International symposium: Asia After Versailles 1919-1933

On occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the Paris Peace Conference, the Japan Center of Munich University hosts, and cordially invites you to join the international symposium "Asia after Versailles, 1919-1933" on 17-20 June, 2009, in Munich, Germany.

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 drew a final close to the horrendous carnage of the “Great War”, and more generally, to the age of global imperialist power politics dominated by European powers. Henceforth, the center shifted, and Europe had to grapple not only with the loss of political certainties and traditions, but also an increasing uneasiness with its “civilization” in general. However, the shock and the disillusion also opened new vistas and gave rise to novel concepts. The founding of the League of Nations being the most conspicuous example in international politics, similar new tendencies in politics and society – although limited in scope at the time and severely hampered by the gravity of historical development – exuded a radiance whose influence, if only indirectly, still can be felt ninety years after.

Asia was not at the center of the Peace Conference, but has been affected by its implications none the less directly. Japan’s prominent participation at the Conference and the popular movements in China and Korea in 1919 all bear witness to the importance of the Conference and the values it stood for (or was supposed to stand for) in Asia. However, despite its importance and beyond these prominent incidents, little scholarship has been devoted to the topic for countries in Asia in general. Thus, the aim of the symposium is to shed new light on the subject by addressing the question of how the political, social, cultural and economic implications of the Paris Peace Conference affected Asia, or particular Asian countries, in the period until 1933, i.e. until the breakdown of the so-called Versailles-Washington system.

Program

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

• Welcome and Introduction: Peter Pörtner (Japan Center, Munich University)
• Keynote Lecture: Kevin M. Doak (Georgetown University, Washington): “Particularism and Universalism in the New Nationalism of Post-Versailles Japan”

Thursday, June 18, 2009

• Shimazu Naoko (Birkbeck College, University of London): “Diplomacy as Theatre: Reassessing the Japanese ‘Performance’ at the Paris Peace Conference”
• Maria Framke (Jacobs University Bremen): “Indian opinion and the League of Nations: the case of India's freedom”
• Andrea Germer (Newcastle University): “Japanese Feminists after Versailles: Campaigning for Universal Women’s Rights and for an Ethnic Awakening to Womanhood”
• Urs Matthias Zachmann (Munich University): “International Legal Thought in Japan after Versailles: the Cases of Tachi Sakutaro and Yokota Kisaburo”
• Wolfgang Seifert (Heidelberg University): “After Versailles: A Paradox in Japan’s Policy of Assimilation in Korea?”
• Yu Myoung In (Bochum University): “Dissemination and Understanding of the Wilsonian Ideal of National Self-Determination in Colonial Korea”

Friday, June 19, 2009

• Gotelind Müller-Saini (Heidelberg University): “Versailles and the Fate of Chinese Internationalism: Re-Assessing the Anarchist Case”
• Sakamoto Hiroko (Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo): “The Impact of Versailles on Nationalism in China and Cartoons as Urban Popular Culture”
• Mark Metzler (University of Texas at Austin): “The Postwar Economic Reaction”
• Jan Schmidt (Bochum University): “Visions of a Postwar International Order in the Japanese Military”
• Torsten Weber (Leiden University): “From Versailles to Shanghai: China, the ‘West’, and Japan’s Re-discovery of ‘Asia’ in the 1920s”
• Anke Scherer (Cologne Business School): “Japanese Attitudes toward Manchuria after Versailles”
• Maik Hendrik Sprotte (University of Halle-Wittenberg): “The Political Scientist and Politician Ōyama Ikuo (1880-1955) and His Perception of the New World Order after World War I”
• Fabian Schäfer (Leiden University): “Agents of Ideology: Tosaka Jun's Critique of Journalism and Academism in Interwar Japan”
• Julia Schmitz (Düsseldorf University): “The Construction of Motherhood in Extremely Nationalist Regimes - Japan, Germany and Italy in the Early 1930s”

Saturday, June 20, 2009

• Peter Pörtner (Munich University): “The Other Side of the Brocade: City Migration and Japan’s ‘Roaring Twenties’”
• Cemil Aydin (University of North Carolina-Charlotte): “The Muslim World after WWI: From the Versailles Treaty to the Abolishment of Caliphate”
• John S. Lobreglio (Oxford Brookes University): “Buddhism and Race after Versailles”