https://dx.doi.org/10.32912/bulletin/21/13
Abstract
Throughout the First World War, neutrals and belligerents publicly defined what they believed their nation’s role in the conflict to be and what they hoped the post-war world would look like. The public discussion in the United States about the structure of post-war international relations drew on a discourse about the nation’s role in world affairs that the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 had significantly shaped. The conferences dealt with a range of issues, such as disarmament, the laws of war, and the development of international organisations, and provided the opportunity for these ideas to be debated in a more public manner than ever before.
It is clear from American newspaper coverage during the First World War that The Hague continued to be seen by some as the best way to achieve peaceful relations. However, it is also clear that from early 1917, people in the United States were coming to view Wilson as the likely architect of any post-war international organisations. Wilson did not suggest, as others did, that The Hague should be used as the foundation for such an organisation, nor did he advocate the creation of an international court; instead, he argued for something separate, something new. 1917, therefore, marks and important transition whereby ideas of world organisation in the United States came to be dominated by a vision different from The Hague.
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Citation
Munro, Thomas. 2020. Competing visions of world order: woodrow Wilson and The Hague in 1917. Bulletin of the Auckland Museum. 21: 87–92. https://dx.doi.org/10.32912/bulletin/21/13