Paris in 1919 was a site of remarkable innovations in the reinvention of international order. A wide range of actors set out new ways of thinking about international politics, established innovative institutions and transformed the conduct of international relations. We can count among the most notable innovations not only the long-maligned League of Nations, but also the first international disarmament commission, the foundation of the International Labour Organization, and the setting up of a mandate system which, in theory at least, was intended to curtail imperial sovereignty. Then there was the dramatic expansion of public opinion and popular discourse on war and peace during the Great War, legitimising more popular participation in international politics. The politics of peacemaking called into question the organising principles of international politics. Even as sovereign states and material power remained at the core of international politics, ideas about self-determination and international law now shaped decision-making in unprecedented ways. So significant were the changes in the new international order that power politics no longer provided a source of legitimacy for international policy and could no longer serve as the fundamental logic for the territorial settlements that emerged from great power negotiations. This was a radical departure from the nineteenth-century practices that shaped the peace settlements of 1815, 1856 and 1871.

Despite these innovations, Paris is rarely mentioned in the same conversation as other transformative sites of international order such as Westphalia, Vienna, Bretton Woods or Bandung.Footnote ¹ The reasons for the absence of Paris from the list are not difficult to fathom – a history of bitter ratification debates, disillusioned participants, and a second global war have long cast the Paris peace settlements as failures. Versailles, the palace in which the Peace Treaty of Paris was signed, remains a derogatory term in the disciplinary lexicon of international relations (IR), where peacemaking in 1919 has become synonymous with failure and contrasted with allegedly more successful moments of peacemaking in 1815 and 1945, which are judged truly transformative moments in the history of international order.Footnote ² More recently, historians have recast the 1920s as a post-war era of reconstruction, highlighting the long-term legacies of peacemaking in 1919 as the ‘Wilsonian moment’, or rescuing from opprobrium its major institutional outcome, the League of Nations.Footnote ³ Nonetheless, the significance of the Paris peace in the scholarship on international order remains obscure.Footnote ⁴ It is the work of this volume to underscore the contribution of historians engaging with the distinctive and diverse dimensions of this new international order, not least who got to shape it, and how, while also insisting on the importance of this history for how we understand the fate of the international order through the twentieth century.

The Problem of International Order

Before examining the specific contexts and implications of the Paris peace settlements, let us first turn to the ‘slippery’ concept of international order.Footnote ⁵ The number of scholarly publications with ‘order’ in their title is formidable and seems to increase daily. Yet most of these studies do not define precisely what is meant by ‘order’. International relations scholars Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit remark on the difficulties inherent in providing a clear definition of this fundamental concept.Footnote ⁶ At a minimum, IR scholars understand international order as characterised by predictable and relatively stable patterns of relations between actors in a given international context. When these relations become unpredictable, when the rules and norms that underpin them are no longer observed, the result is ‘disorder’. But the nature of international political order, the conditions under which it emerges, the way it functions and how it ends, are matters of enduring controversy.

‘Realists’ depart from the assumption of an anarchical international system (the absence of an overarching political authority in world politics). States (including empires) compete with one another in an endless competition for security. Order emerges as the product of power-balancing dynamics between states. The balance of power thus provides an underlying logic which should lead states to act in predictable ways.Footnote ⁷ For Robert Gilpin, an influential realist theorist, the rules and norms that characterize a given order are a reflection of the distribution of power among its members. The most powerful (usually hegemonic) states create the rules and dictate the prevailing logic of orders in order to protect their interests. The rise and fall of international orders thus reflects the power transitions within the system of states. Orders break down when their chief sponsors no longer possess the material power to enforce them. The result is invariably war and the emergence of a new order fashioned by the victors. The Paris peace settlements, Gilpin argued, were doomed from the outset by the failure to ‘reflect the new realities of the balance of power’.Footnote ⁸ Ordering, for Gilpin and for IR realism more generally, is a practice of state power.

Another IR approach goes beyond realism to explore the role of shared expectations, rules and institutions in regulating international politics. ‘Liberal institutionalists’ incorporate non-state as well as state actors into their conception of order. This approach attaches great importance to the fact that states often cooperate to mitigate the effects of anarchy. Many of the rules and norms that shape state behaviour promote collaboration rather than conformation. States sometimes go further to create institutions, the most common of which are diplomacy, international law and international organisations, that enable or facilitate consultation and provide structures for cooperation in a given international order. Power remains central to the institutionalist approach. The most powerful states have the most say in shaping institutions and making and altering the rules and laws that give the international order in question its specific character and logic. Members choose to adhere to the rules to benefit from the stability and security on offer and to avoid the costs of non-adherence. And when the most powerful members of the order are no longer willing or able to enforce its rules and laws, the result is virtually always collapse and usually war. Crucially, and in contrast to the realist vision, the operating assumption is that liberal democratic states are more inclined towards restraint and institutionalised cooperation in the interests of peace and stability. Woodrow Wilson’s efforts at the Paris Peace Conference remain a touchstone in much of the institutionalist literature as the first attempt to place democracy and self-determination at the heart of international practices. This first iteration of ‘Wilsonianism’ is characterised as the necessary antecedent to the post-1945 ‘rules-based’ international order.Footnote ⁹

The ‘English School’ of IR similarly attributes great importance to rules and institutions – especially diplomacy – in regulating state behaviour and shaping international order. English School scholars conceptualise order as constituting an ‘international society’ that is exclusive and therefore defined as much by the actors that are ‘inside’ and those that are ‘outside’ the order in question. A minimum level of shared values and understandings is required for an ‘international society’ to constitute order. The Paris peace settlements, according to this school, failed to create a durable international society. The result was a dysfunctional order.Footnote ¹⁰ Sharp distinctions are drawn between the historical existence of ‘international’ orders and the much more formidable challenge of creating a ‘world’ or ‘global’ order (where the survival and prospects of humanity as a whole are the prime motivation for ordering).Footnote ¹¹

Barry Buzan and Amitav Acharya explore concepts of order across both centuries and civilisations. In a comparative study of Chinese, Indian and Islamic international thought, Buzan and Acharya note that contemporary theorising about international politics within these civilisations draws on cultural traditions that go back hundreds and even thousands of years.Footnote ¹² A key distinction between thinking about order in these three cases and ‘western’ theories of IR is that ‘hierarchy’ is much more important than ‘anarchy’. This is attributed, in part, to the fact that all three civilisations for much of their existence developed as empires with limited regular contact with other polities of similar size and power (and thus limited knowledge of the world beyond their frontiers).Footnote ¹³

The result, particularly in the Chinese case, is an intellectual tradition more amenable to ‘relational’ theories of order that emphasise the extent to which actors are to an important extent constituted by their relations with other actors in a given political realm.Footnote ¹⁴ At the same time, Buzan and Acharya also identify ‘structural similarities of pursuing survival, wealth and power’ when Islamic, Chinese and Indian civilisations encountered actors that posed a challenge to their imperial interests.Footnote ¹⁵ This suggests that competition and conflict are inevitable features of international politics across time, space and civilisational divides.

