Versailles Peace Conference Research Articles

Archeologists Imagine Ukraine: Social Scientists and Nation Building in the Nineteenth Century

AbstractRussia’s brutal invasion in February 2022 revitalized considerations about how Ukraine can contribute to historiographical issues related to the origins of nation-statehood. This essay contributes to that discussion by returning to the 19th century and exploring how the participants in multiple archeological congresses, nascent social scientists confident in the empirical objectivity of their evidence, envisioned Ukraine. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s commonplace about a nation as an “imagined community,” I highlight the contestation between nationalist and imperialist discourses in the emergent social sciences. Although the Versailles Peace Conference, which denied Ukraine the opportunity to “self-determine” as a modern political entity, revealed the limits of the Western political imagination in 1919, many of the ideas presented at these congresses continue to inform the cultural and geographical borders of Ukraine.

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

Brief Synopses of New Arabic-Language Publications

Столетие макроэкономического шедевра Дж. М. Кейнса

. Introduction. In this article, the point of view that recognizes J. M. Keynes’ book “The Economic Consequences of Peace” as his best work, dedicated to the results of the Versailles Peace Conference and published in December 1919, is substantiated. The uniqueness of this publication is due to the author’s participation in the negotiation process, expressing a personal position of protest against the content of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the destructive consequences of its implementation. Scientific review. The experience of macroeconomic research of the European economy transformations at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries is analyzed. The logic of the author’s concept development corresponded to the historical course of events: the economy of Europe before and after the war, on the eve of a peace treaty and the prospects for its post-war recovery. The chronological macroeconomic approach was relevant and productive. The scientific creativity of J. M. Keynes, presented in “The Economic Consequences of Peace”, was an original combination of a commitment to the tradition of English economic thought and an innovative understanding of extraordinary macroeconomic trends and extraordinary structural transformations of the economy. Conclusion. It explains the fundamental importance of the book “The Economic Consequences of Peace” in the scientific work of J. M. Keynes. In the process of its writing, bold, innovative ideas developed that served as a theoretical and methodological key to the formulation and solution of problems in the most famous book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, published later. “The Economic Consequences of Peace” is a creation that deserves the status of a world economic thought classics, a masterpiece of macroeconomic theory that has not lost its scientific value and relevance in the century since its creation and publication.

Russian Political Delegation, 1919–1920

Using materials from Russian archives as well as from the Leeds Russian Archive (Great Britain), this article traces stages of activity of the Russian Political Delegation (RPD). The Delegation was established in 1919 by the Russian Political Meeting (RPM) in Paris for direct participation in the Versailles Peace Conference. Its activities were authorized by Admiral Kolchak, Supreme Ruler of Russia. The article covers the formation of the RPD, which included Prince Lvov, N. V. Tchaikovsky, V. A. Maklakov, and S. D. Sazonov. Due to circumstances beyond its control, the Delegation did not get the opportunity to participate in the conference, and its international activities were quite limited. However, after the dissolution of the Russian Political Meeting, the Russian Political Delegation continued its activities, claiming the status of the foreign center of a White Movement. Its ranks aggravated the split between public figures and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Movement: social activists wanted the government of Omsk to remove S. D. Sazonov. Admiral Kolchak decided to retain control of his government over foreign missions, keep S. D. Sazonov as Minister, and asked the delegation to continue its work. In fact, in late 1919 and early 1920, the Russian Political Delegation managed to head the foreign mission of the White Movement. However, it was unable to cope with problems standing on its agenda. G. E. Lvov and N. V. Tchaikovsky, who used the situation of the Delegation members to influence affairs, diligently supported its existence. The last statements of the Russian Political Delegation refer to the end of 1920, the period of evacuation of the Wrangel’s army from Crimea. Analysis of the RPD’s activities provides an insight into challenges that in general were characteristic of the Movement and that eventually played their role in its defeat.

