1 00:00:02,250 --> 00:00:06,120 Right. It is a great pleasure to welcome Larry Smith from Oberlin. 2 00:00:06,300 --> 00:00:14,290 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. 3 00:00:14,310 --> 00:00:18,060 His attitude in Paris, where I think we can probably. 4 00:00:18,060 --> 00:00:25,410 And do you really feel sorry for you? He has worked primarily on France in the First World War. 5 00:00:26,490 --> 00:00:31,290 His first book Between Mutiny and Obedience, I think is on certain on Thursday. 6 00:00:31,290 --> 00:00:35,279 I will read this here, as is the book he wrote collaboratively, 7 00:00:35,280 --> 00:00:43,800 collaboratively with Annette Becker and the three seven, seven, seven admirers out of France and the First World War. 8 00:00:44,340 --> 00:00:57,000 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. 9 00:00:57,630 --> 00:01:04,830 And his title today is Ending Wars in a Wilsonian World Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference. 10 00:01:05,250 --> 00:01:09,870 Great. Thank you all very much for coming in. Some great is a great pleasure to be here. 11 00:01:11,310 --> 00:01:18,270 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, 12 00:01:18,750 --> 00:01:26,460 and I was reminded of a shortish article I'd written for a French reference work a few years back on on pacifism. 13 00:01:26,880 --> 00:01:36,660 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, 14 00:01:36,900 --> 00:01:41,210 but to make this the last of all wars in the French expression. 15 00:01:41,720 --> 00:01:44,750 De de de de de de de guerre. 16 00:01:44,750 --> 00:01:46,319 So the question was, 17 00:01:46,320 --> 00:01:55,260 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? 18 00:01:56,250 --> 00:02:01,610 What I'm going to talk about today is a particular version of this certainly millenarian. 19 00:02:01,620 --> 00:02:08,519 I'm the concept of of how it was that that a certain group of people tried to make 20 00:02:08,520 --> 00:02:14,460 this the last of the last of all wars and to try and understand it on its own terms. 21 00:02:15,120 --> 00:02:25,710 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. 22 00:02:26,790 --> 00:02:34,410 Its subject appears to be the American presidential election of 1920 to determine the successor to Woodrow Wilson. 23 00:02:34,770 --> 00:02:39,930 You see a sort of brooding, frustrated, bedridden Wilson in the background. 24 00:02:40,320 --> 00:02:45,630 The contenders are struggling with a crowd labelled the American presidency. 25 00:02:46,470 --> 00:02:51,720 The other caption This caption is the more significant. 26 00:02:51,720 --> 00:02:56,490 I should also report that I have had five PhDs in Japanese. 27 00:02:56,490 --> 00:03:02,700 Look at this and counting. Among them, my wife and the translation is still a bit up for grabs. 28 00:03:02,700 --> 00:03:05,700 I've received remarkably different versions of the translation. 29 00:03:06,240 --> 00:03:12,360 Japanese political cartoons of the era were notoriously ambiguous and elliptical to say 30 00:03:12,360 --> 00:03:18,330 nothing of black print against a grey background and some arcane kanji along the way. 31 00:03:18,780 --> 00:03:25,440 The prevailing translation at the moment is something like the following The cripples and the small minded. 32 00:03:25,890 --> 00:03:32,400 The current crop of candidates really represents the bottom of the barrel of humanity. 33 00:03:33,780 --> 00:03:40,650 I'd like to use this image to begin talking about my subject, which is sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, 34 00:03:41,190 --> 00:03:46,650 and to think about what sovereignty means beyond the very standard definition of marks of Labour. 35 00:03:46,830 --> 00:03:52,170 A member of the German delegation at the Paris Peace Conference who of course defined sovereignty 36 00:03:52,440 --> 00:03:58,950 as a monopoly of over the legitimate use of violence over a discrete geographic space. 37 00:03:58,950 --> 00:04:02,460 That's not an exact translation, but it's more or less what he what he said. 38 00:04:03,120 --> 00:04:10,170 Well, why should Tokyo expect its readers to care about the results of an American presidential election? 39 00:04:10,920 --> 00:04:14,430 I'm not really sure that they did, at least not for its own sake. 40 00:04:14,730 --> 00:04:18,059 1919 was not 1945. 41 00:04:18,060 --> 00:04:21,840 The United States was only one of several great powers. 42 00:04:22,920 --> 00:04:32,370 Nevertheless, what for good or for ill? Woodrow Wilson had said and had accomplished had implications far beyond American shores. 43 00:04:33,480 --> 00:04:39,990 Tokyo Park flourished at a time known as Taisho Democracy in Japan Yoshihito. 44 00:04:39,990 --> 00:04:47,490 The Taisho emperor had been enfeebled by a variety of inherited conditions, so such that he reigned but never really ruled. 45 00:04:48,000 --> 00:04:53,190 This, in effect, created something of a power vacuum at the centre of the Meiji regime, 46 00:04:53,190 --> 00:04:57,990 which in fundamental ways was where power began and when where power ended. 47 00:04:58,440 --> 00:05:07,719 Because of this vacuum, the taisho years were in some. Always a time of relative democratisation when some progressive forces in Japan believed 48 00:05:07,720 --> 00:05:12,940 that Japan could and ultimately would evolve into a Western style parliamentary democracy. 49 00:05:14,050 --> 00:05:22,480 I don't know that a great leap of imagination is necessary to read a parallel between the enfeebled Wilson and the enfeebled Taisho. 50 00:05:23,080 --> 00:05:33,490 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. 