160 European History Quarterly 49(1)

an overseas territory’ (136). Ultimately, she concedes, Fascist rule meant ‘a com-
bination of land seizures and the embrace of a Catholic identity in colonial expan-
sion with the total elimination of the Sanusi t¸arıqa as a central goal’ (137). But, at
least until 1931, we are told, Italian rule remained ‘haphazard and contingent’
(141), with a negotiated settlement between colonizers and colonized still
imaginable.
It is an abrupt end, with Ryan therefore doing little to explore the celebrated
governorship of Italo Balbo (1934–1940). The book’s origin as a doctoral thesis
must be the explanation for such curtailment. The reader is left to hope that there
will be other opportunities beyond the monograph under review to learn whether
Ryan fully agrees with Pergher’s stern condemnation of Fascist imperialism or
whether she believes that some of the shadings of her account lingered even
through the violent decade of the 1930s.

Karl Schlögel, Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland, Gerrit Jackson, trans., Reaktion Books: London,
2018; 288 pp., 29 illus.; 9781780239781, £25.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Olena Palko, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

In 2014, Karl Schlögel, a German historian, journalist and essayist, who has
worked on Soviet and Russian history and society throughout his academic life,
refused the prestigious Medal of Pushkin, awarded by the President of the Russian
Federation for a significant contribution to promoting the study of Russian culture
abroad. This was his response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Putin’s denial
that it had taken place. As Schlögel explained, the actions of the Russian leadership
and the Ukrainian crisis came as ‘a moment of truth’ that ‘called a major part of
our life’s work into question’ (24). He was paralysed by a succession of events that
no one was able to anticipate or think through in advance (268). Many scholarly
and popular books appeared thereafter retelling the history of Ukraine in order to
explain the events that unfolded in the country from late 2013 onwards. Schlögel’s
book is not yet another survey claiming that the conflict in Ukraine, split along
linguistic, cultural and historical memory lines, had been a long time coming.
Instead, it encourages its readers to take ‘a fresh look at the map and review
what we think we might know’ about Ukraine and its people (13).
This is an English translation of a book first published in 2015 under the original
German title Entscheidung in Kiew: Ukrainische Lektionen, which can be translated
as ‘Decision Time in Kyiv: Lessons from Ukraine’. The English title chosen does
not do justice to the content of the book. Firstly, it seeks to capitalize on a common
stereotype of Ukraine as a ‘borderland’. Secondly, by no means it is a comprehen-
sive history of this ‘nation on the borderland’. The book can be roughly split into
two parts. In the first part, Schlögel recalls his own path to becoming fascinated by
Russian history and society. He was one of the first historians from West Germany
to travel to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He authored numerous books
and articles thereafter, introducing a German and wider European audience to the
Book Reviews 161

