Post-war Settlement Research Articles

Khrushchev and Kennedy

What are the risks to global security when a disrupter rises to lead a nuclear-armed superpower? Imagine a leader who publicly vows “to smash [adversaries] in the teeth”; or who issues an off-hand nuclear threat to a foreign adversary while talking to a group of school teachers, saying “we have rockets which can land precisely at a preset target 13,000 kilometers away. This, if you want, is a warning ….”1 Two generations ago the world’s most volatile saber rattler was in the Kremlin. Nikita S. Khrushchev had threatened the use of nuclear weapons against France and the United Kingdom in the Suez Crisis of 1956; he demanded a re-drawing of the postwar settlement over Berlin in 1958; and he had loosely but energetically mentioned the possibility of protecting the Castro revolution with a nuclear attack from the USSR in 1960. John F. Kennedy came to office knowing Khrushchev had a record of nuclear bluster, but he was uncertain of what lay behind it all. How much of these statements were bluff, and how much a product of an aggressive, unyielding position? The conventional wisdom among most seasoned Kremlin watchers was that behind the scenes Khrushchev was actually a moderating force in Soviet foreign behavior. His fiery performances reflected not merely a personality quirk but an effort to appease a hardline faction in the Kremlin and the military. Building upon this analysis, President Kennedy believed that if Nikita Khrushchev received the respect and attention denied him by the hyper anti-Soviet Eisenhower administration, the Soviet leader would not only dial down the volume, but could beat back the hawks around him, permitting international relations to achieve some sort of calmer equipoise.

Isolated and dependent: women and children in high-rise social housing in post-war Glasgow

ABSTRACTIn 1971 Pearl Jephcott's Homes in High Flats, the culmination of her groundbreaking research into high rise living in Glasgow, revealed the problems faced by young mothers on the new high rise estates in the city. This article interrogates two connected factors, social isolation and economic dependence, which characterised the experience of many women who were rehoused to high flats in the postwar decades. Drawing on evidence collected by Jephcott's research in the form of qualitative questionnaires with high rise tenants as well as ethnographic observation and action research with residents, we argue that the experience of many women of managing everyday life in a high rise flat with young children was frustrating, often lonely and unsupported, at a time when the home was still conceptualised as central to women's lives. Jephcott asserted that high rise housing had socially negative consequences for women and children. We do not disagree but argue that in the particular context of the postwar settlement, women's financial and welfare dependence on top of their particular housing circumstances in high rise flats constrained their opportunities rather than producing contentment thereby demonstrating the value of revisiting social research data.

On neighbours and those knocking at the door: Holocaust memory and Europe’s refugee crisis

ABSTRACTAt the height of the refugee crisis in Europe in autumn 2015, two public intellectuals, Jan T. Gross and G. M. Tamás, a Polish-American historian and a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, respectively, published articles arguing that Eastern Europe’s failure to respond in a humanitarian way to the refugee movements were reminders that the region was still trapped in its past. Specifically, they claimed that the memory of the Second World War, in which large numbers of people either sympathized with (Poland) or collaborated in (Hungary) the murder of the Jews, had not been worked through and remained a motivating force for dealing with ‘outsiders’. Stone's article analyses those by Gross and Tamás, and suggests that, although there is much to recommend them, they do not go far enough. The draconian response to the refugee crisis by no means characterizes only Eastern Europeans but has been a Europe-wide phenomenon. Stone suggests that it is important to recognize the revision of the post-war settlement that has been in train for several decades if one is to understand the way in which most European states have responded to the latest movement of people to Europe.

Pension Funds and the Politics of Ownership in Britain, c. 1970–86

The growth of occupational pensions in the post-war era transformed the pattern of capital ownership in Britain, as workers' collective retirement savings purchased a substantial share of the national economy. This article examines the response of the Labour and Conservative parties to this significant material change, and considers how it shaped their respective politics of ownership at the end of the post-war settlement. It demonstrates that Labour and the trade union movement recognized occupational pension funds as a new form of social ownership but had to reconcile their desire to give pension scheme-members direct control over their investments with a broader belief that the funds needed be used for a state-coordinated revitalization of the industrial economy. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party's initial enthusiasm for occupational pensions, which it championed for helping to create a 'property-owning democracy', was challenged by a radical neoliberal critique in the early 1980s that sought to dismantle pension funds and to individualize investment. The findings in the article assert the need for historians to situate the politics of the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s in the context of the substantial economic and social changes that had taken place during the post-war decades. These changes often created opportunities to formulate new policies and political agendas, but they also served to highlight deeper tensions within the ideologies of the main political parties.

