Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities After the Great War

European historians focus on two critical aspects of the Treaty of Versailles: it was an attempt to carve out a new Europe as determined by the victors of World War I, and it was doomed to failure. In Beyond Versailles, a broad and more nuanced look at the construction of the Treaty provides a rich understanding of the institutions and ideas involved in constructing the new world order. While previous attention has been paid to the treaty architects and their agendas, this collection considers the treaty's resonance for local players responding to the global shifts in power. This volume offers important reappraisals of the shift from the imperial age to the age of nations and examines how notions of nation, sovereignty, and citizenship were negotiated and contested in order to balance popular will with clear constraints against assertions of post-war nationhood. The work questions our understanding of the nation-state as the inevitable outcome of the cataclysms of war and examines the ways in which a world of nations came into being.