Writing in the Financial Times, Maark Mazower discusses Leonard Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford 2018), and Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard 2018).
Government of the people by the people for the people: a world of sovereigns yielded to a world of sovereignty, a much vaguer concept and a more easily exploited one. And how many peoples there turned out to be. In 1914 there were just over 50 internationally recognised states, mostly in Europe and the Americas. Today there are almost 200 and more than half of these (often small) entities are of very recent vintage. International recognition of independent statehood now depends not on the nod of a crowned head but on admission to membership of the United Nations. Sovereignty in this modern conception, Leonard Smith suggests in his lucid study, was created in Paris at the peace conference and worked out in rough and ready fashion in the drafting of rules, the obsessive drawing and redrawing of boundaries, and above all the establishment of a very new kind of institution — a body of states brought together in an international organisation charged with preserving the peace.
As Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 shows, this new order never entirely managed to disentangle itself from the old. Great powers did not change their spots or slouch offstage: the British, French and Americans were in the driving seat at Paris and everyone knew it. [...] Thus the story of the League and its role in the shaping of modern conceptions of sovereignty is an ambiguous one — it is about the rise of modern international organisation but also about its limits, limits that would become even more evident when the League was adapted for the needs of the post-Nazi world and rebranded as the UN.
The war’s effect on long-run global economic trends was less marked than one might expect. Europe’s gradual decline as an economic powerhouse actually predated the first world war and the slide continued thereafter. [...] It was not so much the numbers that changed as institutions of government, and political ideas along with them. For behind the post-1918 remodelling of sovereignty lay a quite extraordinary social transformation. The old aristocratic order had rested on toilworn hands and bad roads. In societies where deference, or laws, or outright servitude, kept people tied to the land, there was no politics in the modern sense. So it had been since ancient times. Even in 1900, a century or more after the onset of the industrial revolution, only about 13 per cent of the world’s population lived in cities. By 1960 the figure had risen to a third. Today far more people are urban; only in Africa and parts of southern Asia do rural populations remain a majority.
And now, a big one:
This social transformation coincided with an equally dramatic change in the role of government. To ask people to die for the nation required looking after their basic needs in the peace. Sovereignty in the age of total war thus implied a new conception of the state — the guarantor of basic housing, educational and welfare, the arbiter of industrial peace. Public spending on a new scale also meant correspondingly higher tax levels. Modern fiscal policy was born, and with it the modern welfare state. The democratic version of this, halting as it was, was spurred by the competition provided by two far more sweeping systems of social security — fascism and communism. This raises an awkward question: if historically the emergence of state-driven affordable healthcare, housing and education was a product of the age of mass conscription, total war and ideological competition, what of its future?
And thus the modern nation-state was born, a scant century ago. But can it last, can it survive such complications as "the ethnic minority [...] together with such innovations as organized population exchanges, minority rights treaties and genocide"? Nationalism was relatively new in 1919, when "one state after another across central and eastern Europe acquired a modern constitution." Alas, "by 1939, most of the new democracies created in 1919 had ended up as dictatorships."
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