51 00:05:33,820 --> 00:05:37,600 Tokyo podcast and also say was all over the place on Wilson during the war. 52 00:05:37,630 --> 00:05:41,530 Sometimes he was the great hero. Sometimes he was the great imperialist. 53 00:05:42,160 --> 00:05:45,970 He had many different incarnations in the publication over the course of the war. 54 00:05:48,580 --> 00:05:53,139 All this said the resolution of where sovereignty would lay in Japan, 55 00:05:53,140 --> 00:05:58,960 what its characteristics would be in Japan, what would have grave implications beyond Japan? 56 00:05:59,770 --> 00:06:04,569 In 1919, Japan was already the most important military power in East Asia, 57 00:06:04,570 --> 00:06:10,840 with colonies in Taiwan, Korea and of course, expanding colonial interests in China. 58 00:06:11,260 --> 00:06:20,440 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. 59 00:06:21,340 --> 00:06:27,250 In other words, what sort of regime evolved in Japan would play a role in shaping sovereignty among nations, 60 00:06:27,610 --> 00:06:31,630 not just in East Asia, but in the international system writ large. 61 00:06:31,930 --> 00:06:37,839 This, of course, would have become all too clear by the 1930s, under the reign of Yoshihito Sun, 62 00:06:37,840 --> 00:06:42,580 the Showa Emperor, more commonly known in the in the West as Hirohito. 63 00:06:43,570 --> 00:06:52,240 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, 64 00:06:52,240 --> 00:06:57,250 I think is consistent with the people who published it at the time. 65 00:06:57,850 --> 00:07:03,970 Wilson lurks in the background. He's neither controlling things nor is he absent. 66 00:07:04,390 --> 00:07:09,730 Likewise, this bundle of ideas known as Wilsonian ism. 67 00:07:10,460 --> 00:07:15,280 I was there and was not controlling things, but it was not absent either. 68 00:07:16,060 --> 00:07:22,810 And it had within it very radical notions of what sovereignty meant, not just among nations, but within them. 69 00:07:23,750 --> 00:07:27,100 The start, the successors are clearly lesser men, 70 00:07:27,110 --> 00:07:39,110 one of them almost rodent looking like I haven't quite figured out what his story is yet, but they're clearly lesser men. 71 00:07:39,130 --> 00:07:45,100 They're struggling over the crown in the West, commonly a symbol of sovereignty, notably a monarchy. 72 00:07:45,550 --> 00:07:51,550 One hopes the irony is intentional because in a democracy, of course, the people are the sovereign. 73 00:07:52,720 --> 00:08:00,880 And if Wilsonian ism as a global phenomenon was about anything, it was about making the people sovereign across the globe. 74 00:08:01,720 --> 00:08:09,040 If the world could only figure out who they were, if the world could only figure out who the people were read. 75 00:08:09,040 --> 00:08:15,219 Most broadly, I think that the image argues that if the world could not live with Wilson, neither was it. 76 00:08:15,220 --> 00:08:23,470 Sure, it could live without him. My project is not about Wilson, but I fear the project cannot live without him either. 77 00:08:24,040 --> 00:08:29,560 Certainly, no one raised the issues of sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference in more pointed ways, 78 00:08:30,130 --> 00:08:39,100 and I firmly believe that the history of Wilsonian ism is too important to leave to Wilsonian, or perhaps even to Americanness. 79 00:08:39,610 --> 00:08:46,240 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. 80 00:08:46,510 --> 00:08:53,440 It's very interesting and really quite fun for me to encounter this nowadays as someone of a very different professional formation. 81 00:08:53,710 --> 00:08:59,950 And indeed I find it striking, really kind of stunning. The lack of distance, the lack of critical distance. 82 00:09:01,060 --> 00:09:02,980 Even today, 90 years later, 83 00:09:02,980 --> 00:09:12,190 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. 84 00:09:12,530 --> 00:09:16,120 And what I'm interested in really in some ways is the then Mr. Wilson. 85 00:09:16,120 --> 00:09:20,650 And how did the world make sense in these people's heads at the time? 86 00:09:21,610 --> 00:09:26,470 So that's one of the things that I'm playing with in the book that I hope will follow this. 87 00:09:27,220 --> 00:09:34,330 From this one day, I hope to go beyond the question of whether the peace conference succeeded or it failed. 88 00:09:34,330 --> 00:09:38,500 And at some level, the answer to that question has been obvious for a long time. 89 00:09:38,500 --> 00:09:46,870 It failed because it failed to prevent war first in Asia, beginning in 1931 and then in Europe beginning in 1939. 90 00:09:47,680 --> 00:09:50,890 An issue here, I think, is more now. 91 00:09:50,980 --> 00:09:54,220 Did it create something good or bad to create something successful? 92 00:09:54,250 --> 00:10:01,180 Unsuccessful. But what did it create and why did it seem like a good idea or at least a plausible idea at the. 93 00:10:01,870 --> 00:10:07,720 Okay. And how did that system help shape the historical development of sovereignty? 94 00:10:09,130 --> 00:10:21,280 Specifically, I want to begin the story of peacemaking in 1919 with structures of international relations as they existed at the time the 95 00:10:21,280 --> 00:10:29,650 Great War came to a close and how the possibility of a dramatic transformation in those relations came about very swiftly. 96 00:10:31,060 --> 00:10:36,910 Of course, by the fall of 1918, there existed a well-established practice for transitioning from war to peace. 97 00:10:37,270 --> 00:10:43,450 This was the armistice, a specific kind of legal, military and political document. 98 00:10:44,170 --> 00:10:50,520 The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 specified that an armistice constitutes 99 00:10:50,530 --> 00:10:56,170 a suspension of military operations by the mutual agreement of the belligerents. 