A recent book by Daniel Nexon and Alexander Cooley offers a more schematic framework for thinking about order that distinguishes between the architecture of a given order (the rules, norms and values it is designed to defend and project) and its infrastructure (the practices and relationships that are the lifeblood of the order). Institutions in this conception constitute the sinews of the order and provide sites for contestation as well as cooperation between states and non-state actors. Rather than being either manifestations of the existing distribution of power (realism) or frameworks to enable and promote cooperation (liberal institutionalism), orders are conceptualised as dynamic arenas where actors deploy various forms of power in pursuit of their aims. The establishment of the League of Nations was an important innovation, but the absence of the United States from the League and other fundamental flaws, argued Nexon and Cooley, meant that the Paris peace settlements proved a mere interregnum between two global wars rather than a durable international order.Footnote ¹⁶

Scholars of international law take a different approach. Many are inclined to view law as a necessary precondition for international political order. According to one account, the study of international law is ‘the scientific study of the emergence of order out of chaos’.Footnote ¹⁷ The tendency to understand international law as a core element of peaceful and stable political relations can be traced back to Yuan Dynasty China. The early modern development of legal theory by figures such as Gentili, Grotius and de Vattel laid the foundations for the emergence of international law as a distinct profession and academic discipline in the latter half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ Even those legal experts who acknowledge that law is but one of several ways to approach the problem of international order tend nonetheless to describe it as ‘a means of governing relations between sovereign states’. ‘Constituting order’ remains the core function of international law.Footnote ¹⁹ The influential jurist and scholar Hermann Mosler argued that ‘legal force’ is the core binding element in international order. ‘[T]he public order of the international community’, according to Mosler, ‘consists of principles and rules the enforcement of which is of such vital importance that any unilateral action or agreement which contravenes these principles can have no legal force.’Footnote ²⁰

International lawyers differ from one another, however, over big questions such as the sources and nature of international law. Is international law essentially a manifestation of the shared interests of the political actors in a given order? Or does it owe its authority to principles of justice and rights that exist independently of those interests and are applicable ‘regardless of time and space’?Footnote ²¹ There are interesting parallels between these debates and those in IR theory. As in IR theory, anarchy is a core structuring concept in international law. International lawyers generally agree that the defining dilemma for law in the international system is the lack of a ‘higher guarantor’ of the rule of law in the international realm (as opposed to the domestic context).Footnote ²²

‘Realist’ international lawyers argue that the use of law to legitimate empire was inevitable because law depends for its legitimacy and authority on power dynamics in the international realm and in particular the willingness of leading states to enforce it. International law is therefore an instrument for order, but not necessarily for justice. ‘Formalists’, on the other hand, argue that international law is exercised most effectively through the power and authority of international institutions. According to this school of interpretation, in order to be legitimate, law must be as a source of justice as well as order. Realists offer a ‘thin’ conception of law and order in which international law at best can only ever be a mitigator of anarchy. Formalists, conversely, advocate a ‘thick’ conception in which international law rests on an authoritative regime that exists beyond the state.

Over the past three decades scholars have underlined the ways liberal theories of international law provided justification for imperial expansion and colonial subjugation. Non-white peoples were excluded from the ‘law of nations’ in order to provide a cover of legal legitimacy for practices of empire and exploitation. This work has illuminated the ways in which liberal legal practices embedded structural asymmetries in the international political order of the ‘long’ nineteenth century that continue to shape international politics into the twenty-first century.Footnote ²³

Historians have devoted more attention to the origins and ends of international orders as well as their evolution over time. Yet most historical studies of order agree that the ends of major wars represent the most important moments. James Sheehan observes that the means used to win such wars determine the orders that emerge in their aftermath.Footnote ²⁴ Yet historians disagree on the nature and character of international orders. Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman point to a widespread belief during the eighteenth century that the distribution of power gave political orders a self-regulating character that did not require design. Drawing on the natural sciences, thinkers saw institutions such as the market and balance of power as having a ‘natural dynamic equilibrium’.Footnote ²⁵ Adam Tooze similarly considers that international orders are fashioned fundamentally by the distribution of military and economic power. Dismissing the concept of ‘collective design’, Tooze insists instead that international orders are fashioned by ‘cruder calculations of power and material constraints’. Tooze argues that ‘the remaking of global order’ after 1918 reflected a ‘new order of power’.Footnote ²⁶

These interpretations are in line with the thesis of Paul Kennedy, that the evolution of international order reflects the rise and fall of great powers. Kennedy argued that the population size and economic base of member powers constitute the structure of a given order. He further submits that the decline of major powers and change in the international order is accelerated by ‘imperial overstretch’ – the tendency of great powers to assume ever more ambitious strategic commitments that eventually become too great for their economic base to support. The decline of a major power leads to instability, war and the overthrow of the existing order. The mismatch between the claims of a liberal world order and underlying realities of power was particularly acute after 1919. Kennedy emphasised the ‘fragile’ structures of post-1919 politics, including colonial nationalists’ challenge to empire, the residual potential of German power, changing commercial and trade structures, and America’s retreat from an active role in regulating the European balance of power.Footnote ²⁷ Former policy-maker and theorist of realpolitik Henry Kissinger offers a similar view but attaches more importance to rules and norms. Kissinger contends that all ‘systems of order’ are based on two constituent elements. The first is ‘a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action’ and the second is ‘a balance of power that enforces restraint where rules break down’.Footnote ²⁸ For Kissinger, power underpins order.

