THE VATICAN AND THE RESHAPING OF THE EUROPEAN INTERNATIONAL ORDER AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 955-976 ◽  
Author(s):  
GIULIANA CHAMEDES

ABSTRACTThe Vatican is often cast as a marginal player in the reshaping of the European international order after the First World War. Drawing on new archival material, this article argues for a reassessment of the content and consequences of papal diplomacy. It focuses on the years between 1917 and 1929, during which time the Vatican used the tools of international law and state-to-state diplomacy to expand its power in both eastern and western Europe. The Vatican's interwar activism sought to disseminate a new Catholic vision of international affairs, which militated against the separation of church and state, and in many contexts helped undermine the principles of the League of Nations’ minority rights regime. Thanks in no small part to the assiduity of individual papal diplomats – who disseminated the new Catholic vision of international affairs by supporting anti-communist political factions – the Vatican was able to claim a more prominent role in European political affairs and lay the legal and discursive foundations for an alternate conception of the European international order, conceived in starkly anti-secular terms.

2021 ◽  
pp. 176-193
Author(s):  
Richard Steigmann-Gall

This chapter explores the intersection of religion and dictatorship after the First World War. It examines the question of institutional relations between church and state, and seeks to explore how these relations shed light on the ideological relationship between religious traditions and fascism in particular. It does this by considering comparative perspectives across Europe, especially with regard to church–state relations but also in terms of politics, ideology, and culture. It goes on to explore the cases of Italian fascism and German Nazism, demonstrating how these regimes have typically been understood, as well as how they perpetuated a distinctive religious politics.


Author(s):  
Emily Gioielli

THE END of the First World War in eastern Europe could hardly be said to have inaugurated a period of peace. Marked by revolutions, counter-revolutions, renewed foreign warfare, and military occupations, the early post-armistice state-building processes were violent affairs, as political factions wrestled for dominance over their political, ethnic, and religious enemies, and armies battled for territory. This extended period of conflict and violence in the region could be described as the ‘long First World War’. The conflicts that shaped it traced their short-term roots to the preceding years of open warfare and the revolutions that occurred in the wake of the defeat of the Central Powers....


1949 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-66
Author(s):  
Horst Mendershausen

Since the end of the first World War, a turn in the trade balance of the United States toward an import surplus has been prophesied or advocated repeatedly. According to these prognostications and beliefs, the United States has been moving into the position of an “old creditor nation” and therefore is likely, or will be obliged, to carry a passive trade balance financed by a net inflow of earnings on, or repayments of, capital from abroad.1 Fulfillment of such an obligation has often been regarded as a contribution to domestic welfare and international order.


2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIERRE PURSEIGLE

AbstractIn the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike have so far concurred in marginalising the experience of refugees during the First World War. This article examines their unprecedented encounter with host communities in France and Great Britain. It demonstrates that the refugees' plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War.


1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Alchon

“We are, most of us,” Mary Van Kleeck said in November 1957, “getting too old to talk.” Near the end of more than two hours of interrogation by officials of the State Department's Passport Office, Van Kleeck tried to impress upon her questioners the commitment to social research and to social justice that underlay her career. The Passport Office, however, was more concerned about her Communist front and party affiliations, and she was in their offices that Thursday morning appealing their refusal to renew her passport. She was seventy-three years old and retired from public life. She wanted to travel, as had been her practice, to Holland, her ancestral home and the home of her closest friends. “I date way back of you young people,” she told her two interrogators. “I think the work of my generation and our attitudes in international affairs is one of sympathy … to developments in other countries.” But, she continued, “I don't think you people who don't know the period prior to the First World War can possibly see how deep our concern is.”


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Brian

During and after the First World War, authors in several of the main belligerent nations presented the war as a young man's war. The young man's war proved to be a powerful trope, and a myth emerged about the typical trench soldier as handsome, white, and eighteen. In this article, I examine literature about the Great War across several nations – primarily Germany, Great Britain, and France – to demonstrate how and why youth became embedded in the collective memory and representation of the war. I argue, in part, that notions of youth in the early twentieth century allowed participating nations to emphasise innocence and tragedy, claiming the moral high ground in the process. As a result, it is now difficult to accurately depict the First World War soldiers as fathers as well as sons, husbands as well as fiancés, men with careers as well as boys fresh from school. The generation of 1914 must be conceived more broadly, which would disallow easy teleologies to later tragic events in the 1930s.


Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay

This chapter examines the collective efforts of British, French, and German socialists to place a socialist stamp on the emerging post-war political order both within and between countries. The period covered runs from the end of the First World War to the mid-1920s, a moment that several recent scholars have identified as marking the end of the post-war period and the making of a ‘real peace’. In exploring the post-war practice of socialist internationalism, the chapter focuses on a series of interlocking issues: the peace treaties; national self-determination; reparations and economic reconstruction; and the League of Nations and post-war security. On issues such as reparations and Western European security, European socialists claimed with justice to have pointed the way forward to intergovernmental arrangements. But if socialists could rightly boast of their role as trailblazers, their deliberations also exposed the fragile nature of the much-vaunted ‘real peace’ achieved by mid-decade.


Author(s):  
Ian Tregenza

Much nineteenth-century political theory was preoccupied with relations between state and Church. This chapter examines some of the leading European theories of Church and state many of which influenced and reflected broader public debates and institutional developments. In response to the French Revolution and to a series of liberal and democratic reforms various attempts were made to renew the Church by emphasizing its role as the spiritual embodiment of the nation. While in some contexts such as France this would provoke a secular reaction and ultimately a separation of Church and state, elsewhere increasing religious pluralization would generate pluralist state forms and corresponding theories of the plural state. The central themes covered include: ultramontanism to liberal Catholicism in France; the Hegelian theory of the state; liberal Anglicanism and the Broad Church movement; and theories of the plural state from the 1890s to the First World War.


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