The Truth About The Peace Treaties

Excerpt from The Truth About the Treaty There are others who may be able to write as accurately and as interestingly concerning events which led up to the World War and the war itself, bat there is no Frenchman, save Clemenceau, who can write with so much authority concerning the Peace Treaty, signed at Versailles, June 28, 1919, as Andre Tardieu. M. Tardieu gets nothing second-hand. He was a participant in the events of which he writes. As a member of the Chamber of Deputies, he knew the currents of French political life, and he can write understandingly of the causes leading up to the great conflict. As an officer in the French Army, he can speak authoritatively of that glorious page in history of which he was a part. This training served him well when he was called to assume a foremost role in the making of the peace. No man worked with more tireless energy, and none had a better grasp of the delicate and complex problems brought before the Congress. He was not only invaluable to France, but to his associates from other countries as well. He was in all truth the one nearly indispensable man at the Conference. Therefore, if one would know of those fateful days in Paris when the Allies of France had gathered from the ends of the earth to have their reckoning with the Central Powers, it would be well to read The Truth about the Treaty, for here it is told by him who knows. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In the formation of the modern law of nations, peace treaties played a pivotal role. Many basic principles and rules that governed and still govern relations between states were introduced and elaborated in the great peace treaties from the Renaissance onwards. Nevertheless, until recently few scholars have studied these primary sources of the law of nations from a juridical perspective. In this edited collection, specialists from all over Europe, including legal and diplomatic historians, international lawyers and an International Relations theorist, analyse peace treaty practice from the late fifteenth century to the Peace of Versailles of 1919. Important emphasis is given to the doctrinal debate about peace treaties and the influence of older, Roman and medieval concepts on modern practices. This book goes back further in time beyond the epochal Peace of Treaties of Westphalia of 1648 and this broader perspective allows for a reassessment of the role of the sovereign state in the modern international legal order.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the use of peace agreements from a legal perspective. It describes and evaluates the development of contemporary peace processes and the peace agreements that emerge. The book sets out what is in essence an anatomy of peace agreement practice and interrogates its relationship to law. At its heart the book grapples with the role of law in ending violent conflict and the broader questions this raises for the relationship of law to social change. Law potentially plays two key roles with respect to peace agreements: first, to the extent that peace agreements themselves form legal documents, law plays a role in the 'enforcement' or implementation of the peace agreement; second, international law has a relationship to peace agreement negotiation and content, in its regulatory guise. International Law regulates self-determination, transitional justice, and the role of third parties. The book documants and analyses these two roles of law. In doing so, the book reveals a complex dynamic relationship between the peace agreement as a legal document and the role of international law in which international law and concepts of domestic constitutionalism are being re-shaped. The practice of negotiating peace agreements is argued to be producing a new law of the peacemaker-or lex pacificatoria that connects developments in international law with new forms of domestic constitutional law in a set of hybrid relationships. This law of the peacemaker potentially forms part of a broader 'law of peace' that moves beyond the traditional concept of law of peace as merely 'the rest of international law' once the laws of war are subtracted. The new lex pacificatoria stands as an account of the way in which international law shapes and is shaped by peace agreements. The book proposes an ambivalent response to 'this new law' which connects to contemporary debates about the force of international law and its appropriate relationship with domestic constitutonalism.