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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/16, SPi

T H E P O L I T I C S O F S E L F - D E T E R M I N AT I O N
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/16, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/16, SPi

The Politics of
Self-Determination
Remaking Territories and National
Identities in Europe, 1917−1923

VO L K E R P ROT T

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/16, SPi

3
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© Volker Prott 2016
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2016
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a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/16, SPi

Preface

Many people have inspired and supported me during my work on this book. I am
indebted foremost to Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, who supervised the thesis that I com-
pleted at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He not only pro-
vided assistance in the direction of the project from its earliest stages but also
shared his comments and views on numerous specific aspects. During the years of
working on this project, I benefited much from his expertise in Franco-German
and European comparative history in general. I am also particularly grateful to my
second reader at the EUI, A. Dirk Moses, who provided so many challenging
thoughts and detailed suggestions concerning the argument and structure of the
study. Bernhard Struck from the University of St Andrews, who acted as external
supervisor, accompanied this project from its inception, and in a sense even before
that, as his own work on borders and border regions was a major source of inspira-
tion for this book. The four months I spent as a visiting scholar in St Andrews
proved to be one of the most productive phases of this project. I would also like to
express my special gratitude to Donald Bloxham from the University of Edinburgh.
Donald’s advice and insightful suggestions, particularly on the Greek–Turkish
conflict, were essential in opening my view to the larger issues at hand and in trans-
forming what was a PhD thesis into a book. At the EUI, among many others,
I benefited from stimulating discussions with Sebastian Conrad, Kiran Patel,
Antonella Romano, Philip Ther, and Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla.
My work has gained much from debates at conferences and workshops. I would
like to thank in particular Béatrice von Hirschhausen and Daniel Schönpflug
(Centre March Bloch, Berlin), Hagen Schulz-Forberg (University of Aarhus),
Olivier Forcade, Johannes Großmann, Rainer Hudemann, Fabian Lemmes, and
Nicholas Williams (University of Saarbrücken), Martin Kohlrausch, Evert Peeters,
and Joris Vandendriessche (University of Leuven), Alexandra Tcherkasski, Annika
Törne, and Lasse Wichert (University of Bochum), Christopher Storrs (University
of Dundee), and Bettina Severin-Barboutie (German Historical Institute, Paris),
who invited me to these international venues and who themselves provided insight-
ful and challenging comments on parts of my project at different stages.
My special thanks go to Martyna Mirecka from the University of St Andrews,
who has read large parts of the manuscript and whose critical remarks have con-
tributed much to its clarity. Margot Wylie has read the manuscript perhaps more
closely than anyone else and has done an absolutely marvellous job improving its
language and style. In the final phase of the project, Helen Aitchison provided
most useful assistance in polishing the writing.
This study draws extensively on primary source material, and it would have been
impossible to proceed without the help and advice of librarians and archivists. I am
particularly grateful to the personnel of the National Archives in London, the
Archives départementales in Strasbourg and Metz, the Archives of the Ministère
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vi Preface

des affaires étrangères in Paris, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Eisenhower
Library of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the National Archives in
College Park, Maryland, and the Archives of the League of Nations in Geneva.
At Oxford University Press, I would like to thank in particular Robert Faber for
his advice and support of the project and Cathryn Steele for her kind assistance
and effective direction of the publication process. I am also grateful to two anonym-
ous readers who provided comments and suggestions on an earlier manuscript;
their close reading was essential for a greater coherence of the book and the clarity
of its central arguments.
Parts of this book have previously been published elsewhere. I would like to
thank the publishers, Cambridge University Press, Metropol Verlag, and Peter
Lang, for their generous permission to use some of the material of the following
publications for this book: Volker Prott, ‘Tying up the Loose Ends of National
Self-Determination: British, French and American Experts in Peace Planning,
1917−1919’, The Historical Journal 57:3 (2014), 727‒50 (for chapter 1); Volker
Prott, ‘War Aims, Wilsonian Ideas, and the “New Diplomacy”: Reinventing the
Franco-German Border of Alsace-Lorraine, 1914−1919’, in Hagen Schulz-
Forberg, ed., Zero Hours: Conceptual Insecurities and New Beginnings in the Interwar
Period (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2013), 147‒66 (for chapter 2); Volker Prott, ‘A Testing
Ground for Ethno-Political Population Politics: Alsace-Lorraine from the First
World War to the Versailles Treaty’, in Olivier Forcade, Johannes Großmann, et al.,
eds, Evacuations in World War Europe (Berlin: Metropol, 2014), 56­­­­‒67 (for
chapter 5).
Finally, I am indebted to my wife, Janika, for her support and critical comments
on several drafts of this study. Her eye for structure and coherence and her ability
to communicate the perspective of the reader have found their way into this book.
It is to her that I dedicate this work.
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Contents

List of Maps and Tables ix

Introduction 1

I . P L A N N I N G T H E P O S T - WA R O R D E R
1. Tying up the Loose Ends of National Self-Determination:
British, French, and American Peace Planning, 1917−1919 21
2. ‘Réintégration pure et simple?’ Reinventing the Franco-German
Border of Alsace-Lorraine, 1914−1918 54
3. The Cradle of Civilization on the Fringes of Europe: The Quest
for Greek Expansion into Asia Minor 83

I I . I M P L E M E N T I N G T H E PA R I S S Y S T E M
4. The Interwar Period in a Microcosm: Negotiating Borders at
the Paris Peace Conference 113
5. Ethno-Political Drifts: The Return of French Rule to Alsace-Lorraine,
1918−1919 148
6. A Precarious Border Zone: Ethnic Violence and the Greek–Turkish
War of 1919−1922 180
7. Revisiting the Peace Architecture: Border Changes and
Minority Rights in the League of Nations 212
Conclusion 234

Bibliography 245
Index 261
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List of Maps and Tables

Map 1. The Franco-German border, 1919 81


Map 2. Greek claims, expert proposals, and borders in Asia Minor, 1918−22 101
Map 3. Romanian borders and Romanian claims, 1913−19 120
Map 4. The Hungarian–Romanian border 125
Map 5. The Yugoslavian–Romanian border in the Banat 126
Map 6. Polish borders at the Paris Peace Conference 134

Table 1.1. Comparison of the PID, the Comité d’études, and the Inquiry 41
Table 5.1. French policy in Alsace-Lorraine regarding the German
residents, 1918−21 169
Table 5.2. Results of the work of the review commissions in Metz and Strasbourg 170
Table 7.1. Petitions of national minorities to the League of Nations, 1920−39 226
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Introduction

In historical hindsight, the global proliferation of Wilsonian idealism in the wake


of the First World War resembles the opening of Pandora’s box. National self-­
determination appeared in the 1920s and 1930s under the guise of a Marxian
spectre that haunted Europe by unleashing the forces of aggressive nationalism.
These effectively plunged large parts of the continent into acute episodes of ethnic
violence, ushering in a mindset of revisionism that would pave the way to yet
another and even more devastating global war. In Greek mythology, Pandora was
the first human female, created by Zeus to punish humankind for Prometheus’s
theft of fire. Formed from clay by Hephaestus, educated by Pallas Athena, dressed
by Aphrodite, and filled with ‘lies and guileful words and a thievish character’ by
Hermes, the seductive beauty was sent to earth,1 where Epimetheus, the careless
brother of Prometheus, fell for her. Pandora had brought with her a large jar2
that she now opened, thus releasing plagues and sorrow to ravage humankind.
Significantly, however, the jar also contained hope,3 but Zeus prevented its escape.
Later variations of the story, which altered the original ending delivered by the
Greek poet Hesiod, describe how Pandora removed the lid of the jar once more, to
finally set hope free.4
Regardless of whether the box was opened a second time, the most fascinating
aspect of the story of Pandora’s box is how intricately hope and sorrow are interwoven.
In this sense, the original myth—more so than the abridged contemporary version—
of Pandora’s box gives an accurate metaphorical depiction of the international
relations of the early interwar period. It epitomizes the myriad combinations of
belief and despair, internationalist principles and national power politics, interna-
tional law and policies of fait accomplis that were typical of the epoch. As with
the story of Pandora’s box, it was unclear for most of the interwar period what the
outcome between these conflicting forces would be.

