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Perhaps the least discussed aspect of the 1919 settlement is its provisions on social justice, and yet an entire section of the Versailles Treaty and an article of the League Covenant were devoted to the international regulation of labour, which resulted in establishment of the International Labour Organization. These developments reflected the activities of the trade union movement, and particularly its Congresses during the war, as well as heightened sensitivity to labour in the context of both the war and the outbreak of the Russian revolution. It is clear that inclusion of a section on labour was sponsored by all of the Big Three powers for various political and instrumental reasons. What was radically new about the structure of the ILO was that it allowed membership from state representatives, but also from business and labour, thereby recognizing world society membership in an otherwise international society forum. The decisive argument was that social justice was properly the business of international society because it was fundamental to achieving international peace.

Sir Harold Nicolson’s approach to the questions of inter-war European security represented an evolution from an idealist outlook at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to a more measured degree of idealism during the late 1920s. As the 1930s advanced, and the League of Nations and action based on the principles of collective security proved unable to quell the Japanese, Italian, and German aggression, Nicolson sought to devise new methods of resolving the major questions of peace and war. His solution was liberal realism, a fusion of idealism and realism. It was an amalgam of Aristotelian and Thucydidean principles of statecraft and diplomacy. By the late 1930s, with Germany rejecting reasonable revisions of the Treaty of Versailles, he began to believe that war could only be avoided if the democracies and the USSR initiated a cohesive strategy of alliance diplomacy while pursuing dialogue with the dictators. The Munich Agreement of 1938 and the steady unravelling of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement finally convinced Nicolson that war was inevitable.

This chapter summarises and evaluates the pattern of Franco–German relations from the Armistice talks of late 1918 to the reparations crisis of autumn 1922. It explains how and why inter-Allied disagreements compromised the peace and reparations settlement, and investigates German responses to the reparations regime in particular. Specific events discussed include the 1918 Armistice, the Paris Peace Conference and Versailles Treaty of 1919, the London Reparations Agreement of 1921, the abortive attempts at rapprochement — Wiesbaden (1921) and Locarno (1922) — and the ensuing crises that persuaded the French army and government to launch an occupation of Germany's Ruhr District.

The Paris peace conference was formally opened on 18 January 1919. The place and date, which marked the anniversary of the founding of the German empire in the Hall of Mirrors at the French royal palace of Versailles in 1871, were chosen by the French. Once opened, it would be another five months before the conference was ready to present the defeated Germans, in the form of the representatives of the newly formed Weimar republic, with their non-negotiable terms of peace. These peace terms, the muddled and lengthy process by which they were drafted, as well as the personalities and motivations of the men who drafted them, have been fiercely and continually maligned since the very moment of their presentation. The treaties of Paris did not represent the victory of principle and morality over national interest. If the treaties incorporated the principles of democracy, collective security, and self-determination, they also reflected the claims of state sovereignty and individual and often conflicting national requirements. The Treaty of Versailles was unquestionably flawed, but the treaty in itself did not shatter the peace that it established.

This is the exceptional case in that the proposal to include a racial equality clause in the League Covenant was rejected. On the other hand, this is another case where the norm was supported by a leading state (Japan), in conjunction with a wider world society movement. The drafting history casts doubts on Japanese motives for pressing the proposal, but the failure reflects the relative weakness of Japan as a normative sponsor. While opposition to the clause certainly came from Britain, in response to pressure from parts of the empire, President Wilson's own position was ambiguous, and he certainly was not prepared to risk the Treaty of Versailles (and the League Covenant) to include it. There was a widespread pressure to hold a Pan-African Congress at Paris to coincide with the settlement. However, the Japanese delegate Baron Makino expressed a number of interesting normative arguments in support of the clause, appealing to the blurring of the distinction between international and world society brought about by the principle of collective security.

This chapter compares the ratification struggle over the Treaty of Versailles with the passage of the Bretton Woods Agreement Act to demonstrate the legislature’s concern with how multilateralism would alter the checks and balances of American government, and how the institution of Congress was initially able to shape outcomes in international organizations through procedural maneuvers. The chapter argues that in order to surmount the challenges that the Covenant of the League of Nations met in the Senate, the Roosevelt administration included representatives of both political parties and key interest groups early in the process of planning the IMF and World Bank. The administration worked through the National Foreign Trade Council to mobilize a wide-ranging constituency in American civil society. As the act moved through the House and Senate, compromise with powerful committee chairs and the American Bankers Association secured passage. Compromises reached created mechanisms through which initial efforts at congressional advocacy could occur, primarily the National Advisory Council. Nonetheless, during the enactment stage, the Treasury Department organized interest groups with the goal of US membership. Ongoing effort would be required for them to play a major role in the world economy.

