This thesis is a study of English-language media opinion in relation to Canada’s involvement in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Using The News Record, The Globe and the Manitoba Free Press, this thesis will examine how the English Canadian press presented the Paris Peace Conference to Canadians from November 1918 to its signing in June 1918. Historians have traditionally presented the Peace Conference as a turning point in Canadian history that accelerated Canada’s maturity from a colony to a fully-fledged nation. This paper will argue that Canadians’ understanding of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was far more complex than the orthodox interpretation would suggest. While Canadian newspapers were concerned with Canada’s status, they devoted far more attention to other matters. Canadian newspapers spent time discussing reparations, the Kaiser, old diplomacy and the future League of Nations.

This thesis is a study of English-language media opinion in relation to Canada’s involvement in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Using The News Record, The Globe and the Manitoba Free Press, this thesis will examine how the English Canadian press presented the Paris Peace Conference to Canadians from November 1918 to its signing in June 1918. Historians have traditionally presented the Peace Conference as a turning point in Canadian history that accelerated Canada’s maturity from a colony to a fully-fledged nation. This paper will argue that Canadians’ understanding of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was far more complex than the orthodox interpretation would suggest. While Canadian newspapers were concerned with Canada’s status, they devoted far more attention to other matters. Canadian newspapers spent time discussing reparations, the Kaiser, old diplomacy and the future League of Nations.

This investigation is concerned with the role played by the illusions of security, Bolshevism, and American innocence in the making of the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The main sources used in this thesis were the U.S. State Department publications The World War and The Paris Peace Conference and Paul Mantoux's Proceedings of the Council of Four. The drafting of the Versailles Treaty is approached chronologically with special emphasis accorded the problems emanating from the questions of Russia and the Rhine. The study concludes that the peacemakers were manipulated by the illusions of security, Bolshevism, and American innocence.

Although a great deal has been written on the Paris Peace Conference, only in recent years have the necessary German documents been available for an analysis of the conference, not only from the Allied viewpoint but also from the German side. One of the great problems faced by the Allied statesmen in 1919 was the territorial conflict between Germany and Poland. The final boundary decisions were much criticized then and in subsequent years, and in 1939 they became the excuse for another world war. In the 1960's, over twenty years after the boundaries established at Versailles ceased to exist, they continued to be subjects of controversy. To understand the nature of this problem, it is necessary to study the factors which influenced the delineation of the German-Polish boundary in 1919. From the conflict of national interests there emerged a compromise boundary which satisfied almost no one. After this boundary was destroyed by another world war, the victors were again faced with the complex task of reconciling conflicting strategic and economic necessities with the principle of self-determination. This time no agreement was possible, and the problem remained a significant factor in German-Polish and East-West relations. The methods by which the statesmen of 1919 arrived at a settlement are pertinent to the unsolved problem of today.

This diploma thesis is dedicated to the creation of the Czechoslovak army. My goal is to describe its creation, development and significance till the appearance of the Little Entente in 1921. The army organisation took place under urgent needs for defence of state borders. As the Czechoslovak troops in Russia were delayed, commander ranks had to be engaged by the Italian and French officers. Because of many activities led by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Edvard Benes on Paris Peace Conference, the power of the Czechoslovakian Ministry of Defence was reduced. After the state borders were established, the role of the Ministry of Defence stabilized.

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This thesis examines the body of international law drawn upon during the Nuremberg trials after World War II. The work analyzes the Hague Conventions, the Paris Peace Conference, and League of Nations decisions to support its conclusions. Contrary to the commonly held belief that the laws violated during World War II by the major war criminals were newly developed ideas, this thesis shows that the laws evolved over an extended period prior to the war. The work uses conference minutes, published government sources, the official journal of the League of Nations, and many memoirs to support the conclusions.

