Treaty Of Versailles Research Articles

The Treaty of Trianon as a Source of Instability in the Central-Eastern Europe (Part 1)

The article notes that the Trianon Peace Treaty of June 4, 1920 between the Entente countries and Hungary, as a result of the First World War, turned out to be, like all the other six treaties of the Versailles system, mostly unfair. In the forcibly the territory of Hungary decreased by 2/3, the population decreased 2,7 times, a third of the Hungarian ethnic group became part of neighboring states.
 It is noted that during 1920-2020. In Hungary, there were no powerful political forces of various trends and trends that would recognize the Trianon Peace Treaty as just. At the same time, the ruling political elites of the neighboring states of Hungary considered and still consider the conditions of the Trianon fair. Such opposite assessments of the consequences of Versailles engendered antagonism, making it impossible to reach a compromise between the countries of Central-Eastern Europe.
 Attention is drawn to the fact that during the domination in Europe of the coalition of countries led by Germany of the Versailles Peace Treaty, including the Trianon, were dismantled, a new order was introduced, in which opponents of Versailles – Germany, Italy, Japan, the USSR, played an active role. Hungary, Bulgaria.
 It is noted that the winners of the World War ІІ restored the borders of the countries of Germany’s allies in Europe, in accordance with their own geopolitical interests, which corresponded by 70% to the borders established by the Entente after the World War І. The Trianon borders were restored over Hungary by the Paris Peace Treaty of February 10, 1947. The USSR, Great Britain, France and the United States acted from a hegemonic position, were guided by the right of the winner and in many respects imposed on the defeated countries the conditions of the Versailles system were discredited, did not draw proper conclusions and did not build international relations on principles close to justice, but preserved the complicated territorial contradictions of the past with the corresponding treaties.
 It is indicated that the threat of assimilation and disappearance of foreign Hungarians is one of the main reasons for the revitalization of modern Hungary. Measures to overcome the syndrome of the dismemberment of the Hungarian nation in Central-Eastern Europe have been going on for centuries with little results; The rate of decline in the number of Hungarians in neighboring states over the past century is the highest, so Budapest believes that there is no time to delay the introduction of autonomy for foreign Hungarians, because in the next 25 years the very need for it will disappear through their disappearance.
 It is emphasized that the level of ensuring the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia especially affects the relationship of Hungary with Ukraine. The improvement of relations between Hungary and Ukraine has minimal chances, since the positions of the parties on the procedure for the application of educational and language laws in Transcarpathia do not coincide.
 Taking into account the decisive activity of Hungary and the Hungarian foreign communities in 2020 (the century of the signing of the Trianon Peace Treaty on June 4, 1920), it is concluded that this problem will not only not lose its relevance, but will significantly increase.

USSR in World War II

The article offers an overview of modern historical data on the origins, causes of World War II, the decisive role of the USSR in its victorious end, and also records the main results and lessons of World War II.Hitler's Germany was the main cause of World War II. Nazism, racial theory, mixed with far-reaching geopolitical designs, became the combustible mixture that ignited the fire of glob­al conflict. The war with the Soviet Union was planned to be waged with particular cruelty.The preconditions for the outbreak of World War II were the humiliating provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty for the German people, as well as the attitude of the "Western de­mocracies" to Russia after 1917 and the Soviet Union as an outcast of world development. Great Britain, France, the United States chose for themselves a policy of ignoring Moscow's interests, they were more likely to cooperate with Hitler's Germany than with Soviet Russia. It was the "Munich Agreement" that became the point of no return to the beginning of the Second World War. Under these conditions, for the USSR, its own security and the conclusion of a non-aggression pact with Germany began to come to the fore, defining the "spheres of interests" of the parties in order to limit the advance of German troops towards the Soviet borders in the event of German aggression against Poland. The non-aggression pact gave the USSR just under two years to rebuild the army and consolidate its defensive potential and pushed the Soviet borders hundreds of kilometers westward. The signing of the Pact was preceded by the failure in August 1939 of the negotiations between the military mis­sions of Britain, France and the USSR, although Moscow took the Anglo-French-Soviet nego­tiations with all seriousness.The huge losses of the USSR in the summer of 1941 are explained by the following circum­stances: before the war, a large-scale modernization of the Red Army was launched, a gradu­ate of a military school did not have sufficient experience in managing an entrusted unit by June 22, 1941; the Red Army was going to bleed the enemy in border battles, stop it with short counterattacks by covering units, carry out defensive operations, and then strike a de­cisive blow into the depths of the enemy's territory, so the importance of a multi-echeloned long-term defense in 1941 was underestimated by the command of the Red Army and it was not ready for it; significant groupings of the Western Special Military District were drawn into potential salients, which was used by the Germans at the initial stage of the war; Stalin's fear of provoking Hitler to start a war led to slowness in making the most urgent and necessary decisions to bring troops to combat readiness.The Allies delayed the opening of the second front for an unreasonably long time. They, of course, achieved outstanding success in the landing operation in France, however, the en­emy's losses in only one Soviet strategic operation in the summer of 1944 ("Bagration") are not inferior, and even exceed, the enemy’s losses on the second front. One of the goals of "Bagration" was to help the Allies.Soviet soldiers liberated Europe at the cost of their lives. At the same time, Moscow could not afford to re-establish a cordon sanitaire around its borders after the war, so that anti- Soviet forces would come to power in the border states. The United States and Great Britain took all measures available to them to quickly remove from the governments of Italy, France and other Western states all the left-wing forces that in 1944-1945 had a serious impact on the politics of their countries.

