A New International Order? Peacemaking after the First World War [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Michael Cox, Professor Annika Mombauer, Professor David Stevenson | A century after the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919, this session will reappraise the peace settlement that followed the First World War. On 28 June 1919 the Versailles peace treaty was signed between Germany and its First World War opponents, including Britain, America, France, Italy, and Japan. The treaty was intensely controversial, and has remained so. Disillusioned liberals such as John Maynard Keynes condemned it as unjust and unworkable, and much of German opinion agreed them. It has been blamed for inflaming German nationalism, enabling Hitler's rise, and causing the Second World War. Yet other commentators have seen the treaty as too weak, or as being neither consistently conciliatory nor consistently repressive, thus falling between two stools. This session will reappraise the 1919-20 peace conference, an exceptional moment when it briefly seemed possible to reshape the internat