100 00:10:56,350 --> 00:11:03,010 This, by the way, comes from Ernest Saito, the distinguished British diplomat and Alienist. 101 00:11:03,430 --> 00:11:14,620 In fact, by an armistice, need not imply an equality of forces, but neither is it a surrender, 102 00:11:15,070 --> 00:11:22,690 something which Marshall first never entirely understood or didn't want to understand, but nor is it a temporary truce. 103 00:11:23,050 --> 00:11:26,530 It is a political as well as a military document. 104 00:11:26,590 --> 00:11:31,180 Most commonly, an armistice is sought when the outcome of a conflict is clear. 105 00:11:31,480 --> 00:11:35,890 But for various reasons, the powers do not wish to fight to the finish. 106 00:11:36,370 --> 00:11:45,460 Commonly, an armistice is arranged by the military authorities and then approved by the political authorities as really the first act of making peace. 107 00:11:46,630 --> 00:11:52,120 The armistice that ended the great war that ended the fighting, or at least tried to end the fighting of the Great War, 108 00:11:52,480 --> 00:11:57,220 began with the more peripheral fronts and worked their way toward the Western Front. 109 00:11:57,880 --> 00:12:03,010 As such, they operated largely as the Hague Conventions had envisaged. 110 00:12:03,460 --> 00:12:10,300 An armistice was signed with Bulgaria on September 29th, with the Ottoman Empire on October 30th. 111 00:12:11,020 --> 00:12:14,979 So far, so conventional. They were made by the military. 112 00:12:14,980 --> 00:12:21,460 Authorities in the field, were approved by the political authorities and inter allied body known as the Supreme War Council. 113 00:12:22,840 --> 00:12:29,140 Paradoxically, and this is kind of really where the story begins, the German Kaiser, right on its deathbed, 114 00:12:29,200 --> 00:12:36,970 opened up Pandora's box of the ideological content of the peace through the well-known appeal on the 6th of October. 115 00:12:37,690 --> 00:12:43,569 Not to the allies, not to the Supreme War Council, but to the person of the American president, 116 00:12:43,570 --> 00:12:48,420 Woodrow Wilson, for a peace on the basis of Wilsonian ideals. 117 00:12:48,430 --> 00:12:49,750 Most famously, 118 00:12:50,140 --> 00:13:02,770 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. 119 00:13:03,940 --> 00:13:10,299 The immediate motivations of the Germans in appealing to the person of the American president seem very clear. 120 00:13:10,300 --> 00:13:16,330 They wanted to stave off complete military defeat. Above all, an occupation of the German homeland. 121 00:13:17,170 --> 00:13:23,710 But the immediate their immediate motivations, what they wanted out of this, I would argue, ceased to be the point. 122 00:13:24,100 --> 00:13:33,150 Rather, the point was that one side on the military conflict sought an ideological alliance with the other side, 123 00:13:34,390 --> 00:13:39,970 on the other side of the military conflict, and that this odd alliance carried with it. 124 00:13:40,360 --> 00:13:46,990 The prospect of a transformation of international relations, according to the principles, appealed to. 125 00:13:48,370 --> 00:13:53,550 Now, as this all unfolded, I mean, much of the reason that that that, you know, 126 00:13:53,590 --> 00:13:57,790 the Germans call for an armistice the sixth and it wasn't signed until November 11 127 00:13:58,030 --> 00:14:02,710 really involved negotiations among the allies because the Germans had accepted it. 128 00:14:03,040 --> 00:14:09,370 But the British and French going, huh? We're the ones with most of the muscle in the field. 129 00:14:11,050 --> 00:14:17,710 In the end, Britain and France would would insist on exceptions concerning two of the specific 14 points. 130 00:14:18,100 --> 00:14:26,470 The British would insist on deferring for future specification what exactly was meant by freedom of the seas. 131 00:14:27,070 --> 00:14:37,120 And likewise, the French would insist on just what was unarmed, deferring precision as to just what was meant by, quote unquote, restoring. 132 00:14:37,450 --> 00:14:41,140 France and Belgium, which will, of course, become the question of reparations. 133 00:14:42,070 --> 00:14:50,260 But remarkably beyond that, the strange bedfellows of President Wilson and the German high command won on the essential point, 134 00:14:50,830 --> 00:14:56,740 which was the acceptance of Wilsonian ism as the ideological basis of the peace. 135 00:14:57,940 --> 00:15:01,060 The contractual character of what had. 136 00:15:01,100 --> 00:15:07,580 And agreed to, I would argue, created something extraordinary in the history of international relations up to that time. 137 00:15:08,180 --> 00:15:13,640 Indeed, as Paul Brinkley, an American scholar, wrote as long ago as 1931, 138 00:15:14,030 --> 00:15:22,400 I quote him The essential significance of the 14 points as a basis of peace was not their ethical quality, 139 00:15:22,730 --> 00:15:29,900 but their contractual character was not their ethical quality, but their contractual character. 140 00:15:29,990 --> 00:15:37,430 They had made a deal. The acceptance of Wilsonian ism, one could argue, created a common form of agency, 141 00:15:37,460 --> 00:15:45,650 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, 142 00:15:46,370 --> 00:15:48,620 the peacemakers, whether they liked it or not, 143 00:15:48,740 --> 00:15:57,950 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. 144 00:15:58,970 --> 00:16:06,810 And and I would suggest it was this act of creating a collectivity that helped in turn, to create its own reality. 