Starts by pointing out that if the Berlin and Brussels Acts and the experience of the Congo Free State (as discussed in the last chapter) are understood as representing the internationalization of the idea of trusteeship, then the League of Nations mandates system might be understood as representing its institutionalization in international society. Examines the current of ideas from which the institutionalization of trusteeship arose out of the debates concerning the disposal of German colonies conquered during the First World War, and the subsequent compromise that resulted in the creation of the mandates system, which stands as a response to the problem of ordering relations of Europeans and non‐Europeans by reconciling the obligations of trusteeship and the search for national security in a single institutional arrangement. The victorious Allied powers divided Germany's colonial possessions amongst themselves, in no small part for reasons of national security, but in assuming administrative responsibility for these territories they also accepted the oversight of ‘international machinery’ to ensure that the work of civilization was being done. The seven sections of the chapter are: War and the Old Diplomacy; Trusteeship or Annexation?; From the New World—the effect of the Russian revolution and the entry into the First World War of the US on the French and British annexation policy and Woodrow Wilson's ideas for peace; The Mandates System—the birth of the League of Nations; Impasse at Versailles—the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the Versailles Peace Treaty; Trusteeship or Deception—the obligations and defects of the League of Nations Covenant; and Novelty and Tradition—the compromise of the League of Nations system.

Sir Harold Nicolson’s international thought, more specifically, his thinking on international order, diplomacy, a united Europe, world government, and global peace, was shaped by his upbringing in a diplomatic household, an Oxford classical education, and two decades as a diplomat in Europe and Asia Minor. Especially significant were his Foreign Office service in London during the First World War and his involvement in peacemaking at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Nicolson also made important contributions at the Lausanne Conference (1922–23), en poste in Germany between 1927 and 1929, and as an anti-appeasement MP prior to the Second World War. His fifty-year career, from the time of the Balkan Wars to Suez, represented an attempt to resolve the question of how best to secure international stability: through power politics, idealism, or an amalgam of realist and idealist approaches.

This chapter presents a watershed in German views of Eastern Europe in the fateful context of total war and its aftermath. World War I opened with a traumatic invasion of German East Prussia by Russian armies in 1914, a surprising German victory at Tannenberg, and German and Austro-Hungarian occupation of vast Eastern European territories, along with a dramatic expansion in their war aims for the region, propagandistically rendered as a cultural mission. With German defeat in the West, trauma followed with the 1919 Versailles Treaty and loss of German territory in the East. The chapter explores irridentist energies poured into the ‘sciences’ of Ostforschung (politically motivated ethnographic East research) and geopolitics. It reveals a complex range of ambivalent eastern approaches across the volatile political spectrum of the Weimar Republic, including anti-communism, attempts at rapprochement with the Soviet Union, and National Bolshevism.

This chapter's focus is on Adolf Hitler, as well as his Aryan race, who did more than anyone else to bring the twentieth century to its knees through mass destruction and genocide. It notes that the irony of Hitler's leadership is that mass voluntarism, not just systemic coercion, and freedom of choice, not just the limits of choice, lie deeply buried within the Nazi system. It examines the Weimar Republic and the Versailles Treaty and the National Socialist Worker's Party. It also talks about Hitler's expansion through Poland and the war against the Jews that began when von Rath, a German diplomat, was murdered by Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish Jew expelled by the Nazis. It explores the war in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the war in Germany.

Chapter 3 examines how Rhee and the Korean independence movement utilized this constituency to place pressure on American policymakers during the fight over the ratification of the Versailles Treaty and during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–1922. The chapter pays special attention to the common cause the Korean activists and their American supporters made with the so-called Irreconcilables in the US Senate. The Korean independence movement provided these senators with an “internationalist” justification for opposing the treaty and thus an answer to the charge that they were advocating isolationism. The Koreans in return received an airing of their views in the US Senate and even a vote on a Korean reservation to the Versailles Treaty. While scholars have examined the importance of the issue of the Shantung Peninsula to the case against the Versailles Treaty in the Senate, few have realized that it was the brutal Japanese suppression of the March First Movement that injected such passion into the debate over the Shantung. While Korean activists’ passionate invocations of the American mission during both the fight over the Versailles Treaty and the Washington Naval Conference did not result in any official policy changes toward Korea, they significantly shifted American perceptions of the Japanese colonization of Korea and brought much of informed American public opinion on the situation into sympathy with the Koreans.