Reparações e dívidas no Entreguerras: as dificuldades político-econômicas da Alemanha à luz das contribuições de Hjalmar Schacht

O artigo se propõe a explicitar os principais desdobramentos dos pagamentos das reparações da Primeira Guerra Mundial (1914-1918) impostas à Alemanha. Neste, inicialmente é apresentado o teatro de operações da guerra: são mencionadas as perdas humanas e materiais, enfatizando estas em algumas das principais batalhas que compuseram este grande conflito, como as batalhas de Marne e Somme. Após, dado o fim da guerra, mostrar-se-á a nova reorganização territorial da Europa, com a desintegração de impérios e o surgimento de novos países. Ao final, discute-se sobre os reparos de guerra instituídas no Tratado de Paz de Versalhes (1919), de modo que as dificuldades econômicas enfrentadas pela Alemanha e pela França em específico, surgem como ponto central da discussão deste artigo.

Working time limits at sea, a hundred-year construction

In a view to protect workers from extended work periods as well as to comply with the Versailles Peace Treaty requirements, the International Labour Organization (ILO) regulated hours of work from 1919 using ‘8-hour workday and 48-h workweek’ as yardsticks. However, a historical perspective demonstrates the ILO's difficulties in integrating such standards for sea workers. From 1920 to 1958, the ILO endeavoured to anchor the 8-hour workday principle in maritime conventions on working time and to ensure compliance by quantifying manning levels. Facing sectoral opposition and the obstacle of the minimum tonnage requirement, none of the conventions adopted during the first period entered into force. A second regulatory wave (1995–2007) initiated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) orientated working time towards fatigue management and adopted the 14-hour workday. Absorbed by the ILO from 1996, this threshold facilitated the implementation of working time standards for sea workers. The existence of autonomous maritime governance at the ILO and the IMO complemented by the incorporation of the tonnage clause in maritime convention allowed the acceptance of the 14-hour workday system in spite of breaching the universal principles established a century ago. The departure between maritime and land standards show that sectoral interests prevail over labour rights. More decisively, current standards detached labour rights from workers' human nature and attached them directly to sectoral interests.

Rola tajnych służb w rozpoznaniu zagrożenia bezpieczeństwa Polski. O efektach działalności wywiadowczej berlińskiej placówki „In 3”

