HHIK01832U HIS 83. The League of Nations: international organization, international politics and internationalism, 1850s-1950s

Få overblik på
Historie, KA-2019, ét-faglig, lektionskatalog forår 2021
Historie, KA-2015, ét-faglig, lektionskatalog forår 2021
eller
Historie, KA-2019, to-faglig, lektionskatalog forår 2021
Historie, KA-2015, to-faglig, lektionskatalog forår 2021
eller
Historie, KA-sidefag-2019, lektionskatalog forår 2021
Historie, KA-sidefag-2015, lektionskatalog forår 2021
eller
Historie, BA, lektionskatalog forår 2021

HIS 83. The League of Nations: international organization, international politics and internationalism, 1850s-1950s
Why did the victorious Great Powers decide to set up an international organization - The League of Nations - to manage the plethora of regional and global challenges following the First World War? Which deeper structural, ideological, political and economic forces drove the shift from the 19th century Concert of Europe to the 20th century League of Nations? How did the League of Nations function and shape international politics in the interwar period? And, what was the lasting impact and legacy of the League on 20th and 21st century international politics and organization? These are the main questions that this course will seek to answer.

We will do so in a systematic manner, dealing first with the slow emergence of various forms of internationalism in the 19th Century. Second, we turn to the devastating and transformative impact of the First World War on the way the world was organized in its wake. We then, thirdly, explore the Paris Peace Conference and the lasting effects of the hasty diplomacy of the first half of 1919. A fourth - and major - element of the course will delve into the organization of the League of Nations and the role it played in interwar politics. Here we will take a deeper dive into three particular policy areas: international disarmament efforts, the mandate system of internationalized colonial rule and the economic and financial work of the League. This reflects a recent historiographical shift, in which the League is no longer simply understood as a “failed” organization, but a first laboratory of global governance. Lastly, and in continuation of this, the course will trace the legacies and lessons learned from the League into postwar international politics and organization. The course will look more closely at the League’s immediate successor organization, the United Nations, and its special agencies, and the Bretton Woods system of economic organizations.

The course will consist of group instructions/seminar teaching, combining small lectures, group exercises and individual analytical and writing exercises, and aims at the complexities of writing histories of international organizations and how to analyze sources in multinational, transnational or even global contexts. We will rely on Mark Mazower’s Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (2013), a selection of articles and book chapters, and published and unpublished sources, mostly from the League of Nations Archives in Geneva.