1 Hesiod, Theogony: Works and Days. Testimonia, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, Mass.,
London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 93, line 78.
2 The term ‘box’ is actually a mistranslation by Erasmus of Rotterdam in the early sixteenth century.
See Dora Panofsky and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol
(3rd edn, New York: Harper, 1965), 3, 15.
3 There are still philological controversies as to whether the original Greek term would best be
translated as ‘hope’ or rather as ‘expectation’ or ‘anticipation’—and why Zeus had placed it in the jar
in the first place if it could not escape. See footnote 7 in Hesiod, Works and Days, 95.
4 According to Panofsky and Panofsky, Pandora’s Box, 111, it was the adaptation of the myth by the
English writer Nathaniel Hawthorne in the mid nineteenth century in particular that popularized this
amended version.
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2 The Politics of Self-Determination

As the recent conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine demonstrate, moreover, the
quest for a viable international response to competing national aspirations, aggres-
sive territorial revisionism, civil war, and ethnic violence is today as urgent a task
as it was after the First World War. We therefore have much to gain from investi-
gating the manifold dynamics that characterized peacemaking and territorial con-
flicts in interwar Europe. This is particularly true of the early years of the period,
when most of the mechanisms of post-war international politics came to fruition.
These mechanisms prove to be highly instructive when assessing the potentials and
pitfalls of an early attempt at reorganizing international relations on the basis of
democratic and peaceful principles.
A second passage drawn from literary imagination helps us to fathom the char-
acter of the contradictions and the intricate political problems of the early interwar
period. In Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities, one of the most famous
literary attempts to explore European modernity in the early twentieth century, the
Austro-Hungarian government in 1913 begins to prepare a great propagandistic
celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph to
be held in 1918. To upstage the German festivities planned for the thirtieth anni-
versary of the reign of William II in the same year, the Viennese authorities launch
a ‘Parallel Campaign’,5 which is essentially a gigantic planning effort involving
representatives from all sections of society. One such representative is the philosoph-
ically minded General Stumm von Bordwehr. A few months into the planning
phase, General Stumm visits the novel’s hero, the mathematician Ulrich, to discuss
an ‘urgent problem’.6 The general brings a massive leather bag to the encounter,
from which he takes various sheets of paper covered with all kinds of peculiar
notes. Stumm explains that over the past weeks he has tried to bring order into the
innumerable ideas for organizing the festivities whose aim has been to identify one
guiding principle for the ‘Parallel Campaign’. In the style of a military plan of
attack, Stumm’s scheme pinpoints major recent thinkers and their most important
ideas, juxtaposing ‘individualism and collectivism, nationalism and internationalism,
socialism and capitalism, imperialism and pacifism, rationalism and superstition’.7
The argumentative sources of these ideological concepts are represented in the
form of arsenals, and the opposing units have been positioned in a battle scheme.
At this point, as Stumm confesses to Ulrich, the design had assumed an awkward
complexity.
To begin with, each of the different ideas had drawn their ammunition and
supply, that is, their arguments, from diverse arsenals. Moreover, parts of larger
ideological blocs had the habit of attacking varying opponents, or even showed a
tendency to attack their own rear areas. But this was not all. Over time, many
fragments of ideas changed affiliation and joined the enemy, thus blurring any stable
lines of battle that had previously seemed to exist. The general, at last, sums up his

5 In the original German: ‘Große Parallelaktion’.


6 Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol. 1, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Knopf,
1996), 402.
7 Musil, Man Without Qualities, 405.
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Introduction 3

frustration: ‘In short, there’s no way to draw up a decent plan of communications


or line of demarcation or anything else, and the whole thing is . . . what any one of
our commanding officers would be bound to call one hell of a mess.’8
The experts, diplomats, and politicians at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919
must at times have felt like Musil’s fictitious General Stumm von Bordwehr,
when they pored over their ethnographical, political, and geographical maps of
Central and Eastern Europe. Although their task did not amount to arranging
modern systems of thought in an orderly manner, the peacemakers did intend
to set an allegedly chaotic situation straight. Their own ‘campaign’ consisted in
rearranging the European political landscape by drawing national borders. With
the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires crumbling and the principle of
national self-determination at its peak, the local populations were placed at the
centre of attention. But any attempt to respect the wishes of the inhabitants or
their ethnicity found itself in competition with other major factors when the time
came to delineate the borders—economic, strategic, geographical, and historical
concerns all came into play.
As they altered existing borders and drew up entirely new borders, the peace-
makers arrived at diverse and often contradictory solutions. These were shaped by
varying combinations of larger principles, including national self-determination
and political stability, with the vested geopolitical interests of the Allied powers
and specific local circumstances. The result was a renewed European political
landscape that to some extent resembled the confusing scheme General Stumm
von Bordwehr had drafted: new states like Poland and Czechoslovakia were cre-
ated and others like Romania considerably enlarged, plebiscites were held, the
Saar region and Danzig (Gdańsk) were internationalized, and the German
Rhineland was temporarily demilitarized but not politically detached from the
country. Meanwhile, the new and sizeable category of national minorities called
upon the League of Nations for protection, a new international organization
that was intended to embody the new mode of international politics and hold
the whole structure together. It was a complex and in many ways flawed but
therefore all the more serious attempt to place international relations on a more
democratic basis.
As this book sets out to demonstrate, the work of the Paris Peace Conference
was but one part of a broader shift in European and international politics at the
close of the First World War. The years between 1917 and 1923 saw the emergence
of an international system that fundamentally reorganized territories, national
identities, and political rhetoric. More than redrawing state borders, the long ending
of the First World War resulted in a plethora of territorial and national divisions.
It entrenched the discourse of national self-determination and, along with this,
established new forms of mass nationalist mobilization and repertoires of ethnic

8 Musil, Man Without Qualities, 406. The original passage may be found in Robert Musil, Der
Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Erstes und Zweites Buch, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1984; first
published 1930–43), 374: ‘Mit einem Wort, man kann weder einen ordentlichen Etappenplan, noch
eine Demarkationslinie, noch sonst etwas aufstellen, und das Ganze ist, mit Respekt zu sagen . . . das,
was bei uns jeder Vorgesetzte einen Sauhaufen nennen würde.’
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4 The Politics of Self-Determination

violence that introduced an entirely new dynamic between rulers and their subjects,
with very diverse results. Allied statesmen and their experts had a powerful impact
on this new international system, but its final form and future course exceeded
their control. As we will see, local activists, ordinary citizens, and military fortunes
played an important part in shaping the post-war order. It was the interplay
between Allied decision-making and local forces that placed international relations
on its new and fragile footing after the end of the Great War.
This book departs from historical narratives that focus either on the subtleties of
diplomacy or examine single case studies. Instead, it moves the interplay of the
international, national, and local levels to the centre of attention. As will be seen,
this interplay rarely worked out along the lines of democratic principles. Both at
the level of international decision-making and on the ground, the key actors faced
the challenge of how to apply Wilsonian ideas to highly complex and disputed
settings. Given the pressures of strategic interests, budgetary constraints, and the
vagueness of Wilsonian principles, cutting short the costly and open-ended process
of self-determination appeared to many as a convenient solution. Just as democra-
cies have been constantly struggling with attempts by elites to assume control over
their intrinsic volatility,9 the peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919
were constantly tempted to determine by themselves what the people ‘ought to
wish’, as the British expert James Headlam-Morley phrased it.10 At the national
and local levels, the endeavour to exploit self-determination for one’s own interests
frequently meant resorting to ethnic violence.11
Such attempts to circumvent democratic self-determination pervaded all political
levels and European regions, from political planning and decision-making to
national policies and local responses. Yet there were significant variations. While
some regions plunged into prolonged episodes of ethnic violence and full-blown
civil war, other regions experienced only temporary and limited periods of violent
clashes. It was this varying collision of international politics and local reverbera-
tions that gave shape to the complex web of European history at the end of the
First World War. The chapters that follow trace this history in its horizontal and
vertical dimensions. They provide an in-depth examination of the attempts by
policymakers and their experts to redefine the territorial landscape of several
European regions, and of the consequences of their decisions.
The result of the manifold frictions between the ideal of self-determination,
strategic interests, and intricate realities on the ground was not, as critics have so
frequently asserted, the triumph of cynical power politics over naive Wilsonian