W 1918 r. Polska odzyskała niepodległość. Bezpieczeństwo Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej było jednak oparte na kruchych podstawach. Wynikało to z dużego zagrożenia ze strony wschodniego i zachodniego sąsiada. Niemcy i Rosja nie pogodziły się z ustaleniami traktatu wersalskiego, dążyły do jego rewizji i wojny z Polską. Współpraca wojskowa obu groźnych sąsiadów była wymierzona przeciwko Polsce. Rozpoznanie wywiadowcze dotyczące rozbudowy potencjału militarnego oraz zamiarów obu przeciwników miało wyjątkowe znaczenie. Rotmistrz, a później major Jerzy Sosnowski w latach 1926–1934 kierował berlińską placówką wywiadowczą oznaczoną kryptonimem „In 3”. Przekazywał on do centrali Oddziału II SG wiele cennych informacji dotyczących rozwoju niemieckich sił zbrojnych, współpracy Reichswehry z Armią Czerwoną oraz przygotowań do wojny. Kierownictwo polskiego wywiadu otrzymywało podobne wiadomości z innych źródeł. Wiele z nich przyjmowano z niedowierzaniem i nie wykorzystano we właściwy sposób.

The Major Cause of the Collapse of the Versailles System

The establishment of the Versailles System was marked with the Paris Peace Conference, which aimed to settle peace for World War I. The peace settlement was an excuse for the allied countries to regain and recover their powers. This, in turn, called for large amount of reparations and punishments on the losing countries. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles heralded the collapse of the volatile system set up afterwards. Countries adopted the policies of appeasement, complied to the race of powers, and abandoned the so-called consensus on “peace”. Indeed, the collapse of the Versailles System had many causes. However, the rise of Nazi was its direct trigger. This article will mainly focus on how the Versailles System led to the rise of the Nazi and what the Nazi did to accelerate the fall of the system.

The emotional geopolitics of contested peace: the austerity crisis and the Danish minority of South Schleswig

ABSTRACT In 1920, the Treaty of Versailles attempted an innovative solution to the Danish–German boundary dispute, known as the ‘Schleswig-Holstein question’. Two plebiscites asked the populations which state they wished to be governed by, and although the conflict was far from resolved by these votes, the subsequent century has witnessed the stuttering but gradual progression from war to a ‘negative’ and subsequently a ‘positive peace’. However, austerity measures implemented by the German state in 2010 cut budgetary support for Danish minority schooling, threatening to undo decades of progress. This paper uses an ethnographic approach to the 2010 årsmøde, an important annual Danish cultural festival in German South Schleswig, which coincided with the announcement of the budget cuts. Drawing on work in geographies of peace and emotional geopolitics, it interrogates community singing at public meetings as a way to broaden narratives of responses to the budget cuts from just ‘elite’ political accounts, and to highlight the significance of everyday and emotional aspects of nationalism that serve to unsettle notions of ‘successful’ peace-making. Whilst acknowledging the achievements of peace-making in Schleswig-Holstein, it is argued that peace is not an end point, but rather a continual process subject to contestation.

‘A Retrograde Tendency’: The Expropriation of German Property in the Versailles Treaty

Abstract This article explores how the Versailles Treaty was shaped by the effects of economic warfare 1914–1919. The First World War was in part an Allied economic war waged against the Central Powers in conditions of advanced economic and financial globalization. This was reflected in the treaty’s expropriation mechanisms, which were used to take control of German property, rights, and interests around the world. Whereas Articles 297 and 298 of the treaty legalized wartime seizures, the Reparations Section of the treaty also contained a provision, paragraph 18, that gave the Allies far-reaching confiscatory powers in the future. The article places these mechanisms in a wider political, legal and economic context, and traces how they became a bone of contention among the former belligerents in the interwar period.

On the Century of Peacemaking at the 1919 Treaty of Versailles: Looking Back to Look Ahead

This study seeks to make a modest effort to look back at the marathon peacemaking ushered into by the Treaty of Versailles, during 1919–1922 periods, after Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, bringing to an end the First World War. It has sought to place under scanner the said arduous process of peacemaking, resulting in an imposing corpus of five treaties comprising 1914 articles with Germany and its four other allies (Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey). It presents an interesting role of the principal peacemakers therein along with the advent of the era of ‘organizing’ through the League of Nations and other entities such as International Labour Office and Permanent Court of International Justice. Now, at the distance of 101 years from the main event that heralded new milestones in international law and international relations, we have sought to make sense of it so as to deduce lessons to look ahead for our better world. Knowing well that alike human beings, any peacemaking cannot be flawless, it has been our endeavour to provide an objective understanding of the great peacemaking, its aftermath (1919–1939) and its relevance for the United Nations–led world order in the 21st century.

