Right. It is a great pleasure to welcome Larry Smith from Oberlin.
He actually hasn't come all the way from the U.S. to be with us for a year or more because he's currently being held.
His attitude in Paris, where I think we can probably.
And do you really feel sorry for you? He has worked primarily on France in the First World War.
His first book Between Mutiny and Obedience, I think is on certain on Thursday.
I will read this here, as is the book he wrote collaboratively,
collaboratively with Annette Becker and the three seven, seven, seven admirers out of France and the First World War.
And most recently, his book In Battle Zone French Soldiers Testament to the Great War is now moving on March 4 to 1919 on the Wilsonian moment.
And his title today is Ending Wars in a Wilsonian World Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference.
Great. Thank you all very much for coming in. Some great is a great pleasure to be here.
In setting up this talk, I thought about how all of this material would fit into a research seminar on the changing character of war,
and I was reminded of a shortish article I'd written for a French reference work a few years back on on pacifism.
And I argued that by 1917 or so, pretty much everyone was a pacifist in the sense that everyone wanted not just to end this war,
but to make this the last of all wars in the French expression.
De de de de de de de guerre.
So the question was,
how do you get there and how do you transform the world in the meantime so that you end not only the present war but future wars as well?
What I'm going to talk about today is a particular version of this certainly millenarian.
I'm the concept of of how it was that that a certain group of people tried to make
this the last of the last of all wars and to try and understand it on its own terms.
I want to begin by talking about an image, a cartoon published in a Japanese satirical magazine Tokyo Pop Group on the 1st of September 1920.
Its subject appears to be the American presidential election of 1920 to determine the successor to Woodrow Wilson.
You see a sort of brooding, frustrated, bedridden Wilson in the background.
The contenders are struggling with a crowd labelled the American presidency.
The other caption This caption is the more significant.
I should also report that I have had five PhDs in Japanese.
Look at this and counting. Among them, my wife and the translation is still a bit up for grabs.
I've received remarkably different versions of the translation.
Japanese political cartoons of the era were notoriously ambiguous and elliptical to say
nothing of black print against a grey background and some arcane kanji along the way.
The prevailing translation at the moment is something like the following The cripples and the small minded.
The current crop of candidates really represents the bottom of the barrel of humanity.
I'd like to use this image to begin talking about my subject, which is sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919,
and to think about what sovereignty means beyond the very standard definition of marks of Labour.
A member of the German delegation at the Paris Peace Conference who of course defined sovereignty
as a monopoly of over the legitimate use of violence over a discrete geographic space.
That's not an exact translation, but it's more or less what he what he said.
Well, why should Tokyo expect its readers to care about the results of an American presidential election?
I'm not really sure that they did, at least not for its own sake.
1919 was not 1945.
The United States was only one of several great powers.
Nevertheless, what for good or for ill? Woodrow Wilson had said and had accomplished had implications far beyond American shores.
Tokyo Park flourished at a time known as Taisho Democracy in Japan Yoshihito.
The Taisho emperor had been enfeebled by a variety of inherited conditions, so such that he reigned but never really ruled.
This, in effect, created something of a power vacuum at the centre of the Meiji regime,
which in fundamental ways was where power began and when where power ended.
Because of this vacuum, the taisho years were in some. Always a time of relative democratisation when some progressive forces in Japan believed
that Japan could and ultimately would evolve into a Western style parliamentary democracy.
I don't know that a great leap of imagination is necessary to read a parallel between the enfeebled Wilson and the enfeebled Taisho.
The decline in the fall of the Great American did not bode well for those who wish to deepen democracy in Japan in the absence of a strong monarch.
Tokyo podcast and also say was all over the place on Wilson during the war.
Sometimes he was the great hero. Sometimes he was the great imperialist.
He had many different incarnations in the publication over the course of the war.
All this said the resolution of where sovereignty would lay in Japan,
what its characteristics would be in Japan, what would have grave implications beyond Japan?