9 See David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to
the Present (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013).
10 James Headlam-Morley, A Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference 1919, ed. Agnes Headlam-
Morley, Russell Bryant, and Anna Cienciala (London: Methuen, 1972), 44. For the full quotation see
the epitaph at the beginning of chapter 4.
11 As Robert Gerwarth and John Horne have pointed out, one of the primary functions of para-
military violence after 1918 was precisely to ‘short-circuit revolutionary or democratic self-affirmation
and supply a legitimating claim to act for the nation in a more durable manner’. Robert Gerwarth and
John Horne, ‘Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923’, Journal
of Modern History, 83:3 (2011), 489–512, here 506.
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Introduction 5

idealism—this was the lesson statesmen drew from ‘Versailles’ in 1945 and during
much of the Cold War. Semi-finished and contradictory as it was, the peace order
that emerged between 1917 and 1923 was not irreversibly flawed.12 The interaction
between Wilsonian principles, geopolitical interests, and local agency effectively
produced the most diverse results. These ranged from successfully conducted plebi-
scites in Upper Silesia, Schleswig, and Carinthia and innovative but fragile creations,
such as the internationalized Saar region and the autonomous state of the Åland
Islands, to unilateral rectifications of borders that went against local wishes, as was
the case with South Tyrol, and the massive ethnic violence and forced removal of
populations in south-eastern Europe.
It is therefore more accurate to view the struggle between principles, interests,
and local realities in terms of a multi-faceted and regionally uneven peace process
that lasted roughly from 1917 to 1923. During this ‘hot’ period of international
political and territorial volatility, peace and war to some extent intertwined. John
Horne, Robert Gerwarth, and others have rightfully claimed that we need to
reconsider the First World War and its traditional 1914–18 time frame in the light
of the prolonged conflicts across Europe, beginning with the Balkan Wars in 1912
and ending in 1923.13 The present study builds on their ‘Greater War’ thesis and
adds the fundamental dimension of peacemaking to the picture. We may then
conceive of the military and paramilitary conflicts that continued to plague large
parts of Europe after 1918 as expressions of a highly contested and difficult process
of peacemaking.
The fundamental issue with international politics in the ensuing interwar
period—once the initial Wilsonian enthusiasm had faded and most post-war violent
conflicts had ended—was its inability to renew itself by producing viable ideals
and commensurable principles capable of addressing the persisting territorial dis-
putes. Even the most positive and functional outcomes of the peacemaking process
and conflict management of the time did not inform public debate and the larger
international political discourse. Instead, from the moment that John Maynard
Keynes had published his best-selling The Economic Consequences of the Peace in

12 For an early rejection of such a generalized condemnation of the Paris Peace Conference see Marc
Trachtenberg, ‘Versailles after Sixty Years’, Journal of Contemporary History, 17:3 (1982), 487–506,
here 502–4.
13 See Gerwarth and Horne, ‘Vectors of Violence’ and the works that have thus far appeared in the
recently launched Greater War series at Oxford University Press: Robert Gerwarth and John Horne,
eds, War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), Joshua A. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Most recently, Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela have
argued for a beginning of the ‘Greater War’ in 1911 with the Italian invasion of Ottoman territories,
thus reinterpreting the ‘Greater War’ as ‘a war of multi-ethnic, global empires’ in decline that were
ultimately replaced by an international order dominated by nation states. See Robert Gerwarth and
Erez Manela, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds, Empires at War: 1911−1923
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–16, here 3. Independently of these efforts, other scholars
have likewise emphasized the need for an extended periodization of the First World War from 1912 to
1923; see most recently Helmut Bley and Anorthe Kremers, ‘Introduction’, in Helmut Bley and
Anorthe Kremers, eds, The World During the First World War (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2014), 9–18,
here 17.
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6 The Politics of Self-Determination

1920, initial enthusiasm soon reverted to frustration and cynicism.14 Remarkably,


the pragmatic 1920s experienced a steady improvement of social and economic
conditions. There were also major advances in international relations, such as the
Locarno Pact of 1925 or the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928. However, this same
pragmatism enticed radical nationalist leaders to oppose the system with force.
Without any coherent vision to guide international politics, aside from pragmatic
cooperation, there were few compelling arguments that the Western powers could
advance when Japan and Italy assaulted the international system in the early 1930s and
when Germany, making explicit reference to its right of national self-determination,
stepped in to annihilate it.15
Territorial borders and border zones, insofar as they are the spaces that reside in
between nation states and that simultaneously connect and separate them, are not
only the ideal sites in which to examine how international politics are restructured.
Borders also illuminate the challenges that nationalism and nationalist policies
pose and the multiple forms that they may take, as well as the nexus that exists
between local identities and international politics.16 The present study addresses
the question of borders on two interconnected levels. First, it examines the negoti-
ations and the drawing of borders at the international level. By tracing the varying
concepts of national borders from the peace planning process to the negotiations
at the Paris Peace Conference, it will be possible to shed light on the dynamics
between competing concepts like national self-determination, ethnicity, or strate-
gic interests. Second, the study moves on to examine the consequences of newly
drawn borders in local and regional contexts. The investigation of the local dimen-
sion focuses on processes of nationalist polarization and ethnic violence, but also
on the local populations’ evasion and adaptation strategies. Therefore, the study
intrinsically and intimately connects local experiences and actions to the interna-
tional sphere. Thus far, border studies have primarily focused on local aspects,
while the international dimension has been disregarded as a relic of traditional
diplomatic history. Moreover, most scholars have ignored the link between the
international and local dimensions of borders. In this sense, the present study also
endeavours to broaden the methodological scope of historical border studies.

14 See John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1920).
15 On the dynamic of the latter, see Jörg Fisch, ‘Adolf Hitler und das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der
Völker’, Historische Zeitschrift, 290:1 (2010), 93–118. For a meticulous recent account of the histori-
cal context of the 1930s see the excellent monograph written by Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark:
European International History, 1933−1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
16 See the groundbreaking study by Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in
the Pyrenees (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989). Other important works in border
studies that are developed from the perspectives of anthropology, political science, sociology, and
history include Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, ‘Toward a Comparative History of
Borderlands’, Journal of World History, 8:2 (1997), 211–42, Daniel Nordman, Frontières de France: De
l’espace au territoire: XVIe−XIXe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), Hastings Donnan and Thomas M.
Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 1999), Monika Eigmüller and
Georg Vobruba, eds, Grenzsoziologie: Die politische Strukturierung des Raumes (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag
für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006), and Bernhard Struck, Christophe Duhamelle, and Andreas Kossert,
eds, Grenzregionen: Ein europäischer Vergleich vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main,
New York: Campus, 2007).
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Introduction 7

Ethnicity is another key concept of the book. In the most general sense, it refers
to the old debate of civic and ethnic nationalism that gained momentum in the
latter third of the nineteenth century in Europe. More specifically, ethnicity is a
highly useful instrument with which to disentangle the puzzle of international
politics in the early interwar period. To develop its full analytical potential, how-
ever, ethnicity requires a precise conceptualization of the term in regard to both its
content and its function. Unfortunately, most of the numerous historical, socio-
logical, political, and anthropological works on ethnicity have either refrained
from examining the term and its single components in detail or attempted to
establish general definitions that reflect ideological positions rather than real differ-
ences between different forms or functions of ethnicity.17 In this study, ethnicity is
primarily understood to be a means with which the complexity of national self-­
determination was reduced to an objective factor that served both border drawing
and collective political mobilization.18 Ethnic or ethnographic ‘realities’ consti-
tuted, at the time, the formula upon which experts, politicians, and local agitators
reached agreement. In terms of power, ethnic categorization deprived individuals
at the local level of their subjective interests and reduced them to being members
of social groups that were defined by objective traits like religion, language, cultural
traditions, or physical attributes. Insofar as it effectively simplified national classi-
fication and mobilization, ethnicity proved to be a crucial if deeply problematic
binding element between the international and the local levels. Nevertheless, as
will be demonstrated, ethnic definitions of national identity—at the international
and the local levels—hardly ever passed uncontested.
Alongside the concepts of borders and ethnicity, a third major analytical thread
of the present work concerns experts and expertise, a subject that has recently
attracted growing attention among historians.19 Within this emergent field of

