The Treaty of Versailles


Book Description

This text scrutinizes the motives, actions, and constraints that informed decision making by the various politicians who bore the principal responsibility for drafting the Treaty of Versailles.




The Peace That Never Was


Book Description

Ninety years ago, the League of Nations convened for the first time, hoping to create a safeguard against destructive, world-wide war by settling disputes through diplomacy. This book looks at how the League was conceptualized and explores the multifaceted body that emerged. This new form for diplomacy was used in ensuing years to counter territorial ambitions and restrict armaments, as well as to discuss human rights and refugee issues. The League’s failure to prevent World War II, however, would lead to its dissolution and the subsequent creation of the United Nations. As we face new forms of global crisis, this timely book asks if the UN’s fate could be ascertained by reading the history of its predecessor.




The League of Nations


Book Description

Ninety years ago, the League of Nations convened for the first time hoping to create a safeguard against destructive, world-wide war by settling disputes through diplomacy. This book looks at how the League was conceptualized and explores the multifaceted body that emerged. This new form for diplomacy was used in ensuing years to counter territorial ambitions and restrict armaments, as well as to discuss human rights and refugee issues. The League’s failure to prevent World War II, however, would lead to its dissolution and the subsequent creation of the United Nations. As we face new forms of global crisis, this timely book asks if the UN’s fate could be ascertained by reading the history of its predecessor.




The League of Nations


Book Description

The League of Nations - Perspectives from the Present is an accessible and richly illustrated edited volume displaying a wide variety of cutting-edge research on the many ways the League of Nations shaped its times and continues to shape our contemporary world. A series of bite-size studies, divided into three thematic parts, investigates how the League affected the world around it and the lives of the people who became part of this 'first great experiment' in international organisation. Recent research has reinterpreted the League as a laboratory of global economic, political and humanitarian governance. Expanding on this, the volume aims to show that the League is an 'academic site', where international history - as a discipline - has re-invented itself by integrating new approaches from social, cultural and media history. With an introduction by Director-General Michael Moller of the United Nations Organisation in Geneva, this work is a timely reminder of the fragile, varied and enduring history of multilateralism, on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.




Britain and the Intellectual Origins of the League of Nations, 1914-1919


Book Description

In this innovative account of the origins of the idea of the League of Nations, Sakiko Kaiga casts new light on the pro-League of Nations movement in Britain in the era of the First World War, revealing its unexpected consequences for the development of the first international organisation for peace. Combining international, social, intellectual history and international relations, she challenges two misunderstandings about the role of the movement: that their ideas about a league were utopian and that its peaceful ideal appealed to the war-weary public. Kaiga demonstrates how the original post-war plan consisted of both realistic and idealistic views of international relations, and shows how it evolved and changed in tandem with the war. She provides a comprehensive analysis of the unknown origins of the League of Nations and highlights the transformation of international society and of ideas about war prevention in the twentieth century to the present.




The League of Nations and the Organization of Peace


Book Description

The League of Nations - pre-cursor to the United Nations - was founded in 1919 as a response to the First World War to ensure collective security and prevent the outbreak of future wars. It was set up to facilitate diplomacy in the face of future international conflict, but also to work towards eradicating the very causes of war by promoting social and economic justice. The philosophy behind much of the League's fascinating and varied roles was to help create satisfied populations who would reject future threats to the peace of their world. In this new volume for Seminar Studies, Martyn Housden sets out to balance the League's work in settling disputes, international security and disarmament with an analysis of its achievements in social and economic fields. He explores the individual contributions of founding members of the League, such as Fridtjof Nansen, Ludwik Rajchman, Rachel Crowdy, Robert Cecil and Jan Smuts, whose humanitarian work laid the foundations for the later successes of the United Nations in such areas as: the welfare of vulnerable people, especially prisoners of war and refugees dealing with epidemic diseases and promoting good health anti-drugs campaigns Supported by previously unpublished documents and photographs, this book illustrates how an understanding of the League of Nations, its achievements and its ultimate failure to stop the Second World War, is central to our understanding of diplomacy and international relations in the Inter-War period.




A Violent Peace


Book Description

"Confronted with the roiling changes of the post-WWI world--from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements--the League of Nations aimed to counteract dangerous conflicts between national interests and generate instead a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on truth and justice. Amid widespread anxiety over truth and falsehood, an army of League personnel produced streams of documents in the pursuit of "shaping global public opinion." Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace explores the power and the vulnerability of information systems while laying bare "the anatomy of fascism" in the interwar period. Carolyn Biltoft reopens the archives of the League to show how its attempt to operationalize information science in support of the post-WWI order proved ultimately pyrrhic as informational power struggles devolved into violence. A meditation on instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global and violent modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information--and all its attendant problems"--




The League of Nations


Book Description




Plowshares Into Swords


Book Description

Introduction: Knowledge in Exile -- The League Is the Thing: International Society's Super-University -- Plowshares into Swords: Knowledge, Weaponized -- Internationalist Dunkirk: International Society in Exile -- The Rover Boys of Reconstruction: International Society in the American World -- Coda: Great Leaps Forward.




The League of Nations and the Development of International Law


Book Description

This volume examines the contributions to International Law of individual members of the Advisory Committee of Jurists in the League of Nations, and the broader national and discursive legal traditions of which they were representative. It adopts a biographical approach that complements existing legal narratives. Pre-1914 visions of a liberal international order influenced the post-1919 world based on the rule of law in civilised nations. This volume focuses on leading legal personalities of this era. It discusses the scholarly work of the ACJ wise men, their biographical notes, and narrates their contribution as legal scholars and founding fathers of the sources of international law that culminated in their drafting of the statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice, the forerunner of the International Court of Justice. The book examines visions of world law in a liberal international order through social theory and constructivism, historical examination of key developments that influenced their career and their scholarly writings and international law as a science. The book will be a valuable reference for those working in the areas of International Law, Legal History, Political History and International Relations.