Michael Lanthier
PEACE-MAKING AFTER MAJOR WARS: VERSAILLES, VIENNA, AND WESTPHALIA
In January 1919, two months after the armistice that ended the First World War, hundreds of statesmen and diplomats from thirty-two countries around the world gathered in Paris to draw up a series of treaties (including the much-maligned Treaty of Versailles, which quickly became synonymous with the Paris Peace Conference as a whole): their ultimate aim was to solve virtually all the world’s outstanding diplomatic problems and ensure peace for generations to come.
The Conference and its goals strike us today as quintessential examples of Western hubris. However, we can better appreciate the goal of the historical actors involved by studying the European tradition of peacemaking through treaties: the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) reveal much about the mental universe of those seeking to build an edifice of peace in 1919.
This long historical journey will then in turn shed light on the peacemaking processes of the twenty-first century, which have been shaped by this uniquely European understanding of polities (kingdoms, empires, nation-states) and the ways in which they deal with each other on the world stage.