The beginning of the interwar period brought an intensification of the war guilt debate within the Ligue des droits de l’homme. There was vigorous discussion of the question of the Russian general mobilization in 1914. Repeated attempts by the Ligue’s minority to extract a commitment to seek revision of the Versailles Treaty failed. The most that the majority would concede was that the Treaty was legally flawed because it had been forced on Germany, but it continued to believe that the Treaty expressed a valid moral and historical point. The Ligue demanded—unsuccessfully—the publication of French documents relating to the outbreak of the war. The majority continued to argue that there was no point in opening a debate on war origins, although by the end of 1924 it is clear that it was much less confident in the rectitude of its position.

After World War One, jurists on the Commission on Responsibilities at the Paris Peace Conference were divided about the types of criminal penalties the Allies should impose on political and military figures from the Central Powers. European jurists favored the creation of an international tribunal, an innovation which U.S. jurists viewed as unprecedented and politically dangerous. Ultimately, there were no post-war extraditions or international tribunals because the Allies lost political interest, the defeated powers resisted, and the League of Nations’ Secretariat did not want to intervene. Still, European jurists on the Commission outlined an important set of ideas: post-war prosecution for war crimes was legitimate, an international tribunal was the best legal forum to present the victors’ political and moral perspective, and international law should be modernized to restore the moral order. Critics called the idea of prosecuting war criminals “the new justice” and contrasted it to the “old justice,” based on national laws and established procedures.

The First World War marked the watershed between the 19th and 20th centuries. The former was characterized by a relatively well-functioning international payment system based on the gold standard. London played a pivotal and stabilizing role, and the leading central banks cooperated as necessary. There was almost perfect mobility of factors of production, and commercial treaties and rapidly falling transportation costs encouraged trade. All this vanished in the large war spending of the main combatants, to be replaced by uncertainty and conflict after the war. The Versailles Treaty imposed reparations on Germany. It also re-shaped the political and economic geography of the world. Both new and old countries were politically unstable as the war unleashed social conflicts. Uneasy international relations made economic cooperation difficult.

As discussed in the book’s final chapter, Jewish claims to national minority rights made their way to the Versailles Conference’s deliberations and eventual treaties, and the question of collective Jewish rights was one with considerable ramifications in the early Soviet Union. With the breakup of the Russian and Austrian Empires, a Jew might find him- or herself either a citizen of the Soviet Union, a state hostile to religious traditionalism but eager to integrate Jews as individuals, or a citizen of one of the new nation-states, which were indifferent to religious traditionalism but reluctant to integrate Jews as full participants in national politics. Only in Lithuania and Ukraine, and then only briefly, did Jews find themselves in states willing to grant Jews their national autonomy. All the post-Versailles states eventually squelched the one political aspiration uniting the different strands of Jewish politics in Russia and Eastern Europe: autonomy.

This chapter examines the role of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Woodrow Wilson in the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO) as an affiliate to the League of Nations at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. It begins with a discussion of the Bern conference in Switzerland and AFL President Samuel Gompers's travel to Paris to chair the Commission on International Labor Legislation that established ILO and framed a bill of labor rights for the Versailles Peace Treaty. The chapter then considers the conflict between Europe and the United States over the labor provisions of the peace treaty and the ILO, along with the opposition coming from labor groups and left-leaning diaspora political coalitions. It also analyzes Gompers's campaign in defense of the entire Versailles “package,” including his proposed labor conventions involving the AFL, the Pan American Federation of Labor, and the International Federation of Trade Unions. Finally, it describes Wilson's support for ILO and its labor provisions as part of his efforts to incorporate respectable labor into international governance.

This chapter provides an account of liberal economics in Germany during the Weimar period. It presents a history of the economic activity of Germany from the late 15th and 16th century to the present century. In the first half of the 19th century, German liberals hoped that unification would lead to the abolition of restrictions on industry and trade. The free-market mechanism had no sense of liberation when the new currency was introduced, on the contrary, stabilization brought drastic cuts in public spending and large-scale unemployment. Germany's financial and economic problems came to the fore after the humiliating terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty in June 1919, which as a result lead to protectionist trade-policies to be temporarily abandoned when the treaty forbade Germany to erect tariff barriers against her former enemies. German economic depression after 1929 attacked all forms of government intervention, including unemployment benefit. Despite these unfortunate political circumstances, there were many economists who defended the old canons of laissez-faireliberalism.

The end of the First World War brought with it the collapse of the two German regimes and the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. Both the Weimar Republic and the Austrian Republic were of short-lived duration, and this has often been traced to the incompleteness of the break with the past which took place in 1918 The new republics, especially the Weimar Republic, were contested democracies facing critics from the right and the left. The history of the Weimar Republic has inevitably been coloured by its collapse and by the National Socialist era that followed. The position of the two states in the international order was a contributing factor to the sense of discontent. The Versailles Treaty with its ascription of responsibility for the First World War to Germany and its allies was almost universally bitterly resented.