145 00:16:06,830 --> 00:16:10,940 At the time of the Paris peace conference, well, what, in fact, 146 00:16:10,940 --> 00:16:19,130 had the Allied and associate powers signed on to in signing on to Wilsonian ism, and particularly for the younger people here? 147 00:16:19,400 --> 00:16:25,910 I think that Barack Obama, not necessarily Barack Obama today, but Barack Obama in 2008, 148 00:16:27,200 --> 00:16:32,270 helps us understand Woodrow Wilson in 1918, for good or for ill, 149 00:16:33,020 --> 00:16:38,840 and this brief time in which one could almost project anything on to him and with 150 00:16:39,080 --> 00:16:44,870 which one wanted to project and could be all things to all people at the time. 151 00:16:44,870 --> 00:16:54,139 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, 152 00:16:54,140 --> 00:17:01,190 an explanation of what it had all been for a millenarian interpretation of the war that had 153 00:17:01,190 --> 00:17:07,940 international resonance and moreover posited a new kind of world that would result for results from it, 154 00:17:07,940 --> 00:17:10,190 not just how to end this war, 155 00:17:10,520 --> 00:17:22,190 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, 156 00:17:22,190 --> 00:17:27,259 as Arno Mayer argued back in the 1950s, really was Bolshevism. 157 00:17:27,260 --> 00:17:31,910 And I think as as errors, Manilla has done an interesting job explaining, 158 00:17:33,110 --> 00:17:41,360 and I think I would agree with him that really Bolshevism became centre stage in the colonised or Decolonising world, 159 00:17:41,630 --> 00:17:44,210 really kind of after Wilsonian ism floundered. 160 00:17:44,900 --> 00:17:54,500 So this is a time where where ideological power really is more there with Wilsonian ism and Bolshevism is kind of what happens afterwards. 161 00:17:55,940 --> 00:18:02,360 Now, in signing on to Wilsonian ism and whether they appreciated what they had done or not, 162 00:18:02,810 --> 00:18:13,490 the Allied and associate powers had agreed in the abstract to a very different notion of sovereignty within nations as well as among nations. 163 00:18:14,660 --> 00:18:24,380 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. 164 00:18:25,220 --> 00:18:36,080 And I want to think about Wilsonian ism as a radicalised version of 19th century liberalism and a certain logic carried to its conclusion, 165 00:18:38,380 --> 00:18:48,920 the notion being that the locus of sovereignty rested not with the nation, but with the individual with a certain kind of individual. 166 00:18:51,140 --> 00:18:57,020 And I believe that nothing else makes it possible to make sense of the whole notion of self-determination, 167 00:18:57,320 --> 00:19:02,570 which I could talk about at some point, and how difference is handled within self-determination. 168 00:19:04,430 --> 00:19:09,760 Nothing else makes sense of the functioning of the League of Nations, as it were supposed to function, or the mandates. 169 00:19:10,400 --> 00:19:14,719 And at the heart of Wilsonian concepts of sovereignty, I would argue, 170 00:19:14,720 --> 00:19:28,100 lay the political individual as the as 19th century liberal ism had imagined him rational, morally autonomous, in a way self-sovereign also male. 171 00:19:28,340 --> 00:19:30,170 I think there's not much question about that. 172 00:19:30,950 --> 00:19:42,350 It is this individual right, rational, morally autonomous self-sovereign that constitutes the proper self of self-determination. 173 00:19:44,510 --> 00:19:52,340 So these individuals, these building blocks of sovereignty at any level, from the Vermont village to the international system itself. 174 00:19:53,330 --> 00:20:00,920 Who are these people? These political individuals are people who can make governance, which is actually you know, I've given a version of. 175 00:20:00,950 --> 00:20:05,480 This talk in French and the French translation is packed or packed. 176 00:20:05,510 --> 00:20:07,850 DALLIANCE That's not really the same thing. 177 00:20:08,090 --> 00:20:14,330 And I have to go into some sort of translation about, about, about really what the differences are covenants, 178 00:20:14,810 --> 00:20:22,550 individualised and totally made, promises to each other to form a semi sacrilege ized political community. 179 00:20:23,360 --> 00:20:26,630 The Biblical Hebrews became a people through a covenant. 180 00:20:27,170 --> 00:20:31,790 The Puritans and Colonial Massachusetts became a people through a covenant. 181 00:20:32,180 --> 00:20:37,120 According to this way of thinking, Americans became a people through the covenant, 182 00:20:37,130 --> 00:20:45,500 such as the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, or covenant in this sense is more than a treaty. 183 00:20:45,500 --> 00:20:51,950 It's more than just another agreement. I think it was not an accident that Wilson tried to mobilise this term. 184 00:20:52,220 --> 00:20:56,600 It's also not an accident that that I mean, I'm not an expert on American diplomacy, 185 00:20:56,600 --> 00:21:02,809 but I think it's also not an accident that it's not a term commonly used either before Wilson or after Wilson. 186 00:21:02,810 --> 00:21:05,360 It's a historically specific term. 187 00:21:06,830 --> 00:21:16,850 So these self-sovereign individuals, but would become the building blocks of all political society from the Vermont town to the system itself. 188 00:21:17,720 --> 00:21:24,560 And they would do so through covenants, the the highest expression of which would be the covenant of the League of Nations. 189 00:21:24,560 --> 00:21:27,710 And it was that it was, I would argue, for precisely this reason. 