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Andrew Thomas Park, "Sarah Wambaugh and the Plebiscite: The Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
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New Books Network Host
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Andrew park about his book titled Sarah Wombaugh and the the Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Now, this is a really interesting book because it takes us back in time, but in a way that has some pretty clear implications for the present as well. So the plebiscite once was a happened relatively a lot. Those of us, for instance, who have studied in secondary school, all sorts of things around the World War I and interwar period have probably come across this term. And it seems sort of a historical relic that's not by accident. Right. Something doesn't stop being popular or become popular in the first place for no reason. And this book helps us understand the rise and fall of this political process, I suppose, which doesn't come out of nowhere, has all sorts of things to do with political trends at the time, with politics, with war, and with a particular person who is obviously in the title of the book, Sarah Wambaugh, who is involved in this, too. So I think we're going to have a lot of things at kind of multiple levels, the individual, the institutional, the geopolitical to discuss, to go back into this moment for a political process that was a big deal then. It wasn't. And what maybe that would tell us for kind of political processes more generally. So clearly a number of things for us to discuss. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Andrew Park
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda. It's a pleasure to talk today.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Would you mind starting us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah. So I am a historian of international relations. I'm working in the University of Hong Kong. And the interesting question is why does someone living in Hong Kong for over a decade write a book about plebiscites taking place 100 years ago in Europe? And I suppose, like a lot of things, it's kind of a happy accident. So for various reasons, I was Very interested in Central European history and for previous my master's degree and so on, I wrote about particular crisis in Central Europe which was the tessen crisis between Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1919. And I was very interested in this dispute and I thought, you know, it's. There was a role of an international commission and they tried to keep the peace there and eventually they held a plebiscite. And that plebiscite was actually abandoned because it simply got too violent. And in the course of writing that sort of research I came across a really interesting figure who I hadn't really seen discussed much and that was Sarah Wombo. And she wrote what was the defining, it still is I suppose the defining book on the interwar plebiscites. And when I then moving forward was thinking of topics to write about for my PhD dissertation she was one and the plebiscite was one of the things I wrote about and I was trying to look at the international kind of governance response to self determination. But Sarawamba was only one of the, you know, many things I looked at. But then I suppose, you know, I visited her archives. I spent two weeks there and they're mainly in Harvard University, I should say mainly they're only in Harvard University in the Radcliffe Institute as well as one collection in the Law, Harvard Law Library. And as I was going through her papers I basically found that this was just really a compelling story, that she was really a remarkable individual. She defied a lot of of course the gender stereotypes at the time. She and I benefit as a historian and hopefully the book benefits by her being a very good writer herself. So she has lots of nice little catchy pungent quotations that you can use in your writing. So I, I enjoyed my research and writing about Sarah Wombo and of course she was not the main part of my thesis but I did realize that the plebiscite in the story that, that she kind of her career encapsulated was something that was worthy of telling more and was simply exciting and kind of dramatic in its own right. So that's I guess a long winded answer as to, to why I decided to write the book. I thought it's something that was as we can discuss, very, very and as you mentioned, very pertinent to today's world but also just you know, that, that basic, that basic desire for telling a really compelling story and she has a very compelling story to tell and we're
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
definitely going to get into it. In fact that's where I'd like to go next is a bit more about her. So can you tell us about kind of her and her background and especially how she became to be such an advocate of plebiscites?
