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This chapter presents a set of case studies to examine the cycle theory of international norm change with respect to rules on conquest. Each case represents a key cycle of norm change. The cases include Germany's 1870 annexation of Alsace-Lorraine; World War I; Japan's transformation of Manchuria into puppet state “Manchukuo” during the early years of the League of Nations; the Nazi invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland leading up to World War II; North Korea's 1950 invasion of South Korea at the beginning of the Cold War; and the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait at the Cold War's end.

This chapter introduces readers to the topography of Alsace-Lorraine from the perspective of the migratory storks that fly over the region each year. It then introduces the concept of “cartophilia” as a passion for map making and map reading that spread across modern Europe from the late eighteenth century onwards. Cartophilia, the book argues, was inspired by European nationalist movements and made possible through affordable new printing technologies. The chapter also provides an overview of the book’s main contributions to the history of cartography, spatial history, and the history of European nationalism. It concludes with a description of the book’s six thematic chapters, each of which focuses on a different kind of borderland map.

This chapter discusses the early childhood of Kid Ory during the period from 1886 to 1896. It explains that Ory was born on Christmas day in Woodland Plantation in La Place, Louisiana, and that the Ory family moved to America from the Alsace-Lorraine region of France in 1736. The chapter discusses the family’s reason for moving to Louisiana and describes the economic and social conditions in La Place during Ory’s childhood.

This conclusion evaluates the nature of Italy’s military occupation of France during World War II. It compares the occupation of Menton with the German occupations in Alsace-Lorraine and the Italian invasion of the French Riviera in November 1942 with the German occupation of the region from September 1943 to August 1944, and then contrasts it with the Italian occupations in the Balkans. It shows that the Italian occupation of the strip of land including Menton in the summer of 1940 bore some similarities with Germany’s occupation of Alsace-Lorraine. It also highlights the differences between the German and Italian occupation policies both in terms of breadth and enforcement. Finally, it argues that the worst enemy of Italian Army commanders in southeastern France was the low morale of their troops, stemming from the growing sense that the tide of war had irremediably turned against the Axis side by the fall of 1942.

The years immediately following the signature of the Locarno treaties in October 1925 are usually seen as an era of détente in European, particularly Franco-German, politics. There seemed to be a lull in the Ligue’s fixation on the problem of war origins, but it was only an appearance. Other issues briefly took centre stage, but even they were discussed in terms redolent of concerns from the Great War. Some members of the minority began to publish in a new journal, Evolution. An event of signal importance was the publication of a book by René Gerin and Raymond Poincaré on war responsibilities. There was huge debate over the Pierre Renouvin/Camille Bloch thesis which sought to limit the importance of Article 231. On the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, the Ligue devoted its 1932 Congress to the controversy over the peace treaties of 1919. It was too little, too late.

After the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, the potential for a French attempt to recover the territories saw the German government earmark particular French residents as a threat to the security of the region. With the latitude offered by the so-called ‘Dictator Paragraph’ and Alsace-Lorraine’s status as a territory external to the constitution, successive governors of Alsace-Lorraine expelled large numbers of non-citizens. This caused considerable outcry during a period in which a war scare had been prompted by the rise of the ultra-nationalist Boulangist movement in France. Nonetheless, with governors in the region answerable only to a largely disinterested Kaiser, the pressure placed upon them by Berlin to expel the French from Alsace-Lorraine en masse was successfully resisted.

The introduction lays out the central themes of the study: national self-determination, the role of expertise in peace planning and policymaking, ethnic violence, and borders. It briefly describes the methodology and presents the two case studies, the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in 1918–19 and the Greek–Turkish conflict between 1919 and 1923. The introduction then places the study in the wider context of the most recent literature, demonstrating the originality and novel character of the multi-level approach that interconnects international politics with the in situ processes within a comparative framework. The introduction also posits the central argument of the book: policymakers and local agitators alike were tempted to reduce the concept of national self-determination to ethnic identity, thereby undermining the credibility of Wilson’s principle and transforming it to a tool of aggressive revisionism.

This chapter investigates French preparations and justifications for the reintegration of Alsace-Lorraine into the French state after the First World War. The chapter reveals how the issue of a plebiscite for Alsace-Lorraine divided the French experts, particularly in the light of initial American insistence on popular consultation and President Wilson’s vague allusions to ‘righting the wrong’ in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine. The chapter further demonstrates that the experts failed to produce a common ‘magic formula’ that would reconcile the French aim of a ‘pure and simple’ return of the region with calls for self-determination. This conceptual shortcoming prepared the ground for the violent resolution of the issue in local practice, when the region was placed under French rule at the end of the hostilities in November 1918.

This chapter examines the return of Alsace-Lorraine to French rule between November 1918 and June 1919. It shows that the experts’ previous failure to justify the reunion of the region with France in terms of national self-determination triggered radical policies of national disambiguation. Driven less by any premeditated policy than by local claims for mass expulsion of German ‘immigrants’, the French administration expelled roughly one third of the local population of German origin. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that expulsions were balanced by economic and political concerns and that actual ethnic violence remained limited to a few cases. The chapter also situates the case of Alsace-Lorraine in the wider international context, discussing the largely unsuccessful efforts of British and German diplomats as well as American foreign correspondents to resurrect the ‘question’ of Alsace-Lorraine at the international level.