In 1919, Japan was already the most important military power in East Asia,
with colonies in Taiwan, Korea and of course, expanding colonial interests in China.
The very modest participation of Japan in the Great War had earned it a place at the table of the great powers at the peace conference itself.
In other words, what sort of regime evolved in Japan would play a role in shaping sovereignty among nations,
not just in East Asia, but in the international system writ large.
This, of course, would have become all too clear by the 1930s, under the reign of Yoshihito Sun,
the Showa Emperor, more commonly known in the in the West as Hirohito.
Now, reading this image as about being a lot more than an American, being about more than a lot a lot more than an American presidential election,
I think is consistent with the people who published it at the time.
Wilson lurks in the background. He's neither controlling things nor is he absent.
Likewise, this bundle of ideas known as Wilsonian ism.
I was there and was not controlling things, but it was not absent either.
And it had within it very radical notions of what sovereignty meant, not just among nations, but within them.
The start, the successors are clearly lesser men,
one of them almost rodent looking like I haven't quite figured out what his story is yet, but they're clearly lesser men.
They're struggling over the crown in the West, commonly a symbol of sovereignty, notably a monarchy.
One hopes the irony is intentional because in a democracy, of course, the people are the sovereign.
And if Wilsonian ism as a global phenomenon was about anything, it was about making the people sovereign across the globe.
If the world could only figure out who they were, if the world could only figure out who the people were read.
Most broadly, I think that the image argues that if the world could not live with Wilson, neither was it.
Sure, it could live without him. My project is not about Wilson, but I fear the project cannot live without him either.
Certainly, no one raised the issues of sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference in more pointed ways,
and I firmly believe that the history of Wilsonian ism is too important to leave to Wilsonian, or perhaps even to Americanness.
And the thing I've had so much fun with so far is as someone who has never had formal training in American history since high school.
It's very interesting and really quite fun for me to encounter this nowadays as someone of a very different professional formation.
And indeed I find it striking, really kind of stunning. The lack of distance, the lack of critical distance.
Even today, 90 years later,
when in historiographical writing and even thinking about Wilson and it's so easy to slip into a discussion of now the now ness of Wilson.
And what I'm interested in really in some ways is the then Mr. Wilson.
And how did the world make sense in these people's heads at the time?
So that's one of the things that I'm playing with in the book that I hope will follow this.
From this one day, I hope to go beyond the question of whether the peace conference succeeded or it failed.
And at some level, the answer to that question has been obvious for a long time.
It failed because it failed to prevent war first in Asia, beginning in 1931 and then in Europe beginning in 1939.
An issue here, I think, is more now.
Did it create something good or bad to create something successful?
Unsuccessful. But what did it create and why did it seem like a good idea or at least a plausible idea at the.
Okay. And how did that system help shape the historical development of sovereignty?
Specifically, I want to begin the story of peacemaking in 1919 with structures of international relations as they existed at the time the
Great War came to a close and how the possibility of a dramatic transformation in those relations came about very swiftly.
Of course, by the fall of 1918, there existed a well-established practice for transitioning from war to peace.
This was the armistice, a specific kind of legal, military and political document.
The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 specified that an armistice constitutes
a suspension of military operations by the mutual agreement of the belligerents.
This, by the way, comes from Ernest Saito, the distinguished British diplomat and Alienist.
In fact, by an armistice, need not imply an equality of forces, but neither is it a surrender,
something which Marshall first never entirely understood or didn't want to understand, but nor is it a temporary truce.
It is a political as well as a military document.
Most commonly, an armistice is sought when the outcome of a conflict is clear.
But for various reasons, the powers do not wish to fight to the finish.
Commonly, an armistice is arranged by the military authorities and then approved by the political authorities as really the first act of making peace.
The armistice that ended the great war that ended the fighting, or at least tried to end the fighting of the Great War,
began with the more peripheral fronts and worked their way toward the Western Front.