Irish Politics Since the Crash, 2008–2016

The Great Recession has had a far-reaching and profound impact on Irish political life. In the Republic of Ireland, there have been greater shifts at the ballot box since the crisis began than over the previous five decades, and a combative movement against water charges has threatened the state’s image as the poster child for Euro-austerity. Meanwhile, the postwar settlement in Northern Ireland faces its most severe challenge yet, as drastic cuts in public spending imposed by Britain’s Conservative government put the local power-sharing administration under intense strain. This essay will address the main developments in Irish politics, north and south, since the recession began, and identify some of the key factors that will determine the future of political struggle on the island.

Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War by Gi-Wook Shin, Daniel Sneider

Reviewed by: Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War by Gi-Wook Shin, Daniel Sneider Philip Seaton (bio) Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War. By Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2016. xii, 356 pages. $85.00, cloth; $24.95, paper. Particularly since the mid-1990s, there has been rapid growth in the English-language literature on memories of the Asia-Pacific War. Divergent Memories is an ambitious volume that compares memories across four countries—the United States, Japan, South Korea, and China—through a study of “opinion leaders.” It is part of a large project called Divided Memories and Reconciliation, based at Stanford University. The project produced three books (on textbooks, screen memories, and a comparison of memories in Western Europe and East Asia) prior to the present volume (p. 7).1 These three edited volumes taking a transnational approach have close counterparts in books such as Laura Hein and Mark Selden’s Censoring History 2 [End Page 215] or East Asia Beyond the History Wars by Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morris Low, Leonid Petrov, and Timothy Y. Tsu.3 Furthermore, the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus has published dozens of articles on similar topics. However, the work of the Divided Memories and Reconciliation group is notable for bringing together various topics in a coherent project. Memories of the Asia-Pacific War have long cried out for collaborative, comparative research on this scale. Gi-Wook Shin and Daniel Sneider deserve great credit for rising to the task and managing such a major undertaking. In the authors’ words: “This book draws on [the] earlier phases of the project but goes beyond them to delve into the views of the elites that guide each nation and the roles that opinion leaders play in shaping memories of colonialism and war in Northeast Asia and the United States” (p. 7). Opinion leaders who are deemed to have shaped memories were interviewed. Their opinions, in turn, shape the entire book. The appendix lists 14 interviewees from China, 12 from South Korea, 15 from Japan, and eight from the United States. Five people from each country were selected and their (inter)views were presented in five-to-seven-page sections. These form the heart of chapters 2 to 5 about divergent memories in China, South Korea, Japan, and the United States, respectively. The opinions of all the inter viewees are incorporated into chapters 6 to 10, which are thematically based: colonial rule, forced labor and the comfort women (chapter 6), Japanese atrocities in China (chapter 7), war in the Pacific (chapter 8), the A-bombs (chapter 9), and postwar settlements (chapter 10). While Divergent Memories is the project’s first book that is not an edited collection of essays, and despite having only the project leaders as its two authors, I hesitate to call it a monograph. Rana Mitter’s endorsement on the back cover says it well: “a stimulating and comprehensive account of key issues . . . a valuable new resource for scholars and general readers.” A large proportion of the citations are from the interviews with opinion leaders, making the book more akin to a reader than a monograph. If it was an article rather than a book, it would be in the review articles section of a journal. This does not detract from the book’s value. Quite the contrary: it will be very useful on both undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists, and researchers working in similar areas will find the book easy to dip into for insights and information on specific topics or people. But readers will not go to this volume for its synthesis of war memory issues, a point I return to later. There are two major advantages of the book’s approach focusing on interviews with opinion leaders. First, the text is engaging. The views are not abstract arguments but the opinions of visible experts (there is a photo of each of the 20 principal interviewees). Their arguments are “brought to life” for the reader through supplementary biographical information, [End Page 216] such as the wartime experiences that influenced some of the interviewees’ stances. Some interviewees, therefore, are not only opinion leaders...