Dyplomata. Żołnierz. Literat. Hrabia Franciszek Xawery Pusłowski w świetle dokumentów komunistycznego aparatu represji

Count Franciszek Xawery Pusłowski was born in France on June 16, 1875. He studied law, philosophy and art history. He was fluent in six languages. During World War I, he was arrested in Russia. As a result of efforts made by influential friends in 1918, he was released from captivity after the personal decision of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka. After the end of World War I, he participated in the Versailles peace conference. Until 1923, he served in the diplomatic corps. He was an opponent of Józef Piłsudski and his political camp. After being released from military and diplomatic service, he was active as a writer, publicist and social activist. He also led an intense social life. During World War II, he lived in Krakow. After the war, in 1945-1950, he was the vice-president of the Society of Friends of Fine Arts. He also worked as a sworn translator at the District Court in Krakow and as a lecturer at the AGH University of Science and Technology, the Jagiellonian University and the Krakow University of Technology. Despite the politically uncertain times, Pusłowski ran his salon in Kraków after 1945, where Kraków artists, journalists, sportsmen, soldiers and his students from Kraków universities used to visit. Count Pusłowski was famous for the fact that, thanks to his relatives living abroad, he had at his home excellent coffee and curiosities, rare for the post-war years, such as figs and pineapples. He remained under the interest of the communist security authorities, inter alia, due to international contacts and the art collection.

Sir William Orpen’s To the Unknown British Soldier in France: a controversial commemoration

ABSTRACT This article considers Sir William Orpen’s controversial painting To the Unknown British Soldier in France as a site of memory in the decade following the armistice. War art played a part for many people in helping to make sense of and commemorate the war, but expectations of how art could and should do this varied between different groups and changed over time. In the later war years and immediately postwar, art produced by eyewitnesses to the conflict was valued for the truth of its testimony; however, there were different interpretations of what this meant in practice. While the Imperial War Museum sought to create a factual record of events, the majority of the public and press expected war art to tell a symbolic rather than literal truth. To the Unknown British Soldier in France was commissioned by the IWM in 1919 to commemorate the Versailles peace conference and was most expensive art commission of the war. Unveiled to a storm of controversy in 1923, it was rejected by the museum and subsequently altered by Orpen before its eventual acceptance in 1928. Orpen turned the commission into his personal commemoration of the ordinary soldier, whom he felt had been forgotten in the peace process. The painting juxtaposed spectral, decaying soldiers with a realistic, flag-draped coffin, and while this hybrid style offended some, many others warmly approved, believing that it was important to acknowledge the horrors of war even within a memorial context. This episode suggests that in the immediate postwar years, the genres of avant-garde/critical and traditional/memorial art were not mutually exclusive, and that many people wanted to honour the memory of the fallen, whilst simultaneously acknowledging the harsh realities of war.

Etkind , Alexander Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt (review)

