, 386, 411 Radek, Karl, 327

Rai, Lajpat, 367 Randolph, A. Philip, 46 Rankin, Jeannette, 47–8 Ranshofen-Wertheimer, Egon, 206, 208, 219 Rappard, William, 215, 290, 307 Rathbone, Albert, 257 Rathenau, Walther, 108, 268 raw materials crisis of 1920–21, 278–81 future of intergovernmental commodity control, 281–5 international order after First World War, 266–8 League of Nations, 275–8 Paris Peace Conference, 275–8 post-war planning, 268–74 rubber restriction act, 280–1 Realists, 3 conception of law and order, 8 international lawyers, 7 Red Army, 112 Reichsgericht (Reich Court), Leipzig, 87 Renan, Ernest, 33 Rennes Student’s Association, 305 reparations, 196–7 socialist internationalism and, 330–6 Reus-Smit, Christian, 3 Reuter, Ludwig von, 230 Reuters News, 369 revolutions of 1848, 398 revolutions of 1919, 362–4, 364, 373–4 Rey, Luigi Vannutelli, 70 Ricci-Busatti, Arturo, 73 Riezler, Kurt, 122 RMS Lusitania, 65 Romanticism, 106, 110 Root, Elihu, 80, 81 Rousseau, Jacques, 97 Rowlatt Act, 375 rubber restriction act, Stevenson Plan, 280–1 Rubio-Marin, Ruth, 56 Ruhr crisis (1923), 334–5, 403, 405 rules of the game, international orders, 12 Rupp, Leila, 316 Russell, Lord John, 398 Russia Bolshevik revolution, 362 Bolshevik seizure of power, 382 Imperial Russia, 92, 252, 362, 382

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Index as ‘civilised’ nation, 92–3 Russian Bolsheviks, 364–5, 370 Russian Bolshevism, 377 Russian Civil War, 252 Russian Revolution, 100 Saint-Amour, Philip K., 38 Sainte-Croix, Ghévia Avril de, 342 Saint Pierre, Abbé de, 21 Scelle, Georges, 60, 63 Schayegh, Cyrus, 151 Schiff, Victor, 315 Schmitt, Carl, 29, 107, 109 power in international politics, 148–9 Schroeder, Paul, 9–10 Schuker, Stephen, 14, 263 Schwabe, Klaus, 19 Scott, James Brown, 72, 74, 81 Second Industrial Revolution, 266–7 Second International, 27, 105, 316, 318, 321, 323, 328, 330–1, 335 Second World War, 14, 15, 32, 33, 83, 109, 112, 174, 218, 284, 378 commodity organisations, 282–3 Soviet Union, 104 UN Commission on the Status of Women, 360 Secretariat. See also League Secretariat bilateral legitimacy, 203, 208–12 meta-diplomatic activities of, 204 multilateral legitimacy, 203, 212–18 transnational legitimacy, 203, 218–22 Seidenfaden, Emil, 220, 222 self-determination, 28, 37, 114, 154 appeals to Wilsonianism, 44–6 Bolshevik imperium, 103 conceptualisation of, 175 Egyptian, 374 gender, the peace and claims to, 46–53 legal legacies of ‘Wilsonian moment’, 58–64 national, 101–2 nationalists adopting language of, 367 principle of, 363, 367, 372 principle of action, 366 principle of national, 387 promise of, 365 rhetoric, reality, and repercussions, 189–93 suffrage, plebiscites, and question of capacity, 53–8 understanding principle of, 37–40