독일의 평화 지향 역사교육 –노르트라인베스트팔렌 중등 II 역사 핵심교수계획(2014)의 사례-

This study examines Germany''s peace-oriented history education, focusing on the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). In Germany, peace education in history courses was inspired by the social movement for peace in the 1970s and has been integrated into the school curriculum since the 1990s. This study analyzes the Core Curriculum for Secondary School II History, a revised curriculum for history in upper secondary school, presented by NRW in 2014. Among the seven essential fields of contents in this curriculum, which were reconstructed as historically comprehensive, the last field, “Peace treaties and peace regimes in the modern era,” categorized the capacity for peace-building as an inevitable element of history education. The content runs through modern Europe’s peace history-from the Peace of Westphalia, Vienna Settlement, Treaty of Versailles, Cold War, and German unification to European integration. This study analyzes the following: first, the characteristics of the Core Curriculum with regards to structure, goal, and detail; second, the innovations and problems, especially with the last theme “Peace treaties and peace regimes in the modern era,” and finally, its application in school lessons, focused on the teaching model presented by the state. In conclusion, the Core Curriculum systematically introduced “peace” as an essential element of history education. However, this resulted in some challenges, for example, keeping abreast with the latest trends in peace studies and addressing them through the methodology of history education. In this regard, dialogues among historical studies, education of history, and history teachers are ongoing. Thus, cooperation and collaboration between peace practice and history education is an ongoing challenge.

L’OIT, les normes et l’histoire

Cette contribution retrace l’histoire de l’Organisation internationale du Travail (OIT), aujourd’hui une agence spécialisée de l’ONU, à travers son activité principale : l’élaboration, l’adoption et l’application des normes internationales du travail. L’OIT est une organisation tripartite où les normes internationales du travail sont négociées entre les représentants des gouvernements, des travailleurs et des employeurs. L’article analyse les débuts d’une législation internationale du travail au XIX e siècle, le contexte spécifique de la création de l’OIT comme institution tripartite en 1919 et l’impact qu’ont eu sur son action normative le paradigme des droits de l’homme, la guerre froide, la décolonisation et, finalement, la mondialisation sous les auspices du néo-libéralisme. Les conséquences sociales, économiques et politiques de cette dernière ont contribué à déclencher une crise profonde de l’action normative qui se traduit notamment par une difficulté croissante des constituants de l’OIT à négocier des compromis.

