Peace Congress Research Articles

International reactions to the Russian suppression of the Polish insurrection (November 1830)

The outburst of the Polish insurrection and its evolution attracted the attention of the European Powers, due to the international political context in which it started, that of the liberal-bourgeois revolutions in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and of the implications that were expected to occur due to power balance on the continent and in the Eastern Question. Russia’s position in the political systems mentioned above depended on how the Polish Question would be solved. By subordinating all the Kingdom of Poland, whose political individuality, in the Russian political and institutional system, in which the decisions of the „Final Act” of the Peace Congress in Vienna (June 9th 1815) placed it, was about to be abolished by the Tsar, opened to the Russian Empire the path towards the consolidation of its positions in the Baltic region, strategically, political an economical, thus upsetting the other Powers in the European political system, on one hand. And secondly, because it would have relieved it of the necessity to divide its forces to oversee the evolution of the embarrassing Polish Question and would have been capable to focus its attention on a solution to the other problem, the Eastern one. This perspective was likely to happen, especially in the conditions of the peace Treaty that Russia had imposed to Turkey, at Adrianople, on September 14th 1829, which ensured the latter’s „passivity” towards the Oriental policy of its victor. These perspectives affected, in particular, Great Britain and France, the secular rivals of Russia in that area, so they tried, using only diplomatic means because of the very complicated international situation at the beginning of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, to determine Russia to adopt a more conciliatory attitude towards the Polish insurgents. The rivalries that aggravated the Franco-British relations, especially in Western Europe, prevented the two Powers to adopt a unitary position towards Russia, a fact that allowed the latter to dictate the law in the Kingdom of Poland. A position, in some way singular, towards the Polish Question was adopted by another state, with direct interests in the Baltic sea area and with more specific ones in the Eastern Question. It is the United Kingdom of Sweden and Norway, created in the letter and the spirit of the Swedish-Norwegian Convention from Moss, on August 14th 1814. Sweden’s internal and external political circumstances in which, in 1810, the famous marshal of Napoleon I, Jean Baptiste Sebastien Bernadotte, prince of Pontecorvo, was proclaimed crown prince under the name Karl Johan, King Karl XIV Johan, from 1818, as the creation of the Swedish-Norwegian personal Union, determined the Swedish-Norwegian diplomacy favor the Russian interests in the Polish Question as well as in the Eastern Question. In the Polish Question, the one under our analysis, this was also because the insurrection of November 1830 started in the international conditions mentioned above and due to the fact that the liberal internal opposition to the conservative and absolutist monarchical policy of King Karl XIV Johan was becoming more active and could have constituted a reason for the Norwegians to evade the personal Union, which they did not favor and against which they fought, first through arms then by institutional means. The forms in which Great Britain, France and Sweden took position in regard to the reprisal of the Polish insurrection of November 1830, very well documented by the diplomatic reports of the British diplomats in St. Petersburg and of the Swedish ones, accredited in Petersburg and in London, which we had the opportunity to consult in the funds of manuscripts of British Library, in London, and those of the National Archives of Sweden, in Stockholm, constitute, in our opinion, a contribution to the knowledge of the history of European diplomacy, on one hand, and to the research of the international relations in the first half of the nineteenth century, on another. This is the reason why we intend to approach them in this study. All the documents selected from Sveriges Riksarkivet, in Stockholm and cited in these pages are included in the volume X, part I, of the Collection “Europe and the Porte”, which is still in manuscript, for this reason we indicated the archive quotations.

Kahgegagahbowh's (George Copway's) Transatlantic Performance

ABSTRACTOjibwa Methodist minister, author and Indigenous advocate, Kahgegagahbowh/George Copway (1818–69) has been the subject of a number of scholarly studies, particularly within the context of Indigenous studies, literary studies and Indigenous history in Canada and the United States. Born in the British colony of Upper Canada, Copway is known to scholars for his writings, particularly his The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, and his friendships with a number of prominent American writers and public figures. He also has been seen as a figure whose troubled marriage and complicated relationship to the Methodist church illustrates the difficulties Indigenous people faced in mid-century North America. To no small extent, then, Copway often figures in narratives of North American Indigenous history as a tragic figure, as he was displaced from Ojibwa society and simultaneously faced increased racism within settler society. However, Copway can be seen in a different manner. By focusing on his 1850 travels through Britain and Germany, where he attended the Frankfurt World Peace Congress, and exploring Copway's account of this trip, Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland, we can see Copway's narrative as part of a long-standing history of Indigenous peoples' encounters and movements within imperial modernity in metropolitan settings.

