ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TARİHİ

American foreign policy preferences diverged from European Realpolitik, which was based on power politics, fragile and short-term strategic alliances, and secret diplomacy behind. Meanwhile, however, the founders of the United States (the New World) sought to isolate the US from the conflicts of Europe (the Old World).

The Fourteen Points of Wilson include references to open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, the reduction of national armaments, the removal of trade barriers between nations, impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, the readjustment of territorial borders based on the right to self-determination - especially within the former German, Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires-, the rights of minorities in those states, and the creation of “a general associations of nations” known as the League of Nations.

After the end of the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference convened between January and June 1919 in order to design the post-war international system and determine the fate of the defeated countries of the war.

Representatives from thirty-two Allied and associated countries participated in the Paris Peace conference. However, the principal actors, known as the “Big Four”, were Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, represented as they were by David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, and Woodrow Wilson, respectively.

While the Germans felt marginalized, the Soviets protested the Paris Peace conference as “a capitalist tool for imperialism” and distanced themselves from the Western powers. In response, despite protests from the Western powers, both governments signed the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 that established full diplomatic relations and renounced claims against each other.

It was commonly seen as one of the chief purposes of international organizations such as the League of Nations.

From early 1920s onwards, there had been a series of attempts at disarmament. The Washington Naval Conference between 1921 and 1922 was one of the first organized efforts to do so.

The world economic crisis of October 1929, also known as the Great Depression, brought an abrupt end to efforts for world peace. Instead, it augured a decade full of agony, uncertainty, distrust and, eventually, conflict.

It carries a nationalist and populist agenda to liberate “brothers and sisters suffering under a foreign dominance” and claims the recovery of ethnic frontier groups lying outside the territory of the nation-state.

A policy Britain and France applied to both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. It was first applied to fascist Italian leader Benito Mussolini, who invaded Abyssinia/Ethiopia in 1935.

The Monroe Doctrine adopted by US President James Monroe in 1823 laid the foundations of this policy of preventing Europeans from intervening within the internal affairs of the Americas, while at the same time removing the US from the internal clashes of the European continent. The correct answer is A.

The League had three principal organs: the Assembly, the Council, and the Permanent Secretariat. The correct answer is D.

The Treaty of Versailles was the most important post-World War I treaty since it determined the fate of Germany. Signed on June 28, 1919, the Versailles Treaty created a new international order, a large goal of which was to keep Germany incapacitated. The correct answer is B.

Due to the Great Depression, economic liberalism lost its influence, and the gold standard system that had long maintained a stable international currency exchange system was abandoned by the US, Britain, France, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. Britain, the heart of trade liberalization in Europe, abandoned free trade in 1931, while both Britain and France sought economic recovery through a “domestic-oriented and inward-looking” economic policy. Similarly, the US went into a deep isolationism under the President Franklin Roosevelt by minimizing its international transactions (Taylor, 1961: 90). In the wake of economic liberalism’s destruction, protectionism and the command economy gained popularity. The correct answer is A.

Irredentism is a territorial claim by one sovereign state against another, aimed at equalizing the boundaries of its ‘nation’ (or ethnicity) with the borders of the state. It carries a nationalist and populist agenda to liberate “brothers and sisters suffering under a foreign dominance” and claims the recovery of ethnic frontier groups lying outside the territory of the nation-state. It is a version of revisionism whose aim of expanding its territory comes under the pretext of liberating and reuniting with long-lost relatives. The correct answer is D.

Italian Fascism was similar to Nazism in terms of its anti-liberalism, anti-capitalism, antiMarxism, and ultra-nationalism. It was not, however, necessarily anti-Semitic or racist. In fact, Mussolini only adopted anti-Semitism in 1938 after his alliance with Hitler had grown stronger. The correct answer is E.

Japan also called for Asian unification against Western imperialism that would lead to Asian self-sufficiency and prosperity. In reality, it meant Japanese imperial domination in the Far East. According to Hobsbawm, the gates to World War II were opened first in 1931 with the Japanese military take-over and the invasion of Manchuria. The correct answer is E.

Overall, the interwar period is defined by these political and economic factors clearing the path for World War II: • the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, which was seen as unjust and humiliating by the Germans; • the Great Depression, which challenged the world economic order and pushed nation states to self-sufficiency and protectionism; • the rise of Hitler and his revisionist policies; • the unsuccessful French and British appeasement policy towards aggressors; and • the failure of the League of Nations and the concept of collective security. The correct answer is D.

The main justification of the nationalist rebellion was based on religion, insofar as it was seen as a crusade against the destruction of Catholicism in Spain. Indeed, the rebellion started with 160,000 men but grew to more than 1 million troops by 1939. The war ended with around 200,000 war deaths and another 300.000 wounded. Nationalists justified their revolt as a holy war against “infidels” who sought to destroy the Catholic Church in Spain, for which the burning of churches and murder of clerics were blamed on Republicans. The correct answer is D.

Germany, Italy, and volunteers from other countries such as Portugal and France also joined the Spanish Civil War on the side of the nationalists. The correct answer is C.