Beyond Versailles

This is an excellent collected volume, well-conceived and very well written. . . . This is not at all a top-down history of the diffusion of ideas about national self-determination. Rather, it is an examination of the ways in which these ideas were taken up, re-fashioned, and reasserted at many levels to serve local and regional agendas, while at the same time influencing international debates about the meanings and possible implementations of self-determination. -Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History This is an insightful investigation of the enduring impact and relevance of ideas and structures given prominence by the negotiations and settlements at the end of the First World War, raising important questions about the intellectual frameworks and mindsets of the inter-war period. -Alan Sharp, author of The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking After the First World War, 1919-1923 Beyond Versailles powerfully demonstrates the value of doing gritty history and connecting the principles and practices of distant diplomats with their on-the-ground meaning. The essays would deepen and enhance a graduate syllabus about the interwar period, the rise of nation-states, and World War I. -Mary Bridges - Yale University, H NET 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. -Michael S. Neiberg - US Army War College, Austrian History Yearbook