Reassembling a World Order: Toward a New Historiography of the Paris Peace Conference

Special issue on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the treaty of versailles

Abstract

The evaluation of the Paris Peace Conference or the “Versailles–Washington world order” is one of the most widely discussed subjects in the study of history and international relations. The abundance of research and assessment is partly down to the formative character of the post-WWI peace on the national consciousness of many states and to the term ‘Versailles’ which has become an oft-recurring keyword in the analysis of international relations. Due to the sheer volume of accounts, a historiography of the Paris Peace Conference is inevitably a collection of the author’s own discretion. This paper focuses on the international historiography of the Paris Peace Conference and its consequences, and argues that after the consolidation of orthodoxies following 1919, and the triumph of revisionist history in the late-1980s, the scholarly community is now experiencing another reappraisal – beginning from the 2010s.