Humiliation and Peace Treaties: Temporality and Politicization

Whether in Ankara or Budapest, key historical peace treaties are often evoked by politicians with considerable implications for long-term stable peace, reconciliation, statehood, and international cooperation. Recent literature would suggest that this is due to contemporary populism and in particular populist leaders. We think that this is partly true but we argue that temporality of humiliation and politicization is overlooked. All major treaties have some features, such as over power-sharing, territorial and population exchanges, that are controversial particularly at the moment of initial treaty negotiation and implementation, but peace treaties generally do not remain issues of public contestation over time. However, we argue that at critical domestic-international moments, these (peace) treaties can become highly politicized. Specifically, changes in the international order, such as a systemic transformation, and in domestic politics, such as a regime transformation, contribute to the politicization of these peace treaties. We conduct statistical analyses for two hundred years. We then analyze the post-treaty environments, including all of the major WW1 treaties, by examining internal politics and debates in the main defeated parties, namely Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, Russia, and Turkey for the last hundred years. As expected in the literature, we show that political debates commenced even before they were ratified and that indeed politicization was exacerbated during recent populist moments. However, contrary to expectations, we show that key international moments such as the end of the cold war and domestic changes such as advent of multiparty politics in previously single party locations also contributed to higher politicization. Our findings thus contribute to academic and policy debates on memory politics, politicization, recurrent conflict and stable peace.