A Peace to End All Peace

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1. pjmorrisMay 2024
   > "It is essentially lost to history"

   In practice, this is clearly true. But it is not for lack of trying, at least on some people's parts. I recently read 'A Peace to End All Peace', David Fromkin, which goes in depth into the background here, including Weizmann's role and the making of the Balfour declaration. A passage from the book's conclusion has stuck with me:

   "It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states. Whether civilization would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands; whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether dynastic empire, national state, or city-state would command fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged to the Burgundian or to the French nation, were issues painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife, during which the losers—the Albigensians of southern France, for example—were often annihilated. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete. The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed."

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2. fmajidDec 2023
   The fall of the Ottoman Empire, while utterly unsurprising as it had been the sick man of Europe for centuries, was far more consequential, as documented in David Fromkin's master opus A Peace to End all Peace.
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3. selimthegrimFeb 2021
   You might want to check the book by Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace (1989)
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4. mannykannotAug 2020
   I guess that it is a matter of counterfactual history whether the Armenian genocide, or something like it, would have occurred if it were not for the disruption of the war.

   And the seeds for the recent and ongoing trouble in the Middle East were sown in the division of the former Ottoman Empire immediately after the war, as described in David Fromkin's book, "A Peace to end all Peace." (best history-book title ever!)

   https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-peace-to-end-all-peace-creat...

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5. selimthegrimAug 2019
   A Peace to End All Peace is good too
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6. tlbOct 2018
   A good book on why the middle east is the way it is, is A Peace to end all Peace by David Fromkin. There certainly isn’t just one mistake that caused all the trouble.
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