Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War

Abstract

French historians will perhaps be surprised that this book is being reviewed in French History. It does not, strictly speaking, speak to French history at all. Rather, it is an excellent examination, as its subtitle puts it, of the topics of ‘sovereignty, legitimacy, and the formation of new polities after the Great War’. The essays contained in Beyond Versailles range widely, from an examination of the fundamental question of plebiscites, to Austria, Italy, two essays on Egypt, three on Poland, one on Persia and a stimulating essay on black internationalism. They problematize the notion that the new world order born of the Paris Peace Conference was a progressive moment. In line with much recent writing on the Great War itself, they also de-centre the peace conference narrative away from the Franco-German problem and delineate the global, as much as European, ramifications of how the conflict ended. One of the unintended ironies of the Paris Peace Conference was that in its rush to reify the idea of ‘national self-determination’, it ended up essentially opting for the German idea of the nation, as opposed to Ernest Renan’s famous French republican definition of the nation in his 1882 Sorbonne lecture. Thus, John Deak comments in the case of Austria that ‘The Paris system that emerged granted legitimacy based on the idea of ethnic populations’. Provocatively, he concludes that the Treaty of St Germain was a ‘moment of destruction and of unmaking a state: the unmaking of multinational—or even nationally indifferent—possibilities for European history’. Jesse Kaufman writes with regard to Poland that ‘the most intriguing and unsettling aspect of the triumph of this vague ideal [is] that, after thousands of years in which power had been legitimated in a host of ways, national self-determination so thoroughly and rapidly annihilated all competition and ascended to the status of supreme norm for the organization of politics both domestic and foreign’. This is heady stuff, if one follows the argument to its logical conclusion. If the ‘destruction’ and ‘unmaking’ of states was the ‘supreme norm’ because national self-determination had ‘rapidly annihilated all competition’, then one is left with an argument on the international level that is similar to Robert Gerwarth’s (in The Vanquished) on the domestic level: the status quo ante was arguably better than the post-Versailles order.