Paris Peace Conference Research Articles

Lies and misdemeanours: Nauru, phosphate and global geopolitics

The remote, equatorial Pacific island of Nauru once possessed perhaps the world’s purest deposits of rock phosphate, the precursor of the agricultural fertiliser, superphosphate. Scheming for this resource by the big nations of the western Pacific has seen Nauru play a major role in a series of global geopolitical dramas during the course of the 20th century.In 1900, the economies of Australia and New Zealand were overwhelmingly agricultural. Yet both countries had begun to experience serious declines in agricultural productivity as the initial fertility of their soils was exhausted, and both possessed large tracts of marginal land unexploitable because of its low fertility. Access to phosphatic fertilisers was essential, not only to maintain and stimulate the agricultural sector, but to promote the development of the rest of the economy.The discovery in the early 20th century of vast reserves of high-quality, easily accessible phosphate on the islands of the equatorial Pacific promised to be the catalyst that both nations needed to transform their economies. The largest reserves were those discovered on Nauru, and Australia and New Zealand went to extraordinary lengths to safeguard access to the island’s resources. This began in 1914 when Australia seized the opportunity offered by the start of the First World War to invade the then-German protectorate, deport the German population and secure control of the island. With the end of the war, and at risk of losing the spoils of victory to the idealistic philosophies that gave rise to the League of Nations, the Australian Prime Minister threatened the USA, manipulated the Empire Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and even considered refusing to sign the Treaty of Versailles until Australia was guaranteed access to the island and its resources. A similar set of events played out at the end of the Second War. Captured and garrisoned by the Japanese, Nauru was by-passed and cut off by the Allied advance across the Pacific. The island was once again secured for Australian interests by Canberra’s prompt dispatch of HMAS Diamantina to accept the Japanese surrender.For most of the 20th century, the resources of Nauru were depleted to support the economic growth of Australia and New Zealand. Between 1922 and 1966, at least 83% of Nauru’s annual output ended up on the fields and paddocks of Australia and New Zealand; whilst, along with Banaba and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, Nauru supplied almost the whole of Australia’s superphosphate needs for much of the 20th century.Without access to phosphate, neither Australia nor New Zealand would have been able to establish the industrial agricultural systems that were fundamental to their demographic, economic and social expansion. Without superphosphates, agriculture in Australia and New Zealand may not have been viable, whilst in marginal areas cultivation may not have been possible at all. The histories of these nations would have followed unpredictably different paths, their development would have been impeded and it is possible that neither country would have achieved First World standing.

Great Britain in French Policy Conceptions at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919

ABSTRACTDuring the First World War, France and Britain forged the most intimate and comprehensive political, economic, and military alliance in history. The contributions of Britain and its Empire had been vital to France’s survival as a Great Power. A continuation of the wartime Entente was therefore pivotal to a wider strategy of embedding French security in a trans-Atlantic community of democratic Powers including the United States. But neither Britain nor the United States were ready to commit to using force to uphold the European order established at Paris. British political and policy elites reverted to pre-war cultural reflexes that prioritised Imperial considerations and assumed that France posed the chief threat to British interests.

“A House of Cards Which Would Not Stand”: James Headlam-Morley, the Role of Experts, and the Danzig Question at the Paris Peace Conference

ABSTRACTRecent years have witnessed increasing interest amongst international historians on the influence by experts on foreign policy decision making. Most work thus far has concentrated on American foreign policy since 1945, but this analysis broadens the focus to consider the impact of experts on British decision makers through the use of informal networks below the level of Cabinet ministers whilst debating the future of the city of Danzig at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It shows that despite a tendency by the protagonists to interpret their actions as subverting the official role and function of the Foreign Office, sufficient evidence can be found to suggest that through the use of back-channels to David Lloyd George, the prime minister, via Philip Kerr, his private secretary, some officials, such as James Headlam-Morley, within the Office managed to influence high-level decision making at Paris.