17 It is true that recent approaches move increasingly beyond essentialism and politicized concepts
of ethnicity. For instance, Rogers Brubaker has argued that ethnicity as a contingent social phenome-
non must be examined at the level of individuals and that ethnic groups should not be taken as stable
and unquestionable units of analysis. However, Brubaker does not discuss the single components of
ethnicity in more detail, and he does not go beyond a conceptualization of ethnicity as a ‘process’ that
varies according to the setting. See Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2004), 11, especially chapter 2. Likewise, Pieter Judson’s work provides
invaluable insights into the in situ fabrication of national identities in the linguistically mixed border
regions of Austria–Hungary in the early twentieth century, but it does not make use of its empirical
results to draw more general conclusions or develop a historically grounded definition of ethnicity.
See Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
18 Such a functionalist view of ethnicity is advanced by some of the most recent theoretical publi-
cations on ethnic violence. See notably Henry E. Hale, The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism
of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
19 More recent historical works on experts and expertise include Roy M. MacLeod, ‘Introduction’,
in Roy M. MacLeod, ed., Government and Expertise: Specialists, Administrators and Professionals,
1860−1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–24, Eric J. Engstrom, Volker Hess,
and Ulrike Thoms, eds, Figurationen des Experten: Ambivalenzen der wissenschaftlichen Expertise im
ausgehenden 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2005), Kiran Klaus Patel and
Veronika Lipphardt, ‘Neuverzauberung im Gestus der Wissenschaftlichkeit: Wissenspraktiken im 20.
Jahrhundert am Beispiel menschlicher Diversität’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 34:4 (2008), 425–54,
Eric H. Ash, ed., Expertise: Practical Knowledge and the Early Modern State (Chicago: University of
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8 The Politics of Self-Determination

historical research, the following chapters address a noticeable lacuna by focusing


on the role ascribed to experts in foreign policymaking. Experts were new figures
in the foreign offices of national governments and found themselves teetering
between academia and politics. In contrast to professional diplomats, they most
often had a distinguished university background as well as training in history, lin-
guistics, economics, or geography. The foreign offices of the key Western powers,
Great Britain, France, and the United States, recruited these academics during the
latter stages of the First World War to ensure that the peace planning process
was ‘scientific’ and more ‘objective’. In this sense, the introduction of experts to the
diplomatic sphere was an important step in the professionalization of foreign policy
in the early twentieth century. However, while the expected breadth and complex-
ity of the peace negotiations provided the immediate trigger for the emergence of
academic expertise in foreign policymaking, the role that the experts were expected
to play was far more delicate. Particularly after the rhetorical offensive of American
president Woodrow Wilson was launched with his famous Fourteen Points in early
January 1918, experts were expected to translate vague political allusions to self-­
determination into a workable peace programme. Not least, their task was to find
a way to bridge the gap between the universalist rhetoric of a just peace and the
particularist aims of the Western powers and their allies. In an age of positivist faith
in science, experts were to draw objectively fair and equitable borders and assist in
legitimizing the new territorial order.
The extensive use of academic expertise in international politics was a qualita-
tively new phenomenon at the end of the First World War. Those historians,
geographers, linguists, and other academics who found themselves involved in
foreign policymaking struggled to come to terms with the dual demands of scien-
tific objectivity on the one hand and political prerogatives on the other. Quite
often, particularly when their advice ran counter to strategic considerations, the
experts found themselves sidelined. On other occasions, they were able to signif-
icantly shape policy.
Regardless of the fact that they ultimately failed in their endeavour to find a
magic formula that was able to translate Wilsonian ideals into reality, the experts
came up with a number of innovative and balanced solutions. On the whole,
they advised that a careful and moderate approach ought to be taken when
drawing borders or exerting power in territories assigned to a new or foreign
state. The experts usually advised against the allocation of annexations to allied
states that were deemed not only to be territorially too extensive but also to the
excessive detriment of the local population or the defeated power, and they
frequently proposed intermediate solutions such as the internationalization of a
contested area, as was the case in the Saar region or with Danzig. Yet expertise

Chicago Press, 2010), Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trischler, Building Europe on Expertise:
Innovators, Organizers, Networkers (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and most
recently Joris Vandendriessche, Evert Peeters, and Kaat Wils, eds, Scientists’ Expertise as Performance:
Between State and Society, 1860−1960 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015) and Davide Rodogno,
Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel, eds, Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks, and Issues
from the 1840s to the 1930s (New York, NY: Berghahn, 2015).
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Introduction 9

had its problematic side as well. Operating in between academia and politics, experts
frequently managed to shield themselves from both scientific and democratic
scrutiny.20 From behind the smokescreen of objectivity, they could pursue their
own political agendas.
The primary focus here is on the experts’ often problematic involvement in
political decision-making and their interaction with politicians, diplomats, and
national stakeholders. The present study conceives of expertise as a multifaceted
and ambiguous phenomenon. It goes beyond narrow notions of political impact
without retreating to mere discursive analysis. Thus, it is argued that not only the
direct impact of expertise on policymaking, but also its neglect is highly informa-
tive with regard to how the emerging post-war international system operated.
Moreover, as will be demonstrated, the analysis of expertise has great potential as a
mirror of contemporary mindsets and sheds light on historical contingencies and
policy options. Expertise served an important legitimizing purpose for statesmen,
but by the same token it could also set limits for and even direct their actions.
Finally, expertise represented a crucial binding element between the international
and local levels of politics. Experts were not only involved in the implementation
of international concepts; they also revised and challenged these same concepts in
the light of varying local circumstances.
Much has been written about the Paris Peace Conference and the interwar
period. For the most part, the more recent literature favours the view for which the
years between 1919 and 1939 are considered a period in its own right. Historians
such as Robert Boyce, Zara Steiner, Patrick Cohrs, and Adam Tooze have produced
extensive monographs that emphasize the complexity of the 1920s but also the
stabilizing factors that characterize this period.21 From the perspective they pres-
ent, ‘Versailles’ did not inevitably lead to the outbreak of the Second World War,
and the interwar period appears as a time unto itself with its own potentials and
dangers.22 These recent approaches dismiss earlier verdicts that depict the 1920s
and 1930s as a mere ‘Twenty Years’ Crisis’ (E. H. Carr).23 Instead, they introduce
a number of factors previously not considered in explanations of the economic and
political breakdown of the international system during the 1930s: the lack of
moral and military commitment to the Paris peace treaties by the Western Allies,
notably by Great Britain and the United States; the mutually reinforcing economic

20 The social science literature on expertise early on emphasized the dangers that expertise could
represent for democratic decision-making. See the selection of articles in Evan Selinger and Robert P.
Crease, eds, The Philosophy of Expertise (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006).
21 See Robert Boyce, The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Zara S. Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History,
1919−1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Patrick O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after
World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919−1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), and most recently J. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking
of Global Order, 1916−1931 (New York, NY: Viking, 2014).
22 See also Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, NY:
Random House, 2003), xxx.
23 See Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International
Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939).
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10 The Politics of Self-Determination

and political crises that had been feeding into each other since the late 1920s
and that were caused or aggravated by the return to a pre-war, laissez-faire style of
liberalism; or the important albeit ultimately insufficient efforts by the League
of Nations to defend the Paris peace treaties and the failure of the international
sanctions placed on aggressive states such as Italy, Japan, and Germany from the
early 1930s.24
Another important perspective has pointed to the similarities and entanglements
of liberal and authoritarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century. Recent
works by Carole Fink and Mark Mazower have highlighted the contradictory char-
acter of the universal minority protection rhetoric, which was used by the Western
European political elites as a means to reassert old intra-European hierarchies
between their own fully sovereign states and the semi-sovereign ‘minority states’
located in the central, eastern, and south-eastern regions of the continent.25 From a
more general perspective, scholars such as Michael Mann, Eric Weitz, and Philipp
Ther have unveiled the common origins and the overlaps between the liberal
‘Western’ and authoritarian ‘Eastern’ regimes.26 Weitz has even claimed that the
forced transfers of populations and minority rights were but ‘two sides of the same
coin’27 in the more general push for nationally homogeneous states.28
With his The Wilsonian Moment, Erez Manela has made a most important
­contribution to the international history of the early interwar period.29 Manela
documents the global importance of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and uses
the concept of national self-determination to link decision-making at the diplo-
matic level to the local colonial contexts of Egypt, China, Korea, and India. His
study finds that throughout the colonial world, the widespread hopes that the