Norden som atomvåbenfri zone

The Nordic Nuclear Weapon Free Zone. Soviet Involvement in the Danish Peace Movement in 1981 Th e article examines Soviet involvement in the Danish campaign for a Nordic nuclear weapon free zone in 1981. During spring and summer that year, three major events promoting the idea of a Nordic zone took place in Denmark: a Nordic Peace Congress in Aalborg, the publication of an appeal in Danish newspapers and a peace march from Copenhagen to Paris. Th e analysis suggests that Moscow played a major role in these initiatives, with the climax being marked by a statement from CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev in which he alluded to parts of North-Western Russia being included in a nuclear weapon free zone. Th is case study explores how Soviet authorities attempted to infl uence Western audiences. On the one hand, in this particular case the planning and timing of the Soviet initiatives seemed quite successful, while on the other the sources reveal a rigid system with little room for improvisation when confronted with the complex reality of a democratic society.

Marc Sangnier and ‘the Other Germany’: The Freiburg International Democratic Peace Congress and the Ruhr invasion, 1923

Marc Sangnier (1873—1950) was the instigator of a series of International Democratic Peace Congresses in the 1920s and 1930s. A veteran of the First World War, he ardently wished to ‘disarm hatred’. Drawing on his pre-war experience as leader of the Christian Democratic youth movement, the Sillon, he launched a non-governmental movement aimed at youth for the advancement of Franco-German understanding. The Ruhr occupation, undertaken due to war reparations disputes, made the Freiburg Congress of August 1923 particularly audacious as Sangnier and a portion of the French left embraced a non-militarist Germany even if political divisions intruded. Sangnier clashed with Prime Minister Poincaré in parliament and withstood the physical violence of the nationalist right on the street for his daring. The advent of Locarno diplomacy and détente from 1925 turned Sangnier’s movement from being marginal to an important vehicle for promoting rapprochement, recognized as such by Foreign Minister Aristide Briand, himself the symbol of pacifist hopes.

Preventing ‘peace’: The British Government and the Second World Peace Congress

The Cold War demonstrated that perception was critical in the decision making of states as it underpinned the reasoning behind many of the decisions made during the Cold War. This paper examines the British Government's response to the Second World Peace Congress. The response was influenced by the understanding of Communist ideology related to the peace movement, the possible effect of the Congress on other NATO members, and the legal limits on the response to the Congress. These factors combined to create a reaction that was based on the Government's perception of this episode as part of a greater Communist ideologically motivated security threat, not only to Britain, but to the West in general.