Trianon and its aftermath: British geography and the ‘dismemberment’ of Hungary, c.1915-c.1922

ABSTRACTIn the wake of World War I, geographers helped advise national delegations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference whose purpose was to delimit Europe’s new boundaries. The paper examines the role played by British geographers, specifically Alan Ogilvie and the British geographical delegation, in the Treaty of Trianon (1920) which greatly reduced Hungary’s territorial extent. Attention is paid to contemporary published work on the new Europe, particularly Marion Newbigin’s Aftermath: A Geographical Study of the Peace Terms and Ogilvie’s Boundary Settlement (1922). Assessment of manuscript diaries and correspondence reveals the complex circumstances faced by geographers engaged in peace work. The work of different practitioners – in the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), over how national boundaries should be arrived at (on either ethnic or physiographic grounds) – was hindered by inadequate map provision from British geographical institutions. This led Ogilvie to propose a new geographical body for Britain at a time when the RGS was facing criticism and when the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, not the RGS, provided the forum for discussion of the new post-war Europe.

Lloyd George and the American Naval Challenge: “The Naval Battle of Paris”

ABSTRACTIn the immediate aftermath of the First World War, naval competition loomed between Great Britain and the United States. This American naval challenge frustrated Britain’s leaders, who were determined to hold onto their country’s hard-won standing as the world’s leading sea Power. Britain’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George chose the setting of the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to force a showdown with American leaders in an attempt to curtail their naval shipbuilding. Much to Lloyd George’s chagrin, the Americans proved obdurate in negotiations. President Woodrow Wilson and his naval advisors refused to stop the American buildup of large and powerful capital ships that called into question Britain’s naval mastery. The deadlocked talks between American and British naval leaders threatened to wreck the peace negotiations and the establishment of the League of Nations. To prevent a breakdown in Anglo-American relations at Paris, Sir Robert Cecil and Colonel Edward House negotiated an agreement that pledged both countries to work towards a settlement of their naval competition. This analysis examines Lloyd George’s motivations and actions in provoking this confrontation to defeat America’s naval challenge in what would later become known as the naval battle of Paris.

“The Light of History”: Scholarship and Officialdom in the Era of the First World War

ABSTRACTThis analysis examines the interplay between academia and officialdom during the First World War and its immediate aftermath. The role of more especially historians prior to and during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the degree to which they succeeded—or failed—to affect decision making have been examined in some considerable detail by recent scholarship. Far less attention has been paid to the impact of individual historians’ experience of employment in war-time government agencies on their post-war scholarly pursuits. The effect of the war on historical scholarship, in fact, was profound. Not the least, it stimulated the establishment of diplomatic history as a distinct field of academic research and the emergence of the nascent discipline of international relations led by scholars who had served in wartime intelligence.

Editor’s Corner

In planning this editorial I was reflecting on the new year. I began thinking about what was happening a hundred years ago, back in 1919. The most significant diplomatic event was the Paris Peace Conference, (image 1) and domestically the ratification of the 18th and 19th Amendments, but that seemed a bit much to cover in an editorial. In a quest for different ideas, I looked through the February 1919 edition of the Monthly Catalog—or Monthly Catalogue United States Public Documents. As I looked at what was published, it amazed me how many issues that we are dealing with now were also being addressed back then.

State Formation Under International Supervision and the Construction of Hierarchies in National Membership: A Balkan Story

While territorial integrity is largely described as the norm in post-1945 Western Europe, this article shows that it is not one in twentieth century history. This article examines the post-World War I formation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference and the internationally supervised formation of the post-Yugoslav states in the 1990s. It argues that each time multinational entities dissolved and new states were formed in the name of self-determination, territorial rescaling had direct consequences for the status and rights of domestic populations leading to ethnic and citizenship stratifications further supported by international supervisory regimes.

The Meetings Between Faisal and Britain about The Sharing of Middle East During The Paris Peace Conference

The Meetings Between Faisal and Britain about The Sharing of Middle East During The Paris Peace Conference

DURRES CONGRESS EXPRESSION OF ALBANIA'S POLITICAL MATURITY

DURRES CONGRESS EXPRESSION OF ALBANIA'S POLITICAL MATURITY

War as Membership: International Society and Thailand’s Participation in World War I