US-Soviet Dialogue on the Korean Settlement in 1943–1947: Basic Principles and Results

This article considers the history of Soviet-American relations on the Korean issue in the period of their development in the format of bilateral negotiations (1943–1947). The author aims to characterise the content and principles of the organisation of the dialogue between Moscow and Washington on the Korean issue during World War II and the postwar settlement, and to reveal the influence of this interaction on the fate of Korea. The author analyses the content of the dialogue between Moscow and Washington at the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, describes the decision-making process on Korea at the Moscow meeting of foreign ministers in 1945, and examines the work of the Joint Soviet-American Commission, and the interaction between the Soviet and American occupation zones on the peninsula. The analysis is carried out with reference to published and unpublished documents of the diplomatic departments of the USSR and the US (including materials of the Foreign Policy Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Fede­ration, and Internet archives), declassified CIA materials, and memoirs of political establishment members. The research allows the author to conclude that the fixation of the Korean division in 1948 occurred despite the original aspirations of the superpowers, but it became a logical outcome of the Korean settlement process. After the liberation of Korea, the USSR and the United States failed to build effective cooperation in the complex internal political conditions of the peninsula. In the end, Washington decided to choose the path that led to the implementation of a fundamentally new scenario, i.e. the formation of an independent South Korean state.

Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes by Lisa Yoneyama

Reviewed by: Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes by Lisa Yoneyama Dean Aszkielowicz (bio) Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes. By Lisa Yoneyama. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016. xii, 320 pages. $94.95, cloth; $25.95, paper. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the victorious Allies believed there was strong evidence that Japanese forces, during their invasion and occupation of territories in Asia and the Pacific, had committed serious war crimes. Led by the United States, the Allies began an ambitious program to bring to justice senior Japanese leaders who had been key in taking Japan to war and other perpetrators of war crimes. Eventually, 28 military and political figures were indicted at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo (1946–48), otherwise known as the Tokyo trial, and many thousands of Japanese soldiers, sailors, and civilians were prosecuted in military tribunals around Asia and the Pacific (1945–51). Political figures and legal thinkers on the Allied side claimed the prosecutions were to be a marker in international law which would establish that governments and individuals who wage aggressive war and commit other war crimes should be brought to justice in courts. The Allies also pursued Japan through a military occupation (1945–52) that initially included a plan to reform Japanese politics and industry, through punitive measures such as the payment of war reparations and through international agreements that defined Japan’s role in both the war and postwar regional affairs. Lisa Yoneyama argues in Cold War Ruins that the pursuit of Japanese war criminals and other Allied moves to reckon with Japan after the war became hopelessly entwined with the politics of the cold war and with the legacy of colonialism in the region, which ultimately led to the failure of Allied justice. Yoneyama examines how the Tokyo trial and the postwar political and diplomatic settlements (the San Francisco Peace Treaty [1951], the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty [1951], the Treaty of Basic Relations between Japan and Korea [1965], and other agreements) between Japan and its former enemies “performatively define the war’s meaning for the post-belligerence world” (p. 4). Yoneyama claims these agreements and the Tokyo trial have collectively produced an “Americanized view” of the war, marginalized many of the victims of Japanese crimes, and helped establish U.S. hegemony in the Pacific after the war. Moreover, the impact of the postwar settlements continues to be felt in post– cold war attempts at redress for Japanese war crimes. Scholarship on Japanese war crimes and the Allied process to bring Japan to account for those crimes has been booming in recent years. For a long time, Richard Minear’s Victor’s Justice, published in 1971, was the seminal [End Page 225] work in English dedicated to the prosecution of Japanese war criminals. It is a largely critical interpretation of the Tokyo trial.1 Since then, however, and in particular over the last ten years, scholars have addressed the question of the fairness of Allied justice from more nuanced perspectives and have produced more complex explanations of the relationship between politics and justice in the trial.2 The field is populated by as many historians as legal scholars, who seek to place the trials in their historical context and to understand what role the Allied pursuit of justice played in the early post-surrender years and what Japanese war crimes tell us about the conduct of the war.3 Cold War Ruins takes a similar approach in that it goes beyond the postwar courtrooms to examine the way the Allies—the United States in particular—attempted to control the language of justice after the war and shows how the voices of many of the victims of Japanese crimes were overwhelmed by power politics. Yoneyama views the war, its aftermath, and the cold war through an impressive multidisciplinary lens. The book is an important contribution to literature on postwar justice and on how we assess the cold war in Asia. Cold War Ruins is a series of essays loosely linked by the idea that the postwar courts and the political settlements produced an unsatisfactory level of...