Some historians attribute greater importance to ideas and beliefs and are more alive to the way international orders are imagined, negotiated and constructed. Among the most influential is Paul Schroeder, who attributes decisive agency to political and policy elites in the creation and evolution of political orders. Schroeder’s conception of order emphasises the fundamental role of ‘shared understandings, assumptions, learned skills and responses, rules, norms and procedures etc., which agents acquire and use in pursuing their individual aims within the framework of a shared practice’.Footnote ²⁹ Interestingly, Schroeder also embraced a systemic perspective that assumed wars happen not because of the blunders or miscalculations of individual policy-makers or states, but rather because of the nature of the international order itself. While political actors have agency in the shaping of a given order, it is the character of the order they create together that makes conflict more or less likely. Schroeder was unequivocal in proposing that an order based on multilateral institutions and restraint is preferable to an adversarial one based on the balance of power. ‘Any government’, he observed, ‘is restrained better and more safely by friends and allies than by opponents or enemies.’Footnote ³⁰

Schroeder’s framework for understanding international order has been enormously influential. Recent studies by Patrick Cohrs and Peter Jackson have drawn on Schroeder to understand efforts to construct a ‘trans-Atlantic order’ after 1918.Footnote ³¹ Other historians have attached great importance to the ideological content of international orders. For Arno Mayer, the post-1917 order was characterised above all by the confrontation between Bolshevik advocacy of international revolution, on the one hand, and the liberal capitalist response, on the other.Footnote ³² Or Rosenboim, meanwhile, interrogates the conceptual underpinnings of liberal visions of order. Still others focus on liberal visions of imperial order founded on race.Footnote ³³ Glenda Sluga takes a broader view in her study of the early nineteenth-century origins of the present liberal international order. In doing so, Sluga expands the parameters of the concept to include the interplay between the national and the international levels of politics as well as the impact of public attitudes and perceptions on individual and collective practices. Her approach to understanding order captures the influence of class, gender and racial norms, not only on the worldviews of individual actors but also on the institutions they created to enable consultation, preserve peace and perpetuate the social and political order. Sluga argues that the influence of liberal ideology on ordering after 1814 not only embedded capitalist economic institutions and practices in the international system; it also contributed to the progressive marginalisation of women and non-Europeans in that same system.Footnote ³⁴

There is, therefore, little consensus on either the nature or the character of international order. There is even debate as to what terminology should be used. Buzan and Acharya argue that the term ‘international order’ is unhelpfully ‘linked to the Westphalian type of interstate order’. It should therefore be abandoned in favour of the broader concept of ‘global order’. This argument is not persuasive. It is based on an ahistorical and outmoded understanding of the ‘Westphalian order’ as having inaugurated an international system constituted by sovereign territorial states.Footnote ³⁵ The ‘international’, as it is used in this volume, denotes the space beyond domestic politics where political actors of various kinds conduct relations with one another. This usage reflects in part the transformations in the history of international relations over the past three decades. The practice of international history has expanded well beyond the – still important – domain of state-to-state or imperial relations to embrace the roles of international institutions, non- and sub-state actors as well as transnational movements and regional dynamics.Footnote ³⁶

Despite the lack of a widely accepted definition, it is possible to identify three common characteristics of virtually all international orders. The first is the distribution of various types of power. The economic, military and cultural resources of individual actors constitute currencies of power that determine, to a great extent, the positions they occupy within the order and, crucially, their ability to impose their own interests on the functioning of that order. This aspect of order is often understood as hierarchy.Footnote ³⁷ But thinking about an order as a ‘field’ of action better captures the dynamics at work. States and other types of international organisations occupy specific ‘positions’ within the field that are reflections of their material and cultural resources. Those actors with the greatest resources are best positioned to shape the rules, norms and procedures that determine the functioning of the order.Footnote ³⁸

A second fundamental characteristic of international orders are the ‘logics’ that condition relations between members and provide the ‘rules of the game’. These logics are often expressed in terms of rules, norms, shared values and common interests. They are internalised by actors to the extent that they often acquire a ‘taken-for-granted’ status and serve as bases for social action.Footnote ³⁹ A given logic influences, but does not determine, the limits of action available to members of the order in question. The overriding logic of a given order can be consultative (the Concert of Europe) or adversarial (the balance of power). A consultative logic is not necessarily normatively preferable to a logic of power balancing. Political orders resting on common interests, rules and institutions can promote diverse international practices from peace and human rights to imperial conquest and colonial domination.

The third characteristic of virtually all international orders is the institutions that exist to facilitate and regulate relations between actors. Historically, the most influential institutions have been diplomacy, international law (which embeds the commercial and financial architecture of the order), international organisations and transnational non-governmental and civil society organisations. These various institutions are the product of negotiation. While they tend for the most part to reflect the interests of the most powerful states within the order, they are also often shaped by norms and values and can constitute vehicles for bringing about international change. This is clear from the nineteenth-century emergence not only of institutions for the regulation of common standards for weights and measurements, telegraphic communications and public health, but also the creation of transnational associations to promote peace, human rights and the rights of minorities and refugees.

It is important to recognise that the constituent elements of a given order are neither static nor permanent. They are always to a greater or less extent in flux as the relative power resources of individual actors change and as institutions evolve as a result of the permanent process of negotiation. Together they provide a framework for analysing the inner dynamics that give orders their ‘predictable’ and ‘stable’ effects.

The Historiographical Context

The Paris peace settlement has often been deemed an exemplary case of the failure to make an international order. With the ink scarcely dry on the Treaty of Versailles. John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace over three months in a sustained rage at what he considered the vindictiveness and short-sightedness of the peace terms. The result was ‘perhaps the most successful published polemic of the twentieth century’ that denounced the Versailles treaty as a ‘Carthaginian Peace’ that had destroyed all prospects for peace and reconciliation in the post-war era.Footnote ⁴⁰ More than a century after its publication, The Economic Consequences of the Peace remains a massive presence in the historiographical landscape and continues to shape popular understandings of the peace conference despite the fact that its core arguments have long since been rejected by the great majority of historians working on this period.Footnote ⁴¹ Decades of detailed historical research drawing on newly opened archives, emphasising the constraints under which peacemakers laboured and underlining the achievements of the conference, have had limited impact. A persistent association of the Treaty of Versailles with severity, disorder and discarded ideals also remains prominent in interdisciplinary discussions of the problem of international order.

