(Source: Oxford University Press)
Oxford
University Press will publish a new book on the 1919 Paris Peace Conference
next month. The book can be pre-ordered with the publisher.
ABOUT
We have known
for many decades that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 "failed", in
the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book
investigates not whether the Paris Peace Conference succeeded or failed, but
the historically specific international system it created. It explores the
rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires
that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international
relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the Paris
Peace Conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about not just
determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the
questions. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking the world.
Most histories
of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles
with Germany on 28 June 1919. Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919
considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of
Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or
geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace
based on "justice" produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany,
and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference
sought to unmix lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by
drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. The conference sought not so much
to oppose revolution as to instrumentalize it in the new international system.
The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the failure of
the conference, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of
sovereignty established in Paris.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Introduction:
The Riddles of Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference
1. The Agents
and Structures of Peacemaking
2. The
Sovereignty of Justice
3. The
"Unmixing" of Lands
4. The
"Unmixing" of Peoples
5. Mastering
Revolution
6. Sovereignty
and the League of Nations, 1920-1923
Conclusion:
History, IR, and the Paris Peace Conference
For more
information, see the publisher’s
website
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