› › Mihaly Karolyi Istvan Bethlen

Mihály Károlyi & István Bethlen

Author : Sir Bryan Cartledge

Publisher :

Page : 196 pages

File Size : 39,32 MB

Release : 2009

Category : Electronic books

ISBN :

Get eBook

Book Description

Mihaly Karolyi (1875-1955) was brought to power after a revolution as Head of a National Council. He soon concludes an armistice, which leaves large areas of Hungarian territory under occupation by French, Romanian and Serbian forces. After Communists fail to stem the advances of Romanian forces, the Peace Conference, in 1920, dispatches a British diplomat who invites a delegation to come to Paris, which includes Istvan Bethlan(1874-1946). Hungarians are appalled to find that the treaty will deprive their country of two thirds of her territory and over half of her population. The injustice of the treaty will drive Hungary into the arms of Nazi Germany, a fatal alliance which will doom Hungary's Jews to annihilation and Hungary to defeat and destruction in the Second World War.--Publisher's description



Karolyi & Bethlen

Author : Bryan Cartledge

Publisher : Haus Publishing

Page : 151 pages

File Size : 46,52 MB

Release : 2009-06-01

Category : History

ISBN : 1907822100

Get eBook

Book Description

White aster flowers, on sale on the streets of Budapest on the eve of All Souls' Day, are made the symbol of a revolution which brings Mihály Károlyi (1875-1955) to power at the head of a National Council. Károlyi concludes an armistice which leaves large areas of Hungarian territory under occupation by French, Romanian and Serbian forces. Following the King-Emperor's abdication in November 1918, Hungary is declared an independent republic with Károlyi as its President. He sets about meeting Hungary's most pressing social need, for land reform. But Károlyi's liberal regime is soon beset by strong opposition from the right and from the left. The Allies seal Károlyi's fate by refusing to end the economic blockade of Hungary and by imposing, even in advance of a peace settlement (Hungary is denied an invitation until the Conference is virtually over), even harsher armistice terms. Károlyi flinches from opposing these measures by force. The small socialist element in his government of well-meaning aristocrats defects and forms an alliance with Hungary's fledgling Communist Party. Károlyi resigns and chooses exile. The Communists, led by Bela Kun, take power. Kun raises a Red Army, which defeats a Czech invasion but fails to stem the Romanian advance, which enters Budapest in defiance of orders from Paris and engages in an orgy of pillage and destruction. The Peace Conference despatches a British diplomat, Sir George Clerk, to Budapest to broker a Romanian withdrawal. Clerk succeeds in forming a coalition government of right-wing parties, with token representation for the centre-left, which he recognises in the name of the Peace Conference and invites to send a delegation to Paris. It includes Counts István Bethlen (1874-1946) and Pál Teleki, both future prime ministers. The delegation is presented on arrival, on 6 January 1920, with the draft peace treaty for Hungary which the expert committees of the Conference have produced and which the Council has approved without amendment. The Hungarians are appalled to find that the treaty will deprive their country of two-thirds of her territory and over half of her population. The injustice of the Treaty will drive Hungary into the arms of Nazi Germany, a fatal alliance which will doom Hungary's Jews to annihilation and Hungary to defeat and destruction in the Second World War.



Wellington Koo

Author : Jonathan Clements

Publisher : Haus Publishing

Page : 172 pages

File Size : 49,58 MB

Release : 2008-10-01

Category : History

ISBN : 1907822364

Get eBook

Book Description

Gu Weijun, a.k.a. Wellington Koo (1887-1985). Born in Shanghai and raised in the city's International Settlement, Koo became fluent in English during his postgraduate studies abroad - he got a PhD in Law from Columbia in 1912. He was recalled soon afterwards to become the English Secretary to the newly formed Republic of China, and became ambassador to the United States in 1915. He achieved notoriety at the Paris Peace Conference where he sternly resisted Japanese attempts to hold onto seized German colonial territory in mainland China. In protest at their treatment, the Chinese were the only delegates not to sign the subsequent Treaty of Versailles. Koo was China's first representative to the League of Nations, and ended up as acting president of Republican China during the unrest of the period 1926-7. He subsequently served briefly as a Foreign Minister during the peak of the Warlord Era, before returning to Europe, first as a delegate at the League of Nations, and then as China's ambassador to France. With the Nazi occupation, Koo fled to Britain, where he became the Chinese ambassador to the UK until 1946. A founder member of the United Nations, Koo was instrumental in maintaining the position of Republican China on the Security Council -by this time, 'Republican China' was limited solely to the island of Taiwan, while the Communists proclaimed themselves to be the new rulers of China itself. Retiring from the diplomatic service in 1956, the venerable Koo went on to become a judge at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, rising to vice-president before his retirement, aged 80, in 1967. He settled in New York, where his final years were tormented by 'Republican' China's loss of its seat on the United Nations Security Council to the Communists, following Nixon's famous visit to China.