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Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah, so her story is quite interesting. I guess I'll start from the beginning. So she was born in 1882 in Ohio in the United States. But within a decade or so of her life she moved to Boston and she moved where her father was a law professor at Harvard University, and Eugene Wambaugh was his name, and he was a fairly prominent legal scholar in the day. And she had, by all accounts, a very good supportive upbringing from her parents. Her father, in her own words, she said her father talked law and politics to her from around the age of seven. So she was brought up in a very, you know, politically engaged household. And so it's no surprise at that time that she gets very interested in the suffrage movement, the movement for women's, the right for women to vote. She is educated at the Radcliffe Institute, well then the Radcliffe College, which was the. The female only counterpart to Harvard University back in the day. And she studied history, international kind of politics, these kind of subject matter. But her real interest is in domestic politics. She's advocating for a constitutional amendment to allow women the right to vote. She's a member of, of course, a lot of those groups that are advocating as well, in particular the National American Women's Suffrage Association. She was involved in some prominent, you know, she played a minor role in some prominent occasions. She was marching in, in 1913 on the women's Suffrage March, where just before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, there were a large march to kind of advocate for women's suffrage. And were it not for America's eventual entry into the First World War, she probably would have just devoted herself to domestic causes, or at least that was a major part of her interest. But the war breaks out and she is watching from the sidelines in some way because the United States only joins in 1917. But she joins what becomes the Women's Peace Party, which is, as its name implies, a women's organization that is advocating for a few policies, but they're advocating for kind of an immediate ceasefire end to the First World War, an international organization, what becomes the League of Nations and also the kind of democratic resolution of territorial disputes. And it's during her time in the Women's Peace Party that she's exposed to other women's groups and I guess socialist groups, left wing groups who are advocating for the plebiscite. And the plebiscite is a technique that Itself goes back to the Roman times, but it's really modern history is from the French Revolution onwards. And it has a pretty patchy history. It's used more or less legitimately in some votes shortly after the French Revolution. But then in the course of the 19th century, these votes get increasingly rigged and it's kind of seen as a disreputable technique. But sort of radical and left wing and women's groups who are critiquing the First World War are saying that actually we should think about using the plebiscite more. And Sarah Wambaugh is one of those who is listening to these discussions. And then with America's entry into the war in 1917, suddenly the situation changes. Suddenly she's not just on the sidelines. Her country is actively engaging in this conflict. And that's when she basically decides that she's going to write what becomes her first book, which is called a monograph on Plebiscites. And it's a quite hefty book, you know, probably a thousand pages or so. And she just analyzes all of the 19th century, late 18th century and 19th century plebiscites. And that's really the foundation of her career and the foundation of her. Yeah, I would say her beginning to think deeply about this technique of the plebiscite.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. Lots going on there already with her life. So I can see why it kind of jumped out of the page when going through all of her archives. So that sort of gives us a sense of her as an individual. I think we also want to talk about kind of plebiscites beyond the sort of big book that she writes. Because of course, this doesn't remain a sort of theoretical political tool. In fact, immediately after World War I, it becomes in many ways kind of a technique of choice. I mean, it certainly shows up a lot. So why was it a big deal kind of at that moment? And is it because of what Sarah's up to?
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Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah. So it becomes a. It's difficult to say if it becomes a big deal, big technique. So I think the first point is that after the First World War, during, before and. And at the Paris Peace Conference, it would be untrue to say that Sarah Wamba herself is kind of somehow instigating this. Right. She's. She's written a major work on it and she's finished it by 1918. So some fragments of this and some memorandum she writes does make it to the Paris Peace Conference because her, her advisor and she's writing this work officially for the Carnegie Endowment for international peace. And so her supervisor is one of the directors of the Carnegie Institute, James Brown Scott. And so he is also one of the legal advisors to the American delegation in the Paris Peace Conference. So she has some influence in terms of her ideas on the plebiscite, but it would probably be a stretch to say that she influenced it in a really direct sense. I think more important is the broader context during and after the First World War. So you have, I guess, a crisis of legitimacy for these powers who have sent their population to fight and really die in, you know, horrendous ways for four years. And you have, I guess, radical, increasingly radical politics, and particularly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, you have really radical calls for no more imperialism, no more ruling by small group of elites and so on. And you have a number of groups in the uk you have the Union for Democratic Control, which is advocating what the Women's Peace Party also roughly advocates for. And so you have a kind of radical movement which is also paralleled with this movement in a number of countries for women's suffrage. I think it's probably most historians would agree that Woodrow Wilson himself was reactive when he began to talk about self determination. He was concerned by the Russian Revolution and therefore he said, well, they have a very radical call for self determination. We, as America, we have to do something radical as well, to reclaim this. Hence he, he has all of this talk, you know, when he addresses State of the Union and he addresses Congress and all of these things, he's advocating for self determination. And that's really this background where the plebiscite can, can be used. Of course, we can add that Woodrow Wilson didn't seem to really think through in any detail what, what he was saying. He was advocating more in a kind of this. What do you call it, the poetry of, of politics, not really the prose, right. So he said everyone should, you know, determine their own futures. But he later would go on, on record to say that he had no idea that there were so many minority groups who were coming to him when he was in the Paris Peace Conference. And so there were, there was a little bit of idealism overshadowing realism there. But I think that's the overall context that, that revolutionary fervor, this commitment by the Allies to try and I guess channel that, that sense of, of democratic optimism and then the pressure from a number of groups, women's groups as well, to, to make a more democratic order. And so it's that. That is the fertile soil from which peacemakers in the Paris Peace conference call for plebiscites. In fact, they call for plebiscites, as you pointed out, in a kind of they didn't really do it ideologically, they did it very haphazardly in most cases. And they did it usually as a way to break some political impasse. And so there's a number of examples. There was probably around six or so plebiscites written into the Paris Peace Conference, half a dozen or so. And most of those were simply the result that, you know, Britain was siding with Germany and France might be siding with Poland, and they're not entirely sure. So let's have a plebiscite and we won't kind of have to argue amongst ourselves, at least in theory. So they were used in a kind of instrumental fashion really. But the intellectual background that allowed their broad use, I think would be that these rhetorical claims to self determination and this revolutionary kind of moment.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to understand kind of why these ideas are coming up. And obviously given where we're at today, I think I'm not going to be the only listener to that explanation going, hang on a second, you've said optimism, you've said idealism, you've said kind of. I mean, you didn't say silver bullet, but it does sound a little bit like that. You know, if we can't figure out other things, let's just say there's a plebiscite. From today's position in terms of how politics tend to work, that doesn't sound like a great setup for these plebiscites to actually pan out and sort of tick all of these wonderful dreamlike boxes. What actually happens?
