Asia After Versailles addresses an important but neglected watershed for Asian nations - the response to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The Conference marked the end of a conflict which, ...although intrinsically European, had globalized the world on many levels, politically as well as economically, culturally and socially. It also stood at the beginning of a new order that saw the power centre shift towards the US and Asia. Asian countries and people played a significant but so far largely neglected role in this momentous development. Bringing together an international range of experts in the history of China, Japan, India and the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, this pioneering volume demonstrates the importance of Asia in the multifaceted global transformations that revolved around the Paris Peace Conference and its aftermath.
Traditional historical analysis focuses almost exclusively on US and European responses to the Paris Peace Conference and the interwar order and often fails to take into account non-western, particularly Asian voices - this is the first book to demonstrate the far-reaching Asian dimensions of the impact of Versailles in an unprecedented way making this an invaluable and interdisciplinary resource for academics and researchers in the fields of politics, international relations, area studies and history.
This work investigates the 'Janus face' of international relations, refracted through the prism of the duality of Jan Christian Smuts, as it manifested in his contribution to the League of Nations ...and his struggle against the emerging peace treaty. A predominant characteristic of international relations is its requirement to face two different ways at the same time - its Janus face. States profess their adherence to lofty ideals for humanity alongside the pursuit of their own immediate self-interest. This phenomenon in the behaviour of states has been referred to as the distance between vision and reality, and the gap between rhetoric and reality. International relations is, and is likely to remain, suspended between these two extremes: on the one hand, the pursuit of utopian ideals for the world, and, on the other, a defence of narrow self-interest, often prompted by the dictates of the realpolitik of the moment. How, then, are the values that underlie the founding of the first cornerstone of the current international order -- the League of Nations -- to be understood? An under-explored case study in understanding the complex framework of international relations is that of the visionary and controversial South African, Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950). On the one hand, Smuts was one of the principal authors of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and the person directly responsible for the recognition of human rights as a founding value of the Charter of the United Nations. On the other, the Premier of racially segregated South Africa.
The article reinstates an understanding of cartography far beyond that of a strictly geographical discipline, primarily concerned with the depiction of space in various aspects of societies. Using ...the example of several manuscript maps preserved in Polish documents left over from the Paris Conference, depicting the area of the Finnish state that was being established, the author illustrates the role of the map as a tool helping to shape the political entities of European societies and bringing to light various premises related to their threats or security, but also indicating development opportunities for these new state organisms. The author’s subject is Finland, aspiring to be a state at the beginning of the twentieth century, seeking alliances and the support of closer and further neighbours. By discussing surviving (and lost) maps, the author adds to the knowledge of the involvement of Polish diplomats in Paris in Finnish affairs.
At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the international community came together to find a collective way forward in the aftermath of the First World War. The conference is often judged a failure, as ...the resulting Treaty of Versailles did not bring long-term peace with Germany. By following the activities of a key British delegate, the wartime Minister of Blockade Lord Robert Cecil, this book examines the struggles and identifies some under-acknowledged successes of the conference, as delegates from around the world grappled with the economic, political, and humanitarian catastrophes overwhelming Europe in 1919.
Although the centenary of the 1919–1920 Paris Peace Conference reignited interest in this pivotal post-war event, the perspective of East Central European geographical sciences remains little ...investigated. In 1918 and 1919, rather unexpectedly, geography turned out to be a confidante of the knowledge that shaped the future of the world, and it was geographers from new states that emerged in the Eastern and South-Eastern part of the continent that largely contributed to this development. The article assesses the limits of their impact while it also characterises the tensions between their understanding of ‘science’ and their nationalism.
•Geographers played a key role in post-WWI diplomatic conferences.•Experts' political role in border-making exceeded that of the local politicians.•Peace Conference was the field for methodological innovation in geography.•ECE's experts belonged to the main authors of the said innovation.•ECE played pivotal role in the post-WWI reflection on border-making.
The military and political outcome of World War I, and the deliberations of the Paris Peace Conference, offered a real chance for the rebirth of Polish statehood. A key issue was the justification of ...Poland’s future territorial shape, in which ethnic issues played a significant role alongside historical, economic and strategic criteria.
The aim of this paper is to show and discuss selected archival nationality maps, often of an expert nature, produced by Polish scholars for the purpose of negotiating the territorial extent of Poland during the Paris Peace Conference. To what extent were they an attempt at an objective representation of the national reality of the Polish territory, and to what a subjective perception and experience of space by the authors of the maps? What were the aims and ideas of their creators, what did they want to achieve? To what extent did the political reality of the time determine their behaviour?
This collection addresses the impact of the end of the First
World War and challenges the positive vision of a new world order
that emerged from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
This article makes an intervention in the study of the May Fourth Movement by examining the role the mass media played in the diplomatic and domestic mobilization processes set in motion by China’s ...experience at the Paris Peace Conference. In contrast with the mainstream narrative that constructs the May Fourth Movement as a spontaneous response to the loss of Shandong at Versailles, this article shows that it was preceded by a proactive diplomatic strategy to mobilize ‘public opinion’ over the Shandong question. The Chinese delegation’s decision to launch a media campaign in support of their diplomatic agendas at Versailles inadvertently turned domestic media into a platform for political debate. As a result of competition between the political elites who dominated the mediascape, discussions over the Shandong question shifted from focusing on international diplomacy to domestic politics in the spring of 1919. An examination of the ‘media war’ during the May Fourth Movement further demonstrates that the political elites’ variable ability to adopt media strategies to shape and channel public opinion resulted in changing the political landscape of the post-May Fourth era. By focusing on the role of the mass media in the diplomatic and domestic mobilization in China’s strategy at Versailles and during the May Fourth Movement, this article forges new connections between the international and the domestic. It also invites further reflections on the nature of the May Fourth Movement by showing that the media was a tool of political mobilization that connected the political elite to the masses.
This paper focuses on Kurdish elites and their quest for a Kurdish state during the Peace Conference that took place in Paris after the First World War. Cross-examining the British, French, Kurdish, ...and Ottoman sources, this paper shows that despite the failure to establish a Kurdish state in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire the Kurdish elites, with their diplomatic and political experience and networking had equal, sometimes better, capacity to the leaders of other delegations in the Peace Conference. To demonstrate this, I focus on Kurdish elites, who were experienced in the imperial statecraft, especially Şerif Pasha, Sheikh Abdulkadir, Emin Ali Bedirhan, and Süreyya Bedirhan, lay out the complex relations amongst them and describe their efforts to represent the Kurds from the beginning of the Peace Conference until ratification of Treaty of Sèvres on 10 August 1920. In spite of what the available literature suggests, Kurdish elites, using all the available tools at their disposal, negotiated effectively for a Kurdish state. The contribution shows that the Kurdish elites not only presented a series of arguments during the Peace Conference but also laid down the basis for the Kurdish nationalism of the decades to come, with a historical narrative and a cartographic imaginary.
