Originally published in 1985 The Decision to Disarm Germany offers a fresh approach to Britain’s First World War and Paris Peace Conference policy on the question of German military disarmament. It offers interpretations based on extensive research into unpublished records and private papers and provides important new conclusions about British policy. The book shows the interaction of domestic concerns and strategic considerations in the wartime development of British thinking on the issue of post-war German disarmament and in the post-Armistice formulation and implementation of Britain’s German disarmament policy. It establishes the crucial interrelationship in British thinking and policy between German disarmament and general disarmament. It also shows the interwar consequences of wartime attitudes and peace conference policy.
What is the value of diplomacy? How does it affect the course of foreign affairs independent of the distribution of power and foreign policy interests? Theories of international relations too often implicitly reduce the dynamics and outcomes of diplomacy to structural factors rather than the subtle qualities of negotiation. If diplomacy is an independent effect on the conduct of world politics, it has to add value, and we have to be able to show what that value is. In Diplomacy's Value, Brian C. Rathbun sets forth a comprehensive theory of diplomacy, based on his understanding that political leaders have distinct diplomatic styles—coercive bargaining, reasoned dialogue, and pragmatic statecraft.Drawing on work in the psychology of negotiation, Rathbun explains how diplomatic styles are a function of the psychological attributes of leaders and the party coalitions they represent. The combination of these styles creates a certain spirit of negotiation that facilitates or obstructs agreement. Rathbun applies the argument to relations among France, Germany, and Great Britain during the 1920s as well as Palestinian-Israeli negotiations since the 1990s. His analysis, based on an intensive analysis of primary documents, shows how different diplomatic styles can successfully resolve apparently intractable dilemmas and equally, how they can thwart agreements that were seemingly within reach.
The post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan set standards for postconflict nation-building that have not since been matched. Only in recent years has the United States has felt the need to participate in similar transformations, but it is now facing one of the most challenging prospects since the 1940s: Iraq. The authors review seven case studies--Germany, Japan, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan--and seek lessons about what worked well and what did not. Then, they examine the Iraq situation in light of these lessons. Success in Iraq will require an extensive commitment of financial, military, and political resources for a long time. The United States cannot afford to contemplate early exit strategies and cannot afford to leave the job half completed.
Presents the history of how the Nazi regime used laws restricting firearms ownership to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power which rendered political opponents defenseless.
A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel—whose troubles haunt us still. Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize • Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize • Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Between January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. Praise for Paris 1919 “It’s easy to get into a war, but ending it is a more arduous matter. It was never more so than in 1919, at the Paris Conference. . . . This is an enthralling book: detailed, fair, unfailingly lively. Professor MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.” —Allan Massie, The Daily Telegraph (London)
On 28 June 1914, two pistol shots shattered the peace of a sunny afternoon in Sarajevo. Those shots reverberated around Europe and shattered the peace of the whole world. This was the beginning of the Great Slaughter. Could it have been avoided? Alan Woods uses the method of Marxism to answer this question. He explains that, actually, whilst individuals play an important role in history, to explain events such as wars, one must look at deeper causes. As well as dealing with the origin of the war, Woods traces the conflict through its development, looking at the role of all the major actors, and their aims. He shows how in the midst of the despair of the trenches and the home front, a new consciousness was formed. He also makes the case that it was the German Revolution that brought the war to an end, and how a revolutionary wave swept across Europe. The book also looks at the Treaty of Versailles and how the victorious powers imposed the deal, not just on Germany, but the rest of Europe and the Middle East. Given the amount of nationalistic mystification from all sides about the First World War, a history of the subject from the standpoint of the world working class is essential and it is provided by this book.
This March 1941 book-written by a New Jersey Jewish-German émigré-caused a storm in Germany and America with its open advocacy of the physical extermination of all Germans and Germany itself. This was to be achieved through a process of mass sterilization, and the physical dismemberment of that country. Arguing that Nazism was in fact just another expression of militant Germanism, the author said that the Germans would never change and the only way to end the ongoing struggle was to end Germany and the German people. Because of Kaufman's claimed links to the policy advisors of the American president, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels used the book to help encourage Germans to fight to the last. Ironically, significant sections of Kaufman's book, despite being dismissed as the work of a loner, came true. At least 12 million Germans were expelled from their land following the end of the war, and their deportation became the single largest transfer of any population in modern European history, and one-third of German territory was ethnically cleansed of Germans and permanently seized. Although the sterilization plan was never implemented, the collapse in the German birth rate, predicted by the author, has occurred, and even this part of the plan seems set to become reality. As the author wrote: "Of course, after complete sterilization, there will cease to be a birth rate in Germany. At the normal death rate of 2 per cent per annum, German life will diminish at the rate of 1,500,000 yearly. Accordingly in the span of two generations that which cost millions of lives and centuries of useless effort, namely, the elimination of Germanism and its carriers, will have been an accomplished fact." A SENSATIONAL IDEA!-Time Magazine A PLAN FOR PERMANENT PEACE AMONG CIVILIZED NATIONS! -New York Times This is an exact reproduction of the 1941 original, digitally reprocessed to the highest standards.
This text scrutinizes the motives, actions, and constraints that informed decision making by the various politicians who bore the principal responsibility for drafting the Treaty of Versailles.
Signed on June 28, 1919 between Germany and the principal Allied powers, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I. Problematic from the very beginning, even its contemporaries saw the treaty as a mediocre compromise, creating a precarious order in Europe and abroad and destined to fall short of ensuring lasting peace. At the time, observers read the treaty through competing lenses: a desire for peace after five years of disastrous war, demands for vengeance against Germany, the uncertain future of colonialism, and, most alarmingly, the emerging threat of Bolshevism. A century after its signing, we can look back at how those developments evolved through the twentieth century, evaluating the treaty and its consequences with unprecedented depth of perspective. The author of several award-winning books, Michael S. Neiberg provides a lucid and authoritative account of the Treaty of Versailles, explaining the enormous challenges facing those who tried to put the world back together after the global destruction of the World War I. Rather than assessing winners and losers, this compelling book analyzes the many subtle factors that influenced the treaty and the dominant, at times ambiguous role of the “Big Four” leaders?Woodrow Wilson of the United States, David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy, and Georges Clémenceau of France. The Treaty of Versailles was not solely responsible for the catastrophic war that crippled Europe and the world just two decades later, but it played a critical role. As Neiberg reminds us, to understand decolonization, World War II, the Cold War, and even the complex world we inhabit today, there is no better place to begin than with World War I and the treaty that tried, and perhaps failed, to end it.
