Paul Hymans: Belgium

Sally Marks is an independent historian in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. She is author of The Ebbing of European Ascendancy: An International History of the World 1914-1945 (2002), The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918-1933 (1976, rev. ed. 2003) and Innocent Abroad: Belgium at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (1981), winner of the AHA’s George Louis Beer prize in international history.

A wonderful review from the H-Diplo Project in America can be viewed here.

'Hymans is, in his own way, a fascinating character, who symbolisedthe tentative evolution of Belgian Liberal politics out of itsnineteenth-century mould and into a new era of mass politics. Marks, however,rightly assumes that few of her readers will be too engaged by the complexitiesof Belgian politics. Therefore, within the biographical mould imposed bythe series in which it appears, her book provides a lucid and accessibleintroduction to Belgium’s place in the international diplomacy of the era.This is a remarkably unfamiliar story, and Marks’s book provides the bestmodern introduction to the subject. The period between 1914 and themid-1930s constituted a twenty-year moment when Belgium rather suddenlybecame part of the wider European diplomatic process, and when it soughtto influence that process in ways that accorded with its interests. But,as Marks well shows, what is remarkable is the failure of those effortsand, with it, the wider failure of the system within which it tried tooperate.' - Martin Conway, Fellow and Tutor in History at BalliolCollege, University of Oxford.