Suitors and Suppliants
Suitors and Suppliants

Author: Stephen Bonsal

Publisher: ISCI

Published: 2022-03-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

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Col. Bonsal's confidential notes & diary, published with the encouragement of Pres. Wilson, depict the hopeless complexities of making peace among the small nations previously absorbed in the three former European empires at the end of World War I.

Turbulence in the Pacific
Turbulence in the Pacific

Author: Noriko Kawamura

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2000-06-30

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0313000948

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Although events in East Asia were a sideshow in the great drama of World War I, what happened there shattered the accord between Japan and the United States. This book pursues the two-fold question of how and why U.S.-Japanese tensions developed into antagonism during the war by inquiring into the historical sources of both sides. Kawamura explains this complex phenomenon by looking at various factors: conflicts of national interests—geopolitical and economic; perceptual problems such as miscommunication, miscalculation, and mistrust; and, most important of all, incompatible approaches to foreign policy. America's universalism and the unilateralism inherent in Wilsonian idealistic internationalism clashed with Japan's particularistic regionalism and the pluralism that derived from its strong sense of racial identity and anti-Western nationalistic sentiments. By looking at the motives and circumstances behind Japan's expansionist policy in East Asia, Kawamura suggests some of the centrifugal forces that divided the nations and challenged the premise of Wilsonian internationalism. At the same time, through critical examination of the Wilson administration's universalist and unilateral response to Japan's actions, she raises serious questions about the effectiveness of American foreign policy. At the close of the 20th century, after 50 years of Cold War, those in search of a new world order tend to resort to Wilsonian rhetoric. This book suggests that it can be unwise to apply a universalistic and idealistic approach to international conflicts that often result from extreme nationalism, regionalism, and racial rivalry.

Lloyd George and the Lost Peace
Lloyd George and the Lost Peace

Author: A. Lentin

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-07-11

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0230511481

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This lively and original book critically re-examines Lloyd George's part, crucial but enigmatic, in the 'lost peace' of Versailles, 1919-1940. In a re-examination of six key episodes 1919-1940, it reviews his protean role at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, his strategy on reparations, his abortive guarantee-treaty to France, and the emergence at the Conference of 'Appeasement'. It then reassesses his controversial visit to Hitler, and his bids to halt World War II after the fall of Poland and France.

From Peoples Into Nations
From Peoples Into Nations

Author: John Connelly

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 968

ISBN-13: 0691208956

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"This book is a history of East Central Europe since the late eighteenth century, the region of Europe between German central Europe and Russia in the East. Connelly argues the region, for which it is frequently hard to define exact boundaries and which is sometimes treated country-by-country in a way seemingly separate from the broader trends of European history, was one of shared experience despite most of the peoples being divided by linguistic, geographic, and political barriers. Beginning in the 1780s, an unwitting Habsburg monarch -- Joseph II -- decreed that his subjects would use only German, as he hoped to mold a common nationality using German over the disparate subjects. Instead, he unleashed the energies and struggle for the emergence of new nations that pitted small peoples armed with an idea against empires. The author argues that the underlying national self-assertion which emerged under imperial rule in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries shows deep connections to subsequent histories, to the creation of nation states of the regions after World War I, the failure of democratic rule in these states during the interwar years, the submersion of the region under Nazi then Soviet rule after 1939, and to the reinvention of sovereign states (and then the break up of two of them) after 1989. The book interconnects major themes and country histories for first time, chronicling this diverse region over many generations, from the time of Joseph, through democratic and socialist revolutions, genocide and Stalinism, through civil society movements struggling for liberal democracy, into our own day, when illiberal politicians come to power by exploiting very old fears"--

Wellington Koo
Wellington Koo

Author: Jonathan Clements

Publisher: Haus Publishing

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1907822364

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Gu Weijun, a.k.a. Wellington Koo (1887-1985). Born in Shanghai and raised in the city's International Settlement, Koo became fluent in English during his postgraduate studies abroad - he got a PhD in Law from Columbia in 1912. He was recalled soon afterwards to become the English Secretary to the newly formed Republic of China, and became ambassador to the United States in 1915. He achieved notoriety at the Paris Peace Conference where he sternly resisted Japanese attempts to hold onto seized German colonial territory in mainland China. In protest at their treatment, the Chinese were the only delegates not to sign the subsequent Treaty of Versailles. Koo was China's first representative to the League of Nations, and ended up as acting president of Republican China during the unrest of the period 1926-7. He subsequently served briefly as a Foreign Minister during the peak of the Warlord Era, before returning to Europe, first as a delegate at the League of Nations, and then as China's ambassador to France. With the Nazi occupation, Koo fled to Britain, where he became the Chinese ambassador to the UK until 1946. A founder member of the United Nations, Koo was instrumental in maintaining the position of Republican China on the Security Council -by this time, 'Republican China' was limited solely to the island of Taiwan, while the Communists proclaimed themselves to be the new rulers of China itself. Retiring from the diplomatic service in 1956, the venerable Koo went on to become a judge at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, rising to vice-president before his retirement, aged 80, in 1967. He settled in New York, where his final years were tormented by 'Republican' China's loss of its seat on the United Nations Security Council to the Communists, following Nixon's famous visit to China.