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Dr. Andrew Park
So yeah, that's a very good question. I think two things. So first I'll mention a little bit more about the Paris Peace Conference. What happens during the negotiations that also really doesn't help the plebiscites that are eventually held. And then I'll talk about the experience of those of those plebiscites as well. So what actually happens is sort of like the history of the Paris Peace Conference as a whole really is that they had a number of, you know, the great powers, you know, America, Britain, France, Italy, when they are meeting to discuss peace, they have these great structures and ideas in their head. And very quickly the peace conference descends into, you wouldn't call it chaos maybe, but organized chaos in a sense because they're dealing with ongoing crises in Europe and you know, coal supply is running out, food supply, there's disease outbreaks. Everything is a bit of chaos for those six months that they're trying to negotiate peace. And so I think they're, they're grasping at whatever they think, whatever tool might be useful in any given situation. And they don't really look at the whole piece until basically it's already prepared. So they, they take this instrumental approach. The first plebiscite that they agree on is one on the German Danish border. This is the Schleswig plebiscite. And in fact that's the least controversial plebiscite because actually that was a plebiscite that was supposed to have been held in the 19th century when Prussia had defeated Denmark and Austria at a peace treaty. They had signed off that will hold a plebiscite and decide the border area. And of course they refused to hold a plebiscite until after the First World War. So once they've decided on that, they think, well, this seems a pretty good approach. And then they decide a few more for Eastern Prussia on the Polish German border, and then they decide one for Upper Silesia, which is between Poland and Germany, an important industrial area. They even speculate about plebiscites in what is now Ukraine and a whole range of territories. But the only ones they actually put into practice are basically those around defeated Germany and Austria. So they decide on these rather easily, without a lot of thought, and they just defer the technical questions to a committee, as probably happens unfortunately quite a lot in politics. And the committees look through this and they attempted to do as good a job as they can. And one of the requirements for not all but most of these plebiscites was that we need to have Allied troops on the ground. We need to have French, British, American in particular, because they wanted, I suppose, less antagonism by having less French troops because American troops were seen as somehow more acceptable to defeated Germany than obviously French troops were. And they actually had worked out some pretty big plans about this. And all of this looks great. And then within a few months after the Paris Peace Conference at the, the Treaty of Versailles, the post war treaties are completed in the summer of 1919, America effectively withdraws, or at least it becomes increasingly clear that the Senate isn't going to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. So America pulls out of its commitments and then Britain realizes that, oh, we've actually just reached the peak of our imperial expansion with our mandates in Palestine and other regions, and we have a civil war going on in Ireland, and so we don't want to contribute troops. And so the political reality hit very quickly after they had boldly decided on these half dozen plebiscites. And so the reality is they go ahead because they've signed off on these plebiscites, but they've already kind of, you know, shot themselves in the foot to some extent because all of the plans that they had made were sort of put on hold. And as a result, the plebiscites that do take place were a mixed bag. So in the plebiscite I mentioned, the first one written into the, into the Versailles Treaty in Schleswig, in the Danish German border, this goes off pretty successfully. Of course, plebiscite raises the tensions amongst population, but it's a very fairly smooth operation and peaceful operation. Likewise some plebiscites in Eastern Prussia, this is the region sort of today's Northern Poland, we would say they were a little bit tense, but went off fairly peacefully. But then you had other plebiscites which really became a debacle. And the big one was Upper Silesia. So this is the important industrial zone. And there had already been an uprising by the Polish insurrectionaries. There had probably been a second one shortly before the plebiscite. And in the end they managed to hold this vote. But total anarchy breaks out and you get something like 30,000 allied troops need to be sent, British and French and Italian troops need to be sent to basically suppress this uprising and the kind of chaos. And if you look in the files, I mean, it really looks like, like chaos. You know, you see reports of, you know, German planes, you know, bombing villages, and you've got artillery being fired in the street and so on. So it's really close to an open war between these two sides. And a similar situation happens in Teshin, which is this plebiscite between Poland and Czechoslovakia. And incidentally, that that first conflict that sparked my interest in this to begin with, that plebiscite was actually canceled because it was just became too violent. And there were reports of, you know, railway stations being blown up. There's random detection of civilians who are trying to cross the line between the two sides. So, so the reputation of the plebiscite really takes a big hit. Not all of them were chaotic, but those that were chaotic were seemingly so kind of disastrous that, yeah, the reputation simply is not very good after the First World War.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it sounds like when it goes wrong, it goes very wrong, which is not great. What lessons then do people take from this? Right. Sarah Wombaugh, other people obviously thinking about this, watching all of this happen, what did they take from all of this in terms of sort of how politics works and how plebiscites could work going forward?