Yet, among historians, critical assessments of the peace settlement began to give way to more nuanced judgements from the late 1970s. Scholars such as Sally Marks, Pierre Miquel, Charles Maier, Marc Trachtenberg, Stephen Schuker, Georges-Henri Soutou, Antony Lentin and Alan Sharp underlined the social and cultural impact of the war and in different ways emphasised the ambitious and open-ended character of the peace terms. This cycle of research was summarised in the landmark volume The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, edited by Manfred Boemeke, Gerald Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser and published in 1998.Footnote ⁴² The appearance of Margaret Macmillan’s Peacemakers in 2001 was arguably the capstone of this revisionist project. Macmillan emphasised the pressure of time, the risk of famine, the social unrest and sometimes mutinous soldiers, factors which limited political leaders’ freedom of manoeuvre. She also stressed the scale of their achievements and dismissed claims that the peace treaties led to the Second World War. While she acknowledged the shortcomings of the treaties, Macmillan argued that the problems of the 1920s and 1930s were rooted in the realities of political power, not the failings of diplomacy in Paris in 1919.Footnote ⁴³

Since the millennium, two significant moves have reshaped our understanding of the Paris peace conferences and their place in accounts of international order. Zara Steiner’s The Lights that Failed marked the first shift. She gave the most comprehensive account of the 1920s as a post-war decade, during which political leaders and others worked to establish a peaceful international system. ‘The treaty of Versailles was unquestionably flawed’, she argued, ‘but the treaty in itself did not shatter the peace that it established.’ Instead, she directed attention towards what she termed the ‘hinge years’ between 1929 and 1933, which marked the path from the process of reconstruction and peacemaking after the First World War to the conditions that led to the Second World War.Footnote ⁴⁴ Steiner’s work on the interwar period defies summary, but it led historians to view peacemaking not as a point in time, but as a process that stretched beyond 1919 and to take seriously internationalist prescriptions to resolve security dilemmas. In this vein, historians have revised views of French security policy, Italian foreign policy, Central European politics, Anglo-American diplomacy towards Europe, the League of Nations, international law and disarmament. Their work emphasises the imaginative and constructive efforts to make and sustain peace in the 1920s.Footnote ⁴⁵

The second intervention was reflected in Erez Manela’s book, The Wilsonian Moment. Manela showed how the anti-colonial nationalists in India, Korea, China and Egypt took Wilsonian rhetoric about self-determination and fashioned it into a language that challenged imperial domination.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although empires survived these nationalist challenges in 1919, Manela argues that the roots of decolonization after 1945 are located in the First World War. The disappointments of Paris fuelled longer-term change in the international order. Manela’s argument drew attention to several issues for international historians. First, he brought a wide range of actors into the foreground of the action at Paris. Peace was negotiated not only among the diplomats, soldiers and political leaders, but it was also produced by activists, networks and crowds.Footnote ⁴⁷ Second, his book intersected with the rise of global history. Global history challenged Eurocentric views of international politics and directed attention to transnational networks and the flows of ideas around the world. The global dimensions of the Paris settlements and pressure ‘from below’ on international politics has attracted work on issues, including the struggle for women’s rights, citizen diplomacy, labour organisations and humanitarianism.Footnote ⁴⁸ Third, Manela directed renewed attention to Woodrow Wilson’s ideas. Coinciding with the emergence of the history of international political thought as a distinct field of scholarly research, Manela’s analysis of the dissemination of Wilson’s ideas reflected a growing appreciation of the importance of ideas in constituting the international order.Footnote ⁴⁹

By diversifying the social, chronological and geographical frameworks within which the peace settlement has been assessed, these works have enabled historians to think anew about the place of 1919 in the making of international order. Breaking down the classical chronological schema, with its markers of 1919, 1933 and 1939, enables historians to trace the significance of moments, peoples and processes that did not fit easily into a narrative founded on European great power politics. Tracing the ‘continuity of conversations’ across time and space provides potential for more histories of international politics to develop, so that Paris 1919 becomes a fulcrum, or a ‘Ground Zero’, to adapt Natasha Wheatley’s phrase, in explaining international order and its institutions, law and commerce, popular participation and international political thought.Footnote ⁵⁰

The centenary has provided the occasion to take stock of the Paris peace settlements and set them in a wider perspective. To the extent that one may discern a trend in the literature that has emerged, there is evidence of a return to a more critical position, with greater emphasis on the failure of peacemakers to establish a functioning order.Footnote ⁵¹ Stella Ghervas distinguishes between the Paris peace conferences, which ‘reversed the progress made toward peacemaking of the post-Napoleonic era’, and the League of Nations, ‘an ambitious and innovative’ project to make and sustain a peaceful European order. In fusing the League with peace treaties, Ghervas argues, the peacemakers at Paris undermined the legitimacy of the former.Footnote ⁵² Several scholars advance new arguments to connect the failure of post-war peacemaking with international upheaval in the 1930s and 1940s. In Adam Tooze’s account, the combination of American exceptionalism and narrow self-interest doomed the promise of international stability and opened the way for the revisionist challenge of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and fascist Italy in the 1930s.Footnote ⁵³ Patrick Cohrs has underlined a failure to agree on ‘the principles, ground-rules and political foundations of the new order’ after 1918.Footnote ⁵⁴ Robert Gerwarth, in his work on the wars that ravaged much of Europe between 1917 and 1923, argues that the peacemakers in Paris fell well short of their ideal of ‘a peaceful and lasting world order.’ Instead, the ethnic conflicts and irredentist claims that pockmarked Central and Eastern European politics in 1918 and 1919 anticipated the ideas and practices that informed the Nazi regime and its ‘overtly exterminationist imperial project’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Two recent accounts from a global history perspective by Jörn Leonhard and Eckart Conze argue for the open-ended process of peacemaking after 1918, but still strike a pessimistic note. In particular, they show how the injection of ideology into international politics, particularly from 1916, undermined the making of peace. Conze argues that the range of peace projects, the advent of revolutionary Bolshevism in Russia and the complexity of collapsing multinational empires cramped the capacity of the peacemakers to fashion a new world order. He points to the flaws in the League of Nations, which failed to provide France with security, stabilised racial and imperial privilege, and excluded key states.Footnote ⁵⁶ Leonhard also zooms in on 1918 and 1919 as a moment of openness, a ‘unique possibility of change’. Nonetheless, this very sense of openness heightened people’s perception of risk. Politicians were constrained by social realities and public opinion, continued violence around much of the world and their own public pronouncements. He concludes by showing how visions of the future became divorced from the liberal progressive ideas, characteristic of the nineteenth century, opening the space for radical, and often violent, projects of the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁵⁷ Klaus Schwabe’s account argues that the moral dimension of Anglo-American peacemaking produced a fatal contradiction between idealism and power politics, which excluded Germany, Russia and Turkey from the post-war order. The Treaty of Lausanne, rid of moral overtones, offered a successful counter-example of peacemaking in Europe after 1919.Footnote ⁵⁸