190 00:21:27,980 --> 00:21:30,950 All of the treaties produced by the Paris Peace Conference, 191 00:21:30,950 --> 00:21:36,890 including the short lived treaty of said when there was kind of good reason to think otherwise. 192 00:21:37,220 --> 00:21:40,790 I began with the covenant of the League of Nations. 193 00:21:42,200 --> 00:21:50,929 World Government, in quotation marks with does exist at the level of the individual through a global transnational community of 194 00:21:50,930 --> 00:21:58,310 self-sovereign individuals who would be presumed to want the same thing in the supreme matters of war and peace. 195 00:21:58,880 --> 00:22:04,430 All other bodies, notably nation states, would be accountable to this community. 196 00:22:04,520 --> 00:22:11,000 So there'd be a locus of sovereignty and a locus of accountability beyond the states themselves. 197 00:22:12,020 --> 00:22:19,700 Now, politically significant difference would not disappear within this community any more than it had within the United States itself. 198 00:22:20,330 --> 00:22:27,790 Some forms of difference would be, in effect, recognised and largely banished from the public sphere. 199 00:22:27,800 --> 00:22:33,380 And in America one thinks of what Americans call ethnic difference or religious difference. 200 00:22:33,710 --> 00:22:36,890 So Polish Americans are Catholic Americans. 201 00:22:36,890 --> 00:22:40,340 Italian-Americans have more or less identical civil rights. 202 00:22:40,590 --> 00:22:43,010 They're certainly mobilised as such at election time. 203 00:22:43,280 --> 00:22:51,020 But but it's not a politically significant part of one's civic identity, except kind of for electoral purposes. 204 00:22:51,320 --> 00:22:57,080 Other forms of difference, notably race, would determine, according to this way of thinking, 205 00:22:57,890 --> 00:23:02,990 whether certain categories of people would be eligible to make a covenant at all. 206 00:23:05,030 --> 00:23:14,299 And in the United States, this was a time of greatly enhanced racial segregation within the federal government. 207 00:23:14,300 --> 00:23:24,500 And Wilsonian were just fine with with racial difference, with with a kind of politics of exclusion based on difference and liberalism. 208 00:23:24,500 --> 00:23:28,219 I even, I would argue, was not really ever about including everybody. 209 00:23:28,220 --> 00:23:35,690 It's about including everybody eligible for inclusion, which is a more fast and loose concept. 210 00:23:36,590 --> 00:23:39,739 And internationally, in the in the mandate system, 211 00:23:39,740 --> 00:23:47,930 racial difference can determine whether a given people are given a set of inhabitants was ever eligible for self-determination. 212 00:23:49,190 --> 00:23:56,540 And so underpinning all of this was a notion that the American national community had worked 213 00:23:56,540 --> 00:24:00,860 out the problem of difference that we understood difference that we worked it out just fine, 214 00:24:01,370 --> 00:24:05,990 and that it was this that made the United States such an exemplar in the world. 215 00:24:06,680 --> 00:24:09,200 And what I what I love about this as a European, 216 00:24:09,380 --> 00:24:18,080 it was was kind of how seriously Wilsonian took themselves and that they could say without irony and sincerely, 217 00:24:18,080 --> 00:24:25,070 without fear of contradiction, that America wanted a disinterested peace, that wanted an altruistic peace. 218 00:24:25,700 --> 00:24:32,419 It just wanted to remake the world in the image of the United States and Wilsonian then as now, don't really do irony. 219 00:24:32,420 --> 00:24:39,950 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. 220 00:24:41,720 --> 00:24:47,420 Well, and as I'm also had no problem with power and exercising it, Wilson was a once one thing, 221 00:24:47,420 --> 00:24:55,280 an academic and who had a sense of the coercive power of pedagogy and certainly 222 00:24:55,280 --> 00:24:58,340 was very comfortable with the idea that some people knew better than others, 223 00:24:58,820 --> 00:25:07,480 which was right. What was right. He also had no problem with state power, provided that power was accountable to the true sovereign, 224 00:25:07,510 --> 00:25:11,050 which is the people of every progressive ist nation. 225 00:25:11,350 --> 00:25:19,750 The same held true for power among nations. The victory of the allied and associated powers, according to this way of thinking had had, 226 00:25:19,900 --> 00:25:28,930 was the result of a historic combination of military power and what Constructivists would call discursive power of might and right. 227 00:25:31,060 --> 00:25:34,240 And they had, in effect, made a covenant. 228 00:25:34,240 --> 00:25:39,010 They had agreed upon a common set of principles as the foundation of the New World Order. 229 00:25:39,910 --> 00:25:48,280 And as such, they presented this collection of great powers that was agreed on a common notion of sovereignty in world affairs, 230 00:25:49,120 --> 00:26:00,999 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 231 00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:06,300 definition of sovereignty coined a few years later by the kind of evil genius of sovereignty between the wars. 232 00:26:06,310 --> 00:26:15,610 Karl Schmitt. The capacity to decide upon the exception, that is, to decide what there was to decide as well as to decide it. 233 00:26:15,610 --> 00:26:20,680 To decide the questions, as well as the answers to the kind of all encompassing notion. 234 00:26:21,910 --> 00:26:26,320 But as such, the great powers would not operate as they had before 1914. 235 00:26:26,590 --> 00:26:32,020 They would operate in accordance with the wills of the Commonwealth and the Liberal individuals they 236 00:26:32,020 --> 00:26:38,710 comprised who made up a single global community to which all nation states would become accountable. 