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Identities, Self-determination, and the Deferral of Demian’s Dream: A Centennial Perspective on the World in 1919

  • Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Abbr :
  • 2019, 62(1), pp.1-34
  • DOI : 10.17939/hushss.2019.62.1.001
  • Publisher : Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : January 25, 2019
  • Accepted : February 20, 2019
  • Published : February 28, 2019

Bellomy,Donald C. 1

1호남대학교 인문사회과학연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In 2019 we commemorate the centennial of a year of dashed hopes and clashing identities. The conflicts were so disheartening in part because they arose from the failure of expectations ignited around the world that the end of the Great War would facilitate the creation of a new, more just and liberal world order allowing control over the future through self-determination. The focus on self-determination meant that the year’s conflicts would involve a range of incarnations of identity, some assertive, including national-ethnic, anti-imperialist, and racial movements, some predominantly defensive, notably through bonds with a presumed national past to erect barriers against change. Often the most effective identities were the most narrow, as indicated by the limitations of class identity revealed in the pushback against strikes and other worker initiatives and by the repudiation by the U.S. Senate of President Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations. Many of the same identity conflicts still plague the world today, but the main lesson of 1919 for the present may simply be that whatever crises may confront humanity over the next century, it is likely that at their crux we will find questions of identity.

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