As such, they operated largely as the Hague Conventions had envisaged.
An armistice was signed with Bulgaria on September 29th, with the Ottoman Empire on October 30th.
So far, so conventional. They were made by the military.
Authorities in the field, were approved by the political authorities and inter allied body known as the Supreme War Council.
Paradoxically, and this is kind of really where the story begins, the German Kaiser, right on its deathbed,
opened up Pandora's box of the ideological content of the peace through the well-known appeal on the 6th of October.
Not to the allies, not to the Supreme War Council, but to the person of the American president,
Woodrow Wilson, for a peace on the basis of Wilsonian ideals.
Most famously,
the 14 point speech of Wilson of January 1918 on the crumbling Austro-Hungarian regime made a similar appeal the next day on October 7th.
The immediate motivations of the Germans in appealing to the person of the American president seem very clear.
They wanted to stave off complete military defeat. Above all, an occupation of the German homeland.
But the immediate their immediate motivations, what they wanted out of this, I would argue, ceased to be the point.
Rather, the point was that one side on the military conflict sought an ideological alliance with the other side,
on the other side of the military conflict, and that this odd alliance carried with it.
The prospect of a transformation of international relations, according to the principles, appealed to.
Now, as this all unfolded, I mean, much of the reason that that that, you know,
the Germans call for an armistice the sixth and it wasn't signed until November 11
really involved negotiations among the allies because the Germans had accepted it.
But the British and French going, huh? We're the ones with most of the muscle in the field.
In the end, Britain and France would would insist on exceptions concerning two of the specific 14 points.
The British would insist on deferring for future specification what exactly was meant by freedom of the seas.
And likewise, the French would insist on just what was unarmed, deferring precision as to just what was meant by, quote unquote, restoring.
France and Belgium, which will, of course, become the question of reparations.
But remarkably beyond that, the strange bedfellows of President Wilson and the German high command won on the essential point,
which was the acceptance of Wilsonian ism as the ideological basis of the peace.
The contractual character of what had.
And agreed to, I would argue, created something extraordinary in the history of international relations up to that time.
Indeed, as Paul Brinkley, an American scholar, wrote as long ago as 1931,
I quote him The essential significance of the 14 points as a basis of peace was not their ethical quality,
but their contractual character was not their ethical quality, but their contractual character.
They had made a deal. The acceptance of Wilsonian ism, one could argue, created a common form of agency,
a way of acting on the world stage in which the intentionality of each national agent was bound up with the intention of the others,
the peacemakers, whether they liked it or not,
or whether they understood what they had in fact agreed to or not formed in significant ways, something greater than the sum of its parts.
And and I would suggest it was this act of creating a collectivity that helped in turn, to create its own reality.
At the time of the Paris peace conference, well, what, in fact,
had the Allied and associate powers signed on to in signing on to Wilsonian ism, and particularly for the younger people here?
I think that Barack Obama, not necessarily Barack Obama today, but Barack Obama in 2008,
helps us understand Woodrow Wilson in 1918, for good or for ill,
and this brief time in which one could almost project anything on to him and with
which one wanted to project and could be all things to all people at the time.
And this is not, I think, controversial Wilsonian ism loomed as large as it did for a certain time because it gave the war a new moral compass,
an explanation of what it had all been for a millenarian interpretation of the war that had
international resonance and moreover posited a new kind of world that would result for results from it,
not just how to end this war,
but how to end any future war and what it had all been about besides the realist games of 19th century power politics and its only competitor,
as Arno Mayer argued back in the 1950s, really was Bolshevism.
And I think as as errors, Manilla has done an interesting job explaining,
and I think I would agree with him that really Bolshevism became centre stage in the colonised or Decolonising world,
really kind of after Wilsonian ism floundered.
So this is a time where where ideological power really is more there with Wilsonian ism and Bolshevism is kind of what happens afterwards.
Now, in signing on to Wilsonian ism and whether they appreciated what they had done or not,
the Allied and associate powers had agreed in the abstract to a very different notion of sovereignty within nations as well as among nations.
