Caught in the Middle

It is a reflection of the apparent dearth of scholarship on the history of neutrality in the First World War that this fine collection of essays—and the 2009 conference which gave rise to them—take as their point of departure a thesis developed nearly half a century ago. Nils Ørvik’s The Decline of Neutrality 1914–1941, published in 1953 and updated in 1971, has certainly weathered the test of time. Its central proposition—that the law-based neutrality regime embodied in the Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 was progressively eroded over the first half of the twentieth century—has a powerful logic. With war ever more ‘total’, and national economies increasingly interdependent, belligerents were progressively less willing to respect traditional neutral rights, especially the requirement that neutrals be allowed to trade with all parties to a conflict. Post-war internationalism—whether of a Wilsonian or Soviet hue—cast doubt on the continued relevance of neutrality, long before Hitler and Mussolini entered the stage and plunged Europe into a second war in thirty years

Economic history · Internationalism (politics · Interwar period · Neutrality · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · World War II · European history and politics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact