Introduction: world politics 100 years after the Paris peace conference

Abstract

One hundred years ago the Treaty of Versailles, the centrepiece of a set of treaties and agreements collectively known as the Paris peace settlements, was signed in the glittering Hall of Mirrors in the former home of France's Sun King. For some, the war those settlements brought to an end was a distinct period in international relations, one dominated for the preceding century by a European state system that had endured since the Middle Ages.1 While relations among the Great Powers included a degree of cooperation, even some shared values, the European-based international order at its height in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was characterized by a balance of power within Europe and imperialism around the globe. Anniversaries can impose a misleading unity on a period of history, but every so often it is useful to reflect on where we once were—in this case as an international order—what has changed, and where we might be going now. The year 2019 is, as we are realizing with unease and concern, a time of transition and strain in both domestic and international politics. The backlash against globalization, the rise of intolerant and anti-democratic populisms, the tensions between rising and declining powers, the withdrawal of the United States under the present administration from its hegemonic role in the world: all are calling into question norms and institutions underpinning a world order that many of us had taken for granted. There are suggestive and sometimes troubling parallels between 2019 and 1919. At both junctures, the world was seeing a retreat from globalism, the rise of nativist and populist political parties, demands from national movements for their own states, the spread of international revolutionary movements—Bolshevism then, radical Islamism today—and concerns about the international order or lack of one. Constanze Stelzenmuüller of the Brookings Institution speaks of a ‘concerted attack on the constitutional liberal order’.2