The Post-1918 International Order

These shifting historiographical approaches, particularly the emphasis on the institutional innovations, the importance of ideas, popular participation and the global scope, provide an opportunity to reassess the significance of the Paris peace settlements in the making of international order. The contributors to this volume explore the rich variety of ways in which international order was imagined, negotiated and constructed in the aftermath of the First World War. What ordering concepts were available to peacemakers? Which actors possessed the necessary power and authority to impose their visions of post-war order? What were the effects of ordering concepts, institutions and actors on outcomes in international politics? The contributors do not endorse a single interpretation or answer. But their contributions are guided by these questions, including whether there were rules and institutions that meaningfully shaped an international order that went beyond ‘the claims of state sovereignty and national egotism’ that have conventionally defined our understanding.Footnote ⁵⁹ While histories of peacemaking in Paris – whether written by historians or IR scholars – long focused on its ‘outcomes’, this volume is devoted to understanding the connections between the experiences of war, the proliferation of world-making projects and the kinds of international order produced by the peace settlements.

Contributions to this volume consider the role of non-state actors in the making of peace, with chapters on transnational networks of feminist internationalists, colonial nationalists and international socialist organisations, as well as the participation of ordinary citizens in what Carl Bouchard calls the ‘Great Conversation’. We devote Part II of the book to the institutional architecture of peacemaking and international order – the dramatic experiments of the League of Nations and international disarmament commission and the reversion to well-established practices by centralising decision-making in the Council of Four. Several chapters focus on international finance and raw materials and underline the absence of international institutions to regulate and manage global economic interdependence. Others take their cue from a dynamic new international intellectual history and analyse the relationship between key ordering concepts, such as self-determination, sovereignty, international law, and power and the peace settlement. At the same time, states remained the most powerful actors in international politics. The most powerful states exercised decisive influence over the settlement that emerged, not least because of their power to ascribe practical meaning to new concepts of collective security and self-determination. Thomas Otte (Chapter 16) questions to what extent the core practices of international politics altered after 1918, while Martin Thomas (Chapter 6) examines how liberal internationalist ideas and institutions facilitated the ‘exploitative governance’ and state violence that enforced imperial rule.

The premise here is that the construction of international order in Paris was a complex negotiation and accumulation of ideas, norms, institutions and interests, many of which dated from before 1914, some of which were new. While ideas and institutions generated their own dynamics, and enabled new ways of practising international politics as well as new resources for the exercise of power, actors adapted language for strategic purposes and sought to mould institutions to their own advantage. By the mid-1920s these processes and innovations had begun to produce stability and peace on the European continent. And yet, similar to much-vaunted orders such as the Vienna system or the present ‘rules-based’ liberal international order, the international order after 1919 was incomplete, ‘bounded’ and Euro-centric, shot through with contradictions, and never entirely stable. Nonetheless, as the chapters show, it also proved innovative and flexible, and its legacies endured beyond the conventional chronological markers of 1939 and 1945, shaping the conduct of international politics throughout the twentieth century.

Experiencing War, Thinking Peace

If it is a truism among IR scholars that new international orders emerge in the wake of hegemonic wars, most historians contend that the making of a particular order is a process of construction and does not simply reflect the distribution of material power at the end of the war. Wars have altered thinking about international order. Major wars have even provided the backdrop for some of the most notable European thinking about peace, such as Abbé de Saint Pierre’s Projet de paix perpétuelle and Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace.Footnote ⁶⁰ The First World War was distinctive for the range of people who produced visions of peace and how they produced those visions, from commissioned artwork to scribbled letters. Ways of thinking about peace were also distinctive, expanding the meaning of peace from the legal ending of war to more far-reaching projects to design all kinds of social relations. In some cases, there was a self-conscious focus on the capacity of institutions to transform political behaviour, even human nature.Footnote ⁶¹ European and non-European political leaders alike produced comprehensive visions of future peace to justify wartime mobilisation. As we will see, these included reordering projects that focused on the management of international political and economic relations, alongside a desire to limit the chaotic effects of war, or even legitimate race equality, a new vision of the economy which favoured casting off state regulation and wartime cartels.Footnote ⁶²

The new demands for order reflected not only the ambitions of a political elite, but also experts who saw in the promise of nascent social sciences the potential to know the world and therefore regulate it. Throughout the nineteenth century, scientists and engineers had engaged in an ongoing project to subordinate nature to the aims of governments, business, settlers and others. Social scientists, bureaucrats, progressive reformers, revolutionaries, eugenicists – a whole array of people believed that the application of knowledge to social issues could order society and limit or even eliminate conflict. These assumptions were manifest in the late nineteenth century among diplomats, professional experts and campaigners who established institutions and promoted ideas to facilitate international cooperation in specific areas, such as copyright and communications. These developments in turn reflected the thickening connections that bound societies together and laid the basis for more ambitious international-scale social and economic projects during and after the First World War.

