(Source: University of Helsinki)
The
University of Helsinki is organizing an international conference on Versailles
and its legacy over the coming two days.
The conference is organised by the Helsinki Collegium
for Advanced Studies and the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern
Finland, supported by the ERA.Net RUS Plus project ‘Post-imperial diversities –
majority-minority relations in the transition from empires to nation-states’,
part-funded by the Academy of Finland.
The Versailles conference and the founding of
the League of Nations in 1919-1920 had, as a major task, the objective of
reorganising the territories of Eastern Europe and the Middle East following
the collapse of the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires. While much of the
emphasis of the Versailles deliberations (and of subsequent scholarship) was on
the new territorial arrangements, the conference also added impetus and
international legal significance to discourses about minority rights. Different
principles of national rights – self-determination, territorial or personal
autonomy, federalism – were brought to the table and debated. The process also
borrowed from pre-existing discourses, and fed into broader discussions about
Rights at a time when Women’s rights and human rights were also achieving
significant progress. The discourses about Rights established under the
Versailles process set the tone for the policies of the League of Nations, and
went on to inform discussions about Rights ever since.
This international conference will revisit the
issue of Rights at the Versailles conference itself; the antecedents to
Versailles in discussions about rights in the early twentieth century; the
implementation of the Versailles principles in the 1920s; and the legacy of
Versailles on Rights discussions and policies over the subsequent 100 years.
More information, as well as the full program,
can be found here
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