Vittorio Orlando

Author : Spencer Di Scala

Publisher : Haus Publishing

Page : 281 pages

File Size : 48,22 MB

Release : 2010-08-01

Category : History

ISBN : 1907822143

Get eBook

Book Description

The Italian premier Vittorio Orlando came to Paris as one of the 'Big Four', yet in April 1919 walked out in one of the most dramatic crises of the Peace Conferences. Orlando's failure to win for Italy the territories she felt were owed to her was to have far-reaching consequences for both Italy and Europe as a whole. Italy in 1918 was in an ambivalent position: at the outbreak of war the country had been part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, but had stayed neutral until joining the Allies in 1915 on the promise of territorial rewards. The war was a near-disaster for the Italians, culminating in the collapse of their armies at Caporetto in 1917. It was this crisis that brought Orlando to power, and he did much to restore the situation, but the Italians looked to Versailles to compensate them for the terrible losses they had suffered. In this book, the clash between Italy's territorial demands in the Balkans, which had been guaranteed by the Allies in 1915 and earned through her losses in the War, with the new Wilsonian doctrine of open diplomacy and national self-determination is detailed, and it traces the effects the failure of Orlando's delegation to satisfy their people's demands which directly to the rise of Fascism and to Mussolini's policies in the 1930s as he sought to obtain what Italy had been denied at Versailles.



Afonso Costa

Author : Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses

Publisher : Haus Publishing

Page : 185 pages

File Size : 34,63 MB

Release : 2011-04-19

Category : History

ISBN : 1907822321

Get eBook

Book Description

Portugal’s poor military performance in the First World War, notably in Africa, restricted Afonso Costa's (1871-1937) ability to secure his diplomatic aims which, in any case, were highly unrealistic. Nevertheless, his loyal press in Portugal described him as the ‘leader of the small nations’, and reported his every statement as a major triumph. Afonso Costa’s most important intervention took place in May 1919, when he denounced the Allies' unwillingness to make Germany pay for all the damage she had caused during the conflict; this speech led to a number of newspaper interviews in which Costa restated his position. The final draft of the Treaty was a complete shock to Portuguese public opinion: It effectively spelt the end of Costa’s political career. This book considers the political implications of Portugal’s participation in the First World War and of the ‘defeat’ in Paris. Reconciliation between the rival parties – and between factions within parties – became impossible, as did, as a result, the formation of a stable cabinet.



The Hashemites

Author : Robert McNamara

Publisher : Haus Publishing

Page : 215 pages

File Size : 16,73 MB

Release : 2010-09-07

Category : History

ISBN : 1907822356

Get eBook

Book Description

The story of the Arab Revolt and the Hashemite princes who led it during the First World War is inextricably linked in modern eyes to the legend of Lawrence of Arabia as portrayed in David Lean's 1962 film. But behind this romantic image lies a harsher reality of wartime expediency, double-dealing and dynastic ambition, which shaped the modern Middle East and laid the foundations of many of the conflicts that rack the region to this day. Arab nationalists claim that British instigation for the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire was a commitment to independence for the Arab people, but in this book Robert McNamara shows how the British cultivated the Hashemite Sherifs of Mecca more as an alternative focus during the First World War for Muslim loyalty from the Ottoman Sultan, who as Caliph had declared a jihad against the Allies when the Turks joined the Central Powers, than a leader of an independent and united Arabia. At the same time, the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided up the Middle East between British and French spheres of influence. The sense of betrayal that this caused has coloured Arab nationalists' views of the West ever since. The main countries of the Middle East —Jordan, Syria and Iraq—are all the creations of the post-First World War settlement worked out at the Paris Peace Conference. The story of the Hashemite dynasty at the Paris Peace Conference is the story of the birth of the modern history of a region that is now more than ever at the centre of world affairs.