SEER, 97, 2, APRIL 2019 380 of the book, he speculates about the loose relationship between his story of the communes and the revivification of revolutionary idealism in the era of de-Stalinization. There is a specific afterlife, too, with the term ‘kummuna’ occasionally returning to public discourse. Willimott has got close to his subjects and tells their stories with enthusiasm. He acknowledges that they are only a small part of the history of the Revolution, but he is not troubled by whether their experience is representative, precisely because they offer new stories told from unusual angles that illuminate wider themes. There is much for students and scholars to enjoy and learn from in this important book. University of Cambridge Mark B. Smith Etkind, Alexander. Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2017. xiv + 290 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $24.95 (paperback). Deploying his talent for epigrammatic encapsulation, A. J. P. Taylor famously dismissed the roles of diplomats in history as merely what one clerk said to another. Alexander Etkind’s study seems to confirm this judgment, for it speaks of advice ignored, of roads not taken. But the book’s central theme is the wisdom and prescient of William Bullitt’s thoughts, which were not embraced by those in power who ‘preferred his company to his advice’ (p. 2). If only they had adopted his suggestions, then the world might well have been a better place. Etkind describes his book as an intellectual biography, aiming to concentrate on Bullitt’s ideas as much as on his actions. He builds his case principally on the Bullitt papers and those of his second wife, Louise Bryant (John Reed’s widow); Bullitt’s own publications, the volume containing his correspondence with Franklin Roosevelt, which is heavily mined; various secondary works on Bullitt and US politics and foreign policies; and a number of Russian-language memoirs and documentary collections. Bullitt was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1891, graduated from YaleUniversityandspentayearatHarvardLawSchool.Heenteredgovernment service thanks to the sponsorship of President Woodrow Wilson’s close confidant, Colonel Edmund M. House, who helped Bullitt’s appointment as an assistant to the secretary of state. In 1918 Bullitt undertook a mission to meet Lenin and the new Bolshevik government of Russia, securing an agreement involving withdrawal of foreign forces in return for payment of Russia’s debt and independence for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and other nationalities REVIEWS 381 within the tsarist empire. Wilson did not pursue the deal, causing Etkind to wonder how international relations might have developed had Bullitt’s deal been pursued. Yet this seems a rather optimistic reading of what was probably a temporizing move by Lenin. Angry and disappointed, Bullitt resigned and publicly criticized the ‘unjust decisions’ at the Versailles Peace Conference. For the next fourteen years Bullitt was out of public office. Etkind gives extensive treatment to Bullitt’s first novel, It’s Not Done, which sold over 150,000 copies, and his second unpublished novel, Divine Wisdom. The 1920s proved to be a period of emotional turmoil for Bullitt, who met Sigmund Freud and received therapy for his suicidal thoughts. The two men then collaborated on a book about Wilson that aimed to explain him in psychological terms. Although it was eventually completed in 1938, it was not published until 1966. Etkind speculates that the delay was because its appearance would have hindered Bullitt’s revived political career. In November 1932 Franklin Roosevelt was elected US president and decided to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union, a move Bullitt had encouraged him to take. Bullitt arrived in Moscow as the first US ambassador in late 1933 with high expectations and a talented team of diplomats, including George Kennan. He departed in 1936 deeply disappointed by the failure to improve US-Soviet relations, disillusioned by the surveillance of the mission and its officials and shocked by the terror unleashed by Stalin. In August 1936 Bullitt became ambassador to France and immediately settled into his post, enjoying the social scene and the attention he received from prominent people. He sought to promote Franco...

Delegacija Kraljevine SHS u Versaju i Vojvodina

The paper analyzes the policy of the Delegation of the Kingdom of SCS at the Peace Conference in Versailles in respect of Vojvodina, which was incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbia by the decision of the Grand National Assembly in Novi Sad dated November 25, 1918, and joined the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The introductory part of the paper summarizes issues important for the work of the Delegation in territorial matters. External factors that posed an objective threat to the Delegation's policy regarding Vojvodina were analyzed afterwards. The paper further discusses internal factors that disturbed the construction of the unique views of the Yugoslav Delegation in Versailles against Vojvodina. Different concepts on the borders of the Yugoslav state in the Delegation and the work of the Ethnographic Section which was especially significant in determining the territory of Vojvodina and demarcation with neighboring countries were both analyzed. On the basis of these analyzes in the final discussions were given some specific conclusions, as well as an a general assessment of the work of the Delegation of the Kingdom of SCS in Versailles regarding Vojvodina was given.

Statistics of Poland – the First Yearbook of Polish Lands: Authors and Content

The beginning of the twentieth century is a time of the development of official statistics in European countries. Due to the lack of its own independent state, it was not possible to publish a Yearbook of Poland at the time. In this context, the Polish Statistical Association (PSA) was founded in Cracow in 1912. One of its main tasks was to merge statistical information on Polish lands dispersed among statistical offices of Russia, Germany and Austria and to issue its own statistical yearbooks for Polish lands and their population. Before the beginning of World War I, the PSA was able to prepare the publication Statistics of Poland, printed in 1915, whose main authors were: A. Krzyżanowski and K. W. Kumaniecki. Many people from the intellectual elite of the country were involved in the project. The territorial scope of Statistics of Poland is interesting. It covers the territory of the first Polish Republic and the area of Upper Silesia and the southern Masuria, where Poles were the majority. Statistical data contained in Statistics of Poland amaze by their abundance even today. The importance of Statistics of Poland is that it gave arguments for the Polish delegation in the con­duct of the discussions on the shape of the territory of reborn Poland in 1918 carried out at the peace conference in Versailles.

Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ed. by Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann

Reviewed by: Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ed. by Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann Elizabeth McKillen Eileen Boris, Dorothea Hoehtker, and Susan Zimmermann, eds., Women's ILO: Transnational Networks, Global Labour Standards and Gender Equity, 1919 to Present ( Leiden: Brill 2018) The International Labour Organization (ilo) will celebrate its centennial in 2019. Studies by scholars and ilo functionaries of this long-lived and uniquely structured affiliate of the League of Nations and United Nations abound, but the role of women in shaping its policies has received only sporadic attention. Such neglect is not surprising because, until recently, women have constituted a very small percentage of the members of the ilo governing body, or of the delegates and technical advisors sent by individual nations to the yearly ilo conferences. Yet this edited collection of fourteen essays makes a convincing case that women have played an important role in shaping the ilo's policies toward women workers and in ensuring the ratification and implementation of ilo conventions governing women's work in diverse national contexts. The book is divided into two overlapping sections. The first section primarily considers the role of transnational women's networks in shaping debates and policies within the ilo; the second focuses on the ways in which ilo standards were negotiated and implemented within particular nations, regions, and populations of workers. In an important opening chapter of the first section, Dorothy Sue Cobble explores the neglected role of women in the "origin story" of the ilo. (27) The blueprints for the ilo were first drawn up by the all-male Commission on International Labour Legislation at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Fearful of the growing contagion of Bolshevism and other forms of labour radicalism in the aftermath of World War I, they recommended an innovative tripartite structure for the ilo: the yearly conferences would include national delegations of government, business, and labour representatives, and the governing body would also include representatives from all three groups. These groups were charged with working together to raise labour standards in order to prevent the injustices and poverty that caused social unrest and threatened world peace. A coalition of women's groups visited the commission to voice their concerns and several women's organizations asked that representation for women also be mandated as a component of the tripartite structure of the ilo. Instead, the Commission required only that the ilo's director appoint women to the ilo staff and recommended that national delegations include at least one woman in an advisory position. Of the 40 nations that sent delegations to the founding convention of the ilo in Washington, DC in the autumn of 1919, none appointed a woman as a voting delegate and most included only a few female advisors. The US and British-based Women's Trade Union League, however, responded by staging their own International Congress of Working Women (icww) in Washington, DC at the same time as the ilo convention. Their meeting included over two hundred women from nineteen nations, some of whom were also advisors to their national delegations at the ilo convention. The icww prepared a set of resolutions and policy statements that were then championed by the women advisors at the ilo meeting. The icww recommendations proved particularly important in shaping the ilo's Maternity Convention [End Page 302] to include a far-reaching demand for six weeks paid benefits for women before and after childbirth. icww proposals were also taken into consideration in debates over conventions on child labour and the prohibition of night work for women. Subsequent articles by Françoise Thébaud, Kirsten Scheiwe, and Lucia Artner highlight the way women continued to influence debates over labour standards for women during the interwar period through the no's Correspondence Committee on Women's Work and its dedicated staff members. The Cold War, as Eileen Boris demonstrates, complicated the quest for international labour standards as the no's protective legislation for women came under attack by feminist activists from Communist bloc countries as well as legal equality feminists based in the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Silke Neunsinger...

Una questione d’impero: la stampa dell’Estado Novo di fronte alla guerra d’Etiopia

The Ethiopian war had a huge global impact: it challenged the international order established by the Versailles Peace Conference. It also brought into question the relationship between Italy and Portugal. A war in Africa could endanger the stability of Portuguese colonies. This article wants to deepen the impact of the Ethiopian war on the Portuguese press. The final aim is to understand to what extend the Estado Novo considered more important the maintenence of the Portuguese Empire than the ideological linkage with Mussolini’s Italy.

