Seeking Moderation and Stability: Emotion, the British Delegation and the Polish Settlement at Paris, 1919

Abstract

For a century, British policy towards Poland at the Paris Peace Conference has divided opinions. One common view among historians specializing in the topic is that British policy was not only unsupportive but ‘anti-Polish’. A minority takes the opposing view: British policy-makers may have differed with many of Poland’s claims to contested territories, but they were well-meaning and took Poland’s best interests to heart. At the core of the divergence are critical comments by many in the British delegation, notably Prime Minister David Lloyd George: that ‘Poles’ were emotional, ‘difficult’, and overreaching in their territorial claims. Such comments reveal that emotional content was integral to discussions of the Polish settlement. British delegates to the peace conference judged Poles and Poland in emotional terms and also expressed their feelings in connection with policy. Restoring the emotional content of Britain’s policy at the peace conference provides a new framework for understanding how intercultural contact at Paris shaped policy-makers’ discussions and contributes to recent explorations of the integral place of emotions in international history.