Fellowship of Love: Martin Luther King's Legacy and the Renewal of the Labor Tradition

Labor—Lennon or Luther The year 1968 marked a turning point in the history of America and the wider West. The postwar settlement showed signs of strain as economic reconstruction ground to a halt and the Cold War confrontation began to take its toll. Youth protests and the Vietnam War polarized society and fueled the flames of the culture wars, pitting progressive liberals against conservatives. Millions of citizens lost trust in their system of government and their politicians, as was exemplified by President Lyndon B. Johnson's fall from grace. With the assassinations of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and…

Италия, Греция, державы Антанты и вопрос о Додеканесских островах в дипломатической борьбе 1915—1923 годов

The history of Italy’s diplomatic struggle for recognition of Italian control over the Dodecanese Islands during the period of Italy’s participation in the World War I and in the period of post-war settlement of territorial problems at the Paris and Lausanne peace conferences is considered. The article proves that during the World War I and during the post-war peace conferences Italy, referring to the articles of the London Treaty of 1915, sought international recognition of its possession of the Dodecanese Islands. It is reported that Greece, which also participated in the war on the Entente side, sought to establish its own control over the Islands of the archipelago. It is noted that in the current situation, Italy had undoubted advantages over Greece, primarily because the Islands were really under Italian control. It is shown that the discussion of the issue was seriously affected by the defeat of Greece in the war of 1919-1922 with Turkey, after which Greece could no longer be a real rival of Italy in the struggle for the Dodecanese Islands. It is reported that the outcome of the Lausanne peace conference in 1923 was the legal recognition of the Islands as the possession of Italy, with which both Turkey and Greece were forced to reconcile.

Интересы и роль России в образовании королевства Нидерландов: династический союз с Оранскими как инструмент внешней политики Александра I

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Europe was largely influenced by the French Revolution, which appeared as a major blow to the Westphalian political system. Motivated by its revolutionary ideas with the aim to spread them throughout Europe, to confirm its political and economic hegemony on the continent, the First French Republic and later the First Napoleonic Empire during its numerous wars conquered and controlled most of western countries, including the Netherlands, which later also became a satellite state of France. As a major opponent of France’s aggressive policy of that period and Napoleon’s defeater, Russia and its Emperor Alexander I took a significant part in the postwar settlement of Europe. However, Russia’s key role in liberating European countries, among which the Netherlands, from France’s oppression and in establishing their independence is often omitted and ignored in western historiography. By using archival documents, including Dutch ones, the author’s purpose is to show that due largely to consistent policy of Alexander I towards restoring independence of the Netherlands, in full accordance with Russia’s national interests, to the Emperor Alexander’s personal participation at the Congress of Vienna, a new state was formed in 1815 – the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. An essential instrument of Emperor Alexander’s foreign policy which strengthened the ties between the two countries was the dynastic marriage in February of 1816 of his younger sister Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna with Dutch Hereditary Prince of Orange William who became in 1840 the King of the Netherlands William II.

Contested Spaces: London and the 1984-5 Miners' Strike.

The 1984-5 British miners' strike can be understood as a defence of place as well as jobs. Such a conception encourages us to foreground the local in accounts of the strike. However, I argue in this article that the local should not be understood in an excessively bounded way. By paying attention to relationships developed between London and the coalfields during the dispute, we can see how direct personal networks of solidarity were constructed between these very different places. This article discusses the spaces in which solidarity activity for miners in London took place. I argue that political activists rooted themselves in localities by constructing permanent spaces such as centres and bookshops, which enabled the development of concrete relationships between different places. I highlight 'twinning' as a distinct spatial tactic used by supporters of the strike to bridge geographical distance and develop personal connections between London and the coalfields. I also show that elements of the state were used to both sustain this solidarity and to restrict the space available for the miners and their supporters. I argue centrally, therefore, that opposing political visions for moving beyond the post-war settlement manifested in a struggle over space in the 1980s.