425

Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and promises of, 40–4 Wilson on, 179–80 Senegalese Quatres Communes, 43 SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International), 326, 331–4 Shaarawi, Huda, 340, 352–3, 359 Shandong, 194, 372 Sha’rawi, `Ali, 52 Sha’rawi, Huda, 52 Sharp, Alan, 14 Sheehan, James, 8 Sheehan, Jonathan, 8 Shotwell, James, 49 Siegel, Mona, 295, 313 Siegelberg, Mira, 166–7 Sinn Fein, 171 Slobodian, Quinn, 159 Sluga, Glenda forms of international sociability, 120 gender in principle of nationality, 39 liberal international order, 11 peace of 1919, 99 Smith, Adam, 95 Smith, Leonard, 157, 301 Smuts, Jan-Christian, 33, 181 advocating mandates, 98 redistribution of resources, 274 self-determination, 41, 170 Social Contract (Rousseau), 97 socialisation, debates on, 325 socialism, 95, 315 international, 27, 319, 320, 323, 331 National, 249 Socialist International, 320 socialist internationalism, 314–18 Berne conference, 315, 320–1 Bolsheviks and, 319–24 establishing the basics of, 318–29 mechanics of, 317 reparations and, 330–6 Socialist Party of America, 45 Society for the Rise of Kurdistan, 361 Sonnino, Sidney, 54, 133, 138, 185, 186, 193 Soong Mei-ling, 358 South Africa, 156, 158, 168 Soutou, Georges-Henri, 14 Sovereignty, Weber’s definition of, 108 Soviet Institute of State and Law, 162 Soviet Russia, 25

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907750.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

426

Index

Soviet Union, 104, 112, 389 Spain, 82 Staley, Eugene, 284 Stalin, Joseph, 59, 105, 405 ‘socialism in a single country’, 104 vision of self-determination, 41 state sovereignty from Bolshevik imperium to Bolshevik imperial state, 99–106 peacemaking after Great War, 111–13 successor state, 106–11 Westphalian system, 91–4 Steiner, Zara, 15, 111–12, 309 Stern, Jacques, 254, 255, 261 Stevenson Plan, rubber restriction act, 280–1 Stresemann, Gustav, 31, 238, 404 Strong, Tracy, 110 Study of the Legal Status of Women, 360 Sudan, 159 suffrage National Women’s Party, 47 plebiscites and question of capacity, 53–8 Supreme Economic Council, 32, 246 Sweetser, Arthur, 220 Sykes-Picot agreement (1916), 142 Syria, 175 Tardieu, André, 130–2 Tata, Hirabai, 351 Tata, Mithan, 351 Tcheng, Soumay (Zheng Yuxiu), 353–4, 358 Terrell, Mary Church, 357 Third International, 105 Thirty Years’ War, 391 Thomas, Martin, 20 Throntveit, Trygve, 301 Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 195 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, home-rule activist, 371–2, 375 Times, The (newspaper), 65, 67 Tirard, Paul, 236 Togoland, 142, 169 Tooze, Adam, 8–9, 18, 108, 200 Trachtenberg, Marc, 14 transnational legitimacy, Secretariat, 203, 218–22 Treaty of Berlin (1878), 117 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 103–4, 234, 252 Treaty of Chaumont, 396

Treaty of Frankfurt (1871), 234 Treaty of Lausanne (1923), 19, 153, 194 Treaty of Locarno, 238, 239, 240, 243, 404, 405 Treaty of London (1915), 70, 133, 134–6, 183, 193 Treaty of Münster, 391 Treaty of Neuilly, 78, 85 Treaty of Osnabrück, 388, 391 Treaty of Paris (1856), 2, 116, 234 Treaty of Saint Germain, 78 Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, 163 Treaty of Sèvres, 78, 94, 295 Treaty of Trianon, 78 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 13–15, 73, 74, 78, 86–8, 99, 108, 138, 150, 191, 195, 213, 227, 258, 295, 405 conflicting understandings of German disarmament, 232–42 German disarmament and, 228–32 Treaty of Versailles (Boemeke, Feldman and Glaser), 14 Troelstra, Pieter, 328 Troeltsch, Ernst, 144 Trotsky, Leon, 102–3 Trusteeship Council, 225 Turkey, 142, 157, 194, 200, 358, 390 Twenty-One Demands, 194, 195 Union for Democratic Control, 181 Union française pour le suffrage des femmes (UFSF), 48, 341 United Nations, 226 Commission on the Status of Women, 360 Security Council, 205, 225 UN International Law Commission, 83 United Nations Charter, women’s rights and equality, 360 United States, 158 cost of living, 251 economic growth, 156 Federal Reserve, 278 international politics, 382 racial discrimination, 350 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Garvey and, 45, 48, 362 Universal Peace Congresses, 120 Universal Postal Union (1874), 119, 206 USPD/independent German Socialists, 326, 327

