[Woodrow Wilson and the reimagining of Eastern Europe. Larry Wolff]

ENWolff readily admits that his new book "Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe" (2020) is not really his area of expertise, but at the same time, it can also be seen as a logical continuation of his interest in the constructivist make-up of Eastern Europe. As he pointed out in Inventing Eastern Europe, the Enlightenment image of Eastern Europe was a region in permanent anarchy and chaos that needed to be dominated, disciplined and ordered, if not outright conquered, and from this perspective the 1919 Paris project of reconstructing Eastern Europe, in which the US President Woodrow Wilson played a major part, could be seen as an example of the Enlightenment in action. Indeed, in his earlier work Wolff considered the Peace Conference as the culmination of ‘diplomatic operations from afar upon the map of Eastern Europe’, in which Eastern Europe served as an object to be operated upon by the West, but acknowledging the impact of not only the Enlightenment but also the intervening 19th-century great-power practices. The idea that the political structure of interwar Eastern Europe was largely the result of the imagination of peacemakers at Paris is rooted in the assumption of Western dominance, to which Wolff’s work on Woodrow Wilson, perhaps unintentionally, lends credence. By focusing on the sanguine deliberations in Paris, it is easy to overlook the fact that the Allies had neither the boots on the ground nor the will to use force in East-Central Europe, while the regular and irregular armies of successor states fought to maximise their territorial gains before, during and after the conference from 1918 to 1923. There is now a large body of work that explores the ‘sky beyond Versailles’, to use Robert Gerwarth’s phrase, or the ‘Greater War’, that takes stock of the broader chronological and global frameworks beyond the West European-centric dates of 1914-1918/1919.In this sense, I would argue that Wolff overrates the importance of Wilson, and underestimates the role played, for example, by Polish arms in the conquest of territories in Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, when he states that the Versailles Peace Settlement ‘gave Eastern Europe its twentieth-century form on the map as a system of interlocking national states’. True, the role of the Peace Conference was to bestow sovereignty on the ‘new’ states through the practice of recognition, which in itself was a novel development in international relations. [...].