Some Problems of the Peace Conference

This concise historical study brings the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 into sharp focus as an overburdened attempt to rebuild a shattered Europe after World War I. Against a backdrop of hunger, political collapse, and ruined nations, Charles Homer Haskins and Robert Howard Lord examine the practical problems of peacemaking: ending war, redrawing borders, restoring economies, punishing aggressors, and preventing future conflict. Wilson's Fourteen Points provide the guiding ideal, but the book shows how history, ethnicity, economics, resources, and strategic realities forced constant compromise. The volume concentrates on the territorial settlements in Europe, where border-making became a struggle between geography, language, nationality, and power. It explores Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, the Rhine, Poland, Austria-Hungary, the Adriatic, and the Balkans, arguing that no frontier can perfectly satisfy self-determination or justice. Special attention is given to the Saar Basin, the Franco-German frontier, and the League of Nations' role in making such arrangements workable. Poland's restoration is treated as both a moral triumph and a difficult territorial problem, shaped by centuries of partition, expansion, and contested identity. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.