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907750.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Index Vanpoulle, Joseph, 305 Vienna, 329 Vienna Congress (1814/15), 25, 76, 90, 383, 395 Vienna Union, 326–32, 335 Vietnam, 160 violent peacetime, 154 Volk, 106, 107, 110 Vorwärts (newspaper), 315 Wafd Party, 51 Wafd Women’s Committee (WWC), 26, 52–3 Wahrman, Dror, 8 Waites Hunton, Addie WILPF and, 357 woman of colour at Paris conference, 350–1 Wall Street Crash (1929), 150, 201 Walters, Frank P., history of League, 214 Wambaugh, Sarah, 62 Wang, C. T. (Wang Zhengting), 372 Warburg, Max, 144, 258 war funding, 250–1 war guilt clauses, notion of, 388–9 War of the Spanish Succession, 394 Washington Conference, 378 Weber, Max, 29, 107, 109 Wellington Koo, V. K. (Gu Weijun), 140, 372 Wells-Barnett, Ida, 46 Weltpolitik, German imperial, 253 we-ness, sense of, 326 Westphalian order, 2, 11, 100–1, Westphalian system, 91–4, 391–4 Wheatley, Natasha, 17 White, Henry, 47–8, 53 Wilhelm II (Kaiser), 184, 195 Wilson, Woodrow, 4, 16–17, 100, 243, 260, 365 advocate of peaceful cooperation, 115 ‘balance of power’ dynamics, 40–1 on birth of new world, 298 bout with Spanish flu, 344 China, 376 as decision-maker, 384 fear of ‘a tragedy of disappointment’, 181 financial power of US, 125 Fourteen Points, 28, 44, 52, 95, 127, 136, 141, 144, 145, 180, 192, 218, 247, 361, 366, 368–70, 374

427

Great Conversation, 291, 304–6 handling crises, 25–6 international law, 71 intervention of ordinary people in politics, 303 League of Nations, 75, 80, 89 legal legacies of Wilsonian moment, 58–64 letters to, 304–6 letter to Lloyd George, 260, 261 Lloyd George and, 41–4, 132–8 opening of peace conference, 297 pace in peacemaking, 406 peacemaking, 179 on People’s War, 301 ‘program for the peace of the world’, 180–2 raw material controls, 273–4 reparations, 196–7 repudiation of power and security, 129 on role for women in negotiations, 341–2 on self-determination, 41–6, 70, 170, 189–93, 365 sovereignty, 84 support of peace, 290 vision of international order, 29 vision of new international order, 148 wartime rhetoric, 363 Wilsonian imperium, 95–9, 112 on world made safe for democracy, 340 ‘world public opinion’ term, 301 Wilsonianism, 4, 44–6, 71, 95, 106, 108, 326 Wilsonian Moment, The (Manela), 16, 291 Wilsonian sovereignty, 110 Witt Schlumberger, Marguerite de, 48, 53, 341 Woman’s Peace Party, 181 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 23, 220, 295–6, 355–9 Woolf, Leonard, 152 World Disarmament Conference, 222, 244, 309 World Economic Conference, 282 World Health Organization, 226 world opinion conception of, 149 Great Conversation and, 306

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907750.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press

428 world opinion (cont.) Wilson’s use of term, 301 World Systems Theory, 94 Yellow Second International, 321 Yesayan, Zabel, 349, 354 Young Plan (1929), 150 Yuan Dynasty China, 6 Yugoslav state, 77 Zaghlul, Saad, 26

Index arrest of, 352 father of the nation, 374 requesting independent status from Britain, 51–2 Zaghlul, Safiyah, 352 Zheng Yuxiu. See Tcheng, Soumay (Zheng Yuxiu) Zilliacus, Konni, 307 Zinoviev, Grigory, 320–1, 323 Zionist movement, 167 Zionist Organization, 383

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108907750.022 Published online by Cambridge University Press