Recently, Hans Morgenthau's concept of strategic narcissism has come back into vogue in the policy world. It refers to the corrosive belief among superpowers that they can control the course of events on the world stage without worrying much about the agency that those affected on the local level might wield. The essays in this excellent volume give us a clear demonstration of that principle at work in the world that the Big Four (the United States, France, Great Britain, and Italy) vainly tried to create in Paris in 1919. The book also underscores the need for us to look backward to this age of strategic narcissism if we hope to understand our own.
The essays in Beyond Versailles range geographically from Poland to Egypt to Persia, but they share some themes in common. Most importantly, they demonstrate that whatever the great powers decided in Paris, the actions of people on the ground in places like Teschen, Cairo, and Tehran ultimately settled the fates of millions. Maybe more accurately, the decisions by locals interacted with the newer ideas of national self-determination, government by plebiscite, and minority rights that informed the treaties that the victorious powers negotiated in Paris. Those ideas, however, lacked the power by themselves to shape events. As the chief of the British imperial general staff, General Sir Henry Wilson, warned Prime Minister David Lloyd George, “The root of evil is that the Paris writ does not run” (1).
This book is an analysis of what filled in the gaps when that writ did not run. Intercommunal violence, the competing interests of the great powers, a fear of bolshevism, and the basics of economics all worked in a nonlinear fashion to produce an outcome quite different from one based on the Fourteen Points or on treaties that were becoming irrelevant even as they legally went into effect.
A second, equally important theme emerges most clearly in Jesse Kauffman's essay on political legitimacy in Poland. He argues, with support from other essays in this volume, that the violent, hypernationalist “völkisch” turn in Germany in the postwar period was not so unique to Germany after all. Similar patterns of the weaponization of history and geography to meet contemporary political needs, the usage of all the tools of the modern and bureaucratic state to enforce a single ideal of identity, and the persecution of ethnic minorities were all present in Eastern and Central Europe as well. By this reading, Germany emerges less as a horrific outlier than a state that moved murderously to one end of a common spectrum.
Readers of this volume will likely be most interested in Isabelle Davion's essay on Teschen, the one that (along with John Deak's) most directly deals with former Austrian lands. She argues that the will of the people did not, in the end, inform the region's future. French desires for a strong eastern ally in the new Poland, the role of economics, and the complicated multilayered nature of Silesian identity all combined to make the planned plebiscite impossible to execute. In the end, she argues, the plebiscite was in any case less a solution to a problem than an instrument advanced only when a given group believed that it could win. Once the outcome became unclear, the parties agreed to cancel it. So much for self-determination.
These processes were neither natural nor guaranteed simply because the great powers wished them to be so. Instead, they were, as Deak argues, always and everywhere “contingent, contested, and improvised throughout central Europe” (126). Indeed, as the chapters herein show, these processes were at work outside of Europe as well. Aimee Genell and Jeffrey Culang show how they functioned in the unusual quasicolonial environment of Egypt. There, especially, the Paris writ did not run, as the British looked for a way to balance Egyptian nationalism with their desires to maintain control over such a strategically important place. Similarly, Timothy Nunan analyzes this process at work in Persia, a welcome addition to the literature of a place not often studied by historians of the peace process.
Combined with works like Dominique Reill's terrific recent study of similar processes at work in Fiume (The Fiume Crisis [Cambridge, MA, 2021]), scholars are now adding welcome layers of local complexity to the picture of 1919. Reill's study likely came too late for the authors to consider, but a deeper engagement with Leonard Smith's Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference (Oxford, 2018) would have been welcome. There are also a few editorial mistakes: Erez Manela, Margaret Macmillan, and Théophile Delcassé all have their names misspelled at one point.
One can easily forgive these small errors because of the many ways that this volume advances our understanding of the Paris Peace Conference and its implementation. It also shows the importance of political leaders understanding local context if they hope to make positive change in the regions they influence. To do otherwise is to fall victim to the dangerous trap of strategic narcissism.