The Face of Germany, 1918–1945: Ufa Personnel, Censorship, and Propaganda

The Face of Germany, 1918–1945: Ufa Personnel, Censorship, and Propaganda Heather Oriana Petrocelli Toward the end of World War I (WWI), with the Allied powers’ anti-German propaganda at its zenith, Generalquartiermeister Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff considered the German propaganda efforts to be too fragmented to be effective and felt the need to create a film production company that would be controlled directly by the German armed forces.1 Thus, at the end of 1916, Bild-und Filmamt (Bufa) was created as an umbrella organization for all government and military film, as well as press agencies, to promote the German war effort.2 Bufa mainly produced short educational, propaganda, and entertainment films for both the front line and the reserve forces.3 Still, General Ludendorff, wanting to move beyond the mechanism of Bufa, wrote a letter to the Imperial Ministry of War on July 4, 1917, that would lay the foundation for the consolidation of the German film industry and the formation of a larger film conglomerate, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa): The war has demonstrated the exceptional power of photography and film as a means of educating and influencing. Unfortunately, our enemies have thoroughly exploited their lead in this area, causing us severe damage. In the further course of the war, film will retain its momentous significance as a political and military means of influence. For this reason, it is essential for the positive outcome of the war that film exert the strongest influence in all places where German influence is still possible. Thus, we must examine 1. how this influence can be achieved and 2. what means are to be used. On 1. In film, the bolstering of German propaganda efforts must extend a. to the influencing of the film supply in neutral third countries and b. to the unification of the German film industry, setting broad, uniform targets for the systematic, energetic influencing of the masses in the interest of the state.4 [End Page 54] Heeding General Ludendorffs call, the government officially formed Ufa on December 18, 1917.5 Through this deliberate process of consolidation and mergers, Ufa became Germany’s first vertically integrated film conglomerate—controlling production, distribution, and exhibition—as well as the largest German film studio and eventually the largest studio in Europe (second only to Hollywood). A “cultural production company of historically unprecedented magnitude,”6 Ufa produced a renowned canon—including films such as The Golem (1920), The Last Laugh (1924), Metropolis (1927), and Triumph of the Will (1935). Click for larger view View full resolution Erich Ludendorff and Adolph Hitler, 1924 Moreover, in spite of dramatic regime changes from 1918–1945, during three distinct German political periods—from the Kaiserreich (a monarchy), to the Weimar Republic (a parliamentary democratic republic), to the Third Reich (a totalitarian dictatorship)—Ufa maintained an extraordinary degree of continuity in its personnel, its censorship regulations, and, most notably, its propaganda efforts (from its escapist films to its overtly nationalistic material). Given the pervasiveness of film, the force of which Ludendorff had accurately assessed, Ufa was perhaps the most consistent cultural representation of Germany for 27 years. Ufa was both a cultural institution and a modem industry, constantly surrounded by the “force field made up of capital, politics, film, and the public.”7 If its policies and products often reflected the uneasiness of these politically transitional eras occurring in just a quarter of a century, the studio nonetheless adapted quickly and energetically to the shifting political pressures (producing almost all of its filmic corpus during the Weimar and Nazi eras). Germany’s social and political landscapes fundamentally changed at the end of WWI. The nation had been unified for less than fifty years when the end of WWI brought about the abolishment of the Kaiserreich monarchy, due to the abdication and subsequent flight of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Germany’s defeat at the end of WWI shocked the German public because the nationalistic propaganda, from sources including Bufa films, had led the vast majority of the German public to believe that Germany was winning the war.8 In addition to the shock of defeat, the Treaty of Versailles caused widespread humiliation among Germans, which spurred a palpable...

A Review of the Transfer Problem: Keynes, the Versailles Treaty,and the German Reparations

A Review of the Transfer Problem: Keynes, the Versailles Treaty,and the German Reparations

A Human is not a Resource

The conviction that ‘labour is not a commodity’ has been central to international law for nearly a century.1 Peace, said the ill-fated Versailles Treaty, ‘can be established only if it is based upo...

México y la Sociedad de Naciones: sobre su exclusión e ingreso (1919-1931)

La firma del Tratado de Versalles en junio de 1919 supuso la marginación formal, por espacio de poco más de una década (1919-1931), de la revolución mexicana respecto de la Sociedad de Naciones, referente institucional del efímero sistema internacional de entreguerras. A un siglo de distancia, prevalece cierta ambigüedad y confusión en relación con las motivaciones de tal decisión entre las potencias de París, con lo que resulta aún más difícil de entender, en primer lugar, el sostenido retraimiento mexicano frente a la llamada Ginebra Internacional; y, después, transcurridos casi diez años, la inquietud por una colaboración dentro de los márgenes reales del multilateralismo y del sistema de seguridad colectiva operante. Este importante giro, como lo demostrará el presente artículo, tuvo que ver con un proceso lógico –aunque complicado– de normalización de relaciones emprendido por el régimen posrevolucionario mexicano tan pronto pudo hacer frente, con gradual eficacia, a reclamaciones y temores externos de diversa naturaleza; pero también, y esto no fue menos difícil, con las formas en exceso sutiles y cuidadas de su diplomacia para evitar un agravio reiterado a su figura internacional. Se apreciarán, finalmente, los términos de negociación directa en torno al ingreso de México en la Sociedad de Naciones, estimando sus beneficios y significado inmediatos para ambas partes.

