Call for Papers - A False Springtime of Peoples: The Legacies of Peacemaking after World War I in Eastern Europe and the Middle East (22 July 2018, Comenius University, Bratislava)

Comenius University in Bratislava Comenius University in Bratislava

Call for Papers - A False Springtime of Peoples: The Legacies of Peacemaking after World War I in Eastern Europe and the Middle East (22 July 2018, Comenius University, Bratislava)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Date: 24-27 September 2019

Venue: Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, Bratislava (Slovakia)

Concept: Elizabeth F. Thompson (American University Washington D.C); Leonard V. Smith (Oberlin College, Ohio); Frank Hadler (Institute for the History and Culture of Western Europe [GWZO], Leipzig)

Proposals (in English) due 22 July 2018

Recent international crises—the flow of refugees to Europe, simmering war in Ukraine, multiple civil wars in the Middle East, the spread of ethnic populism—have roots in the peace settlements made after World War I. This conference seeks a better understanding of that foundational episode a century ago and to use this knowledge to promote a greater understanding of fault lines across and within societies today.

The end of the Great War fed millenarian aspirations around the globe, echoing the expression attached to the European revolutions of 1848, the “springtime of the peoples.” Georges Clemenceau remarked famously at the opening of the Paris Peace Conference: “We have no longer to make peace for territories more or less large; we no longer have to make peace for continents; we have to make it for peoples.” Of course, such a sweeping statement begs the question of what makes a people a people? Who gets to become a people, at any rate a people eligible to form its own nation-state? The Paris Peace Conference would answer these questions in differentiated and hierarchical ways in different parts of the world.

As early as 1903, W.E.B. Dubois posed “the problem of the color line” demarcating ever more rigorously defined “white” peoples from myriad “others.” More recently, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have shown how the color line structured international relations from the late nineteenth hcentury forward. Certainly, the Paris Peace Conference played its role, as they put it, in “drawing the global color line.” Our conference will explore the ways in which provisions for religious and ethnic minorities and League of Nations Mandates constituted two sides of the same coin. Provisions for “white” ethnic and religious minorities and for mandate system were both about defining peoples, in the service of a certain international order.

With particular attention to Europe, Eric Weitz and others have traced the construction of a new world order that normalized ethnically homogeneous nation-states rather than multinational empires. Whereas previous European peace settlements had tended to focus on lands, the peacemakers in Paris shifted the focus to peoples, in the defeated German, Russian, and Habsburg Empires. The conference would participate in coding the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe as “white.” As such, the conference accorded these peoples an assumed right to organize immediately as ethno-national states. The conference likewise contrived means of protecting linguistic and religious minorities within these new states.

Beyond Europe, making peace for peoples meant defining and affirming racial hierarchies, in sharp dissonance with the universalist rhetoric accompanying the end of the war. The former Ottoman and German domains posed distinct definitional challenges to the peacemakers. The “Mandate Principle” as it emerged from the conference deemed these lands and peoples a “sacred trust of civilization,” a concept likewise applied differentially and hierarchically. The “color line” had been drawn long ago for the former German colonies in Africa and the South Pacific, and no one at the Paris Peace Conference seriously considered according them self-determination.

The former Ottoman lands were another matter altogether. Too many wartime promises had been made to the peoples of the predominantly Arabic-speaking Middle East for their lands simply to be absorbed as colonies, at least in the familiar legal sense of the previous century. Yet few in Paris considered these peoples “white,” in the sense of being worthy of immediate self-determination. The conference thus struggled to define them as superior to Africans and Pacific Islanders, inferior to Europeans and Americans. Like their counterparts in Eastern Europe, the former Ottoman peoples spoke many languages and followed various religious faiths. In the Middle East as in Europe, defining a “minority” meant simultaneously defining a “majority.” 

Inevitably, defining peoples set them against one another, at times violently. Few scholars have addressed the historical links joining postwar violence in Europe and the Middle East. This is surprising, given that political violence in the Balkan borderlands between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires ignited the World War I, with a Serb’s assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.  The time is right further to explore these connections, as the world confronts the prospect of continued conflict around Muslim migration to Europe, the politics of Turkish accession (or rather non-accession) into the European Union, and the rise of ethnic and religious populist movements in Europe, the Middle East, and North America.  

This conference will be the first to link the histories of making minorities (and majorities) in Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Historians of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires, and their successor states, will come together to revisit the six treaties signed between 1919 and 1923, as well as the accompanying “New State” or “minority” treaties. We will do so in a comparative and transnational mode.

The first part of the conference will encompass a long historical perspective on the treaties, to clear away ideological assumptions that continue to muddy scholarship. What were the problems to which minority treaties and mandates seemed to provide the answers? We will also analyze how diplomats in Paris envisaged a world without monarchical multinational empires, but with colonial empires left intact and even expanded among the victors. We will consider alternatives the peacemakers rejected. Perhaps most fundamentally, the conference will explore why guarantees of minority protection backfired and why the mandate system came more to reinvent empire than replace it.

The second part of the conference considers the long-term impact of the treaties signed between 1919 and 1923. We ask how legal protections triggered reactionary politics among freshly minted “majorities” and, in turn, how these protections radicalized “minorities,” thereby laying the basis for conflicts today. For example, we welcome contributions on such topics as: the historic roots of present-day anti-immigrant movements and Islamism; Zionism from a transnational perspective; and “universal” versus “national” rights. We particularly encourage topics that compare minority politics and experience in different regions and countries.

We envisage a conference of some thirty scholars, including chairs and commentators. We invite proposals that address our two major themes:

1)    Situating minority provisions and the mandate system in their proper historical context

2)    The long-run impact of the Paris Peace Conference in defining peoples, and in shaping their responses 

Our goal is to produce a set of papers useful to scholars, policymakers, and journalists. We plan publication of an edited volume. The language of the conference will be English.

We are presently applying for funding to support the conference. If we are successful, the conference will cover travel to and from Bratislava, as well as accommodations and meals. The conference will be housed administratively at the GWZO in Leipzig. 

Questions may be addressed to any of the three organizers below. Proposals (in English) are due on 22 July 2018.  Please send your abstract to Elizabeth Thompson:

Frank Hadler (GWZO, Leipzig):  <frank.hadler@leibniz-gwzo.de>

Leonard V. Smith (Oberlin College, Ohio): <lvsmith@oberlin.edu> 

Elizabeth Thompson (American University, Washington, DC): <eft@american.edu>

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412