24 On the League of Nations see e.g. Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, ‘Transnationalism
and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of its Economic and Financial Organisation’,
Contemporary European History, 14:4 (2005), 465–92, Mark Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of
Nations in Interwar Europe’, Daedalus, 126:2 (1997), 47–63, Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League
of Nations’, American Historical Review, 112:4 (2007), 1091–117, and Martyn Housden, The League
of Nations and the Organisation of Peace (Harlow: Pearson, 2012).
25 See Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International
Minority Protection, 1878−1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Mazower,
‘Interwar Europe’. For the related issue of human rights see Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of
Human Rights, 1933–1950’, Historical Journal, 47:2 (2004), 379–98.
26 See Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), Eric D. Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System:
International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and
Civilizing Missions’, American Historical Review, 113:5 (2008), 1313–43, and Philipp Ther, Die
dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: Ethnische Säuberungen im modernen Europa (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).
27 Weitz, ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System’, 1313.
28 Mark Mazower was one of the first to argue that fascism and communism not only drew their
strength from the crisis of liberal democracy, but actually sprang from the same ideological source of
Western civilization and modernity. His account, however, places emphasis on the clash between the
forces of liberalism, fascism, and communism rather than on their mutual influences and similarities.
See Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 403.
29 See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of
Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also his earlier article in Erez
Manela, ‘Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East–West Harmony and the Revolt against
Empire in 1919’, American Historical Review, 111:5 (2006), 1327–51.
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Introduction 11

American president Woodrow Wilson and his vision of self-determination had


aroused before the onset of the peace talks quickly degenerated into frustration and
upheaval when the actual outlines of the peace came to be known.
The causal connection between ideas of self-determination and nationalism on
the one hand and local ethnic violence on the other has also been emphasized in
two other recent works. As Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz argue, nationalism was a
truly revolutionary concept in that it postulated the congruence of territorial
and ethnic borders, which had devastating consequences for the great European
empires.30 In a theoretically and empirically sophisticated global approach encom-
passing 156 territories between 1816 and 2001, Andreas Wimmer detected a
surprisingly stable correlation between the local occurrence of nationalist ideas
and the outbreak of war. Wimmer argues that rapid changes in power structures and
perceptions of political legitimacy, exclusion of important groups from power,
and transnational ‘contagion’ of formerly disaffected regions with nationalist
ideas are mechanisms that help explain this statistical connection between nation-
alism and war.31
Important as these studies are, they do not specify why and under which
­particular conditions nationalist designs, hopes, and claims were—or were not—
transformed into frustration and ultimately into political protest and violent
upheaval.32 What is needed, therefore, is for the focus to be shifted to the condi-
tions that enabled the ‘Wilsonian moment’ to mobilize local populations to spe-
cific and diverse forms of political action, as well as to the different trajectories and
international repercussions of single cases. The present study argues that between
1917 and 1923, ethnicity became the primary driving force that linked the inter-
national political rhetoric of national self-determination to mobilization processes
in conflict-prone local settings. In this view, it is of decisive importance which kind
of ‘Wilsonianism’ prevailed—a more flexible, civic, or a more narrow, ethnic version;
to which extent policymakers and experts took local circumstances into consideration;
which role state and military elites played at the national level; and, significantly,
in which ways local citizens contributed to the course of the conflict. By focusing
on ethnic definitions of borders and ethnicized local identities, it will be possible
to examine in depth the varying interrelations between the international and the
local levels that triggered diverse trajectories of violence. Experts, politicians, and
local actors are the protagonists of these processes, and it is their interaction that

30 See Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, ‘Introduction: Coexistence and Violence in the German,
Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands’, in Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds, Shatterzone
of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2013), 1–20, here 5.
31 Wimmer uses the categories of inter-state war, civil war, and secessionist war. See Andreas
Wimmer, Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 25–6.
32 Wimmer’s model, for instance, in order to operate at a highly aggregate level, reduces the histor-
ically and regionally shifting modes of political organization to one unalterable variable of modern
Western ethnic ‘nationalism’. Wimmer consequently tends to disregard or downplay different types of
nationalism and their local adaptation, political alternatives to nationalism, as well as individual
dynamics of conflict. See Wimmer, Waves of War, 4.
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12 The Politics of Self-Determination

decisively shaped the diverse effects that the Wilsonian ideas had in different
­settings. This book maintains that such a refined assessment of the interplay
between international politics and local conflicts will improve our understanding
of the relationship between authoritarian and liberal forces and the interwar period
as a whole.
The present study begins with the assumption that the recalibration of interna-
tional politics after the violent upheaval of the First World War was an open-ended
process. Over the course of this recalibration process, apparently contradictory
concepts such as self-government and racism were joined in all kinds of unex-
pected combinations. At this formative stage of the interwar period, the fragility of
the international architecture and the mechanisms that would dismantle it were
already fully visible. Before the destructive forces took the upper hand, however,
they competed and engaged with the more constructive forces of the period.
At the same time—and this is where the following chapters to some extent
depart from the aforementioned literature—it is possible and indeed indispensable
to distinguish between liberal and authoritarian policies. There were different tra-
jectories just as there were varying patterns of violent or non-violent conflicts all
across Europe. As Gerwarth and Horne have argued, the decision to resort to force
and an aggressive policy of fait accomplis was always the result of specific local
circumstances.33 It may be observed, moreover, that the interplay of Wilsonian
ideals and domestic politics progressed differently in different settings.
One of the principal results of this approach is that during the early interwar
period, authoritarian and liberal policies simultaneously occurred at all levels of
politics, from the local to the international level. These tendencies pervaded not
only eastern but also western areas of Europe. Despite these similarities, the par-
ticular interplay between liberal solutions and policies such as plebiscites or minor-
ity rights on the one hand and expulsions or persecutions on the other produced
markedly different outcomes in different settings. Whether a region would adopt
a more peaceful solution or embark on a more violent path was not solely deter-
mined by local circumstances or ‘arbitrary’ decisions of the Allied political leaders
at the Paris Peace Conference. Rather, the dynamic of a conflict resulted primarily
from the relationship between the political designs of the Allies and the political
leverage that a given region or state had. In other words, much depended on the
question of whether a given region or state was able to defend its own conceptual-
ization of collective identity against external and domestic pressures alike for the
national or rather the ethnic homogenization of the local population. As will be
discussed, the fate of many disputed border regions in the period immediately
following the First World War was also contingent upon the will and the ability of
the Allied expert teams to develop a common and compelling proposal as to just
how the Wilsonian principles of national self-determination were to be balanced
against geopolitical directives and pragmatic economic, military, or geographical
considerations.

33 See Gerwarth and Horne, ‘Vectors of Violence’, 503.


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Introduction 13

With regard to methodology, this study combines transnational and compara-


tive approaches in order to develop a new perspective on early interwar Europe.34
The book postulates that it is insufficient to replace discrete units of comparison
with a focus on transfers and entanglements.35 The conditions for, and the limits
of, transfers between the entities at hand, which in the context of this study mostly
concern nation states, are a more appropriate object of analysis. Even so, the con-
nections and transfers that move across national borders must not only be recon-
textualized within a larger comparative framework in order to assess their specific
impact; more importantly, the similarities, differences, and interconnections
between the given cases also need to be addressed at multiple levels of political
action. The historical analysis has much to gain from proceeding simultaneously
within a vertical dimension—in the sense of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ contexts36—and
within a horizontal dimension that relates different regional contexts to each other.
This study aims to do precisely this by interconnecting the local, the national,
and the international dimensions of several regions. The objective is to arrive at a
more rigorous explanation of the multi-level dynamics that characterize the early
interwar period and that have remained surprisingly unexplored in much of the
secondary literature.
This multi-level and comparative approach is based on a large body of historical
sources primarily from French, British, and US archives. In addition to the files of
the respective foreign offices, the present work draws on personal papers of key
experts as well as material from local archives. The records of the League of Nations
in Geneva, finally, offer a perspective on the international and transnational man-
agement of borders and national minorities during the 1920s and 1930s.
The analytical point of departure resides in the question of the interrelation
between the territorial rearrangements that the peacemakers planned and finally
brought about at the Paris Peace Conference and the local dimension of these plans

34 On the need for a combination of transnational and comparative approaches see Heinz-Gerhard
Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Comparative
History’, in Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, eds, Comparative and Transnational History:
Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2009), 1–28, here
20–1. On transnational history see Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Überlegungen zu einer transnationalen
Geschichte’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 52:7 (2004), 626–45, Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining
Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History, 14:4 (2005), 421–39, and Akira Iriye and
Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
35 While this seems to be the tendency of some of the literature on transfers and entanglements,
many authors have argued for transfer studies to serve not as a replacement but rather as a corrective
measure of comparative history. For the latter approach see Michel Espagne, ‘Sur les limites du com-
paratisme en histoire culturelle’, Genèses, 17 (1994), 112–21, here 121. In a similar though more
sophisticated vein, the method of histoire croisée uses its focus on ‘crossings’ to reflect upon and call
into question the stability of national contexts as meaningful analytical units. While this is certainly
useful in terms of a more general reflection and criticism of comparisons and simple models of trans-
fer, it does not seem as capable of providing an empirically feasible alternative. See Michael Werner
and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Penser l’histoire croisée: Entre empirie et réflexivité’, in Michael Werner
and Bénédicte Zimmermann, eds, De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 15–49,
here 19–21.
36 For a classical sociological conceptualization of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ see James S. Coleman,
Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), 6–10.
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14 The Politics of Self-Determination

and decisions. How did the local population react to, or rather act upon, the
changes that were made to their borders? Which role did the local and national
administrations play? What were the limits of state-imposed models of identity
and internationally sanctioned borders? Aside from these local effects of interna-
tional decisions, the present study also examines the repercussions that local actions
might have had on international politics. More generally, it investigates the oppor-
tunities and difficulties that the Wilsonian principles of national self-determination
and peaceful arbitration were faced with as politicians and experts attempted to
establish their validity at the level of international policymaking.
The primary argument that will be developed with regard to the local impact
of territorial changes is as follows: not only could local reactions decisively shape
a given regional conflict, but the resulting dynamics of the conflict may also have
major repercussions at the international level. With regard to the Wilsonian
principles, it will be argued that many of the Allied experts and even some dip-
lomats and politicians were in fact driven by a genuine intention to bring about
a radical change in international policymaking and to follow and promote
Wilsonian ideas. However, the defenders of Wilsonian ideas underestimated the
resilience of competing economic, geographical, military, and historical consid-
erations as well as geopolitical egotisms, and they ultimately failed to implement
the Wilsonian programme at the core level of international politics. Perhaps
more decisively, they failed to reconcile their belief in the Wilsonian vision with
the diplomatic and local realities that they were faced with at the Paris Peace
Conference. Disappointed with the compromises that they were forced to make,
the peacemakers failed to communicate their decisions more effectively to the
wider public, and in so doing they failed to garner support for the changes that
were brought about at the peace conference. The result was a growing disparity
between the rather pragmatic application of national self-determination and
arbitration in international policymaking and the increasingly vociferous politi-
cal rhetoric that lamented the shortcomings of the peace treaties in terms of the
Wilsonian programme.
The following chapters address the political dynamics of the early interwar
period in Europe from various structural, chronological, and regional perspectives.
To unveil the intricate web of local, national, and international actors and struc-
tures, the interplay of these different levels must be the object of focus.37 This
study therefore progresses chronologically in two main parts: planning the post-
war order at the end of the First World War (part I) and the implementation of the
‘Paris system’ (Weitz) between 1919 and 1923 (part II). The concluding chapter 7
offers an outlook on the development of the peace architecture during the 1920s
and 1930s. The chapters within each section revisit processes as they were manifested
at the international as well as at the national and local levels. The case studies allow

37 On such levels and ‘scales’ see Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, ‘Introduction:
Space and Scale in Transnational History’, International History Review, 33:4 (2011), 573–84 and
Matti Peltonen, ‘Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research’, History
and Theory, 40:3 (2001), 347–59.
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Introduction 15

for a more specific examination of the larger processes and provide a comparative
element that incorporates different European regions.
One major theme of the study is politics at the international level. It begins by
examining the peace planning process of the three principal Western powers,
France, Great Britain, and the United States, whose delegates and teams of experts
decisively shaped the Paris peace treaties (chapter 1). Here, the emphasis lies on the
groups of experts that were created in each of the three Allied states towards the
end of the war. The schemes that these experts developed for a new European
territorial order and their first experiences in foreign policymaking are then dis-
cussed in a detailed exploration of the Paris Peace Conference (chapter 4). It is in
this setting that the experts, diplomats, and politicians met daily over six months
and were confronted with the practical and urgent need to put their plans to the
test. As will become clear, the tensions that arose between principles and geopolit-
ical directives, not to mention the persistence of a mutual suspicion between the
delegations, were present from the very beginning of the peace planning phase
right through to the peace talks in Paris.
The second major theme regards the effects of the Allied peace schemes on
local settings. This part of the study is characterized by a comparative dimension
wherein a detailed examination is made of two cases in which changes made
to territorial borders at the Paris Peace Conference directly provoked violent
and ethnicized national conflicts. It compares a western European region—the
Franco-German borderland of Alsace-Lorraine—with a south-eastern European
region—the Greek–Turkish conflict between 1919 and 1923; this being the first
study to compare and relate these two rather distinct cases. The purpose of this
comparison is not only to shed new light on these rather well-researched regions,
but it is also to take some further steps towards overcoming the persistent con-
ceptualization that there was a ‘civilized’ or pacific western half of Europe and a
‘chaotic’ eastern half that was inescapably plagued by ethnic strife and civil
wars.38 Both cases represent what are perhaps the most extreme episodes of mass
ethnic violence in their larger region; by comparing them and linking them both
to the international level of politics, it will become possible to reach an under-
standing of interwar Europe that goes beyond the simplistic perspectives characteristic
of an East–West dichotomy.
In the two case studies, the focus lies on local actors, from regional and munic-
ipal administrations and political groupings down to the level of individuals. These
actors, as will be demonstrated, did not only play an active part in the respective
local conflicts. By shaping the course of these conflicts, their actions also had major
reverberations at the level of international politics. The grassroots-level perspective
thus allows us to trace the manifold effects of Wilsonianism and Allied policies on
the ground. What is more, it enables us to better understand the challenges and

38 For recent examples of fruitful comparisons between western and central–eastern areas of Europe
see Tara Zahra, ‘The “Minority Problem” and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak
Borderlands’, Contemporary European History, 17:2 (2008), 137–65 and Timothy Wilson, Frontiers of
Violence: Conflict and Identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918−1922 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/16, SPi