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Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah, so that's a great question. And I think the immediate lesson that people take is that, well, the plebiscite is, is a pretty worthless technique. And you really get this almost literally said in the final post war peace treaty that is negotiated in 1922, 1923, this becomes the Treaty of Lausanne. And this is between the Western powers, minus the US and Turkey, the new Turkish Republic under Ataturk. And they have to revise the initial treaties that they had tried to make with the Ottomans because Turkey is now a bit more powerful. And so when they wrote those treaties to begin with with the Ottoman Empire, they had actually written in not quite plebiscites, but what they called kind of expressions of popular opinion. So a little bit vague, but a quasi plebiscite. Once, you know, four years later they come to negotiate again, they're absolutely scathing. So Lord Curzon, who is the chief negotiator, the British Foreign minister, he basically dismisses the plebiscite and then has these kind of elegant speech where he totally condemns it. And he condemns the plebiscite after citing all of the chaos in Upper Silesia, in Tessen. And he calls it fatal and pernicious, a fatal and pernicious way of settling a border. And what is interesting, if not a little tragic, is that it's precisely at that moment in the Treaty of Lausanne that another technique for dealing with self determination, or rather dealing with a conflict between competing sovereignties kind of gets enshrined in international law. And that is this idea of what was called compulsory population transfer. We would today call that ethnic cleansing, of course, but that was the technique that is literally written into that treaty instead of the plebiscite. So the plebiscite is seen as offering only chaos. It seems much better to those statesmen and leaders who are kind of managing affairs to just move the people instead. Don't let them decide, just move them in different sides of the border. So that is basically a pretty profound rejection of the plebiscite. And that is maybe where things might have stayed if it weren't for Sarawambo. And that's where her role is quite interesting. So she, after the first world war, she briefly, for about five months, begins to work for the League of Nations, the new international organization set up by, well, advocated by Woodrow Wilson, set up by the victorious powers minus the United States. And she is a, I mean really no exaggeration to say she's a starry eyed idealist for the League of Nations. Some of her quotes later on include, you know, my heart is always with the League of Nations. I mean, she's really a league tragic. And she witnesses in her brief time in the League of Nations this kind of different approach to dealing with international politics. What she sees as a scientific approach, an impartial approach to resolving these disputes. And so her brief time there convinces her, makes her a totally convinced enthusiast for the League of Nations. But then she does go, after her time with the League of Nations to visit all of the sites of the plebiscite zones, the plebiscites that had just taken place. She visits them in 1922, which is a year or two after these events have taken place. And she is collecting evidence, collecting research for what she plans to be her next book on plebiscites. And she visits all of them. She one account calls it a personally conducted peace mission. And so you can imagine her going up to these, to these officials and she's advocating international harmony and international peace and asking them about the experiences at the plebiscite and getting official documents and all of these things. And so by 1922, 23, she has her initial lessons. And unlike the statesman who had totally written off the plebiscite, she says, look, the plebiscites were really bad, they weren't great. But if we analyze them sort of systematically, we can see that there are some things that work better than others and there's still potential to make this plebiscite work. And the phrase she kind of uses is this idea of, can we make the plebiscite fit the tool shed of international politics, something like that. She's very keen on thinking about it as a technique that can be perfected. And already in 1923, the key lesson she takes away is that you need to do everything possible to kind of make the plebiscite zone neutral. You need to try and neutralize the plebiscite. That's really the key, the key lesson that she takes away.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's really helpful to understand that, as you said, the plebiscite takes a hit, but kind of not all hope is lost at this point. So can we talk then about the extent to which these ideas are put into practice with the next plebiscite? I mean, the Saar plebiscite doesn't go kind of quite as badly. Like what gets changed from the ones that have gone before. What factors enable this to be more successful?