The Problem of Shared Victory: War-Winning Coalitions and Postwar Peace

War-winning coalitions face a unique problem of ensuring multilaterally credible commitments to the distribution and defense of a new postwar status quo. Some sustain cooperation for years or decades, yet others collapse into intramural violence. Why do some victorious coalitions collapse into war, while others do not? I analyze data on war-winning coalitions from 1816 to 2007, using an event history framework to model the duration of postwar peace between their members. Increasing coalition size is associated with less durable postwar peace, while more extensive prewar alliance commitments are associated with less durable peace and great power participation is associated with more durable peace. These results have implications for the survival of postwar settlements, for the role of alliances and great powers in preserving world order, and for assessing the implications of modern theories of war.

The Irish Revolution and World History: Nation, Race, and Civilization in the Rhetoric of the Irish Revolutionary Generation

The Irish Revolution and World History:Nation, Race, and Civilization in the Rhetoric of the Irish Revolutionary Generation Jason Knirck (bio) As the first Dáil was debating the wisdom of Irish support for the League of Nations, Deputy Terence MacSwiney arose and noted that "no League would be permanent if small and large nations were not admitted on equal terms. It could not be permanent if Germany and the neutral countries were not equally admitted. Ireland was the test case."1 At first glance this statement appears to be an example of Irish nationalist self-importance that verges on the ridiculous. Of all the issues that could bedevil the creation of the League of Nations, the status of Ireland seems rather far down the list. But if examined in the context of Irish revolutionary rhetoric about the rest of the world, the comment becomes more comprehensible. Sinn Féin took seriously President Wilson's language about self-determination and the rights of small nations, and thought that the postwar order would be based on a system of equality between large and small countries. As victims of British imperialism, Irish nationalists also anticipated the breakup of European empires in the wake of the First World War. Thus the creation of Dáil Éireann in Ireland, combined with the near-universal hope that the days of large empires were over—what one historian has dubbed "the Wilsonian moment"—led Sinn Féiners and other Irish revolutionaries to magnify Ireland's importance in [End Page 157] the coming postwar settlement.2 As a colonized region whose leaders considered it to be a small, European, civilized nation, Ireland did seem to be a suitable case to test the intentions of the victorious powers—in particular, the United States—in creating a postwar order based on equality, rational discussion, and decolonization. When MacSwiney made this comment in April 1919, President Wilson had already proven unsympathetic to the Irish case and to its Irish American representatives in Paris, and suspicion of American intent was already appearing in the ranks of Sinn Féin. Given how the revolutionary movement saw Ireland as a crucial contact zone between the old world and the new, empire and decolonization, Europeanness and ethnic difference, it seems less absurd that those same revolutionaries would seek to elevate the Irish case into a vital component of the postwar settlement. While nationalists in Vietnam, Egypt, and India undoubtedly thought the same about the positions of their respective countries, MacSwiney's comment reveals fundamental assumptions that many members of Sinn Féin made about the rest of the world and Ireland's primacy in it. Most of these assumptions rested on or were expressed through analogies to other situations that had arisen in imperial and world history. Analogies, of course, are always dangerous terrain for nationalists, as uniqueness is the fundamental assumption of any nationalism, but the perceived definitions of each unique nation also rest on implicit or explicit differences from other nations.3 Thus an argument from analogy risks either undermining the singularity of the nation or categorizing it with other nations in a way that jeopardizes the nation's self-image. De Valera recognized this as the Dáil was preparing to appoint plenipotentiaries to conduct negotiations in London in 1921. He declared, "Nothing disgusted him so much as introducing analogies when there was no analogy there. Their position was totally different to that of the American states or South Africa, and let them deal with plain facts."4 De Valera perhaps had particular reason to be [End Page 158] wary of analogies, having been burned politically by an ill-conceived attempt to compare Ireland to Cuba while touring the United States in 1920. Nevertheless, Irish revolutionaries often saw a need to place their country, themselves, and their revolution in a global context when defending, promoting, or evaluating their case. Recent historiography has exploded the notion that Irish nationalism was particularly insular, and the engagement of Irish nationalists with the rest of the world—particularly the colonized world—has become much better analyzed over the past decade or so. In particular, it has been shown that well before the revolutionary period "Irish...

Burying the Alliance: Interment, Repatriation and the Politics of the Sacred in Occupied Germany

In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the dead of the four occupying forces were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? The case of occupied Germany highlights different approaches to commemoration. Soviet officials commemorated the war dead as symbols of the collective sacrifice of the USSR in Eastern Europe, while the western allies desired to identify and rebury fallen soldiers to meet the expectations of their domestic audiences. Despite these differences, the politics of the sacred surrounding the dead necessitated that the allies engage one another. As the occupation regimes of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America embarked on their mission to retrieve their dead from the Soviet zone, USSR officials reacted with skepticism and hostility. But rather than rejecting what they viewed as attempts at espionage, Soviet officers traded the western dead for their own sacred mission – the chance to return living Soviet repatriates from the western zones of occupation. Even as animosity grew in the emerging Cold War, occupation officials made uneasy compromises across the iron curtain.