16 The Politics of Self-Determination

modifications that the Allied peace order experienced over the 1920s and 1930s.
Seen in relation to international politics, the case studies reveal that local actors
were not merely passive victims of or radical opponents to ‘Versailles’. Instead,
they were deeply involved in the process of negotiating, applying, and modifying
Allied policies.
The first case pertains to the planning and the actual return of French rule to
the ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace-Lorraine (chapters 2 and 5). The fate of this Franco-
German border region is particularly significant, because it is an example of a
violent ethnicized conflict in what was an apparently civilized Western Europe.
Although the region’s return to France may seem to represent a mere realization
of a French war aim, Alsace-Lorraine is in fact a highly illustrative case of the
contradictions produced by the clash of Wilsonian principles of self-determination
and Allied strategic interests—with dire consequences for parts of the local pop-
ulation. On the surface, the Allies agreed to support France’s war aim of a ‘pure
and simple return’ of Alsace-Lorraine. As chapters 2 and 5 demonstrate, however,
underneath this surface even some French experts felt uneasy about their claim in
the light of the virulent discussion of national self-determination in late 1917 and
early 1918. Alsace-Lorraine thus became a fascinating example of the subtleties of
meanings that self-determination could assume and how they later played out on
the ground. These subtleties and political tensions become visible, it will be
argued, not at the top political and diplomatic levels, but in the discussions of the
American, British, and French experts. Wilson’s eighth point demanding that ‘the
wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 . . . should be righted’,39 for instance,
sparked an intense debate among the French experts of the Comité d’études as to
whether this phrasing was to be interpreted as a full endorsement of French
claims, or whether it contained an implicit call for a plebiscite in the region fol-
lowing the war. As the files of the American experts of the Inquiry demonstrate,
such a popular consultation had indeed been seriously considered as a solution for
the ‘question’ of Alsace-Lorraine right down to the final phase of the war. Although
the issue of a plebiscite did not surface in official political debates, Wilsonian
principles exerted strong argumentative pressure on France’s claim of a ‘pure and
simple’ return of the region. This conceptual discrepancy of French war aims and
Allied rhetoric had very real consequences. As chapter 5 shows, the fait accompli
of the region’s return to France in November 1918 and the French zeal for
its rapid assimilation not only caused uneasiness among Allied experts and diplo-
mats at the Paris Peace Conference40 but also set the stage for a violent drive of
de-Germanization in the region that was to silence any doubts and settle the issue
by force.
The second case study on the Greek–Turkish conflict takes us to the south-­
eastern fringes of the European continent. Like Alsace-Lorraine, the Greek–Turkish

39 See http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp (accessed 26 June 2015).


40 In June 1919, British expert James Headlam-Morley, for instance, informed French delegate
André Tardieu at the Paris Peace Conference that he considered France’s policy in Alsace-Lorraine to
be ‘radically and completely wrong and unjustifiable’, and if Great Britain did not intervene it was
because it regarded the issue as France’s internal affair. See Headlam-Morley, Memoir, 143.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/16, SPi

Introduction 17

dispute was provoked by Allied alterations of territorial borders after the First
World War. Following the military defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the Western
powers decided to award their Greek ally with a zone in western Asia Minor
around Smyrna, today’s Izmir—a possible outcome that had been discussed
rather controversially by the British, French, and American experts before.
Chapters 3 and 6 examine first the phase of planning and decision-making and
then the local reverberations of this new Greek–Turkish border that would last
for only three years. Much like Alsace-Lorraine, the Greek–Turkish conflict was
pervaded by ethnic violence. This latter, however, proved to be significantly more
violent and intense than the quarrels in Alsace-Lorraine, resulting in the out-
break of a full-blown war and the compulsory population exchange of more than
one million people across the Aegean in 1922/3. Most importantly, the Greek–
Turkish conflict was the first case in which an aggressor—or, from the perspec-
tive of Kemalist Turkey, a victim of the Great Powers—had been successful in
revising the Paris treaty system. Furthermore, over the course of the dispute, the
erosion of the alliance between Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States
came to the surface. The Greek defeat only contributed to the cynicism of the
four and fed their growing disbelief and scepticism in the ability of the Paris
peace architecture to resolve such conflicts, as well as towards the premises of
justice and self-determination upon which it had been based. In many ways,
therefore, the Greco-Turkish conflict provides us with an important change of
perspective on the peace settlements, and in order to understand what was to
happen in the ‘centre’ of Europe in the coming decades, this change of view is
essential.
The concluding chapter 7 discusses these early fractures in the Paris system and
examines the recreative potential of the peace architecture in the 1920s and 1930s.
The chapter demonstrates that as the revolutionary heat of the Wilsonian moment
had faded and with the peace treaties signed, the League of Nations silently trans-
formed the political right of self-determination into less troublesome cultural
minority rights. Historians are engaged in renewed debate as to whether the dis-
creet approach of the League of Nations towards the political claims of minorities
was a helpful or rather a harmful factor in the interwar period. This chapter argues
that the League’s take on minority rights provided all but a deeply problematic
makeshift solution to the continuing tension between the rhetoric of peace and
international justice on the one hand, and what was only a partial capacity or will-
ingness to implement these principles on the other. Minority rights and voluntary
international arbitration eased minor tensions in the short run. In more favourable
circumstances, they might have contributed to a peaceful transition to a world of
tolerant nation states. Faced with an increasingly hostile and aggressively national-
ist political atmosphere, which began to manifest in earnest by the early 1930s,
however, the unresolved tension between the League’s official rhetoric of peace and
its weak instruments of behind-the-scenes diplomacy proved to be fatal for the
stability of international relations.
Reviewing the League of Nation’s efforts to establish a durable peace order, the
forces unleashed by Pandora’s box are brought back to mind, as are General
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/16, SPi

18 The Politics of Self-Determination

Stumm’s inconclusive efforts to bring the major contemporary ideologies in


order. Just as with the general’s battle scheme of modern thought and the ques-
tion of hope in Pandora’s jar, the interwar period was more than anything an
open-ended experiment in international politics. The following chapters explore
this short-lived epoch, which had its beginnings in the final stages of the First
World War.
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Title: Essentials of woodworking


A textbook for schools

Author: Ira Samuel Griffith

Illustrator: Edwin Victor Lawrence

Release date: October 12, 2023 [eBook #71855]

Language: English

Original publication: Peoria: The Manual Arts Press, 1908

Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Harry Lamé and the Online Distributed


Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSENTIALS


OF WOODWORKING ***
Please see the Transcriber’s Notes
at the end of this text.
This book on woodworking contains
notes and working drawings for the
content in Correlated courses in
woodwork and mechanical drawing
by the same author, available at
Project Gutenberg.
FOREST INTERIOR. SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA.
ESSENTIALS OF
WOODWORKING
A TEXTBOOK FOR
SCHOOLS

BY

Ira Samuel Griffith, A.

