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  • Imperialist Peace Order: Saint-Germain and Trianon, 1919–1920 by Arnold Suppan
  • Laura A. Detre
Arnold Suppan, Imperialist Peace Order: Saint-Germain and Trianon, 1919–1920. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2019. 250 pp.

We may be over one hundred years away from the cessation of hostilities in World War I, but it would be difficult to argue that the issues raised by that conflict are no longer relevant in modern society. The twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries have seen multiple military conflicts that essentially reexamine the national boundaries created by the post–World War I negotiations in Paris. The European Union, which was created in large part as a peace project to prevent future conflicts on the continent, is faced with challenges to its future existence. And multiple Central European nations have significant nationalist political movements. This situation leads to the obvious question, why has so little changed in a century? The answer may very well be in a close examination of the treaties that were negotiated after the War to End All Wars. In his book Imperialist Peace Order: Saint-Germain and Trianon 1919–1920, historian Arnold Suppan examines two of those treaties and the impact that they had on Central Europe. His overall conclusion is that these two treaties were far more punitive to Austria and Hungary, respectively, than was the Treaty of Versailles to Germany. Additionally, he shows that the treaties were negotiated by western powers, particularly the United States, with little or no knowledge of local conditions, and that the ideology behind them, [End Page 114] one of self-determination of nations, did not always make sense based on the region and was most certainly unevenly applied.

The overall thesis of this book, that the treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon were undue punishments meted out by powers with limited understanding of the regions involved, is not groundbreaking, but Suppan's book brings detailed explanations of how these treaties were created and, more importantly, how the western allies imposed them onto the successor states of the Habsburg Empire. For example, Suppan writes extensively on the efforts of the Supreme Economic Council to increase coal production in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and ensure that said coal would be distributed to the places most in need. Much of the Empire's coal came from regions that were now in Czechoslovakia, and the city of Vienna was desperately in need of the resource. The Council appointed Herbert Hoover to oversee this issue and Hoover in return put Col. Anson C. Goodyear in charge of direct negotiations between the states of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Austria. They were able to come to an agreement that the Czechoslovak government would export 241,675 tons of coal per month to Austria and that other states would also export to the nation, but Goodyear concluded his report on this negotiation by noting that access to coal remained a major threat to stability in the region and that only the western powers of America, France, or Britain were in a position to maintain the production and distribution of the resource going forward (26). By detailing this negotiation Suppan is trying to demonstrate how tenuous the positions of these new governments was and how the Allies had to take responsibility for basic things like energy and food distribution because the bureaucracies that had once overseen these issues were gone and the new nation-states created in the wake of the war were in no position to oversee the topics themselves.

Suppan demonstrates that, while these new nation-states were created to be liberal parliamentary democracies, as the decade after the war wore on, they moved farther from those origins. In particular, Suppan shows how Central Europe developed two distinctive political movements, the Christian Conservative Party and the Social Democrats. He details how the ethic of Christian Conservatism arose from a combination of Catholic theology and traditional conservatism, speaking to a rural population but also to civil servants and white-collar workers who had perhaps become part of the bourgeoisie in previous generations. On the other hand, Social Democracy emerged at the same time, when divisions within Socialist parties forced...

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