237 00:26:39,370 --> 00:26:50,680 The league, then the new League of Nations would simply be an institutional expression of this new kind of sovereignty across the globe. 238 00:26:52,360 --> 00:26:58,179 If nations in general and great powers in particular remained accountable to the true 239 00:26:58,180 --> 00:27:02,860 global sovereign to this this transnational global community of liberal individuals, 240 00:27:03,400 --> 00:27:07,650 then you don't need to get rid of the nation state. You don't even need to get rid of the great powers. 241 00:27:07,660 --> 00:27:11,650 You simply need to orient their morals correctly. Okay. 242 00:27:12,220 --> 00:27:17,650 And then I keep thinking about this this Tokyo Park image, perhaps as a metaphor for the conference. 243 00:27:18,130 --> 00:27:22,180 You have the crown, the conventional image of Western sovereignty, 244 00:27:22,600 --> 00:27:30,760 and then you have this other thing and there's this Wilsonian thing in the background, not controlling things, but not absent either. 245 00:27:33,100 --> 00:27:41,980 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. 246 00:27:42,400 --> 00:27:51,940 It had practical consequences as the Paris Peace Conference got going in common usage, which I again adapt from from Saito, 247 00:27:51,940 --> 00:28:02,200 a conference of great powers would make a preliminary piece which would then be refined and affirmed by a Congress of all interested parties, 248 00:28:02,200 --> 00:28:03,970 including the former enemies. 249 00:28:04,570 --> 00:28:14,200 And this suggested a sequential process of first ending the war, then designing the international redesigning the international system. 250 00:28:15,340 --> 00:28:20,860 The French, among others, put out an idea for doing so fairly quickly. 251 00:28:22,240 --> 00:28:28,480 In a memo circulated ten days after the armistice from ongoing idea of the French delegation delegation. 252 00:28:28,900 --> 00:28:33,400 The problem was that it also suggested abandoning the 14 points as the basis of peace, 253 00:28:33,670 --> 00:28:39,040 as an abstract set of principles ill suited to what grown up diplomats actually do. 254 00:28:40,600 --> 00:28:44,770 This, however, was not what the French had signed off on. 255 00:28:44,770 --> 00:28:55,120 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? 256 00:28:56,170 --> 00:29:01,030 Well, interestingly, people didn't quite seem to know when the conference began. 257 00:29:01,960 --> 00:29:08,830 Strictly speaking, one could argue the Paris peace conference began on the 12th of January 1919, 258 00:29:09,640 --> 00:29:15,520 at a meeting of the Supreme War Council held in the office of the French Foreign Minister, Stephen Fisher. 259 00:29:15,940 --> 00:29:21,249 Its first item of business was hearing a report from the Allied Commander in 260 00:29:21,250 --> 00:29:25,570 Chief Marshal Fosh about progress in carrying out the armistice with Germany. 261 00:29:27,040 --> 00:29:33,760 The minutes are really are kind of hilarious of this discussion and glided as to how various nations would be represented. 262 00:29:34,060 --> 00:29:38,889 But matters remained uncertain enough for President Wilson to ask, rather plaintively. 263 00:29:38,890 --> 00:29:45,420 At the end of the meeting, I quote What was the conference to which the discussions on representation related? 264 00:29:46,420 --> 00:29:53,770 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 265 00:29:53,770 --> 00:30:00,220 the Preliminary Peace Conference in Paris at its first plenary session on the 19th of January. 266 00:30:00,250 --> 00:30:00,640 And the. 267 00:30:00,710 --> 00:30:09,380 18th of January 1990, the first documentary evidence, I would argue, of the peace conference as a particular structure of international relations. 268 00:30:10,970 --> 00:30:17,750 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. 269 00:30:18,170 --> 00:30:23,540 In identifying belligerent powers with general interest, which should be included in all discussions, 270 00:30:24,110 --> 00:30:28,700 these comprise the United States, the British Empire, France, Italy and Japan. 271 00:30:29,330 --> 00:30:34,580 All other invitees would be consulted at the discretion of this inner circle of five. 272 00:30:34,610 --> 00:30:42,200 These ranged from Belgium to the British dominions to China to the newborn Czechoslovak Republic, 273 00:30:42,200 --> 00:30:47,510 to a country is that had broken relations with Germany, such as Nicaragua. 274 00:30:48,350 --> 00:30:54,260 Early on, I opened the Congress of the the head of the Brazilian delegation complained 275 00:30:54,740 --> 00:30:58,010 about the composition of the committee that when designed the League of Nations, 276 00:30:58,430 --> 00:31:01,730 he said he sent before the plenary of the conference. 277 00:31:02,120 --> 00:31:06,349 It is with some surprise that I constantly hear it said This has been decided. 278 00:31:06,350 --> 00:31:15,290 That has been decided. Who has taken the decision? We, that is the plenary, are a sovereign body, a sovereign court. 279 00:31:15,500 --> 00:31:20,600 It seems to me that the proper body to take a decision is the conference itself. 280 00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:28,159 Well, the response came from the French prime minister, George Clemenceau, who, according to 19th century practice, 281 00:31:28,160 --> 00:31:31,820 was the president of the conference because the conference was taking place in Paris. 282 00:31:32,720 --> 00:31:36,350 On the one hand, he certainly left no doubt as to who was in charge. 