Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Diplomacy confirms the fact. As an illustration no incident is better than the Italian retention of the Southern Sporades or Dodecanese group of Aegean Islands in the years immediately preceding the First World War. Italy, last and weakest of the Great Powers, was able to defy the expressed wishes of Britain, the dominant naval power on whose patronage Italy traditionally relied. Defiance of Britain was not accompanied by a corresponding surrender to Italy's Central Power allies. It triumphed through Italian skill at exploiting the above dictum: possession is nine-tenths of the law.

On 26 April 1915 the governments of Great Britain, France, and Russia signed a treaty with the Italian Government settling the terms for Italy's entrance into the war on the allied side. The Treaty of London was the result of hard bargaining, particularly because of extensive Italian claims in the Adriatic which were resisted by the Russian government, and which would leave a difficult legacy for the postwar period. Nevertheless, the evolution of Italy from membership in a rival alliance system and potential foe to an active ally was completed after less than a year of neutrality. Italy's defection from the Triple Alliance was hardly a surprise to anyone with the slightest idea of Austro-Italian relations, and for over a decade before the outbreak of the war the strength of her commitment to Austria and Germany had been diluted by secret agreements with France.In Austria-Hungary leading naval and military officials took little trouble to conceal their mistrust; while unpopular measures by Habsburg officials could be counted upon to produce hostile demonstrations before the Austro-Hungarian embassy or consulates in Italy. Nevertheless, the French, although well aware of Austro-Italian friction, were never really sure of their southern neighbour and at times exhibited a suspicion of Italy which rivalled that of the Austrians. France and Italy were in a sense Mediterranean rivals and the development of the Italian fleet was followed closely by the French naval staff.

Both the Entente and the Central Powers interpreted the ascension of Benedict XV to the papal throne in the fall of 1914 as signalling a reinvigoration of Vatican foreign policy. Indeed there was little reason to expect that Giacomo Delia Chiesa, elected successor to Pius X on the morning of 3 September, would be passive in a diplomatic sense. As Rennell Rodd, the British ambassador to the Italian court remarked a few days after Benedict's election, the new Pontiff's first acts gave promise of prefacing a ‘vigorous and interesting reign.’.

During the First World War Germany had aimed at the eventual annexation of the Baltic provinces of Russia, later to become the independent Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia. After Germany had been defeated in November 1918, the young German Republic faced the task of building up relations with these small states. A new and difficult situation existed in Eastern Europe. Especially aggravating was the setting up of a large Polish state possessing areas of land which had formerly belonged to Germany. Beyond, Soviet Russia presented a great attraction to Germans who were anxious to exploit the potentially unlimited new markets and at the same time to offset some of the disadvantages created by the Treaty of Versailles. Under such circumstances the German government was anxious to obtain good relations with the Baltic states since, apart from a hostile Poland, they provided a means of indirect access to Russia. In the attempt to obtain the friendly co-operation of the Baltic states the German government was compelled to change its attitude towards the so-called ‘Baltic Germans’ who had been especially important in Latvia. This article attempts to show why such changes were considered necessary and what were the general aims behind the new German policy towards the Baltic Germans.

Until August 1914 the European powers dominated the Far East. Japan was growing rapidly in stature and strength following her victories over China in the war of 1894–5 and over Russia in the war of 1904–5 but she was not in a position to challenge the European powers. Britain was concerned primarily with maintaining the status quo in the Far East and in particular with defending British commercial supremacy in China, especially in the great Yangtze valley. These objectives had involved her in growing friction with her ally, Japan, for Japanese leaders wished their country to play a more effective political and economic role in China. The outbreak of war in August 1914 transformed the situation in the Far East. The European powers were divided and interested principally in winning the conflict in Europe. War spread to the Far East, however, as a result partly of German naval strength necessitating a British request to Japan for assistance but essentially because of Japanese determination to seize the opportunity to extend Japanese power in the region. The German fortress at Tsingtao in Shantung province of China and the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator were in Japanese hands by November 1914. The next Japanese objective was to replace European hegemony in China with Japanese hegemony and in January 1915 a list of twenty-one demands was handed to the president of the Chinese republic, Yuan Shih-k'ai. Yuan had become president after the revolution of 1911–12 which had terminated the ancient Chinese empire.