And and what I'm going to argue here is that the problem of Wilsonian ism is not so much its incoherence as its radicalism.
And I want to think about Wilsonian ism as a radicalised version of 19th century liberalism and a certain logic carried to its conclusion,
the notion being that the locus of sovereignty rested not with the nation, but with the individual with a certain kind of individual.
And I believe that nothing else makes it possible to make sense of the whole notion of self-determination,
which I could talk about at some point, and how difference is handled within self-determination.
Nothing else makes sense of the functioning of the League of Nations, as it were supposed to function, or the mandates.
And at the heart of Wilsonian concepts of sovereignty, I would argue,
lay the political individual as the as 19th century liberal ism had imagined him rational, morally autonomous, in a way self-sovereign also male.
I think there's not much question about that.
It is this individual right, rational, morally autonomous self-sovereign that constitutes the proper self of self-determination.
So these individuals, these building blocks of sovereignty at any level, from the Vermont village to the international system itself.
Who are these people? These political individuals are people who can make governance, which is actually you know, I've given a version of.
This talk in French and the French translation is packed or packed.
DALLIANCE That's not really the same thing.
And I have to go into some sort of translation about, about, about really what the differences are covenants,
individualised and totally made, promises to each other to form a semi sacrilege ized political community.
The Biblical Hebrews became a people through a covenant.
The Puritans and Colonial Massachusetts became a people through a covenant.
According to this way of thinking, Americans became a people through the covenant,
such as the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, or covenant in this sense is more than a treaty.
It's more than just another agreement. I think it was not an accident that Wilson tried to mobilise this term.
It's also not an accident that that I mean, I'm not an expert on American diplomacy,
but I think it's also not an accident that it's not a term commonly used either before Wilson or after Wilson.
It's a historically specific term.
So these self-sovereign individuals, but would become the building blocks of all political society from the Vermont town to the system itself.
And they would do so through covenants, the the highest expression of which would be the covenant of the League of Nations.
And it was that it was, I would argue, for precisely this reason.
All of the treaties produced by the Paris Peace Conference,
including the short lived treaty of said when there was kind of good reason to think otherwise.
I began with the covenant of the League of Nations.
World Government, in quotation marks with does exist at the level of the individual through a global transnational community of
self-sovereign individuals who would be presumed to want the same thing in the supreme matters of war and peace.
All other bodies, notably nation states, would be accountable to this community.
So there'd be a locus of sovereignty and a locus of accountability beyond the states themselves.
Now, politically significant difference would not disappear within this community any more than it had within the United States itself.
Some forms of difference would be, in effect, recognised and largely banished from the public sphere.
And in America one thinks of what Americans call ethnic difference or religious difference.
So Polish Americans are Catholic Americans.
Italian-Americans have more or less identical civil rights.
They're certainly mobilised as such at election time.
But but it's not a politically significant part of one's civic identity, except kind of for electoral purposes.
Other forms of difference, notably race, would determine, according to this way of thinking,
whether certain categories of people would be eligible to make a covenant at all.
And in the United States, this was a time of greatly enhanced racial segregation within the federal government.
And Wilsonian were just fine with with racial difference, with with a kind of politics of exclusion based on difference and liberalism.
I even, I would argue, was not really ever about including everybody.
It's about including everybody eligible for inclusion, which is a more fast and loose concept.
And internationally, in the in the mandate system,
racial difference can determine whether a given people are given a set of inhabitants was ever eligible for self-determination.
And so underpinning all of this was a notion that the American national community had worked
out the problem of difference that we understood difference that we worked it out just fine,
and that it was this that made the United States such an exemplar in the world.
And what I what I love about this as a European,
it was was kind of how seriously Wilsonian took themselves and that they could say without irony and sincerely,
without fear of contradiction, that America wanted a disinterested peace, that wanted an altruistic peace.
