Ending Wars and Making Peace: the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 re-examined [Audio]

Speaker(s): Professor Margaret MacMillan | The Great War of 1914-18 left a shattered Europe and a changed world. Despite a widespread longing for peace and for a new international order, the world was to have a second catastrophic war 20 years later. The peacemakers of 1919 are often blamed for creating the conditions which sent some European nations down the road towards dictatorship and led Europe and the world towards the Second World War. This public lecture will ask why moving from war to peace can be so difficult and examine the particular challenges faced by the peacemakers in 1919. It will ask whether the accepted view, that the peace settlements made then doomed Europe and the world to another war, is a fair one. It will also suggest ways we might learn from the past as we face a turbulent and uncertain present. Margaret MacMillan is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Emeritus Professor of the University of Oxford. LSE's Department of Law (@LSELaw) is one of the world’s top law schools. The Department ranked first for research outputs in the UK’s most recent Research Excellence Framework and has consistently been among the top 10 departments to study Law in the world according to the QS World University rankings. Our staff play a major role in helping to shape policy debates and in the education of current and future lawyers and legal scholars from around the world. Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSEMakingPeace This event forms part of the “Shape the World” series, held in the run up to the LSE Festival, a week-long series of events taking place from Monday 2 to Saturday 7 March 2020, free to attend and open to all, exploring how social sciences can make the world a better place. The full programme will be available online from January 2020.