L'Italia e il primo conflitto globale, 1914-1918

L'Italia e il primo conflitto globale, 1914-1918

Political and administrative boundaries of the German state in the 20th century

The paper presents the changes in the political and administrative boundaries of the German state, which took place during the 20th century. The starting point is constituted by the political pattern having developed after the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, this pattern lasting until the World War I. Then, the territorial consequences are considered of the decisions, taken at the Versailles Peace Conference. After the presentation of the situation existing during the inter-war period, the political transformations are shown of the annexation politics of the Nazi Germany. The final part of the paper is devoted to the territorial effects that the Potsdam Treaty brought for the defeated Germany.

Dr med. Kazimierz Habicht, generał tytularny Wojska Polskiego, wobec problematyki zwalczania chorób zakaźnych w Polsce po 1918 roku

The opinion of Dr med. Kazimierz Habicht, a general tytularny of the Polish Army, in reference to the problems of combatting contagious diseases in Poland after 1918The purpose of the article is to present a lesser-known (it is omitted in many research works) figure of Kazimierza Habichta (1868-1943), brigadier general, doctor of medicine. In the light of bibliographical and archival research, the author managed to establish that the person in question had an immensely interesting biography and a military career. He served for many years in the Austro-Hungarian navy; subsequently he worked as an internist in the St. Lazarus hospital in Krakow. After the end of the First World War he volunteered for service in the Polish Army. Until 1923 he distinguished himself in the field of combatting extremely dangerous epidemics of contagious diseases, due to which more people died than due to military activities associated with armed conflicts in the years 1914-1920. He collaborated, or rather he headed the civil and military International First-Aid Missions in Poland. The seriousness of the epidemiological threat is attested by the fact of the engagement associated with attempts to contain the epidemic on the part of the American and international Red Cross, the League of Nations, and even the peace conference in Versailles in the years 1919-1920.

Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism by Elizabeth McKillen (review)

Reviewed by: Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism by Elizabeth McKillen Lloyd E. Ambrosius (bio) Making the World Safe for Workers: Labor, the Left, and Wilsonian Internationalism. By Elizabeth McKillen. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. 320. $55.00 cloth) With her new book, Elizabeth McKillen makes another significant contribution to labor and diplomatic history. She analyzes the interactions between labor and socialist leaders, on one side, and President Woodrow Wilson’s administration, on the other, from its response to the Mexican Revolution, through the Great War in Europe during the years of U.S. neutrality and belligerency, to the Versailles Peace Treaty after the war. With one notable exception, she argues that Wilson’s priorities diverged from those of labor unions and socialist parties in the United States and Europe. Although Wilson called for making the world safe for democracy in his 1917 war address to Congress, while asking it to vote for war against Imperial Germany, his commitment to a world safe for workers was limited by his preference for [End Page 132] protecting U.S. commercial and financial interests abroad. He favored capitalism, not socialism, although workers benefited from some of his progressive reforms. Unlike the U.S. Socialist Party that Eugene V. Debs led, the president did not embrace industrial democracy in his vision of a new world order. McKillen summarized this thesis about the differences between Wilsonian liberal internationalism and the alternative visions of internationalism of most labor and socialist leaders in her statement: “International labor experienced no ‘Wilsonian moment’ during which most labor groups aligned behind Wilson’s agenda. Rather, the continuing debate over Wilson’s foreign policy programs within U.S. and international labor circles exposed fundamental cleavages surrounding the question of whether the president’s unique brand of liberal internationalism really served, or could be modified to serve, the interests of the world’s workers” (p. 2). This fundamental divergence between the labor and socialist Left and the progressive capitalist Wilson culminated in the postwar rift between them, which expressed itself in the Red Scare and the labor and socialist Left’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty, particularly the League of Nations. McKillen’s persuasive argument refutes Thomas Knock’s interpretation in To End All Wars (1992), which emphasized Wilson’s appeal to the labor and socialist Left and downplayed substantial differences between him and them. The most notable exception to this general pattern was Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Under his leadership, the AFL collaborated with the Wilson administration. When the president led the nation into war, Gompers supported U.S. belligerency and sought to improve the conditions of workers without resorting to strikes that would jeopardize wartime production. In exchange for this loyalty, the president appointed Gompers to the Commission on Industrial Labor Organization, which met in Paris in 1919 and created the structure for the new International Labor Organization (ILO). He succeeded in dominating these proceedings, despite widespread criticism from European labor and socialist leaders, [End Page 133] but failed to win U.S. membership in the ILO, which was founded in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1919. Along with rejecting the Versailles Treaty, the U.S. Senate kept the United States out of the ILO as well as the League of Nations. By the time of this failure, however, even Gompers recognized the limits of Wilson’s commitment to American workers. One of the outstanding features of this book is McKillen’s coverage of the intersection between racial/ethnic identity and labor politics. Because American workers came from many backgrounds, racial and ethnic issues overlapped with questions of class in labor unions and their relations with employers and political leaders. She understands these dimensions very well. One minor flaw in this otherwise excellent book is her frequent reference to the Versailles Peace Conference instead of the Paris Peace Conference. Although signed at Versailles, the peace treaty was drafted at the conference in Paris. Lloyd E. Ambrosius LLOYD E. AMBROSIUS is the Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations and Professor of History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of several...