It just wanted to remake the world in the image of the United States and Wilsonian then as now, don't really do irony.
And that's that's kind of a great such a great shame. You know, Wilson actually did have kind of a sense of humour, but not about himself.
Well, and as I'm also had no problem with power and exercising it, Wilson was a once one thing,
an academic and who had a sense of the coercive power of pedagogy and certainly
was very comfortable with the idea that some people knew better than others,
which was right. What was right. He also had no problem with state power, provided that power was accountable to the true sovereign,
which is the people of every progressive ist nation.
The same held true for power among nations. The victory of the allied and associated powers, according to this way of thinking had had,
was the result of a historic combination of military power and what Constructivists would call discursive power of might and right.
And they had, in effect, made a covenant.
They had agreed upon a common set of principles as the foundation of the New World Order.
And as such, they presented this collection of great powers that was agreed on a common notion of sovereignty in world affairs,
not only appropriated but merited, but deserved a predominant role in the making of the peace and indeed merit in making peace according to a
definition of sovereignty coined a few years later by the kind of evil genius of sovereignty between the wars.
Karl Schmitt. The capacity to decide upon the exception, that is, to decide what there was to decide as well as to decide it.
To decide the questions, as well as the answers to the kind of all encompassing notion.
But as such, the great powers would not operate as they had before 1914.
They would operate in accordance with the wills of the Commonwealth and the Liberal individuals they
comprised who made up a single global community to which all nation states would become accountable.
The league, then the new League of Nations would simply be an institutional expression of this new kind of sovereignty across the globe.
If nations in general and great powers in particular remained accountable to the true
global sovereign to this this transnational global community of liberal individuals,
then you don't need to get rid of the nation state. You don't even need to get rid of the great powers.
You simply need to orient their morals correctly. Okay.
And then I keep thinking about this this Tokyo Park image, perhaps as a metaphor for the conference.
You have the crown, the conventional image of Western sovereignty,
and then you have this other thing and there's this Wilsonian thing in the background, not controlling things, but not absent either.
So this Wilsonian way of imagining sovereignty, I think, was not just some scheme created by this this academic floating in the aether out there.
It had practical consequences as the Paris Peace Conference got going in common usage, which I again adapt from from Saito,
a conference of great powers would make a preliminary piece which would then be refined and affirmed by a Congress of all interested parties,
including the former enemies.
And this suggested a sequential process of first ending the war, then designing the international redesigning the international system.
The French, among others, put out an idea for doing so fairly quickly.
In a memo circulated ten days after the armistice from ongoing idea of the French delegation delegation.
The problem was that it also suggested abandoning the 14 points as the basis of peace,
as an abstract set of principles ill suited to what grown up diplomats actually do.
This, however, was not what the French had signed off on.
And and the concept went nowhere. Well, if the Paris peace conference was not going to be 19th century business as usual, what was it?
Well, interestingly, people didn't quite seem to know when the conference began.
Strictly speaking, one could argue the Paris peace conference began on the 12th of January 1919,
at a meeting of the Supreme War Council held in the office of the French Foreign Minister, Stephen Fisher.
Its first item of business was hearing a report from the Allied Commander in
Chief Marshal Fosh about progress in carrying out the armistice with Germany.
The minutes are really are kind of hilarious of this discussion and glided as to how various nations would be represented.
But matters remained uncertain enough for President Wilson to ask, rather plaintively.
At the end of the meeting, I quote What was the conference to which the discussions on representation related?
Well, matters obviously couldn't end there, and they talked about it for a few more days until they presented a document called The Rules of
the Preliminary Peace Conference in Paris at its first plenary session on the 19th of January.
And the.
18th of January 1990, the first documentary evidence, I would argue, of the peace conference as a particular structure of international relations.
The document certainly made clear that all states were not created equal at the conference, nor would they be treated as such at the proceedings.
In identifying belligerent powers with general interest, which should be included in all discussions,
these comprise the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy and Japan.
