The Militarization of Austrian Foreign Policy on the Eve of World War I

Author(s):  
Günter Kronenbitter
Keyword(s):  
2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA ROOS

AbstractThis essay revisits 1920s German debates over the illegitimate children of the Rhineland occupation to examine hitherto neglected fluctuations in the relationship between nationalism and racism in Weimar Germany. During the early 1920s, nationalist anxieties focused on the alleged racial ‘threats’ emanating from the mixed-race children of colonial French soldiers. After 1927, plans for the forced sterilisation and deportation of the mixed-race children were dropped; simultaneously, officials began to support German mothers’ paternity suits against French soldiers. This hitherto neglected shift in German attitudes towards the ‘Rhineland bastards’ sheds new light on the role of debates over gender and the family in the process of Franco–German rapprochement. It also enhances our understanding of the contradictory political potentials of popularised foreign policy discourses about women's and children's victimisation emerging from World War I.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth McKillen

This book explores the corporatist alliance between President Woodrow Wilson and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and how it sparked debates over his foreign policy programs within labor circles. During World War II, Wilson pledged to make the world “safe for democracy.” For Wilson, the cooperation of the United States and international labor movements was critical to achieving this goal. To win domestic and international labor support for his foreign policies, Wilson solicited the help of AFL's conservative leaders. This book traces the origins of the partnership that developed between the Wilson administration and AFL leaders to promote U.S. foreign policy, from its tentative beginnings during policy deliberations over how the United States should respond to the Mexican revolution, through World War I, to its culmination with the creation of the International Labor Organization (ILO). It details the significant opposition to the Wilson–AFL collaboration that arose among U.S., transnational, and international labor, Socialists, and diaspora Left groups and how this opposition affected Wilson's efforts to create a permanent role for labor in international governance.


Slavic Review ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-482
Author(s):  
Richard Kent Debo

In November 1917, the Bolshevik Party came to power in Russia with a foreign policy based on “proletarian internationalism” and the aim of spreading the socialist revolution to all parts of Europe. Developed by V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky this policy sought to take advantage of the disruption of European society caused by World War I to transform that conflict of state against state into a vast international civil war of class against class. Believing that the peoples of Europe were weary of war and ripe for revolution the Bolsheviks called for the negotiation of a “just and democratic peace” based on the principles of no annexations, no indemnifications and the liberation of all colonial, dependent and oppressed nations. The Bolsheviks hoped that bourgeois governments would be unable to accept these principles and that their failure to do so would generate sufficient popular unrest to ignite revolution everywhere in Europe.


1997 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clyde W. Barrow

In 1916, Charles A. Beard was denouncing Germany as “a danger to civilization” and calling for American participation in World War I on the side of the Entente Allies. Like John Dewey and other social-democrats, Beard saw the Great War as an opportunity to advance the interests of the European working class by breaking “the union of the Hohenzollern military caste and the German masses whose radical leaders are Social Democrats”. Even after the Versailles Treaty, Beard continued to embrace the Wilsonian theme that the Great War had been fought to make the world safe for democracy. However, by the mid–1980s, he was staunchly opposed to war with Germany and Japan, had come to embrace the revisionist history of World War I, and even testified before Congress against the Lend-Lease Act. Thus, intellectual historians agree that somewhere between the end of World War I and the 1930s, Beard shifted from internationalism to isolationism and, indeed, a few critics have referred to him as a pacifist in his later years. Within the umbrella of this consensus, debates among biographers, intellectual and diplomatic historians, have come to center largely on identifying the timing and the reasons for Beard's “conversion” to isolationism. Not coincidentally, during the 1960s and 1970s, Beard's writings on foreign policy and diplomatic history enjoyed a resurgence among many on the New Left who were constructing their own revisionist history critical of America's political and military involvement in various Third World countries. Today, Beard's views are still cited in international relations and history textbooks as an example of isolationist theory in American foreign policy.


1952 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank L. Klingberg

There seems little doubt that the defense and strengthening of the “free world” in our time depends largely upon American leadership. Confidence that America will continue to play this role in world affairs is weakened by the memory of America's political isolation following World War I, and by certain currents of American opinion noted by observers since World War II.1 Barbara Ward warns the peoples of the West that “we shall certainly fail unless our effort is at once sustained, calm and supremely positive.”


Skhid ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 36-44
Author(s):  
Yaroslav POPENKO ◽  
Ihor SRIBNYAK ◽  
Natalia YAKOVENKO ◽  
Viktor MATVIYENKO

The article covers the course of negotiations between the plenipotentiaries of Romania and the leading states of the Entente and the Quadruple Alliance during the First World War. Facing the dilemma of determining its own foreign policy orientation – by joining one of the mentioned military-political blocs, the Romanian government was hesitating for a long time to come to a final decision. At the same time, largely due to this balancing process, official Bucharest managed to preserve its sovereign right to work out and make the most important decisions, while consistently defending Romania's national interests. By taking the side of the Entente and receiving comprehensive military assistance from Russia, Romania at the same time faced enormous military and political problems due to military superiority of the allied Austrian and German forces at the Balkan theater of hostilities. Their occupation of much of Romania forced official Bucharest to seek an alternative, making it sign a separate agreement with the Central Block states. At the same time, its ratification was being delayed in every possible way, which enabled Romania to return to the camp of war winners at the right time. At the same time, official Bucharest made the most of the decline and liquidation of imperial institutions in Russia and Austria-Hungary at the final stage of the First World War, incorporating vast frontier territories into the Kingdom. Taking advantage of the revolutionary events in Russia, the Romanian government succeeded, in particular, in resolving the “Bessarabian problem” in its favor. In addition, Romania included Transylvania, Bukovina and part of Banat. An important foreign policy achievement of Romanian diplomacy was signing of the 1918 Bucharest Peace Treaty, as well as its participation in the Paris Peace Conference.


Author(s):  
Banu Turnaoğlu

This chapter illustrates how the Parisian positivist Young Turks conceived humanity in light of a universal world history that progressed through the application of developmental laws. They sought to eliminate conventional intellectual, historical, and geographical boundaries between East and West, and aspired to transcend these through an ideal universal order. In so doing, they challenged Western domination and its subjugating foreign policy, and asserted the multiplicity of world civilizations, offering one of the earliest formulations of a modern, pluralist worldview. The positivist, universal project of spiritual union between East and West was to fail in the aftermath of World War I and the successive War of Turkish Independence (1919–22), but its role in shaping the ideological foundations of the early Republic remained substantial.


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