Performing Invisibility: Dialogue as Activism in Grace Paley's Texts

Performing InvisibilityDialogue as Activism in Grace Paley's Texts Darcy L. Brandel (bio) One of the things that art is about, for me, is justice.… What art is about—and this is what justice is about …—is the illumination of what isn't known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden. Grace Paley, "Of Poetry and Women in the World," 1986 Without question, Grace Paley's political activism proved central to her life and work. An ongoing activist for peace and equality, she gave countless talks, wrote numerous reports, and was arrested several times during demonstrations. In 1969 she and three other antiwar activists were chosen to travel to Hanoi in order to bring home three American prisoners of war.1 Upon returning she published "Report from North Vietnam" (1969) as well as several other articles documenting her observations from the trip. In 1976 she wrote "Conversations in Moscow" after visiting the Soviet Union as a delegate to the World Peace Congress. Representing a diverse body of women activists who came to demonstrate at the Pentagon, she composed the "Women's Pentagon Action Unity Statement" (1982), which was one of the earliest manifestos to draw explicit connections between issues such as violence, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, the global capitalist economy, the nuclear arms race, and the environment. She was outspoken in her protest against the Gulf War, giving frequent talks across the country. Many of these reports and talks, along with additional nonfiction and fiction pieces, were compiled in Paley's later collection Just As I Thought (1998). More recently she published "Why Peace Is (More than Ever) a Feminist Issue" in the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever. In it she writes: Today's wars are about oil. But alternate energies exist now—solar, wind—for every important energy-using activity in our lives. The only [End Page 77] human work that cannot be done without oil is war. So men lead us to war for enough oil to continue to go to war for oil. I'm now sure that these men can't stop themselves anymore—even those who say they want to. There are too many interesting weapons. Besides, theirs is a habit of centuries, eons. They will not break that habit themselves. For ourselves, for our girl and boy children, women will have to organize as we have done before—and also as we have never done before—to break that habit for them, once and for all.2 As this polemical passage demonstrates, Grace Paley, aged eighty at the time of publication, adopted radical suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton's lifelong promise that she would not grow conservative with age, and all of her work serves as a testament to this commitment. In this article I examine the ways in which Grace Paley's texts embody her political work as they employ narrative strategies that politicize and perform ongoing dialogues between contradictory voices. While I use the word dialogue because Paley's texts consistently present these tensions as conversations or interactions between people, I do not mean to suggest that these difficult debates are always worked through to satisfactory resolution. Instead, I show how such difficult dialogues perform a kind of ongoing dialectical process that never fully reaches a final synthesis. Paley's difficult dialogues perform the necessity of this process over and over so that as many contradictory voices as possible can be heard and considered. In such dialogues with one another, these voices present often irresolvable debates that perform the very tensions surrounding access to voice and power. Furthermore I argue that Paley's texts enact her political activism through the use of several innovative narrative strategies, such as disrupted boundaries between fiction and reality, narrative interruptions and multiple versions of "truth," and complex dialectical debates between voices that ultimately reveal previously invisible perspectives. Such innovative narrative strategies become performative, I argue, in the way they cultivate difficulty for readers.3 For example, in disrupting the boundaries between fiction and reality, Paley's texts upset the power an author typically exerts over the reader, helping readers recognize, through their own frustrations, the many ways...

L'Africa al XV congresso universale della pace (1906)

- Cesira Filesi Fredrik Bajer, chairman of the International Office for Peace place in Bern, sent a note to the Italian Minister of Foreign Affair on march 1907, concerning the request made at XV Universal Peace Congress, which took place in Milan on 1906, thanks to Mr. Ernesto Teodoro Moneta who was also at its top. It was a very important proposal, which could change European great Powers' action in Africa. The international Office held it in great esteem and tried to spread the proposal to all European Governments. Congress activities were focused on opposing the exploitation policy managed by the Belgian king: they were supported by a European campaign against this conduct. Focus was on the Congo basin: the Congress asked colonial Powers to convene a new conference to revise and complete the decisions taken on 1884-85 at Berlin International Conference. This article inspects the international approach against colonialism, sustained by the Congress and Moneta, examining African state of affairs and European great Powers reaction to the proposed revision of Berlin General Act. .

PACIFISM IN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

This article presents some pacifist ideas developed in various economists' works since the origins of economic thought. The Classicals considered international peace to be a normal result (as well as a necessary condition) of economic development and human progress. Such a conception is also shared by other schools of thought, such as Utopian socialism or institutionalism. Some economists were active in the development of the pacifist movement before the First World War, which led to the organization of several international Peace Congresses. During the Cold War, certain economic studies on military expenditure and the arms race contributed to the denunciation of an excessive militarism. However, the post‐Cold War disarmament highlighted the costs of the necessary peace investment. There is a substantial research agenda and a need for more academic economists to undertake analytical and empirical work in this important field.