All other invitees would be consulted at the discretion of this inner circle of five.
These ranged from Belgium to the British dominions to China to the newborn Czechoslovak Republic,
to a country is that had broken relations with Germany, such as Nicaragua.
Early on, I opened the Congress of the the head of the Brazilian delegation complained
about the composition of the committee that when designed the League of Nations,
he said he sent before the plenary of the conference.
It is with some surprise that I constantly hear it said This has been decided.
That has been decided. Who has taken the decision? We, that is the plenary, are a sovereign body, a sovereign court.
It seems to me that the proper body to take a decision is the conference itself.
Well, the response came from the French prime minister, George Clemenceau, who, according to 19th century practice,
was the president of the conference because the conference was taking place in Paris.
On the one hand, he certainly left no doubt as to who was in charge.
I quote With your permission, I will remind you that it was we who decided that there should be a conference in Paris that
that and that the representatives of the countries interested should be summoned to attend it.
I make no mystery of it. There is a conference of the great powers going on in the next room, unquote.
He made no excuses for the authority of the great powers.
He continued, We have had then we have had wounded in the millions, and if we have not kept before us the great question of the League of Nations,
we might perhaps have been selfish enough to consult only each other.
It was our right.
But on the other hand, and I think interestingly, the great powers as this sort of provisional world sovereign acted in various ways,
that that undercut their own hegemony and I think may be the first example of this was turning to the league as the first order of business.
And he moreover, one more quote from Clemenceau The peacemakers as instruments of individual nation states were not their own master.
He continued, Now, gentlemen, let me tell you that that behind us is something very great, very August, and at times very imperious.
Something which is called public opinion.
It will not ask us whether such and such a state was represented on such and such a commission that interests nobody.
It will ask us for results. Ask us what we have done for the League of Nations.
Now you know what Clemenceau actually meant by all this. Your guess is as good as mine.
I don't think we need to believe that he believed what he was saying.
I think that what he said matters as what? As as well as what he meant and whatever he believed.
He felt compelled to explain himself in Wilsonian language, a language that recognised the sovereignty of a sort of global public opinion.
And I think that's interesting. Now, Wilsonian still believe that Wilsonian ism was undone by realism.
In effect, as the conference succeeded that base selfishness, base nationalism undid the idealism of the 14 points.
I guess I like to think, though, that had realism actually been the predominant discourse.
The conference might have been less complicated and might even have been less contentious.
But the problem, in a way, was that something else had been created.
Wilson And this Wilson thing was still lurking there in the background from the first days of the conference to the last week.
And paradoxically, I think this is clear from all in all sorts of ways,
from the Treaty of Versailles itself, an enormous document of 440 articles, more than 200 printed pages.
And I would recommend to lovers of history to read the Treaty of Versailles beginning to end sometime.
I just want to talk briefly as my last main topic about ah,
one particular example of the Treaty of Versailles, the covenant, not as it functioned but as it was written.
And I'm going to argue that the radical logic of Wilsonian ism was alive and well in the covenant as it was written.
And that that that was something that supporters of the league and opponents of the league understood very well,
that this was a real time bomb and something that would radically change the way the world worked if it was actually carried out.
The league would comprise two bodies, a council and an assembly, not unlike the United Nations.
The membership of the council would comprise five great powers as permanent members, plus four other rotating members.
There was no veto of the great powers, however, as there is in the United Nations.
These these other four members would be elected from the Assembly.
Certainly the Council was the senior body on matters of of war and peace.
But the great powers that made up this, this, this kind of centre of the council were not supposed to be what they had been in 1914.
They were supposed to act according to a single will as beacon and protector of the world.
As Wilson himself put it. The significance of the result, therefore, has that deepest of meanings.
The union of wills and a common purpose.
A Union of wills which cannot be resisted, and which, I dare say no nation will run the risk of attempting to resist.
And I think it's only this this kind of logic that makes workable Article five of the Covenant, which called for unanimity in all decisions.