283 00:31:37,340 --> 00:31:43,730 I quote With your permission, I will remind you that it was we who decided that there should be a conference in Paris that 284 00:31:43,910 --> 00:31:48,140 that and that the representatives of the countries interested should be summoned to attend it. 285 00:31:48,590 --> 00:31:56,060 I make no mystery of it. There is a conference of the great powers going on in the next room, unquote. 286 00:31:56,750 --> 00:32:00,230 He made no excuses for the authority of the great powers. 287 00:32:01,220 --> 00:32:09,200 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, 288 00:32:09,500 --> 00:32:13,640 we might perhaps have been selfish enough to consult only each other. 289 00:32:13,850 --> 00:32:15,380 It was our right. 290 00:32:16,340 --> 00:32:23,989 But on the other hand, and I think interestingly, the great powers as this sort of provisional world sovereign acted in various ways, 291 00:32:23,990 --> 00:32:34,010 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. 292 00:32:34,520 --> 00:32:44,930 And he moreover, one more quote from Clemenceau The peacemakers as instruments of individual nation states were not their own master. 293 00:32:46,700 --> 00:32:55,620 He continued, Now, gentlemen, let me tell you that that behind us is something very great, very August, and at times very imperious. 294 00:32:56,000 --> 00:32:57,950 Something which is called public opinion. 295 00:32:58,280 --> 00:33:05,030 It will not ask us whether such and such a state was represented on such and such a commission that interests nobody. 296 00:33:05,630 --> 00:33:11,030 It will ask us for results. Ask us what we have done for the League of Nations. 297 00:33:11,690 --> 00:33:16,240 Now you know what Clemenceau actually meant by all this. Your guess is as good as mine. 298 00:33:16,250 --> 00:33:20,420 I don't think we need to believe that he believed what he was saying. 299 00:33:20,810 --> 00:33:27,860 I think that what he said matters as what? As as well as what he meant and whatever he believed. 300 00:33:28,280 --> 00:33:38,420 He felt compelled to explain himself in Wilsonian language, a language that recognised the sovereignty of a sort of global public opinion. 301 00:33:38,540 --> 00:33:46,819 And I think that's interesting. Now, Wilsonian still believe that Wilsonian ism was undone by realism. 302 00:33:46,820 --> 00:33:55,730 In effect, as the conference succeeded that base selfishness, base nationalism undid the idealism of the 14 points. 303 00:33:57,170 --> 00:34:01,520 I guess I like to think, though, that had realism actually been the predominant discourse. 304 00:34:01,820 --> 00:34:06,380 The conference might have been less complicated and might even have been less contentious. 305 00:34:07,010 --> 00:34:10,790 But the problem, in a way, was that something else had been created. 306 00:34:11,750 --> 00:34:19,390 Wilson And this Wilson thing was still lurking there in the background from the first days of the conference to the last week. 307 00:34:20,260 --> 00:34:25,520 And paradoxically, I think this is clear from all in all sorts of ways, 308 00:34:25,520 --> 00:34:33,770 from the Treaty of Versailles itself, an enormous document of 440 articles, more than 200 printed pages. 309 00:34:34,070 --> 00:34:40,800 And I would recommend to lovers of history to read the Treaty of Versailles beginning to end sometime. 310 00:34:41,210 --> 00:34:44,750 I just want to talk briefly as my last main topic about ah, 311 00:34:44,750 --> 00:34:51,740 one particular example of the Treaty of Versailles, the covenant, not as it functioned but as it was written. 312 00:34:52,250 --> 00:34:59,480 And I'm going to argue that the radical logic of Wilsonian ism was alive and well in the covenant as it was written. 313 00:35:00,670 --> 00:35:07,630 And that that that was something that supporters of the league and opponents of the league understood very well, 314 00:35:07,780 --> 00:35:14,890 that this was a real time bomb and something that would radically change the way the world worked if it was actually carried out. 315 00:35:17,470 --> 00:35:22,850 The league would comprise two bodies, a council and an assembly, not unlike the United Nations. 316 00:35:23,380 --> 00:35:30,850 The membership of the council would comprise five great powers as permanent members, plus four other rotating members. 317 00:35:31,120 --> 00:35:36,940 There was no veto of the great powers, however, as there is in the United Nations. 318 00:35:37,450 --> 00:35:41,320 These these other four members would be elected from the Assembly. 319 00:35:41,770 --> 00:35:47,260 Certainly the Council was the senior body on matters of of war and peace. 320 00:35:48,310 --> 00:35:56,520 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. 321 00:35:56,530 --> 00:36:03,070 They were supposed to act according to a single will as beacon and protector of the world. 322 00:36:03,370 --> 00:36:09,490 As Wilson himself put it. The significance of the result, therefore, has that deepest of meanings. 323 00:36:09,820 --> 00:36:12,370 The union of wills and a common purpose. 324 00:36:12,850 --> 00:36:20,140 A Union of wills which cannot be resisted, and which, I dare say no nation will run the risk of attempting to resist. 325 00:36:22,150 --> 00:36:32,200 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. 326 00:36:32,680 --> 00:36:34,950 It supposes, and I think, 327 00:36:34,960 --> 00:36:46,840 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. 328 00:36:48,670 --> 00:36:55,120 So that in this way, sovereignty within nations and sovereignty among nations are two sides of the same coin. 329 00:36:56,260 --> 00:37:02,440 Wilson put the matter, quite frankly, we are depending primarily and chiefly upon one great force, 330 00:37:02,680 --> 00:37:05,960 and that is the moral force of public opinion in the world. 