- [31:56]
Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah, so that's a very good question. And I think this is where Sara Wambaugh's life begins to get really quite dramatic and, you know, quite interesting. And it's these kind of things that when I first saw them in the archive, I thought, wow, this is a very compelling story. So Sarah Wombo works out the normative principles that the detailed normative principles she's going to write for the plebiscite while observing another plebiscite. And actually it's the first plebiscite she ends up observing. And this is a plebiscite between Peru and Chile. And it's this dispute, the Tacna Arica dispute, and similar to this Schleswig plebiscite, it was actually a plebiscite that was supposed to have taken place in the 19th century, but in this case, Chile had defeated Peru and other countries in the War of the Pacific in the latter half of the 19th century and refused to hold this plebiscite, although officially it had written it into this treaty of peace. And so eventually, for various reasons, the United States is made the arbiter of that peace treaty and they decide, look, the plebiscite should go ahead. And it's now 1925. It's time that you. That Chile, that we actually hold the plebiscite. So this plebiscite actually takes place and it's. The Americans are the only sort of arbitrating power who are supposed to organize the plebiscite. And the two sides competing are going to be Peru and Chile. And the Peruvian government is very pro American at this time, and it asks Sarah Wombaugh to be the technical advisor. And she agrees. She's actually a bit reluctant at first. She's much more eager on just advocating for the League of Nations. But she says, all right, I'll go advise the Peruvian government on the plebiscite. And it's in Peru and in fact, specifically floating on a ship for about 10 months off the coast of Tacna Arica that she comes to write these normative principles. So I think that's one important Thing to bear in mind is that for Sarah Wambaugh, the principles that she writes to make a plebiscite legitimate are things that she felt very viscerally, because during this plebiscite in Takna Arica, she. She witnesses firsthand what happens if you're trying to hold a vote over a disputed territory when there's no freedom for both sides, for at least one side to have a vote. And so the Peruvian campaign, you know, the officials going out trying to advocate for Peru, they're beaten up by kind of thugs paid by the Chilean government or by police, they're tracked by spies. She has really harrowing time. She, she talks to people who are beaten up and nearly killed. And she herself has these dramatic moments where they're driving on a lonely road and suddenly they're kind of stopped and kind of thugs come out and threaten to beat them and all of these things. And so at the very moment where she's trying to tell the Peruvian government what kind of measures we need to make a legitimate plebiscite, she's witnessing that firsthand. And she's viscerally seeing people beaten up and stabbed and all of these things, mob violence. And that is really the catalyst for, for the normative principles that she ends up arguing for. And she really does write a lot of these on this ship.
- [35:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so what then gets taken forward to be put in place to make further plebiscites more successful?
- [35:41]
Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah, so the key thing, the key normative principle is this idea of neutralization. And what she means by that is that basically for six months or maybe a year, she's not totally specific on this, but that there needs to be kind of total international control of the region that is going to vote on its sovereignty. And that is a big ask, right? So she's in the case of, you know, Peru and Chile, this disputed province, she would advocate for, you know, putting in third party troops or international police to try and control that region and prevent violence from either side. And so neutralization for her becomes the kind of the key defining principle. And she ends up elaborating on this in her second book, which is called Plebiscite since the World War. And that's where she basically writes out a list of 18 points. And these 18 points are her normative prescriptions for what she wants an ideal plebiscite to be like. And I won't read them all out, but I mean, they are quite important. She ends up, these normative principles end up being discussed by policymakers later on and so on. But in a very brief sense, they kind of mean things like the international commission that is organizing the plebiscite. It must basically take charge of all of the public services. So the legal authorities must be in charge of the international commission, the police, public utilities, telephones, all of these kind of things. They must have enough personnel to actually control these things. They must replace the leading officials. They basically have to, have to take power for the, in some sense for the duration that the plebiscite is being prepared. And of course there's other things they need to of course, take charge of the list of voters. They need to put careful precautions to vet this list and to try and, you know, make it as as clear as possible and so on and so forth. But that's really the heart of her normative prescriptions are this idea of neutralization.
- [38:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that is a pretty big ask, but a clear one as well. So what does this mean then for some of the plebiscites that happen after this list?