A Bridge Across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See Between the Two World Wars by Luca Castagna (review)

Reviewed by: A Bridge Across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See Between the Two World Wars by Luca Castagna Agnes de Dreuzy (bio) Luca Castagna, A Bridge Across the Ocean: The United States and the Holy See Between the Two World Wars (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014). 224pages. On January 10, 1984 the Holy See established full diplomatic relations with the United States for the first time since 1867 when the U.S. Congress had cut funding for the American pontifical mission in Rome, resulting in its closure. The appointment by President Ronald Reagan of the first ambassador to the Vatican was the culmination of 117 years during which relations between the two governments endured a lengthy, but slow maturation. In his book A Bridge Across the Ocean, Luca Castagna, professor at the University of Salerno, reconstructs these complicated relations between 1914 and 1939. Originally published in 2011 in his native Italian, Castagna’s work is an informative and insightful account of the gradual but uneven and uneasy thawing of the relations between the Holy See and the American government during these two crucial decades. He sheds light on the intricate diplomatic interplay between the Holy See, the U.S. government, and the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, against a political and social background, highlighting “the disturbing international scenario of the twenties and thirties” (xv). Castagna shrewdly navigates between the primary sources he uses from the Vatican and the United States and analyzes them with the existing literature on the topic. The narrative that emerges from his study is a page-turner. The year 1917 arguably represents the lowest point in the chaotic relations between the papacy and the American government. Two recognized [End Page 133] moral authorities collided. President Woodrow Wilson, a staunch Protestant, offered a polite but firm fin de non recevoir to Pope Benedict XV’s Peace Note of August 1, 1917. The long history of American anti-Catholic bigotry is not enough to explain this rejection. A deep ingrained sense of the separation of church and state led Wilson to not only oppose the papal attempt at mediation but also to support Italy with its refusal of the Holy See’s participation in the Versailles Peace Conference as stipulated in article 15 of the secret treaty of London, an article inserted to avoid a much-feared internationalization of the “Roman Question”—the issue of the pope’s temporal rights to the Papal States after the Italian unification movement. Although this story is already well documented, Castagna places it within the broader American context of revived anti-Catholic nativism which is balanced against cautious support from the American Catholic hierarchy represented by the elderly Cardinal James Gibbons. The meeting between Wilson and Benedict XV on January 9, 1919, the first of its kind, did not provide any reason for the Holy See to celebrate. Castagna vividly describes the post-war years and convincingly argues that the relations between the Holy See and America did not improve until Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to the presidency in 1932. Most interesting is Castagna’s explanation that, in an apparent paradox, it is under the anti-Catholic Republican administrations (1921–1933) that the Catholic Church in the U.S. organized itself at the national level and became a unified and structured force on the political and social scene, after “reflect(ing) on their role within the troubled American society of the 1920s” (70). The National Catholic War Council (NCWC) was to be the privileged instrument for this new role. Castagna retraces its origins and development, weaving an intricate scholarly fabric of the maneuvering of the cardinal of Boston, William Henry O’ Connell in his attempt to have the NCWC suppressed by Pius XI and the pained reaction of the American bishops through a petition drafted by the Board of the Catholic University of America. The order was eventually retracted and the NCWC became “an effective instrument of pressure on the federal government” (82). The signing of the Lateran Treaties between Pius XI and Mussolini in 1929 signaled what Castagna calls “a new era for Vatican diplomacy, as it was for relations with the United...