Making international order demanded choices not only about the design of institutions to regulate conflict, but also the principles underlying legitimate political action and the right to representation and participation in international politics. These categories overlapped and sometimes even constituted each other. So, even though it is not difficult to identify decisions that violated the precepts of the new principles, it is also significant that departures from norms required justifications. Indeed looking at a much wider range of actors, ideas and institutions suggests that 1919 represented a critical moment in the evolution of both decolonisation and feminist internationalism.Footnote ⁶³

The escalating violence of the war, along with the growing sacrifices demanded of belligerent societies, combined to undermine the legitimacy of traditional power politics. Failure either to prevent the outbreak of war or to achieve a negotiated settlement to end the fighting created the conditions for the ideological and geopolitical revolutions of 1917.Footnote ⁶⁴ The totalising logic of societal mobilisation connected everyday life to cabinet politics in ways that were unprecedented. Representations of the war as a crusade for international law, self-determination and, after 1917, democracy tended to erode the frontier between domestic and international order and created expectations that framed the peace negotiations.Footnote ⁶⁵

Ordinary citizens considered themselves entitled to a voice in the making of peace and even wrote their own projects for a new world order. These projects were wide-ranging because the most intimate human relationships were interwoven with and altered by the war. Popular opinion in belligerent countries tended to associate peacemaking with the remaking of daily life and reform of all kinds of social relations in both the domestic and international spheres.Footnote ⁶⁶ Wider participation embedded conflicts in the new international order, while simultaneously creating new modes of resolving conflict. For example, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) worked to overcome war cultures, while challenging the assumption that international politics was a masculine sphere.Footnote ⁶⁷ The participation of ordinary citizens, colonial nationalists, feminist internationalists and labour activists in international politics was an opportunity to strengthen the international order by co-opting popular support, but also created expectations that, in the context of 1919, were unlikely to be met.

Political elites within all belligerent states responded to new pressures to justify wartime sacrifices by articulating comprehensive visions of future peace.Footnote ⁶⁸ The result was an extraordinarily diverse array of projects to remake both domestic and international order, from revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat to the creation of new institutions for the management of international political and economic relations.Footnote ⁶⁹ Many of these projects, and the networks supporting them, existed before 1914. As the Great War drew to a close, as Smith argues, political leaders ‘sought to create the reality they purported to describe’.Footnote ⁷⁰ But the experience of the war and the manner of its ending – civil war and revolution, the shatterzone of empires, humanitarian crises – had a radicalising effect that, in Eastern Europe in particular, favoured more radical solutions to the problem of order and created the political conditions for enduring violence.

Recent work on the post-war period has emphasised the significance of persistent paramilitary and political violence across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as large swathes of Russia, the Caucasus and Asia Minor after the armistice.Footnote ⁷¹ Robert Gerwath, one of the leading figures in this new literature, stresses the need to ‘go beyond a narrow engagement with the negotiations in Paris and the Versailles Treaty in particular’ to consider the very considerable disorder that prevailed beyond Western Europe. Along with a number of other scholars, Gerwath argues that we must recast the classic 1914–18 chronology of the Great War to include hostilities that began in 1911 and subsided only in 1923.Footnote ⁷²

This scholarship on post-war disorder has added new dimensions to our understanding of this era of the Great War. But endemic political violence in the former imperial borderlands did not determine the international system after 1918. By bringing an end to more than four years of a great power war of unprecedented scale and intensity, the armistice created the political space for the ambitious renegotiation of political order that took place in Paris. What is more, new norms and practices introduced at the peace conference, including self-determination, sovereignty and plebiscites, provided a logic and a framework within which much of the violence in the borderlands took place.Footnote ⁷³ Ordering in Paris did not bring an end to disorder elsewhere. But it was pivotal in establishing the wider context within which political violence played out in Europe and beyond.

The Politics of the New International Order

In 1919, peacemaking was a complex political process that began long before delegates reached Paris and remained a work in progress after the principals had left. Major decisions about territory, security and the international economy were postponed and these issues dogged the path from war to peace throughout the 1920s. It took time for new institutions created as part of the settlement to find their role and some, such as the Permanent Court of International Justice, were marginalised. Indeed, the peace treaties did not mark the end of violence in many regions of the world. Empires systematically denied juridical protection to their subjects, whose lived experience was characterised by violence. Most ‘post-war’ periods are shaped by continued violence and upheaval (for example, revolts in Italy and Spain after the Vienna Congress or the establishment of dictatorships and ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe after 1945). These conditions were also intrinsic to the new international order, and reflect how experiences of order and disorder are subjective and practices of ordering can be violent and oppressive as well as peaceful and conciliatory.

Historians have long noted the delegitimising effects of the absences of Germany and Soviet Russia from the peace settlement. These absences also limited the resources and political will to sustain collective action. Soviet leaders challenged the ideological underpinnings of the settlement, whereas German leaders used the language of self-determination and disarmament to pursue their own agenda for change and to delegimitise a peace settlement that was being imposed on Germany. Even before the United States Senate rejected the treaty, its refusal to underwrite international economic cooperation and Wilson’s handling of crises over Fiume and Shantung raised questions about the capacity, indeed the will, of American diplomacy to manage the international order. On the other hand, the international order proved able to accommodate change, including the integration of Germany in the mid-1920s, supported by American financial diplomacy. Iraq joined the League in 1932, while imperial conferences recognised the autonomy of dominions within the British empire.

As we show in this volume, popular mobilisation characterised the construction of the international order in 1919. Groups often excluded from participation in international politics became part of the ‘great conversation’. In other words, the conversations in cafes, in markets and in people’s homes constituted an expanded public sphere. The act of writing letters to leaders, notably the US President Wilson, reflected people’s sense of their own right to participate – people from a range of countries, whether imperial, colonial or post-colonial. Such transnational popular adulation bolstered Wilson’s power in early 1919, but it came with expectations of transformation. These expectations persisted after the treaties were signed as ordinary citizens from around the world continued to write letters in their thousands to the League of Nations, often in the form of petitions.

Letters and other practices of popular mobilisation placed diverse issues on the agenda of high politics, from racial equality and women’s rights to disarmament.Footnote ⁷⁴ The expansion of public opinion did not move peacemaking in one particular direction; rather, it allowed groups to stake claims, sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting with each other. For example, some feminist activists deployed civilisational hierarchies to colonial questions, while other feminist groups, such as the Wafd Women’s Committee in Egypt, criticised their exclusion from politics at the hands of male colonial nationalists.Footnote ⁷⁵

At first glance, the achievements of the feminist activists who gathered in Paris were limited as they failed to secure female representation in the peace negotiations. Though inter-allied women delegates presented proposals to the Labour Commission, there were no female voting delegates at the International Labour Organization’s inaugural meeting in November 1919. These delegates and other feminist activists contributed to a broader imagination of what constituted peace and international politics, one that embraced health, education, human trafficking and disarmament, and also the fundamentally ‘international’ status of the rights of women. Yet even though Article 7 of the Covenant opened employment opportunities for women in the League of Nations, the Council of Ten refused to legitimate the international as an appropriate domain in general for addressing the woman question.Footnote ⁷⁶ Similarly colonial nationalists strategically used Wilsonian rhetoric to advance their claims, but many did not even make it to Paris. Britain blocked the travel of members of the Indian National Congress and arrested the Egyptian nationalist leader, Saad Zaghlul. Imperial authorities violently suppressed protests and revolts in Korea, Egypt and India, while the Chinese delegation refused to sign the peace treaty amid popular outcry in China at the terms.