331 00:37:05,980 --> 00:37:14,290 The cleansing and clarifying and compelling influences of publicity so that intrigues can no longer have their covers. 332 00:37:14,530 --> 00:37:21,309 So their designs that are sinister can at any time be drawn into the open so that those things that are destroyed by the 333 00:37:21,310 --> 00:37:28,780 life may be promptly destroyed by the overwhelming light of the universal expression of the condemnation of the world. 334 00:37:29,380 --> 00:37:35,500 Indeed, Wilson went further and described the league as a kind of panopticon of world peace. 335 00:37:35,770 --> 00:37:37,500 And there's a real remarkable connection. 336 00:37:37,720 --> 00:37:48,240 Jeremy Bentham You know, one of the, the, one of the founding fathers of what became liberalism on January 25th, 1919. 337 00:37:48,250 --> 00:37:55,600 Wilson described the league before the plenary as, quote, the eye of the nation to keep watch upon the common interest. 338 00:37:55,840 --> 00:37:59,860 And I that did not slumber and I that was everywhere. 339 00:37:59,860 --> 00:38:06,939 Watchful and attentive. Must think of Lord of the Rings or or Michelle Fuko or something like that. 340 00:38:06,940 --> 00:38:09,790 It's really not something you would think of Wilson saying. 341 00:38:12,330 --> 00:38:18,460 And and it's worth noting that Wilson wasn't the only one saying this sort of thing at the time. 342 00:38:18,760 --> 00:38:20,049 So cautious a figure is. 343 00:38:20,050 --> 00:38:27,550 Lord Robert Cecil of the British delegation said that the success of the league would depend on those who really believed that, 344 00:38:27,550 --> 00:38:30,700 that the interest of one is the interest of all. 345 00:38:31,540 --> 00:38:38,769 Vitoria Orlando went still further. He spoke of, quote, a self constraint, a spontaneous coercion, 346 00:38:38,770 --> 00:38:44,050 so that states will in the future be brought under the control of public opinion of the world 347 00:38:44,410 --> 00:38:50,440 voluntarily to recognise the restraint imposed upon them for the sake of universal peace. 348 00:38:51,190 --> 00:38:56,040 The French delegate, Leon Bourgeois, who had been an advocate of a league long before, before the war, 349 00:38:56,920 --> 00:39:04,870 in fact wanted a supranational military force to, ah, to give the league a kind of material power as well. 350 00:39:05,410 --> 00:39:11,530 One could argue that this really about Germany, that there's really a kind of reflection of the French obsession with Germany. 351 00:39:12,160 --> 00:39:17,860 On the other hand, once you set up an international transnational entity, can you really control it? 352 00:39:18,640 --> 00:39:22,060 The French helped set up the euro, not exactly controlling it. 353 00:39:22,060 --> 00:39:32,379 Nowadays, there's also a whole nother register in which I could explain this through the mandates, 354 00:39:32,380 --> 00:39:37,630 but I'll leave that for some other occasion and proceed right to a few conclusions. 355 00:39:38,470 --> 00:39:44,770 The kind of so one question that any historian ought to be able to answer what do we get out of this? 356 00:39:44,770 --> 00:39:49,300 What do we get by trying to open up the question of sovereignty at the Paris peace conference? 357 00:39:50,200 --> 00:39:57,910 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. 358 00:39:58,690 --> 00:40:05,460 I think it Mark Trachtenberg work on. Some time ago on reparations and showing that reparations were a far more 359 00:40:07,860 --> 00:40:12,660 sophisticated and complicated enterprise than simply the allies doing unto Germany. 360 00:40:13,740 --> 00:40:19,500 The League of Nations is undergoing a kind of subtle rehabilitation, not so much at the high level, 361 00:40:19,500 --> 00:40:24,060 but at the low level to the work of people like Susan Peterson and Bruno Coban. 362 00:40:24,480 --> 00:40:30,300 Above all, historians, and I think it was Sarah Steiner, among others, have pointed out the treaties are not destiny. 363 00:40:30,540 --> 00:40:40,440 You cannot draw a line of causation to 1919 and renewed war in Asia in 1931 and Europe in 1939. 364 00:40:41,640 --> 00:40:48,560 But it still seems to me, though, the historiography of peacemaking is is still has this balance sheet component. 365 00:40:48,570 --> 00:40:56,880 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. 366 00:40:57,030 --> 00:41:01,230 And Ranka is somebody I think of as I go about this. What did it do? 367 00:41:01,260 --> 00:41:09,440 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? 368 00:41:09,450 --> 00:41:19,330 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. 369 00:41:19,800 --> 00:41:27,120 And and history and certainly political scientist air people can benefit by knowing more about history. 370 00:41:27,840 --> 00:41:32,760 But I also believe that international history can benefit from a deeper engagement in air. 371 00:41:33,600 --> 00:41:38,790 International history is still very influenced by realism and of international relations. 372 00:41:38,790 --> 00:41:42,450 Is a game not fundamentally changed since facilities? 373 00:41:43,620 --> 00:41:51,299 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, 374 00:41:51,300 --> 00:42:02,490 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. 375 00:42:03,450 --> 00:42:06,630 It was both and perhaps something else besides. 376 00:42:06,660 --> 00:42:14,270 Which is why I keep returning to this image. And there I will stop at something between 40 and 45 minutes. 377 00:42:14,650 --> 00:42:19,140 So thank you very much. Thank you very much, indeed.