ABSTRACT International relations scholars and historians have long debated the reasons for Siam’s maintenance of formal political independence during the colonial period. Territorial concessions and intra-great-power agreements are recognised as important, but attention is beginning to be paid to the solidarist and normative aspects of Siam’s diplomacy. I argue that Siam’s stance in World War I, first as a neutral nation, and then as a belligerent, allowed it to demonstrate mastery of European conventions of war. In line with the predictions of the English School theory of international relations, this increased Siam’s status in international society. This allowed Thailand to participate in the Paris Peace Conference, providing Thailand with a better position for its campaign to rid itself of extraterritorial legal provisions and unequal treaties. Thailand’s rules-based and normative participation in World War I also offered the maximum opportunity to benefit from the advent of the new liberalism in international affairs that was then emerging, especially through the ideas of United States President Woodrow Wilson. I argue that Siam’s use of its military force as a passport of sovereignty, a membership card of the family of nations, has had important long-term implications for its understanding of the role of military force in its international relations.

“Neither Peace nor War”: the Strategy of the German Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference

This article examines the strategy of the German diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference 1919, with new, unpublished sources, including the personal papers of German Minister of Foreign Affairs Count U. von Brockdorff-Rantzau. The author concludes that the strategy of German diplomacy in Versailles resembled the politics of Russian Foreign Minister (Narkom) Leo Trotsky during Brest-Litovsk peace negotiations. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, like Trotsky, was not going to sign a peace treaty with the Allies, hoping to use the platform of the Paris Peace Conference to promote his ideas, in particular, to deny the thesis of Germany's primary responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. In addition, the leader of the German delegation placed great hopes on U.S. mediation and manipulation of the so called “Russian (Bolshevik) threat”. This strategy did not bring the desired results. Germany was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles. As an ambassador of Weimar Germany in Soviet Russia, Brockdorff-Rantzau believed that the recovery of Germany lies in cooperation with Russia, considering this rapprochement with Moscow necessary to counteract the pressure on Germany by the Entente powers.

Проблема державної приналежності Буковини в міжнародних відносинах напередодні та під час Паризької мирної конференції.

The article analyzes the Ukrainian-Romanian relations and the position of the victorious countries in the First World War concerning the issue of allegiance of Bukovyna. The Ukrainians who lived compactly in the northern part of the country made up the largest ethnic group of the region. The Romanians ranked second in number. In November 1918, the Ukrainians proclaimed their power in the northern part of the country and became a part of the ZUNR (Western Ukrainian People’s Republic). However, in a few days, the Romanian troops occupied all territory of Bukovyna. A sharp diplomatic struggle unfolded around the allegiance of Bukovyna. The issue was raised at the Paris Peace Conference. Despite the demands of the Ukrainian population, the victorious countries neglected the right of the Ukrainians to self-determination and left Bukovina as part of Romania.

Етнічно строкатий світ: меншини від Версалю до сьогодення.

One of the determinant provisions of liberal world order that were announced at the Paris Peace Conference was the right of nations to self-determination of also known as the right to the national self-determination. Even a century after the Paris Peace Conference the problem of the right to self-determination remains relevant. Meanwhile, the implementation of the right to national determination contradicts the right of the state to maintain its territorial integrity and inviolability of its borders. Given the polyethnicity of many countries of the world, the political forces refer to an array of mechanisms (some of them can be destructive for the state) aiming at ethnical political mobilization of the minorities. The ethnic factor, therefore, becomes a factor of potential danger for the state and becomes a reason for interethnic and sometimes international clashes, acts of separatism or irredentism. Therefore, the states may single-handedly select the approaches to their ethnopolicies and ethnopolitical regimes to be applied practically and their state ethnopolitical models. The ethnopolitical regimes, as a form of already existing relations between the authority / state ethnonational communities, influence the conflict potential of the ethnonational factor and the states approach to setting ethnonational conflicts. Furthermore, specific types of the concepts of nations right to self-determination are theoretically substantiated.

Great Britain and the Russian Question at the Initial Stage of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919—1920

The article is devoted to the debated question of evaluation and attempts of British diplomacy to settle the so-called “Russian problem” on the eve and during the first months of the 1919—1920 Paris Peace Conference. The author reveals that the previous interpretation of London's intentions towards Soviet Russia as exceptionally negative is simplistic and requires revision, taking into account the comparative analysis of previously inaccessible to researchers Russian and British archival records. As a result, the paper demonstrates a much more complex and contradictory dynamics of Soviet-British relations than could be found in modern studies on Britain’s reflection of the Great Russian revolution of 1917—1922.