- [38:16]
Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah, so for Sarah Wombo, she's lucky in a way because there was one plebiscite which was virtually guaranteed. And this was the plebiscite in the Saar. This territory it was written in to the Versailles Treaty. And it was basically that for 15 years the league of nations would administer the Saar territory and then they would hold a vote on whose sovereignty it should go. Now this territory was always German. It was, the people spoke German. They always thought of themselves as German. There was really no question that this is a German territory. But they again part of this compromise, during the negotiations in the Paris Peace Conference, they wrote in this plebiscite to allow basically Germany to return or vote to join France or vote to maintain the status quo, which was continuing under the League of Nations administration. And so there is a plebiscite that is going to happen in early 1935, 15 years after the ratification of the Versailles Treaty. And so that plebiscite is basically always going to happen. And so Sarah Wambaugh had even worked on the early preparations for this during her five months with the League of Nations back in 1920. And she always had her eye on the Tsar plebiscite. And so she knew that this is the chance to basically put into practice all of the normative techniques that I have been writing about. And that's exactly what she did. So the plebiscite is held on 13th of January 1935, but the Commission goes there in about July the year before. And so they have about six months or so to prepare this plebiscite, some of the 18 points, her 18 normative principles have already been in place because the League of Nations is controlling this territory anyway. And so she sees this as this perfect, ideal opportunity to run, you know, the perfect plebiscite, in a way. And that's really what she does. She is made the technical advisor and also the deputy plebiscite commissioner. And so there's three male plebiscite commissioners. She is the deputy. She is obviously not calling all the shots, but in fact, if you look at the plans for the plebiscite, she really kind of, from start to finish, has written this. All of the reference material, virtually all of the reference material, is her own book on the plebiscite. So she is really the driving force of arranging this plebiscite. And that's kind of, I guess, precisely what she sees as an opportunity to put into place the perfect normative conditions for a plepocyte.
- [41:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And does it work?
- [41:15]
Dr. Andrew Park
So this is a question which, I mean, frankly speaking, I still don't know. And that's maybe a strange thing to say, having written a book where the SAAR plebiscite is kind of one of the high points. But for Sarah Wombo, she was absolutely convinced with one important proviso, which I will mention that, that she had prepared basically what she called the highest point yet attained in the technique of the plebiscite. And so from a technical perspective, she is correct, because she has put in all of these safeguards. She's got district controllers. They've got a lot of, you know, technical apparatus in place. There's alongside kind of 40 district controllers for each district in the SAAR, which only has a population of around less than a million at that point, 800,000 or so. You've got 40 officials, League of Nations officials. Then you've got 900 vote observers who join shortly before the vote as well. And on top of that, the League of Nations authorizes the first instance of an international military force under the control of an international organization. And that's the SAR International Force, which has around 3,000 troops or so. And so added up, you know, you get a commission of somehow an involvement of more than 4,000 people, I would say, just to run this plebiscite. So from a technical perspective, I think it's very much the case that it is much more successful than the plebiscites after the First World War. However, the interesting point is that the plebiscite, until 1933, it was considered Really a non event, right? It's German territory, it's going to become German. So what? Everyone expects that there were even some brief negotiations to directly return the Tsar without a plebiscite, but those were never really taken seriously. But in 1933, of course, you get the Nazis coming to power, you get Hitler as the new Nazi leader, and suddenly the Saar plebiscite is no longer this really non event. Many people, particularly the liberal, you know, exile press from Germany who are in France and other countries as well as liberals all over and anti fascist forces, see the SAR plebiscite as a kind of referendum on Nazism. And that's why this event, this vote really takes on a much higher profile. And that's where things get a little difficult, because the technical provisions that she puts in place are very strong. But she herself is aware, and she spends a lot of time thinking about this question, that it's not good enough just to have technical provisions, right? To make a vote through fair, you also have to convince the voters that the technical provisions are fair. And that's where it's a bit trickier because of course, the Nazi regime has put in a lot of propaganda effort and they're not very nice people. They're not very doing a very nice thing in the Tsar. They have this campaign group called the Deutsche Front, and they go around, you know, spreading rumors and trying to undermine the people's belief in the secrecy of the vote. They make kind of veiled threats that, you know, you'll end up going to a concentration camp and all of these kind of things. And so there's a real dilemma of how you stop rumors, how you do your best to, to make people have confidence in the vote. And Sarawamba herself takes the leading role in this. She is, in theory, the League of Nations says no one in the plebiscite commission should, you know, be interviewed for the press. They should be totally neutral and just keep quiet. But they make an exception. The plebiscite commission decides we need to promote the authenticity and the validity of the technical measures we put in place. And Sarah Wambaugh is really doing a lot of interviews. She's writing things, she's talking with journalists. She's basically using all of her experience, which she gained in the women's suffrage movement, putting that into good practice when she's working in the saar. So when I say I still don't know if the plebiscite was a success, I suppose what I mean by that is the technical provisions were very fair. But there are good grounds to criticize whether people on the ground in the Saar did they totally feel devoid of fear. And Sarah Wamba herself wrote to a colleague, or rather a friend in the, in the women's movement saying that there was no. What she called there was no physical terror. Right. So there wasn't people being beaten up, you know, outside of polling stations and things like that, which, which happens of course in Takna Arika and also happens in, in the Nazi, you know, domestic rigged plebiscites when they had referendums for their own political purposes. And so it was free and fair in that sense. But she herself admitted that in terms of what she called moral terror. So fear that people were clearly still afraid. Right, because the. You couldn't really do anything to stop that fear. Later, about 10 years later, she actually admits that. Well, actually maybe some of the officials, the League of Nations officials were a little bit, you know, a little bit ignorant about the, the techniques the Nazis were using to try and undermine the plebiscite. So she does later admit that she doesn't think it was perfect, but she never publicly changes her mind on that. So as far as she is concerned and as far as she promotes it, the SAR plebiscite is seen as this perfect plebiscite.