It supposes, and I think,
an only function if in fact there is this global community that can be presumed to want the same thing on the supreme matters of of war and peace.
So that in this way, sovereignty within nations and sovereignty among nations are two sides of the same coin.
Wilson put the matter, quite frankly, we are depending primarily and chiefly upon one great force,
and that is the moral force of public opinion in the world.
The cleansing and clarifying and compelling influences of publicity so that intrigues can no longer have their covers.
So their designs that are sinister can at any time be drawn into the open so that those things that are destroyed by the
life may be promptly destroyed by the overwhelming light of the universal expression of the condemnation of the world.
Indeed, Wilson went further and described the league as a kind of panopticon of world peace.
And there's a real remarkable connection.
Jeremy Bentham You know, one of the, the, one of the founding fathers of what became liberalism on January 25th, 1919.
Wilson described the league before the plenary as, quote, the eye of the nation to keep watch upon the common interest.
And I that did not slumber and I that was everywhere.
Watchful and attentive. Must think of Lord of the Rings or or Michelle Fuko or something like that.
It's really not something you would think of Wilson saying.
And and it's worth noting that Wilson wasn't the only one saying this sort of thing at the time.
So cautious a figure is.
Lord Robert Cecil of the British delegation said that the success of the league would depend on those who really believed that,
that the interest of one is the interest of all.
Vitoria Orlando went still further. He spoke of, quote, a self constraint, a spontaneous coercion,
so that states will in the future be brought under the control of public opinion of the world
voluntarily to recognise the restraint imposed upon them for the sake of universal peace.
The French delegate, Leon Bourgeois, who had been an advocate of a league long before, before the war,
in fact wanted a supranational military force to, ah, to give the league a kind of material power as well.
One could argue that this really about Germany, that there's really a kind of reflection of the French obsession with Germany.
On the other hand, once you set up an international transnational entity, can you really control it?
The French helped set up the euro, not exactly controlling it.
Nowadays, there's also a whole nother register in which I could explain this through the mandates,
but I'll leave that for some other occasion and proceed right to a few conclusions.
The kind of so one question that any historian ought to be able to answer what do we get out of this?
What do we get by trying to open up the question of sovereignty at the Paris peace conference?
As I'm sure many of you know, the historiography of peacemaking and after the Great War has made great strides in in recent years.
I think it Mark Trachtenberg work on. Some time ago on reparations and showing that reparations were a far more
sophisticated and complicated enterprise than simply the allies doing unto Germany.
The League of Nations is undergoing a kind of subtle rehabilitation, not so much at the high level,
but at the low level to the work of people like Susan Peterson and Bruno Coban.
Above all, historians, and I think it was Sarah Steiner, among others, have pointed out the treaties are not destiny.
You cannot draw a line of causation to 1919 and renewed war in Asia in 1931 and Europe in 1939.
But it still seems to me, though, the historiography of peacemaking is is still has this balance sheet component.
Did the good outweigh the bad? And the question I want to pursue, though, is really kind of distinct from this is almost more wrong can.
And Ranka is somebody I think of as I go about this. What did it do?
How did it make sense to people at the time who were not stupid people and indeed who were the, you know, the cream of their societies in many ways?
How did the world make sense? And I'm also interested in in trying to deepen the dialogue between air what is going on in our today.
And and history and certainly political scientist air people can benefit by knowing more about history.
But I also believe that international history can benefit from a deeper engagement in air.
International history is still very influenced by realism and of international relations.
Is a game not fundamentally changed since facilities?
I don't think it's controversial anymore to argue that sovereignty has a history and it's in that history that that this project,
you know, wants to associate itself. Okay. Sovereignty at the time wasn't just Wilson, and it wasn't just the successors struggling over a crown.
It was both and perhaps something else besides.
Which is why I keep returning to this image. And there I will stop at something between 40 and 45 minutes.
So thank you very much. Thank you very much, indeed.