The international order accommodated and arguably strengthened imperial regimes. Yet it also created space for colonial nationalist movements to challenge the legitimacy of imperial rule. Paradoxically, therefore, 1919 is a pivotal moment in the histories of both imperial expansion and decolonisation.Footnote ⁷⁷ International socialism, meanwhile, fractured utterly during and after the war. But different strands remained committed to international cooperation, albeit in their own particular ways and on their own terms. While the Comintern prescribed world revolution and the overthrow of capitalist economic relations as an alternative order, the Second International promoted international cooperation and ultimately sought to work through governments. The influence of international socialist collaboration was evident not least in the reparation settlements of the mid-1920s.Footnote ⁷⁸

In challenging the international order, feminists, colonial nationalists and socialists shaped its development. Through their strategic use of language, they established not only the validity of their own claims, but they also contributed to reimagining what peace meant and international ordering. Peacemaking, for these movements, required far-reaching international and social reform. Allied leaders also anticipated popular demands. The establishment of the International Labour Organization grew out of wartime cooperation between Allied trade unionists that was mirrored within the Central Powers. Its creation was a response to the Bolshevik alternative of revolution and class war, as was its corporatist vision of worker participation in the creation of a new social and economic order. The Mandates system, meanwhile, acknowledged the illegitimacy of simply seizing colonial territory. The reporting requirement to be overseen by the League of Nations was part of a normative agenda that aimed to temper colonial misrule and abuse.Footnote ⁷⁹

When we look at the claims of colonial nationalists and feminist internationalists to widen participation, they demanded institutional reform, justified on the grounds of self-determination.Footnote ⁸⁰ The result was that the scope of peacemaking broadened considerably at Paris. Peacemaking encompassed a wider range of political issues and social relations than previous peace settlements, reflecting the effects of wartime mobilisation on so many aspects of life and the appreciation of the connections between social reform and international relations.

The Discursive Logics of a New International Order

The experience of war altered the normative vocabulary of international politics. The rhetoric of wartime mobilisation provided a new language that was used to justify internationalist reform projects. The war undermined the legitimacy of power politics as the predominant discourse of international relations. Even in private diplomatic negotiations, it had become difficult to use the language of the balance of power to substantiate territorial, economic, and military claims.Footnote ⁸¹ New principles grounded in self-determination, international law and sovereignty were elaborated to underpin the machinery created to regulate future conflicts of interest in international politics.Footnote ⁸² Norms did not dictate political choices, but they provided a logic for the mitigation and peaceful resolution of future conflicts. Actors also had to account for their decisions within the normative vocabulary of the post-war order. The transformative effect of changing ideas about international order remains a matter of debate. ‘New concepts, instruments and methods’ were added to the diplomatic toolkit, argues Otte, without transforming the ‘core of diplomacy’, while Thomas emphasises how liberal internationalist ideas could easily justify imperialist rule.Footnote ⁸³

Other contributors place more weight on the transformative effects of new concepts, notably self-determination. Self-determination was closely associated with President Woodrow Wilson, but a wide range of actors developed their own definition to self-determination; indeed, most had developed their ideas before Wilson. It is well-known that Wilson never used the phrase ‘self-determination’ in his ‘Fourteen Points’ speech to Congress in January 1918, though it slipped out the following month. It is equally well-known that peoples across the globe attributed ‘self-determination’ to Wilson’s programme. The invocation of Wilson to justify programmes of self-determination around the world magnified the American president’s appeal. But it also eroded his power to shape the post-war normative environment because global public advocacy of this concept took on a life of its own that was quite independent of the president’s original intentions. Wilson’s vision limited self-determination to the ‘civilized’, autonomous citizen. Although excluded from Wilsonian visions on the grounds of race and gender, women and colonial subjects took up the language of self-determination to advance their claims to citizenship and participation in the international order. The discourse of self-determination became a strategic resource, upon which different groups drew to advance specific interests.Footnote ⁸⁴

The task of rendering the concept of self-determination the basis for a functioning political order was a massive challenge, particularly as it had to be woven into other organising principles, notably sovereignty and international law. Just as problematic was the contestation of the content of these concepts. Wilson’s vision foresaw autonomous (white, male) citizens constraining sovereign nation-states to observe ‘liberal’ principles of peace and justice. V. I. Lenin, the newly installed leader of Soviet Russia, sought to recast sovereignty in terms of a world revolution that would render the very concept of the nation-state meaningless. Political theorists Max Weber and Carl Schmitt provided a third option for advocates of sovereignty, combining nineteenth-century romanticism, ethnic claims and the lessons of power politics to maximise the power of the sovereign state.Footnote ⁸⁵ Understandings of international law varied significantly, so that the translation of discourses of ‘law and justice’ into a coherent basis for the peace settlement proved formidably difficult. Variation arose from national difference and political preference. For French politicians, enforcement by sanctions, including military sanctions, must constitute a fundamental attribute of an order based on international law. For the American president, however, ‘the judgement of the tribunal of world opinion’ constituted a more effective sanction than any international sanction ‘because it is more powerful and can impose itself without technical subtleties’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Lawyers drafted the treaties to give legal expression to other principles, such as the management of plebiscites, mandates and minority treaties.Footnote ⁸⁷

Building on the existing conceptions of ‘order’, we can see that the profusion of ordering concepts had four major consequences for peacemaking. First, politicians bargained over the application of principles, as well as over territory and economic resources. The articulation and dissemination of new ordering logics reflected the political interests of the most powerful state actors at the peace conference. Similarly, the universal application of a particular principle conferred rule-making advantages on particular states and was an important source of power in its own right.Footnote ⁸⁸

Second, principles had effects and shaped the logic of the peace settlement, often in unintended ways. Measuring the terms of the peace settlement against declared principles necessarily illustrates numerous violations and compromises, but this also sets the bar of judgement at an impossibly high level. Making peace required compromise, principles shaped key territorial decisions and practices, from the constitution of new nation-states to plebiscites, and decisions at odds with key principles required justification.