A great deal of published historical work has been devoted to establishing the causes and chronology of the demise of the Liberal party in British politics. The downfall of the Liberals has been ascribed to the inevitable outflanking development of the Labour party; to the mutilation of Liberal principles involved in waging the first ‘total’ war; to the personal rifts and feuds between the rival followers of Asquith and Lloyd George—and to various combinations of these factors. Yet there has been no detailed analysis of the division within the Parliamentary Liberal party during the First World War. Although at the end of 1916 obviously certain Liberals supported Asquith and others Lloyd George, no attempt has been made to examine the way in which the rifts in the party were reflected in political action in the House of Commons during the time of the second coalition government, nor to determine accurately the lines of division in the party. An answer to the question of ‘How did the Liberal party divide during the First World War?’ has proved elusive, although some historians of the period have been more successful than others.

‘The Power of the Man in the Saddle’: this was the burden of the Liberal chief whip's advice to David Lloyd George in April 1918. But the Prime Minister hardly needed any instruction in this theme: the uses and the limitations of power formed his absorbing passion. Even at the time many felt that his period as prime minister had marked a totally new departure in British politics. Some later commentators (most recently Mr Humphry Berkeley) have even claimed to detect the dawn of a new political era between 1916 and 1922, one in which ‘prime ministerial government’ gradually took the place of conventional cabinet government. But, despite their certainty, the precise character of Lloyd's George premiership, like the man himself, is still shrouded in mystery. Was it rule by a dictator or by a democrat? Did any consistent principle animate the ‘man in the saddle’ or was it all opportunism gone berserk ? Was Wales's Great Commoner really ‘rooted in nothing’, as Keynes was to allege? Not even Lloyd George's closest associates, Kerr and Riddell, felt able to say with any assurance. They were as baffled as the rest. Lloyd George was suddenly thrust from office in October 1922 with the issue still inconclusive. Ever since then the debate about his premiership has been passionate and unremitting. Each observer seems to have seen a different prime minister, one created in his own image. Fifty biographies on, the essential Lloyd George remains as elusive as ever. He remains the most controversial and contradictory of political animals, ‘the Big Beast’, the rogue elephant of twentieth-century prime ministers.

The 1931 General Election reduced the Parliamentary Labour Party to forty-six. Though a disappointing result, there was substantial evidence for confidence in the eventual revival of the Party; it had received over six and a half million votes and thirty per cent of the total vote cast, only seven percent less than the total vote it had received in 1929 when Labour formed a government. The departure of Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, and J. H. Thomas to join the National Government freed the Parliamentary Labour Party from the domination of an important section of its older generation. The 1931 election marked the slow transition of power from one generation to another, often an awkward moment for any political party. There was wide agreement in the party that the years after 1931 should be an interregnum period.

Histories of the Second World War rarely describe the impact of that conflagration upon the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. Such omission is not surprising, yet the German efforts to assimilate this allegedly Germanic borderland reveal interesting aspects of National Socialist totalitarian methods.

The best chances of a negotiated peace during the First World War lay with the President of the United States. Woodrow Wilson's efforts were abortive, but he made some very interesting moves. The most sensational was his note to the belligerents in December 1916, requesting them to state their peace terms—a move which seemed all the more provocative in Allied countries because it followed upon the heels of the German Chancellor's proposal to negotiate. The main purpose of this article is to examine the British Government's reactions to the President's note. A secondary purpose is to criticize some important points of interpretation made by Professors A. S. Link and Ernest May.

The countries of south-eastern Europe at the beginning of the last war were caught, as they themselves put it with as much self-deprecation as fear, between the Axis hammer and the Russian anvil. There was almost a touch of defiance in their description, as if the extraordinarily high odds against their survival confirmed in their eyes their claim to national independence and to world attention. In fact over the 20 years of their existence they had made a virtue of the politics of Kleinstaaterei, of the fact that their destiny was determined not by themselves but by the Great Powers surrounding them. The Balkan states were creatures of Great Power politics and, with an unerring appreciation of their dependence on powerful neighbours, they looked to London or Paris or Rome or Berlin or Moscow for sustenance and direction. And yet—and this is the crucial paradox—they continued to harbour, side by side with their acknowledged dependence on the Great Powers, a deeply felt longing for collective independence and for political self-sufficiency. This paper is concerned with the desperate attempts of the Balkan countries in the autumn of 1939 to harmonize these conflicting requirements by promoting collective independence in the form of a bloc of neutrals under the leadership of a Great Power.