The distribution of political centrality in the European state system

Abstract First of all, the paper describes the evolution of interstate cooperation and transnational group formation as integrative processes in the European state system, focusing on the political centers from where these processes emanate. Secondly, it depicts the current pattern of political centrality with respect to interstate cooperation and transnational group formation. The European Union and its predecessors are the products of unprecedented levels of interstate and transnational contact and have provided the conditions for further growth. This has also to some extent affected the nature of political centrality. The evidence for this paper is derived from quantitative data and literary impressions regarding the locations of peace congresses, the network of cosmopolitanism and world citizenship, the secretariats of international governmental and nongovernmental organizations and the venues of international meetings. Conclusions are that Europe is currently unusually richly endowed with international organizations and meeting places and that this builds on a long tradition. Many capital cities, certainly not merely major power centers, play very prominent roles. Brussels, London and Paris are in a class of their own. The emphasis on capitals has grown over time particularly as regards interstate cooperation. In processes of transnational group formation, capital cities are a trifle less prominent. University towns play a pretty important role in this regard, continuing a long tradition. They, after all, sheltered the Gelehrtenrepublik of the renaissance and were focal points of the Republique des Lettres of the ancien regime.

The Dove Flies East: Whitehall, Warsaw and the 1950 World Peace Congress

In 1950 the Cold War turned hot in Korea, the threat of atomic annihilation hovered menacingly and the spectre of another world war haunted Europe. The establishment of the World Peace Council that year was one response to these fears. In November 1950 the Council decided to hold a World Peace Congress in Sheffield. The British Labour government sabotaged this Congress and forced it to shift to Warsaw. This article analyses this event which, to date, has received no scholarly attention. It argues that the attitudes and actions of the protagonists were a microcosm of the Cold War in that each side, East and West, saw the Congress as an opportunity to achieve moral authority, political leverage and strategic advantage over the other. The article also highlights the role of the state in controlling major political events during the Cold War.

Der Exzellenz-Titel für die kurfürstlichen Gesandten auf dem Westfälischen Friedenskongreß

SUMMARY In this article, Günter Christ discusses the special ceremonial privileges of the ambassadors of the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire at the peace congress which led to the treaties of Westphalia in 1648. The problem is focussed on the right of the ambassador to be accorded the title of Exzellenz, usually reserved for the ambassadors of sovereign states. The concession was opposed at first both by the Emperor and the ambassadors of France and Spain, but in the course of the year 1645, although the Emperor and the representatives of the ‘Crowns’ remained reluctant, they eventually conceded the point. This success meant more than a gain in status for the Electors: it signalled that the Electors were treated at the congress not only as fully authorised representatives of the Empire, but also as the accepted and independent members of the European congress. At the same time it was a landmark in the constitution of the Empire. Henceforth the Emperor was seen to be sharing his authority with the other members of the Empire, especially the Electors.

Ken Gott: The fashioning of an activist

Contains a paper on Ken Gott, a prominent contributor to Australian politics, a leading activist of the left in Melbourne, and a journalist. During the 1940s Melbourne University Labor Club and the university branch of the Communist Party provided a training ground for many of the intellectuals who remained active on the left for the next forty years. Ken Gott, who became one of the leadership group in both, was one of the few who actually came from a working class background. After graduating, he worked at various unskilled jobs, as well as doing casual work for the Melbourne Herald and some research for trade unions, before going in 1950 to Prague, where he became head of the weekly news service of the International Union of Students. After his return to Melbourne, he followed a career as a journalist, working first for West Australian Newspapers and assisting the Communist Party press, and eventually becoming Asian Editor of Business Week and then Managing Director of Business Asia. He finished his career back in Australia working for CRA as personal assistant to Sir Maurice Mawby. He had left the Communist Party following the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, was active in subverting Communist efforts to manipulate the Peace Congress in 1959, and continued throughout his career to undertake research on behalf of the Labor Party. One of his most effective publications, and still germane, is Voices of Hate, a precisely documented study of the League of Rights and its methods.

The State Political Geography is In

Political geography is just a century old. It was initiated by Ratzel, who published his ‘Politische Geographie’ at about the same time that in the Hague the first Peace Congress was held. This was close to the location of the IGU 1996 congress where this paper was first presented. The continuing differences in approaching the subject of international relations and of polities at large are highlighted by these two events. Political geography is concerned with the territorial basis of the political order, the actual systems of territorial control and their economic and cultural conditions and consequences. The paper elaborates on these three problem areas and presents a research agenda derived from them.