- [47:32]
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- [48:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And yet there is the fall plebiscite. Right? We talked at the beginning that this was a story to some extent of rise and fall. So if that was the perfect plebiscite, why did she and others turn away from suggesting this as a technique going forward?
- [48:46]
Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah, so that's a very good question. In fact, it's really like the rise and fall and then the re rise and the Refall, I suppose. So it rises in the First World War, falls again, then Serwamba rehabilitates the reputation, puts it into practice in 1935 in the Tsar Plebisci. Then you only have to fast forward basically three years for the, the fall to begin. And it's really quite a, I guess, a bitter moment for Sarah Wambaugh. So the Saar plebiscite that she herself had called the highest point yet attained, in a nutshell, it is literally written into the munich Pact of 1938 as a model for a plebiscite to resolve the Sudetenland crisis. And so I can explain a little bit about how that happened or the dynamics of that. But basically the reputation of the plebiscite after 1935 really is very, very high. So government is pretty happy with it. Politicians rather are pretty happy with it in Western countries because it seemed to resolve a potentially tense situation. Peace groups are very happy with it. Sarawamba herself gets lots of honorary doctorates and, you know, peace recommendations about her role in preventing conflict. And some of them declare that the plebiscite is a technique that has brought peace. And so unfortunately, the other group that took away a positive impression of the Saar plebiscite is Nazi Germany, because the Saar vote saw the Saar territory vote with something like 90% of people to return to Germany. And so that vote is seen as a vote of confidence in Hitler, even though it's technically just a vote on, you know, return of sovereignty to Germany or France or maintaining in the League of Nations. And so you get, basically you get two groups thinking that Tsar plebiscite is a great way to resolve future conflicts. You get the Germans thinking that it is a successful technique. And you get Britain and France or particularly Britain thinking that it is a technique. And added to that, these peace groups who are saying it's also a great technique. And then you fast forward into the years of appeasement going into 1938 and you get into the real crisis over Czechoslovakia in September or in the late summer and into September of 1938, where Hitler says, we want the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the German speaking parts of Czechoslovakia. And if you look at the diplomacy going on about there, the plebiscite is mentioned quite frequently, but it's a unique position. So the British Foreign Office, for example, directly cites Sarah Wambaugh's works and they say, look, 18 point normative points. This is the ideal we can have for a plebiscite. It is very unlikely that we could arrange something like that for the Sudetenland. But then you get Neville Chamberlain and some other British politicians saying, yes, but a plebiscite really seems like a technique we could use to resolve this. It's much more complex. It floats up and down during this diplomacy. But in the end, when Chamberlain meets Hitler, they discuss these points. And it's ultimately written into the Munich Pact that there will be some territories will go outright to Germany, but for the rest of the territory, that we can't decide if it belong, if it should go to Germany or Czechoslovakia, we will hold a plebiscite. And they literally write into the agreement along, you know, along the lines of the Tsar plebiscite. And so this is kind of what if. If imitation is the highest praise. This is a tragic form of praise because it's showing that the Tsar plebisci is seen as this really successful role model. But it's obviously a sham. And basically as soon as the ink is dry on the Munich Pact, there's a commission that is set up to try and implement the details of the pact. And the British diplomat there is very clear within a few days writing that it's very clear that a plebiscite along the lines of the Tsar is not, you know, feasible in the Sudetenland. And so it's always, it's a kind of weird wishful thinking, particularly for the British, that this ideal plebiscite, all the things that made it ideal in the saar. So 15 years of League of Nations control, 4,000 personnel, six months preparation alone for the plebiscite. All of that is obviously non existent in the case of Czechoslovakia, where they want to have a plebiscite within a few days. But, you know, they're sort of, I guess, misled or rather this wishful thinking, thinking that the tsar plebiscite is somehow the way the plebiscite is the way to get out of this impasse between Germany and conflict with Western power. So that's really what starts the demise of the plebiscite. But in general, it's that association with Nazi Germany, with fascism that really sinks the reputation of the plebiscite. And at the same time, we have to remember that plebiscites are used domestically within Nazi Germany for a lot of causes. When they want to, you know, strengthen Adolf Hitler's political power. When they want to, you know, exit the League of Nations, there's all these rigged plebiscites. And so the Sudeten plebiscite is Sort of the, the proposed plebiscite, it's obviously abandoned very quickly because they realize it's unworkable. And Czechoslovakia just gives the rest of its territory that, that was disputed there to, to Germany. A few months later, it's swallowed completely by Nazi Germany. And so the plebiscite is part of that backlash, I suppose, against these policies of appeasement or a backlash against this wishful thinking that thought that they could just buy off fascism in this way.