‘Russian space’. Nonetheless, this ‘peculiar attachment’ and ‘fondness’ formed

over the years made it difficult for him to see Putin’s Russia for what it
was (31). The crisis in Ukraine offered an opportunity to think again and afresh
about Russia. This disenchantment in Russia allowed the author to re-evaluate the
recent history of Russian–Ukrainian relations, trying to discern some inner logic in
Putin’s treatment of Ukraine.
The major part of the book consists of essays on Ukraine’s major cities – Kyiv,
Odessa, Yalta, Kharkov, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Chernivtsi and Lviv, generally
unknown in the West. Those previously published vignettes had been written by
Schlögel during his numerous visits to Ukraine between 1987 and 2015. They were
updated for the present publication to reflect the effect of the war on Ukraine’s
people and places. Schlögel forms his picture of Ukraine by exploring its historical
topographies, the physical spaces where history actually happened, rather than its
chronologies. Overall, Schlögel rejects the possibility of constructing historical
metanarratives and instead applies a mesoscopic perspective for surveying urban
spaces, exploring localities and neighbourhoods where crucial historical develop-
ments took place.
This method has proved especially fruitful for examining modern Ukraine,
where cities became the arena for national and socialist revolutions, the two
world wars, the largest famine in European history, and the battlefield of the
competing nationalizing states, Russia/the Soviet Union and its western neighbour,
Poland in particular. Schlögel calls Ukraine ‘miniature Europe’, in whose modern
identities one can still discern the traces of the major European empires together
with their bygone national, cultural and religious diversity. Beyond those historical
layers is modern diverse Ukraine, now facing yet another challenge to its identity.
Although some essays date back to the late 1980s and could now seem rather
outdated, their inclusion in the present collection highlights an important aspect of
temporality in studying Ukraine. The author allows the readers to see for them-
selves the evolution of Ukraine’s cities and their population over time – from being
a Soviet periphery and European borderland to becoming a distinct nation with
diverse, modern and ever-changing identities. By no means, do these vignettes
represent the full map of Ukraine. Among the regrettable gaps acknowledged by
Schlögel are Vinnytsia and Chernihiv, which suffered greatly during the
Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932–1933, as well as Uman and
Drohobych with their rich Jewish histories. This volume would also benefit greatly
from an essay on Uzhgorod, at one time on the Hungarian periphery, then a
regional centre of the interwar Czechoslovak republic, chosen by the
Czechoslovak government to showcase the new republic’s modernizing potential.
Nowadays, as the centre of Ukraine’s Zakarpattia (Transcarpathia) region, it strug-
gles to define and defend its national identity, faced with the immediate proximity
of the economically much more prosperous EU.
This book is not a historical monograph. A trained historian of the region will
struggle to find any new facts or useful references for further archival studies here.
Instead, this book is an invitation to the broader public, well-familiar by now with
162 European History Quarterly 49(1)

the cities in Western and Eastern Europe, to discover Ukraine, to explore its multi-
faceted identities. Since an end to the war in Ukraine is not yet in sight, books like
this are much needed. When most of the publications available reiterate the same
narratives of unbridgeable differences between Ukraine’s east and west, it takes
Schlögel’s insightfulness and erudition to show the commonalities between Lviv in
the West, Odessa in the South and Donetsk in the East; to take Ukraine out of the
shadow of Russia and put it back on Europe’s mental maps.

Leonard V. Smith, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 2018; 304 pp., 17 illus.; 9780199677177, £35.00 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Haakon A. Ikonomou, Aarhus University, Denmark

Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 is a formidable tour de force of

just how transformative the settlement after the First World War was. In it,
Leonard V. Smith takes on the ambitious task of showing how the conference
sought to ‘create sovereignty over the international system in ways that sovereignty
previously had not existed’ (264). To do this, he conceives of the council of Great
Powers (and more often the Supreme Council) as having a ‘self-created role as
provisional world sovereign, representing in its way ‘the people’ of the world’ (27).
Through six chapters, Smith shows how this ‘world sovereign’ (Chapter 1)
wielded its power. In Chapter 2, he displays how the council of Great Powers
fused the logics of civil and criminal law to produce their own discourse of justice
to pass a moralistic judgement on German war guilt and reparations. This in turn
created a criminalized Germany, which could appeal to the Wilsonian premise of
the Peace Conference to highlight the hypocrisy of the punitive measures taken
against it. Smith then goes on to examine how the Peace Conference applied newly
invented territorial concepts, ‘unmixing’ the lands and peoples of the collapsed
multinational empires, based on a careful investigation of the expertise that under-
pinned the ‘official mind’ in France, Britain and the United States (Chapter 3).
In Chapter 4, Smith categorizes and compares four variations of population
policies applied by the Supreme Council, ranging from plebiscites, via the minority
treaties forced upon the successor states in the east and the racial hierarchy
inherent in the mandate system, to the horrific logic of population exchanges.
These policies, which sought to make a reality of the principle of complete overlap
of nation and state, often created as many problems as they solved. Chapter 5 sees
the Supreme Council ‘mastering’ several revolutions. It first explores how they
tamed the two transnational movements of anti-colonialism and industrial
worker discontent, through the differentiated sovereignty baked into the
Mandate System and vague promises of the International Labour Organization.
The second part of the chapter considers how the emerging new states in Central
and Eastern Europe were disciplined by the need for formal, external recognition
by the conference to be admitted into the international system. The last chapter
traces the transition from the Peace Conference to the League of Nations.