Poland`s Memorandum to the Peace Congress in Rome November 1891

Poland`s Memorandum to the Peace Congress in Rome November 1891

The Canadian Peace Congress and the Challenge to Postwar Consensus, 1948–1953

This article delineates the nature of peace activism in Canada in the immediate post‐World War 11 period. It contends that in the politically charged atmosphere of the Cold War any peace activism was, by definition, a highly politicized project. In turn, the range of dissent dictated by the postwar liberal “consensus” was narrowed dramatically. Consequently, peace activists who did not conform found themselves marginalized by a host of political and cultural forces, primarily the state and media. Negative responses to attempts by the Canadian Peace Congress to challenge aspects of the postwar order indicate how Western democracies view peace activism as dissent and how this dissent is marginalized and minimized through a variety of mechanisms.

Jane Addams and William James on Alternatives to War

On the evening of 7 October 1904, some 500 members of the Universal Peace Congress attended a banquet in Boston. An evening of good food and conversation culminated intalks by nationally prominent peace advocates. The speakers that night included, among others, two individuals who had figured prominently in the anti-imperialism movement after the Spanish-American War: the well-respected and widely-known philosopher from Harvard University, William James, and one ofthe most prominent women in the United States and founder ofthe Hull House social settlement in Chicago, Jane Addams. Their talks differed in specifics but shared a commonpurpose. Bothtriedto articulate an alternative to the psychological allure of war.1 Doing so seemed particularly necessary, for the United States had recently begun to modify its traditional isolation from foreign affairs. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the United States had worked to consolidate its influence in Latin America and the Pacific, and it had acquired its first formal colonies as the result of victory over Spain in 1898. Furthermore, these developments were approved and encouraged by the man who became president in 1900, Theodore Roosevelt. An advocate of foreign intervention and the use of military force, Roosevelt, as well as other like-minded contemporaries, worried that as the United States became industrialized and urbanized, its citizens were growing too accustomed to comfort, security, and leisure. To counteract this development, he advocated a renewed appreciation ofmilitarism and violent conflict.2 Roosevelt's views did not, of course, stand unchallenged. Soon after the end of the Spanish-American War the peace movement in the United States grew

Richard Cobden and the International Peace Congress Movement, 1848–1853

Between 1848 and 1853 a series of major peace congresses was held—in Brussels (1848), Paris (1849), Frankfurt (1850), London (1851), Manchester (1853), and Edinburgh (1853). This midcentury period was one of great confidence and optimism in the likely success of the cause. Indeed, reading the reports of the congresses today, one is struck by the at times naive overoptimism of many delegates. This may in part have been the product of the millenarian atmosphere of the period. However, it has to be said that the congresses were also characterized by a strong sense of the practicality of their proposals and the steady progress toward their goal that implementation of such proposals would achieve. Above all, the efflorescence of the peace movement in the short six years around the midcentury was the product of a class confidence, of a momentary triumphalism that inspired a section of the bourgeoisie to believe that the scourge of war could be eradicated at last.The nineteenth-century peace movement effectively began with the establishment toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, independently and virtually simultaneously, of peace societies in the United States and Britain. They were dominated by men of religion, particularly Quakers, and for a quarter of a century their work was essentially that of proselytizing the peace cause through publicity, petitions, and lecture tours. In connection with the last, the London Peace Society sent emissaries on tours of continental Europe in the early 1840s to spread the peace message.