정치적 근대로서 자유주의에 대한 저항 - 1920년대 독일 보수혁명을 중심으로 -

Germany has undergone widespread and fundamental changes since the end of the First World War, which led to social divisions. Some saw Weimar Republic and the 1920s as a late modernization of Germany, while others saw it as a defeat. German conservatism, in particular, saw the violence of the Versailles treaty, the failure to manage crisis in the Weimar government, political turmoil, the Great Depression and the collapse of the German economy as the crisis of modernization.BR Conservatism saw this crisis in terms of the German political tradition, and as a result there was an insurmountable gap between modern and German conservatism. Their resistance to the political modernization of Germany, expressed in the Weimar Republic, was radical enough to bear the adjective contradictory name of

Fourteen ways of looking back at the Treaty of Versailles†

Abstract: This article examines the idea of the Treaty of Versailles as a readily quantifiable corpus of provisions as set down in a readily identifiable document that was signed at the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919. It does so by recalling the pre-history to that peace that stretches as far back as US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918, for the German Government accepted these Fourteen Points as well as subsequent pronouncements of President Wilson as the basis for the peace that ended the Great War. Through a close engagement with diplomatic correspondence from October and November 1918, the article considers how impressions came to form that a ‘contract’ had been made with the enemy (John Maynard Keynes) by the time of the Armistice of Compiègne of November 1918—an apparent ‘charter for our future activity’ (Harold Nicolson) or a localized lex pacificatoria for its time. The article explores the amenability of each of the Fourteen Points to international normativity and, in its final section, it provides a broader account of how this set of positions shaped Germany’s official response to the draft treaty (‘Observations of the German Delegation on the Conditions of Peace’) that was released in May 1919.

Visuality of a treaty: reflection on Versailles

Abstract This article revisits one moment in international law through the prism of visual culture, analysing paintings, photographs and political cartoons of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. It considers the historical representation of treaty-making, narratives of international law as beneficent universal regulator and spectacle, and the projection of ‘successful’ international law through image. It reflects on photographs that capture working, ‘behind-the-scenes’ moments and portrayals of a more agitated, restless visual international law. And it explores the idea that visuality contributes to the construction of international legal reality and is a specific site of meaning for our understanding of treaty-making at Versailles.

Symposium on the centennial anniversary of the Peace of Versailles: verdicts and revisitations

One momentous day in June 1919 is often remembered, contrastingly, in the technicolour of its ambition and attempted modernity, or the foreboding monochrome of its destructive, self-delusion. However, the chromatic spectrum of the treaty's reality, both in its own time but also in its enduring legacy, highlights the peace project's formidable complexity. Just as the haze of the summer of 1914 is so compellingly captured in the tragic remembrances of pre-war tennis matches in Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, so the vision of 1919 bathes in seasonal shimmers and phosphorescent flashbacks that cannot help but be the product of emotion rather than cool dissection. However, the peace process born of the Great War remains an exercise in revelation, as public international lawyers continue to interact with it well into the 21st century. Yet, there is (as perhaps there has always been) a distinct unsettling at how the peace settlement’s suffocating old-world tropes jostle with the first pangs of a new, scarcely recognisable, international society in the livery of the League of Nations. Like Mrs Dalloway, our various disorientating encounters with these events—these past, these living events—force us to reckon with the roles of time, faith and doubt in our discipline.

The role of Anglo-German Naval Agreement in escalation of crisis trends of the Versailles system (based on the materials of new archival documents)

This article reviews the role of Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 in escalation of crisis trends of the Versailles system. Leaning on the British Russian archival documents, which recently became available for the researchers, the author analyzes the reasons and consequences of conclusion of this agreement between the key European democratic power and Nazi Reich. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the moods within the political elite of the United Kingdom. It is proven that the agreement became a significant milestone in escalation of crisis trends in the Versailles model of international relations. It played a substantial role in establishment of the British appeasement policy with regards to revanchist powers in the interbellum; policy that objectively led to disintegration of the created in 1919 systemic mechanism, and thus, the beginning of the World War II. The novelty of this work is substantiated by articulation of the problem. This article is first within the Russian and foreign historiography to analyze execution of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement based on the previously unavailable archival materials. The conclusion is made that this agreement played a crucial role in the process of disintegration of interbellum system of international relations. Having officially sanctioned the violation of the articles of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 by Germany, Great Britain psychologically reconciled to the potential revenge of Germany, which found reflection in the infamous appeasement policy. This launched the mechanism for disruption of status quo that was established after the World War I in Europe. This resulted in collapse of the architecture of international security in the key region of the world, rapid deterioration of relations between the countries, and a new world conflict.