Third, the multiple meanings layered onto key ordering principles created the potential for disorder, as the different meanings created scope to justify conflicting solutions. The convention of honouring wartime treaties led Lloyd George and Clemenceau to support Italian claims under the secret articles of the treaty of London despite conflicting with the nationality principle and newly declared standards of transparency. The same was true of decisions to grant Poland a corridor to the Baltic Sea through East Prussia and to deprive Germany of much of the Sudetenland. These measures were aimed at ensuring the strategic viability of the new Polish and Czechoslovak states. But they were imposed on Germany in contravention of the logic of self-determination. ‘We must accept inevitable infringements to the principle of self-determination’, Clemenceau argued, ‘if we wish to safeguard the principle itself.’Footnote ⁸⁹

Fourth, the relative marginalisation of traditional forms of power as an organising principle of peacemaking undermined the chances of achieving political consensus on central questions about security. French projects to break up Germany and transform the European strategic balance, for example, had to be phrased in the language of self-determination and the greater good of the international community. The result was a series of unsustainable arguments about the ethnic status and political preferences of the German populations in the Rhineland that could easily be dismissed. The absence of an agreed measure of military power similarly hampered Anglo-French efforts to disarm Germany and to establish the basis for more far-reaching agreements about arms limitations.Footnote ⁹⁰

New Sites of International Order

Institutions were both an expression of principles and instruments intended to change the logic of international politics. The peace settlements created a dense network of international institutions centred on and around the League of Nations. Throughout the post-war decade, the League remained a site where ‘deft realists’, such as Austen Chamberlain, Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, could negotiate. But it also produced new ways of conducting international politics. The Secretariat, the permanent bureaucracy of the League, was a ‘radically novel invention’. Although its composition reproduced the hierarchies of European domination and power politics, it promoted new ways of conducting international politics. Eric Drummond, the founding Secretary-General, used the Secretariat’s Information Section to construct and buttress international public opinion. He and other diplomats at Geneva laid claim to represent ‘the greater international good’ that included the rights of stateless persons and refugees, minorities, victims of human trafficking and the drug trade. The League provided a forum for states beyond the circle of great powers to shape international politics and to resolve regional conflicts.Footnote ⁹¹ The League was central to the management of the international order with oversight of mandates, disarmament and plebiscites.Footnote ⁹²

Drummond was a realist in that he was keenly aware of the need to balance the interests of the great powers with efforts to carve out an autonomous space for the League in international politics.Footnote ⁹³ In this way, despite evidence of the incorporation of social movements and new political ideals in the form of the new League, older institutional forms of great power politics persisted, as leaders wrestled with humanitarian crises and the collapse of state structures at the same time as they had to settle classic questions about territory and military security. For example, the Council of Four, set up in March 1919, was the most obvious expression of entrenched hierarchies of power in international politics. At one level, the Council of Four was an ad hoc solution to the complexity of negotiating the peace settlement, but its establishment also reflected long-standing practices by which the great powers arrogated to themselves the responsibilities for ordering international politics. Sharp examines how, locked in meetings with one another over the course of several months, each leader brought their ‘national agenda and personal vision’ to negotiations, creating conditions that lent themselves to bargaining.Footnote ⁹⁴ Britain and France, as Thomas shows, continued with arbitrary, exploitative systems of imperial rule, despite the changes introduced via the League’s mandate system.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Allies had institutionalised their economic cooperation gradually over the course of the war. Institutions such as the Allied Maritime Transport Council and the Supreme Economic Council provided a basis for the management of the post-war international economy. French leaders pushed for the continuation of Allied wartime economic institutions – just as Clemenceau aimed to maintain the wartime alliance with British and American guarantees of military assistance. American leaders, on the other hand, were loath to formalise economic cooperation, to mutualise debt obligations, and to extend state management of the domestic and world economy. Their opposition reflected a preference to roll back the state’s involvement in the economy as well as calculations of American national economic self-interest.Footnote ⁹⁶ In contrast to the aftermath of the Second World War, when American power underwrote international economic cooperation, American decisions against proposals for deepening economic collaboration undermined international economic order. The result accentuated the pursuit of national economic interests from the demands for reparations to the rise in interest rates. The effects of economic upheaval spilled into other domains, from the exploitation of colonial labour to geopolitical strains in Europe and East Asia. Post-war economic dislocation resulted in various innovations to promote greater cooperation during the 1920s, including cartels sanctioned by imperial states and the Bank of International Settlements. Yet, for all the efforts put into governing the economic dimensions of international order during the post-war decade, the Great Depression underlined the fragility of international economic cooperation.Footnote ⁹⁷

The ‘experiment’ in peacemaking in 1919 left the way open to very different types of international order. Take as an example the place of empire in world politics. Three different paths for empire were marked out in 1919: the often-violent expansion and consolidation of imperial rule; the establishment of a mandate system that curtailed imperial sovereignty; and, finally, the strategic use of the language of self-determination by colonial subjects to bolster claims to citizenship rights, home rule, and even independence. The day after the signing ceremony at Versailles, South African Jan Smuts declared that the ‘real work of making peace will only begin after this treaty has been signed and the definite halt has been called to the destructive passions that have been desolating Europe for nearly five years’.Footnote ⁹⁸ To paraphrase Ernest Renan, making peace and sustaining an international order was a ‘daily plebiscite’, requiring diplomatic commitment, strategic restraint, the construction of a sense of international public good, and popular support. A harmony of interests was never possible, but new norms, practices and institutions provided fresh approaches and new international machinery for the management of conflict. By the early 1930s that commitment to the ‘daily plebiscite’ of maintaining peace had frayed and the outbreak of the Second World War remains an irrefutable criticism of peacemaking after the First World War. The ‘limited durability’ of the Paris peace settlements continues to require explanation, but the Second World War did not extinguish the potential of international order in Paris in 1919. The UN, European integration, decolonisation, greater popular participation in international politics, the codification of international law and the restraints on power politics had their roots in the possibilities of peacemaking after the First World War.