Extending the American Century: Revisiting the Social Contract

Extending the American CenturyRevisiting the Social Contract Jahara Matisek (bio), Travis Robison (bio), and Buddhika Jayamaha (bio) As the guns fell silent at the end of World War I, the US could no longer deny its great power status. Though abdicating the responsibilities inherent to this status during the interwar years, the US eventually fought on a global scale again during World War II. The conclusion of this conflict ushered the beginning of the Cold War and what came to be called the "American Century." The United States' efforts during the Cold War focused on protecting itself and its allies without compromising America's democratic system, values, and ideals.1 The US was generally successful at achieving these ends.2 Following the Cold War, the US enjoyed a brief period of primacy. The US was the sole global hegemon and exerted its ideological, political, economic, and military might to expand the world order it created after World War II. Three decades after the Cold War ended, American primacy is eroding and its influence is contested by revisionist powers. America's combat credibility is not in question, and rising powers could only threaten US leadership if American power is weakened on an absolute basis. The true challenge to continuing 21st-century American leadership therefore comes from within. Americans today resent seemingly endless military deployments across the globe with no discernible security benefits, feel abandoned by the supposed economic benefits of globalization that have not accrued to a majority, and are suspicious of laissez-faire capitalism. A vocal minority of Americans actively oppose US foreign engagements [End Page 5] and aim to tear down the global economic and military architecture their forbearers sacrificed to create.3 Americans are also electing representatives that espouse once fringe views that fundamentally undermine American economic and military global leadership. It would be erroneous and selfserving to interpret this shift as a "populist anomaly." Instead, a more accurate perspective is that the shift is a democratic response to failed foreign and domestic policies and an indictment of policy elites.4 This article reflects on the history of US primacy and projects its uncertain future. We argue that the US role in world affairs is fundamentally shaped by its democratic system of governance. US foreign engagements historically depended on the government's ability to maintain an implicit and explicit social contract with the American public that guaranteed domestic prosperity in exchange for supporting foreign policy goals. The social contract remained legitimate to the extent that the government fulfilled its obligation to pursue foreign goals that contributed to the public interest. When the government failed to do so, the public withdrew its support by demanding new policies and electing new leadership to act in accordance with the public's will.5 We see this happening in America today. This indictment of America's foreign policy elites is the result of a fundamental breakdown of the social contract that undergirded the domestic legitimacy of American global engagement during the 20th century. The following sections highlight the nature of the social contract and explain how it frayed through decades of political neglect. We conclude by highlighting the need to reassess the social contract by suggesting that strategic retrenchment may provide an opportunity for reevaluation that will contribute to the strategic solvency necessary for maintaining American leadership in the 21st century. Reluctant Great Power Though the United States had become a leading economic power by the 1890s, few realized that it was taking the first steps toward defining the American Century. When American military forces landed in France in 1917, the American public did not seem to realize the United States' great power status and was eager to "bring the boys home" after the war.6 When the Allied Powers emerged victorious, America's economic and military power was comparable to Europe's on a global scale. However, the US was not the preeminent European power—it played a decisive but not the defining role in the war.7 This became clear during the Paris Peace Conference when the war's victors debated over key provisions of the postwar settlement. President Wilson misread the situation and attempted to negotiate a settlement...

Why (and How) Rusyns Joined Czechoslovakia a Hundred Years Ago

It is soon to be 100 years since the modern Transcaprathian region of Ukraine (also known as Karpatalja, as the Podkarpatska Rus and as the Zakarpattia Region) was incorporated into the new-born state of Czechoslovakia as per the treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Czechoslovakia was built by merging different ethnicities, one of which were the Rusyns who were promised substantial autonomy within the confines of their traditional ethnic lands. The present study examines the thoughts of the Rusyn leaders regarding their preferences of territorial belonging at the end of World War I, with due attention to the differences between various groups in Hungary and in the American diaspora. At the Paris Peace Conference, the Rusyns, as members of the Czechoslovak delegation, were aiming to gain fair borders for their nation, a task that was, however, complicated, to say the least. During the conference, the region became a source of numerous conflicts between the victors, and even within the Czechoslovak delegation itself. As a result, significant Rusyn minorities remained in Romania, Poland and Slovakia. In this particular case, geopolitical considerations prevailed over the principle of self-determination for a nation which the “New Europe” declared to be one of the key elements of the postwar world. The fact that the seceding parts of imperial states were often divided about what country to belong to and under which particular political elite is often overlooked in Western historiography. This study seeks to provide new insights into this relatively seldom-discussed case — and into the reasons and circumstances that led to the decisions taken at the Conference in regard to it.

Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan by Kate McDonald

Reviewed by: Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan by Kate McDonald Jessamyn R. Abel (bio) Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. By Kate McDonald. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2017. xviii, 254 pages. $34.95, paper. Since at least the publication in 1998 of Louise Young's path-breaking Japan's Total Empire, scholars have been exploring the many ways in which cultural activities and materials helped shape Japanese imperialism through their impact on the goals, desires, and expectations of the Japanese people. Kate McDonald's excellent Placing Empire takes this ongoing work along a new path, asking about the roles in empire building of mobility and representations of place, specifically through tourism promotion and travel writing. Through thoughtful analysis of a wealth of varied materials related to travel within the empire, she demonstrates that Japanese tourism to Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria (and, conversely, the tight restrictions on colonial [End Page 411] travel to the Japanese islands) contributed to what she labels the "spatial politics of empire," by which she means "the use of concepts of place to naturalize uneven structures of rule" (p. 7). McDonald traces the changing ways in which travel and the promotion of tourism by a variegated group of people she refers to collectively as "colonial boosters" helped to convince the Japanese public that colonial territories were and should be an integral part of the empire, while at the same time clarifying and maintaining a hierarchy among these disparate spaces, thus helping to remake ideas about the "inner territory," the colonies, and the empire as a whole. The preface of this book places it in the context of the study of imperialism, both in general and of Japan in particular, but its impact extends well beyond that field, contributing equally to scholarship on mobility and tourism. Taking the lead from scholars primarily in geography, sociology, and anthropology who have examined the meanings of movement for our understandings of space and place, historians have begun to consider the significance of space and mobility from our own disciplinary viewpoint. McDonald brings this field into conversation with the study of imperialism, highlighting the significance of mobility—and, importantly, the contrast between mobile and immobile populations—in the conceptualization, creation, and maintenance of empire and national identity. She also engages with work on tourism, showing the tremendous political significance of this leisure activity, as the collective experiences of Japanese tourists enjoying the sights in colonized territories helped legitimize and structure the empire. McDonald skillfully links together various levels of analysis, for instance, by showing how changes in international norms following the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 prompted new approaches to selling imperial tourism, which in turn impacted the spatial politics of Japanese empire. The book's overarching narrative about the spatial politics of empire demonstrates a shift from the early promotion of colonialism through a "geography of civilization" to the careful differentiation among diverse spaces and peoples within the empire through a "geography of cultural pluralism." In the two chapters that make up the first of the book's two sections, McDonald shows how advocates of empire used tourism to foster a sense of the colonies as part of Japan but lagging behind. They "placed" the colonies within Japan's history, economy, and nation by shaping the places travelers would visit and sights they would see through guidebooks and itineraries. For instance, situating important battle sites of the Russo-Japanese War as must-see tourist destinations for visitors from Japan engendered an affective connection to Korea and Manchuria, while highlighting the infrastructures of circulation and production displayed the close integration of the colonies in the empire. In contrast, the people of these spaces were consistently portrayed as uncivilized, stuck chronologically behind the Japanese nation. In these ways, colonial promoters mobilized tourism to doubly justify Japanese [End Page 412] imperialism: first, by convincing travelers that these territories were proper parts of Japan; and second, by suggesting the civilizing benefits of Japanese rule. The second section of the book, consisting of three chapters, shows how the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism was transformed by the two-pronged change that marked the empire and the...

Introduction: world politics 100 years after the Paris peace conference

Introduction: world politics 100 years after the Paris peace conference

Summing up: the “Russian Question” and the Formation of a “New World Order” at the Paris Peace Conference

Summing up: the “Russian Question” and the Formation of a “New World Order” at the Paris Peace Conference