Prince Lichnowsky’s memorandum as a source for determining the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War

Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky was a German ambassador in London from 1912 to 1914. He was one of the most important direct participants of the July Crisis which led to the outbreak of the First World War. This document was written in 1916 and secretly delivered to the German military and political supreme authorities. It came into possession of Swedish socialists and they published it, first in English and then in all other European languages. This document explicitly attributes the responsibility for the outbreak of the war to the German political and social circles. It accuses them of instigating Austria- Hungary to attack Serbia. The Germans declined and undermined solemn interventions to evade the war. Also, this document briefly describes the German imperialistic politics in the decade before the War and indicates that these politics have inevitably led to the confrontation with Great Britain, Russia and France. Assassination in Sarajevo is indicated as a motive but little attention is paid to it (Gavrilo Princip is not even mentioned at all). During the Paris Peace Conference (in Versailles), this document was used as one of the important arguments to declare Germany guilty of starting the war. Western press wrote a great deal about it and it was given a lot of credit. Also, this memorandum was often disputed during the debate in German politics and historiography in the 1920s and the 1930s on the war accountability (Kriegsschuldsfrage), but it was often quoted by German opponents.

Emmanuel de Martonne and the wartime defence of Greater Romania: Circle, set square and spine

This essay examines how Romanian intellectuals defended Greater Romania during and before World War II, and discusses the influence of the French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne (1873–1955) on this process. De Martonne played a pivotal role in shaping the borders of Greater Romania at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, and geographical discourse subsequently became central to the formation of a distinctly Romanian geopolitics. Geographical arguments and practices, and not least ethnographic mapping, became linked to Romanian nation-building. Ample evidence of this can be found in the Romanian wartime review Geopolitica şi Geoistoria (published 1941–1944), wherein intellectuals and politicians sought to defend the historic and geographic integrity of Greater Romania. The essay shows how geographical and geopolitical arguments acted as bulwarks against the traumatic dynamics of wartime occupation and conflict. It also uses the case of de Martonne to suggest that geographers' connections with World War II need to be placed in a longer interwar time frame and wider European settings.

100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR I – HAVE WE LEARNED ANYTHING FROM THE CONFLICTS IN THE PAST 100 YEARS

100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR I – HAVE WE LEARNED ANYTHING FROM THE CONFLICTS IN THE PAST 100 YEARS

Making the world safe for workers: labor, the Left, and Wilsonian internationalism

In this intellectually ambitious study, Elizabeth McKillen explores the significance of Wilsonian internationalism for workers and the influence of American labor in both shaping and undermining the foreign policies and war mobilization efforts of Woodrow Wilson's administration. McKillen highlights the major fault lines and conflicts that emerged within labor circles as Wilson pursued his agenda in the context of Mexican and European revolutions, World War I, and the Versailles Peace Conference. As McKillen shows, the choice to collaborate with or resist U.S. foreign policy remained an important one for labor throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it continues to resonate today in debates over the global economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the impact of U.S. policies on workers at home and abroad.