B.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

E d w i n V i c to r L aw r e n c e
The Manual Arts
Press

Peoria, Illinois

Copyright
Ira Samuel Griffith
1908
PREFACE.
An experience, somewhat extended, in teaching academic
branches of learning as well as woodworking, has convinced the
author that the most effective teaching of woodworking can be
accomplished only when its content is made a subject of as diligent
study as is that of the other and older branches. Such a study
necessitates the possession, by the student, of a text-book.
The selection of a suitable text is made difficult because of the fact
that tool processes are usually treated in connection either with
models or exercises. It is hardly to be expected that any one set of
models or of exercises, tho they may be of very great value, will fill
the needs of varying local school conditions. The production of a
text-book which shall deal with tool processes in a general way
without reference to any particular set of models or exercises is the
author’s aim. It is believed that such a text will prove suitable
wherever the essentials of woodworking shall be taught, whether in
grammar, high school or college, and whatever the system of
instruction.
A few words as to the manner of using the text seem advisable. It
is not expected that the book will be studied chapter by chapter,
consecutively, as are the elementary texts in mathematics or
science. Rather, it is to be studied topically. To illustrate: A class is to
make a model, project, exercise, or whatever we may choose to call
it, which will require a knowledge of certain tools and the manner of
using them. At a period previous to their intended use the numbers
of the sections of the text relating to these tools and their uses, or
the page numbers, should be given the student. Previous to the
period in which these tools are to be used he should be required to
study the sections so marked. The recitation upon the assigned text
should take place at the beginning of the period following that of the
assignment, and may be conducted in a manner quite similar to that
of academic branches.
This should prepare the way and make intelligible the
“demonstration” which may be given in connection with the recitation
or at its close.
If as thoro a knowledge of the matter studied is insisted upon in
the recitation as is insisted upon in the academic classroom, there
need be but little excuse for ignorance on the part of the pupil when
he begins his work or at any subsequent time.
Acknowledgement is due the Department of Forestry, Washington,
D. C., for the use of material contained in the chapter on Woods and
for the prints from which many of the half-tones relating to forestry,
were produced.
INTRODUCTION.
Care of Tools and Bench.
It is important that a beginner should become impressed with the
importance of keeping his tools in the best condition. Good results
can be obtained only when tools are kept sharp and clean, and used
only for the purposes for which they are made. Tools properly
sharpened and properly used permit one to work easily as well as
accurately. When it becomes necessary for the worker to use undue
strength because of the dullness of his tools, “troubles” begin to
accumulate and the “pleasure of doing” is soon changed to despair.
Orderliness and carefulness, with knowledge and patience are
sure to bring good results; just as a lack of them will bring failure.
The bench top must not be marked with pencil or scratched
unnecessarily. Chisel boards are to protect the top from any
accidental cuts and should always be used for that purpose. Bench
tops that are scraped and shellaced or oiled every other year ought
to remain in as good condition as when new except for the few
accidental marks too deep to remove, which the thoughtless boy
may have inflicted.
Good workers take pride in keeping their benches in good order.
Tools that are not in immediate use should be placed in their racks
that they may not be injured or cause injury to the worker. At the
close of the period the bright parts of tools that have come in contact
with perspiring hands should be wiped off with oily waste kept for
that purpose. All tools should then be put away in their proper places
and the top of the bench brushed clean.
The beginner should also understand that, important as are the
results he may be able to produce in wood, more serious results are
being produced in himself in the habits he is forming. Carefulness,
neatness, accuracy, ability to economize in time and material, ability
to “think” and “to do” because of the thinking, honesty, orderliness—
these are some of the more important results that are oftentimes
overlooked.
CONTENTS.

Introduction.

Care of tools and bench 3

PART I.

Tools and Elementary Processes.

Chapter I.—Laying-out Tools; Their Uses 9


1. The rule; 2. The try-square; 3. The framing
square; 4. The bevel; 5. The marking gage; 6.
The pencil gage; 7. Splitting gage; 8. The
mortise gage; 9. The Dividers; 10. Pencil and
knife.
Chapter II.—Saws 20
11. Saws; 12. The crosscut saw; 13. The rip-
saw; 14. The back-saw; 15. The turning saw;
16. The compass saw; 17. Saw filing.
Chapter III.—Planes 28
18. Planes; 19. Setting the blade; 20.
Adjustment of the iron; 21. The jack-plane;
22. The smooth-plane; 23. The jointer; 24.
The block-plane; 25. The wooden plane; 26.
Planing first surface true; 27. Face side, face
edge; 28. Planing first edge square with face
side; 29. Finishing the second edge; 30.
Finishing the second side; 31. Planing the
first end square; 32. Finishing the second
end; 33. End planing with the shooting board;
34. Rules for planing to dimensions; 35.
Planing a chamfer.
Chapter IV.—Boring Tools 46
36. Brace or bitstock; 37. Center bit; 38. The
auger bit; 39. The drill bit; The gimlet bit; 40.
Countersink bit; 41. The screwdriver bit; 42.
The brad-awl; 43. Positions while boring; 44.
Thru boring; 45. Boring to depth.
Chapter V.—Chisels and Chiseling 53
46. Chisels; 47. Horizontal paring across the
grain; 48. Vertical paring; 49. Oblique and
curved line paring; 50. Paring chamfers; 51.
The firmer gouge; 52. Grinding beveled edge
tools; 53. Whetting beveled edge tools; 54.
Oilstones; 55. Sharpening the chisel; 56.
Sharpening plane-irons; 57. To tell whether a
tool is sharp or not.
Chapter VI.—Form Work; Modeling 65
58. Making a cylinder; 59. The spokeshave;
60. Making curved edges; 61. Modeling.
Chapter VII.—1. Laying Out Duplicate Parts;
2. Scraping and Sandpapering; 3.
Fastening Parts 70
62. Laying out duplicate parts; 63. Scraping;
64. Sandpapering; 65. Hammers; 66. Nails;
67. Nailing; 68. Nailset; 69. Withdrawing
nails; 70. The screwdriver; 71. Screws; 72.
Fastening with screws; 73. Glue; 74. Clamps;
75. Gluing.

PART II.

Simple Joinery.

Chapter VIII.—Type Forms 84


76. Joinery; 77. General directions for joinery;
78. Dado; 79. Directions for dado; 80. Cross-
lap joint; 81. Directions for cross-lap joint, first
method; 82. Directions for cross-lap joint,
second method; 83. Glue joint; 84. Directions
for glue joint; 85. Doweling; 86. Directions for
doweling; 87. Keyed tenon-and-mortise; 88.
Directions for key; 89. Directions for tenon;
90. Directions for mortise; 91. Directions for
mortise in the tenon; 92. Blind mortise-and-
tenon; 93. Directions for tenon; 94. Directions
for laying out mortise; 95. Directions for
cutting mortise, first method; 96. Directions
for cutting mortise, second method; 97. Miter
joint; 98. Directions for miter joint; 99.
Dovetail joint; 100. Directions for dovetail
joint.
Chapter IX.—Elementary Cabinet Work 105
101. Combination plane; 102. Drawer
construction; 103. Directions for rabbeted
corner; 104. Directions for dovetail corner;
105. Directions for drawer; 106. Paneling;
107. Cutting grooves; 108. Haunched
mortise-and-tenon; 109. Rabbeting; 110.
Fitting a door; 111. Hinging a door; 112.
Locks.

PART III.

Wood and Wood Finishing.

Chapter X.—Wood 116


113. Structure; 114. Growth; 115. Respiration
and transpiration; 116. Moisture; 117.
Shrinkage; 118. Weight; 119. Other
properties; 120. Grain.
Chapter XI.—Lumbering and Milling 126
121. Lumbering; 122. Milling; 123. Quarter
sawing; 124. Waste; 125. Lumber
transportation; 126. Seasoning; 127. Lumber
terms and measurements.
Chapter XII.—Common Woods 138
128. Classification. Coniferous woods; 129.
Cedar; 130. Cypress; 131. Pine; 132. Spruce.
Broad-leaved woods; 133. Ash; 134.
Basswood; 135. Birch; 136. Butternut; 137.
Cherry; 138. Chestnut; 139. Elm; 140. Gum;
141. Hickory; 142. Maple; 143. Oak; 144.
Sycamore; 145. Tulip wood; 146. Walnut.
Chapter XIII.—Wood Finishing 150
147. Wood finishes; 148. Brushes; 149.
General directions for using brush; 150.
Fillers; 151. Filling with paste filler; 152.
Stains; 153. Waxing; 154. Varnishes; 155.
Shellac; 156. Shellac finishes; 157. Oil or
copal varnishes; 158. Flowing copal varnish;
159. Typical finishes for coarse-grained
woods; 160. Patching; 161. Painting.
Appendix I.—Additional Joints 164

Appendix II.—Wood Finishing Recipes 171


1. Wax; 2. Water stains; 3. Oil stains; 4. Spirit
stains.
Appendix III.—Working Drawings 173
1. Instruments; 2. Conventions; 3. Projection
and relation of views; 4. Letters and figures;
5. Constructions; 6. Order of procedure.
PART I.
TOOLS AND ELEMENTARY
PROCESSES.

CHAPTER I.
Laying-Out Tools—Their Uses.

1. The Rule.—The foot rule is used as a unit of measurement in


woodwork. The rule ordinarily used is called a two-
foot rule because of its length. Such rules are hinged so as to fold
once or twice and are usually made of boxwood or maple. The
divisions along the outer edges, the edges opposite the center hinge,
are inches, halves, fourths, eighths, and on one side sixteenths also.
Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
The rule should not be laid flat on the surface to be measured but
should be stood on edge so that the knife point can be made to
touch the divisions on the rule and the wood at the same time. Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.

Whenever there are several measurements to be made along a


straight line, the rule should not be raised until all are made, for with
each placing of the rule errors are likely to occur.

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