Benes & Masaryk

Author : Peter Neville

Publisher : Haus Publishing

Page : 182 pages

File Size : 33,90 MB

Release : 2011-01-04

Category : History

ISBN : 1907822097

Get eBook

Book Description

Of even greater importance for Hungary's future were the activities of the champions of an independent state of Czechs and Slovaks. Tomáš Masaryk, a Czech professor of philosophy and a future leader of his people, was hard at work within a month of the outbreak of war lobbying in Paris and London for an independent Bohemia, still a major component of the Austrian Empire within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which would incorporate the predominantly Slovak regions of northern Hungary. Masaryk, who was assisted in his efforts by Eduard Beneš, a bitter enemy of the Habsburgs. Thus the new state was effectively shaped before the Paris Peace Conference. But the Conference laid down the seeds of Czechoslovakia's later destruction. Only nine million Czechoslovaks lived in the state out of a population of fourteen million. A large discontented Hungarian minority lived in Slovakia, and the Polish majority area of Teschen poisoned Czech-Polish relations. Yet the greatest challenge came from the rise of the Nazis in Germany in 1930s: Masaryk always claimed that he did not want three and half million ethnic Germans, but he and Beneš accepted them nonetheless. Masaryk died in 1937, and Britain and France would not support the Czechs over the Sudetenland, the infamous deal struck in Munich by Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler.



The Versailles Settlement

Author : Alan Sharp

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 396 pages

File Size : 21,21 MB

Release : 2018-04-06

Category : History

ISBN : 1350307203

Get eBook

Book Description

The third edition of this acclaimed textbook on peace-making after the First World War advances that the responsibility for the outbreak of a new, even more ruinous, war in 1939 cannot be ascribed entirely to the planet's most powerful men and their meeting in Paris in January 1919 to reassemble a shattered world. Giving a concise overview of the problems and pressures these key figures were facing, Alan Sharp provides a coherent introduction to a highly complex and multi-dimensional topic. This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking modules on the Versailles Settlement, European and International History, Modern History, Interwar Europe, The Great War, 20th Century Europe, German History, or Diplomatic History, on either history courses or international relations/politics courses.



Heads of State and Government

Author : John V.Da Graca

Publisher : Springer

Page : 273 pages

File Size : 49,60 MB

Release : 1985-06-18

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1349079995

Get eBook

Book Description



Black Humor and the White Terror

Author : Béla Bodó

Publisher : Taylor & Francis

Page : 277 pages

File Size : 26,37 MB

Release : 2023-04-06

Category : History

ISBN : 1000863859

Get eBook

Book Description

This book examines political humor as a reaction to the lost war, the post-war chaos, and antisemitic violence in Hungary between 1918 and 1922. While there is an increased body of literature on Jewish humor as a form of resistance and a means of resilience during the Holocaust, only a handful of studies have addressed Jewish humor as a reaction to physical attacks and increased discrimination in Europe during and after the First World War. The majority of studies have approached the issue of Jewish humor from an anthropological, cultural, or linguistic perspective; they have been interested in the humor of lower- or lower-middle-class Jews in the East European shtetles before 1914. On the other hand, this study follows a historical and political approach to the same topic and focuses on the reaction of urban, middle-class, and culturally assimilated Jews to recent events: to the disintegration of the Dual Monarchy, the collapse of law and order, increased violence, the reversal of Jewish emancipation and the rise of new and more pernicious antisemitic prejudices. The study sees humor not only as a form of entertainment and jokes as literature and a product of popular culture, but also as a heuristic device to understand the world and make sense of recent changes, as well as a means to defend one’s social position, individual and group identity, strike back at the enemy, and last but not least, to gain the support and change the hearts and minds of non-Jews and neutral bystanders. Unlike previous scholarly works on Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, this study sees Budapest Jewish humor after WWI as a joint adventure: as a product of urban and Hungarian culture, in which Jewish not only played an important role but also cofounded. Finally, the book addressed the issue of continuity in Hungarian history, the "twisted road to Auschwitz": whether urban Jewish humor, as a form of escapism, helped to desensitize the future victims of the Holocaust to the approaching danger, or it continued to play the same defensive and positive role in the interwar period, as it had done in the immediate aftermath of the Great War.