Eclipse of the Constitution {Europe Nouveau Siècle}

The Court of Justice of the European Union has come to adopt a peculiar mode of balancing, revolving around a set of ‘general principles of law’, which results in key social rights at the core of the postwar constitutional settlement no longer being sheltered from review by reference to supranational economic freedoms. It is submitted that this does not only imply a kind of ideological restyling of European law, as noted in the literature but, more fundamentally, the erosion of Europe's composite constitutional architecture (at once European and national) resulting from playing down social rights qua ‘constitutional essentials’. As the new jurisprudence ‘obscures’ Europe's constitutional constellation, it is submitted that the Court should rule under the constitution and not over it.

The origins and limitations of the Atlantic Charter: Britain, the USA, Venezuela, and the development of free trade, 1933–1944

In response to the Great Depression and the Second World War, the US government worked to propagate free trade throughout the Americas as a means of stimulating domestic economic growth and fostering hemispheric solidary. By 1941, Washington aimed to extend this free trade programme and, therefore, the Anglo-US Atlantic Charter contained a limited commitment to free trade as part of its outline for a new post-war order. However, in 1944, the Venezuelan government demonstrated that it was possible to challenge Anglo-US efforts to apply the Charter to the international oil industry. By analysing the development of the Atlantic Charter's free trade provision, this article develops our understanding of the origins of the international post-war settlement and its contested nature.

Refugee women in the Sahrawi camps: towards gender equality

This paper examines the different roles women acquire during their experience in post-war refugee settlements. It focuses on the consequences of these new roles in the context of the Sahrawi conflict. The core of the paper addresses the particular form of management of the Tindouf Refugee Camps, which are run by the Polisario Front with the participation of the National Union of Sahrawi Women (UNMS), among others. Is the involvement of Sahrawi women in the administration of the camps making a difference in comparison with other refugee camps? Is any kind of gender dimension being implemented? The paper concludes by taking into account the fragility of the concept of peace, and observing whether the parties have adopted a gender dimension in the reconstruction and peace strategies.

Palestine and the Secret Treaties

The Sykes-Picot agreement is the foremost example of Western double-dealing in the Middle East since the discovery of oil. The agreement, formalized in an exchange of notes between the British Foreign Secretary and the French Ambassador to the United Kingdom in London, is named after its principal negotiators Sir Mark Sykes (1879-1919) and Georges-Picot (1870-1951). As one of several overlapping arrangements affecting the postwar settlement in West Asia secretly negotiated during the First World War, the agreement provided for the division of the region into spheres of influence comprised of nominally independent Arab states under the “tutelage” of British and French advisers.

Defending Turkey on Global Stages: The Young Turk Reşit Saffet’s Internationalist Strategy in 1919

AbstractThe article investigates the internationalist activities of a Turkish nationalist during his Swiss exile at the outset of the postwar settlements in early 1919. Reşit Saffet, a devoted Young Turk and Ottoman diplomat on leave, moved in the internationalist milieus in Berne while his agenda remained utterly nationalist. Drawing on pan-Turkic, pan-Islamic, anti-imperialist, socialist, and Wilsonian ideas, he adapted his rhetoric to the internationalist conferences he attended; he thus sought to disguise and to defend his otherwise discredited nationalist cause on these global stages. The article traces Reşit Saffet’s internationalist activities as a strategy to engage with the ‘Paris moment’ and the Ottoman question beyond official politics and governmental discourse. In a time when Ottoman diplomacy was in deadlock as a result of the Empire’s exclusion from the peace conference and Reşit Saffet’s career faced an unknown future in the face of the Ottoman collapse, internationalism seemed a promising option. The case illustrates the increasingly blurred border between state diplomacy and non-governmental influence, and thus questions exclusively state-centered approaches. It reveals the appeal and potential held by civil society internationalism, not only for Western pacifists and socialists, but also for anti-imperialist nationalists confronted with the disappointment of the ‘Wilsonian moment’.