The women's international league for peace and freedom 24th international congress, Sydney, 14–22 July, 1989 women building a common and secure future

The women's international league for peace and freedom 24th international congress, Sydney, 14–22 July, 1989 women building a common and secure future

The Indian Nationalist Movement and the League of Nations: Prologue to the United Nations

Prior to 1947, India, despite its dependence upon Great Britain, was represented in most of the bonafide international conferences and organizations that evolved especially during the inter-war years. For example, India participated in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Washington Conference on Naval Armaments of 1921, the London Naval Conference of 1930, the Disarmament Conference of 1932 and the annual inter-war conferences of the International Labour Organization. In addition, India was represented in two important international organizations of the inter-war period—the British Commonwealth, in whose deliberations it was included from 1917 onwards and the League of Nations, of which it was a founding member. For a variety of reasons; Indians involved in the independence movement disassociated themselves from and were critical of official Indian diplomacy conducted through the major international conferences and institutions of the world community and tended to attach greater importance to those non-governmental organizations in which the voice of nationalist India could be fully heard—that is to the deliberations of such bodies as the League Against Imperialism, 1927–1930, the Anti-War Congress of 1932, the World Peace Congress of 1936 and the International Peace Campaign Conference of 1938. Nevertheless, despite the nationalist antipathy for official Indian diplomacy, an examination of such governmental institutions as the League of Nations from the perspective of nationalist India is still important in order to understand some aspects of independent India's foreign policy and more specifically its approach to international organization. Further, even though Indian delegations to the League were unrepresentative, there were subtle ways in which they reflected national Indian opinions and exhibited specifically Indian traits, so that a study of the official Indian role is useful in drawing attention to what were to prove to be some of the earliest and most persisting elements of independent Indian diplomacy via such bodies as the United Nations. It is thus the purpose of this article first to explore nationalist Indian attitudes towards the League (especially the reasons for opposition to the organization), second to analyze the extent to which the official Indian role in the League reflected nationalist Indian concerns, and third to comment upon the impact of the League of Nations on independent India's foreign policy, especially its role in the United Nations.

The King's Peace

Nothing about Xenophon's Hellenica is more outrageous than his treatment of the relations of Persia and the Greeks. It was orthodoxy in the circle of Agesilaus that Theban medizing, barbarismos, had sabotaged the plans for a glorious anabasis (IV. ii. 3, V. ii. 35, III. v. 1 f.) and recalled him to the defence of his city (by the very route, ironically, taken by King Xerxes in 480 — IV. ii. 8 — the would-be avenger in the footsteps of the would-be enslaver). Not until the Thebans woo and win the fickle favour of the King (VII. i. 33 ff.), does anything like detail emerge. In the regrettable interlude, the less said the better. If the third speech of Andocides had not survived, there would have been some tangled theorizing about a note in Didymus (FGrH 328f 149), especially as regards ‘the ambassadors who in Sparta consented’, but sober historical judgement would never have transgressed so far from the text of Xenophon as to postulate a Peace Congress in Sparta as well as in Sardis in 392. Likewise, the merest chance of epigraphic survival assures us that the oaths, which the ‘Athenians and the Spartans and the other Greeks’ swore in 387/6, ‘the King swore’ (G.H.I. 118 lines 10 f.) — and so on. If we did not have the reflection of Ephorus in Diodorus, albeit a mirror cracked and blemished, we would be sadly astray in 375 and 371. When, however, the despicable Thebans become the King's favoured power, disgraceful scenes unfold. ‘Pelopidas very much had things his own way with the Persian; he could say that the Thebans alone of the Greeks had fought on the King's side at Plataea, that they had never afterwards campaigned against him, that the Spartans were at war with them because they would not join Agesilaus…etc.’ (VII. i. 34). A Persian is found at Thebes reading out the contents of a Royal Rescript, after displaying the Royal seal (ibid. §39); at Sparta twenty years before, such details had been left to the imagination.The cause of Xenophon's method in this matter is not for the moment under discussion, but rather the consequence, viz. our uncertainty about what precisely the King's Peace said. There was a document, inscribed on stone pillars and displayed in the national shrines (Isoc. IV. 180, XII. 107). If ever a copy turns up, what can we expect to find? The measure of our uncertainty was provided by Wilcken, who produced a curious hypothesis which found little sympathy; that he could do so shows the state of the evidence. Some effort of the imagination is needed, and those who gravely disapprove of conjectures of what might have been the case need read no further. At the end one can be sure of very little. Conjectures, however, have been uttered, en passant, elsewhere. What may prove to be a chorus of disdain has begun. A formal confession may be welcome.