American military plans for a war with the British Empire, first discussed in 1919, have received varied treatment since their declassification. the most common theme among historians in their appraisals of WAR PLAN RED is that of an oddity. Lack of a detailed study of Anglo-American relations in the immediate post-First World War years makes a right understanding of the difficult relationship between the United States and Britain after the War problematic. As a result of divergent aims and policies, the United States and Great Britain did not find the diplomatic and social unity so many on both sides of the Atlantic aspired to during and immediately after the First World War. Instead, United States’ civil and military organizations came to see the British Empire as a fierce and potentially dangerous rival, worthy of suspicion, and planned accordingly. Less than a year after the end of the War, internal debates and notes discussed and circulated between the most influential members of the United States Government, coalesced around a premise that became the rationale for WAR PLAN RED. Ample evidence reveals that contrary to the common narrative of “Anglo-American” and “Atlanticist” historians of the past century, the First World War did not forge a new union of spirit between the English-speaking nations. the experiences of the War, instead, engendered American antipathy for the British Empire. Economic and military advisers feared that the British might use their naval power to check American expansion, as they believed it did during the then recent conflict. the first full year of peace witnessed the beginnings of what became WAR PLAN RED. the foundational elements of America’s war plan against the British Empire emerged in reaction to the events of the day. Planners saw Britain as a potentially hostile nation, which might regard the United States’ rise in strength as a threatening challenge to Britain’s historic economic and maritime supremacy.

This dissertation attempts to determine what Britain expected from participation in the Supreme Economic Council (SEC) of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and to what extent its expectations were realized. An investigation of available sources reveals that access to European markets and raw materials and a balance of power to prevent French, German, or Russian hegemony in Europe were British foreign policy goals that SEC delegates sought to advance. Primary sources for this study include unpublished British Foreign Office and Cabinet records, published British, United States, and German government documents, unpublished personal papers of people directing SEC efforts, such as David Lloyd George, Austen Chamberlain, Cecil Harmsworth, Harry Osborne Mance, and John Maynard Keynes, and published memoirs and accounts of persons who were directly or indirectly involved with the SEC. Secondary accounts include biographies and histories or studies of the Peace Conference and of countries affected by its work. Primarily concerned with the first half of 1919, this dissertation focuses on British participation in Inter-allied war-time economic efforts, in post-war Rhineland control, in the creation of the SEC, and in the SEC endeavors of revictualling Germany, providing food and medical relief for eastern Europe, and reconstructing European communications. It concludes with Britain's role in the attempt to convert the SEC into an International Economic Council in the last half of 1919 and with the transfer of SEC duties to the Reparations Commission and to the League of Nations. Through participation in the SEC, Britain led in negotiating the Brussels Agreement and in establishing the Rhineland Commission and the German Economic Commission, reversing French attempts to control the Rhenish economy, preventing French hegemony in Europe, and gaining access to German markets for British goods. Although it failed to achieve its goals of strong eastern European states and access to markets and raw materials there, Britain led in restoration of communications and participated in the relief effort which saved the new states from anarchy in 1919.

My doctoral dissertation examines the delimitation of the Slovak - Polish border in the interwar period and the impact of the cession of the parts of the Slovak districts in Orava and Spiš to Poland on the relations between Czecho-Slovakia and Poland, Czechoslovakia and Poland, and Slovakia and Poland. The Tešín question dominated the border delimitation and the relations and the Orava and Spiš questions and the delimitation of the Slovak - Polish border received much less scholarly attention. While acknowledging the complexity of the issue under consideration, this work attempts to make small contribution towards filling existing gap in historiography. The majority of research work occurred at the diplomatic archives in Prague, Paris and Warsaw (Archives of the Foreign Ministry, Archives diplomatiques and Archiwum Akt Nowych). Some primary research also took place in Bratislava, Warsaw, Washington and Ottawa. This work seeks to interpret primary sources in an innovative way which demonstrates influence exerted by the Orava and Spiš questions on the relations between Czecho-Slovakia and Poland, Czechoslovakia and Poland, Slovakia and Poland, Slovaks and Poles, Slovaks and Czechs, and Czechs and Poles. Effectiveness of the Orava and Spiš questions to carve out their own constituencies and to communicate the message of their populations were limited or enhanced by contemporary configuration of international and internal factors. The Orava and Spiš border delimitations in the Slovak-Polish border and their consequences for the Slovak-Czech-Polish relations, remain largely neglected by the scholars in the English and French historiographies. The Orava and Spiš border delimitations play an important role in understanding of Slovak-Polish-Czech relations and international relations in the interwar and post World War II periods. The questions posed by examining the Orava and Spiš border delimitations are as relevant in Schengen Europe as they were almost a century ago.