Instruments of Peacemaking 1918-1941: The Failure of Diplomacy

(Hardback)

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This book is a sequel to Instruments of Peacemaking 1870-1914 in that it considers how attempts were made to settle disputes between states without recourse to war after the war to end all wars.

It considers the idealism of President Wilson's Fourteen Points which formed the basis for the Armistice in 1918, and his scheme for a League of Nations providing for self-determination of nations and collective security for European states.

It goes on to analyse the key challenges that faced statesmen and jurists in attempting to resolve disputes under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. It considers the consequences of the peace conference of 1919 that failed to give France security guarantees and aroused German animosity through loss of territory, population, and payment of reparations. Despite its defects the treaty was an instrument for resolving disputes and tensions between the victors and the vanquished.

The book considers the many successes of cases referred to the Reparations Commission and to arbitration regarding boundary, industrial property, and shipping including claims by the relatives of deceased passengers of the RMS Lusitania. More importantly, it analyses the diplomatic challenges faced by statesmen after 1919: the attempts at disarmament, the Locarno Arbitration Agreements which attempted to underpin the peace settlement of 1919, and the subsequent crises in Abyssinia, the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. The decline and failure of Wilsonian idealism, the League of Nations, collective security, and diplomacy is traced through the various diplomatic exchanges that took place between governments from official records and contemporaneous accounts of the times as well as academic sources. The attempt to resolve the Sudetenland crisis by the mediation of Lord Runciman is included as part of the diplomatic intervention by Mr Chamberlain to appease Hitler. The final chapter looks at American Foreign Policy in the context of isolationism, and Anglo-American Relations and the attack on Pearl Harbor which is examined in relation to the Army, Navy and Congressional Enquiries.

Author Bio

Michael Reynolds is Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.