Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (review)

2003 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-378
Author(s):  
J. Michael Hogan
Keyword(s):  
League Of Nations ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
The World

Scientists, Foreign Policy, and Politics

1962 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warner R. Schilling
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Plenary Session ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
The World ◽  
Open Question

… we must take, so far as we can, a picture of the world into our minds. Is it not a startling circumstance for one thing that the great discoveries of science, that the quiet study of men in laboratories, that the thoughtful developments which have taken place in quiet lecture rooms, have now been turned to the destruction of civilization? … The enemy whom we have just overcome had at its seats of learning some of the principal centres of scientific study and discovery, and used them in order to make destruction sudden and complete; and only the watchful, continuous cooperation of men can see to it that science, as well as armed men, is kept within the harness of civilization.These words were spoken in Paris in January 1919 by Woodrow Wilson, addressing the second Plenary Session of the Peace Conference. Wilson believed he had found a watchdog for civilization in the League of Nations. In this he was sadly mistaken. Science and armed men have indeed been harnessed, but in order to promote and maintain the goals of conflicting polities. Whether in the pursuit of these ends the cause of civilization will yet be served remains, we may hope, an open question.

Woodrow Wilson and Germany's Membership in the League of Nations, 1918–19

1975 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Schwabe
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Minister ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Press Conference ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Crucial Point ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
The World ◽  
German Republic ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Way

On January 15, 1919, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, recently appointed foreign minister of the German Republic, concluded a press conference with the following appeal:We demand a policy of reconciliation …, a policy which realizes a genuine … League of Nations. But we will be asked whom we are introducing into this League. Then we must be able to say: “We are introducing a united people that wants peace in the world and is willing to enter the lists for every progress of mankind. …”With these words the German minister gave expression to an ideal that had inspired many left-wing liberals and pacifists in Germany during the war, and that had been taken up by the spokesmen of the newly proclaimed German Republic immediately after the armistice. To them, as well as to Brockdorff, the future League of Nations, in the way it was going to be constituted, was to become the test of the spirit in which the peace would be concluded. The crucial point was whether, and if so on what terms, it would include the new German Republic. If it admitted Germany on equal terms, it would thus demonstrate that it would be a universal organization, open to all democratic nations and in line with the aspirations of the moderate Left of Europe.

Woodrow Wilson—Then and Now

1974 ◽  
Vol 7 (03) ◽  
pp. 256-259
Author(s):  
Pendleton Herring
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
The Body ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Public Office ◽  
Samson Agonistes ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Mind

It was in this house that Wilson, after the burdens of public office, sought “some ease.” In words I quote from John Milton's “Samson Agonistes:”“Ease to the body some, noneto the mindFrom restless thoughts, thatlike a deadly swarmOf hornets armed, no soonerfound aloneBut rush upon methronging, and presentTimes past, what once I was,and what am now.”One cannot speak of Woodrow Wilson fifty years after his death without recalling his last tragic days. Most poignant is Raymond Fosdick's account:“I went down to Washington to see him…. It was less than a month before he died, and it was very obvious that his strength was failing, although his mind was keen and alert. When I said to him: ‘How are you, Mr. President,’ he quoted a remark by John Quincy Adams in answer to a similar query: ‘John Quincy Adams is all right, but the house he lives in is dilapidated, and it looks as if he would soon have to move out’…. His whole thought centered on the League of Nations, and I had never heard him speak with deeper or more moving earnestness. In his weakness the tears came easily to his eyes and sometimes rolled down his cheek, but he brushed them impatiently away. I think he had a premonition that his days were numbered - “The sands are running fast,’ he told me - and perhaps he Wanted to make his last testament clear and unmistakable. The League of Nations was a promise for a better future, he said, as well as an escape from an evil past. Constantly his mind ran back to 1914. The utter unintelligence of it all, the sheer waste of war as a method of settling anything, seemed to oppress him. ‘It never must happen again,’ he said. ‘There is a way out if only men will use it.’ His voice rose as he recalled the charge of idealism so often used against the League. ‘The world is run by ideals,’ he exclaimed. ‘Only the fool thinks otherwise.’ The League was the answer. It was the next logical step in man’s widening conception of order and law. The machinery might be changed by experience, but the core of the idea was essential. It was in line with human evolution. It was the will of God.

The Emergence of the International Law Societies

1957 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irwin Abrams
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
World Politics ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Significant Expression

The history of world politics of the half century before 1914 is full of nationalist wars, imperialist conflicts, and the diplomacy of the armed peace. To the less spectacular developments of internationalism so little attention is usually paid that the League of Nations almost seems to emerge full-grown from the head of Woodrow Wilson. It is true that the dominant trend in the relations between the sovereign states was anything but pacific, and the peoples were increasingly swayed by the emotion of aggressive nationalism. At the same time the world was becoming more interdependent economically and culturally, and there was a quiet but clearly perceptible growth of international-mindedness. A significant expression of this development was the movement of ideas in the eighteen-seventies which led to the establishment of two important law societies, the Institute of International Law and the International Law Association. The story of their origins is an interesting chapter in the history of international law and throws light as well upon its relationships with the organized peace movement.

The New Diplomacy and the New Europe, 1916–1922

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Sharp
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
The World ◽  
Reasonable Solution ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Paris Peace Conference ◽  
Post War

In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson of the United States demanded ‘a new and more wholesome diplomacy’ to replace the international architecture that had failed to prevent the war that was currently engulfing the world. This chapter investigates some of the origins of this ‘New Diplomacy’ and the attempts made at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to implement its principles, most notably the creation of the League of Nations, attempts to encourage world disarmament, and the application of national self-determination, which advocates hoped would create a stable and peaceful ‘New Europe’. The clash between aspirations and reality was highlighted by the problems inherent in applying national self-determination to hopelessly ethnographically mixed regions and in seeking a fair and reasonable solution to reparations and inter-Allied debts. The chapter concludes with a survey of the post-war settlement, its practicalities and its reputation.

Tautai

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Indigenous Resistance ◽  
World Government ◽  
Pacific History ◽  
The World

This is a biography of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson, the Sāmoan nationalist leader who fought New Zealand, the British Empire and the League of Nations between the world wars. It is a richly layered history that weaves a personal and Pacific history with one that illuminates the global crisis of empire after World War One. Ta’isi’s story weaves Sweden with deep histories of Sāmoa that in the late nineteenth century became deeply inflected with colonial machinations of Germany, Britain, New Zealand and the U. S.. After Sāmoa was made a mandate of the League of Nations in 1921, the workings and aspirations of that newly minted form of world government came to bear on the island nation and Ta’isi and his fellow Sāmoan tested the League’s powers through their relentless non-violent campaign for justice. Ta’isi was Sāmoa’s leading businessman who was blamed for the on-going agitation in Sāmoa; for his trouble he was subjected to two periods of exile, humiliation and a concerted campaign intent on his financial ruin. Using many new sources, this book tells Ta’isi’s untold story, providing fresh and intriguing new aspects to the global story of indigenous resistance in the twentieth century.

Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard V. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Power ◽  
World War ◽  
Treaty Of Versailles ◽  
The World ◽  
Paris Peace Conference

We have long known that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 “failed” in the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book investigates not whether the conference succeeded or failed, but the historically specific international system it created. It explores the rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking “the world”—not just determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the questions. Most histories of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919. This book considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace based on “justice” produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany, and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference as sovereign sought to “unmix” lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. It sought less to oppose revolution than to instrumentalize it. The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the conference’s failure, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of sovereignty established in Paris.

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