- [55:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, that is quite a fall indeed. Skipping ahead then a little bit to look at kind of the bigger picture of all of this rise and fall. Obviously the association with plebiscites in Nazi Germany. That makes sense as why that would be a reason kind of to consign that political technique, at least for a while, to history. Are there any other key factors though that help explain kind of why the plebiscite has been forgotten and especially why Sarah Wambaugh was sort of taken out of ideas of like political theory and how international relations could work?
- [55:45]
Dr. Andrew Park
Yeah, so the plebiscite in general, there's this backlash against self determination in a way, and Sarawamba herself is part of it. She, in her later political thoughts during and after the, the Second World War, she herself says, look, the, the welfare of international society as a whole should take precedence over the specific, you know, claims of a, of a group for independence or not. And so she, at some point she even gets very close to totally, you know, opposing the plebiscite herself. In the end, she settles for the plebiscite as being a tool that can be very useful, but as a last resort. And interestingly, that's also sort of what most contemporary legal scholars have come to think, or I suppose liberal leaning legal scholars have come to think about self determination. This idea that you want to have complex power sharing arrangements. Only as a last resort do you actually want cessation or independence movements. You really don't want to split territory off. And in that sense, of course, plebiscite is all about splitting a specific territory off from another country. And so that's bound to cause some kind of tension there. In terms of her broader, I guess, reputation, there's obviously a number of factors at play. The fact that self determination isn't that popular, that's something that affects her. Her closeness to the League of Nations also goes against her. So she is seen as tied up too closely with the League. She ends up advising the United nations on their proposed plebiscite in Kashmir after the Second World War. And she has a little resurgence in her career. She's involved in an election monitoring mission to Greece in 1946. But I suppose her real moment in the sun, so to speak, was Tsar Plepiscid. And that was something particularly her closeness to the League of Nations was something which maybe tarnished her in some sense. And of course, there's the gender aspect. So in the Second World War, American planning efforts really only had one woman, maybe two, and Sarawambo wasn't one of those. So there was obviously discrimination based on the fact that she was a woman as well.
- [58:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, a whole bunch of factors there important to keep in mind. Is there anything further you're hoping readers take today from all of this history?
- [58:29]
Dr. Andrew Park
So it's a good question. I've been thinking about this as well. I think the main point is probably, you know, if Sarah Wombo, who started very idealistically, if she moved away from an idealistic support for the plebiscite, that is something worth taking seriously. Right. And so when we think in the news a few years ago, and hopefully they stay in the past, but, you know, there were some enthusiastic people commenting in the press that why don't we hold plebiscites in Ukraine and why don't we hold these things? And in fact, Russia did hold plebiscites. They just looked like the 19th century ones, completely dodgy under Russian guns, all these kind of things. If in terms of plebiscites, what you can take away from Sarah Wambaugh's career is that you shouldn't hold one of these things unless you're willing to put in really a lot of effort and make it as legitimate as you can. And even then, maybe still in terms of the ease with which you can make decisions or the political impact, maybe it's still potentially something that you should only do in last resort. So it's not something I think you should that that people should bandy about as a kind of casual solution to international conflict. It's one that needs to be taken really seriously. And then a broader point is this tension between technical solutions and sort of politics. Sarawamba herself was very technically focused. Her focus was on perfecting the plebiscite as a tool of political science. But she herself was a little bit blinkered when it came to these broader political situations. And so that's tying into that first point, which is you might have a technique of international relations, say the plebiscite or international peacekeeping or something along those lines, but it doesn't mean that just because you can do something, it's politically a good idea. So that's always a tension, perhaps, that reminding people, I guess, that danger of idealism, maybe that maybe temper that down a little bit at the same time, I think, and having said that, kind of contradictory to that is that we do need people to honestly and sincerely think about the role of democracy in international relations. And I think that was one of the really key things that Sarah Wambaugh did in her career. She was really concerned. She made mistakes, for sure, but she was someone who was thinking deeply about the role of international, the role of democracy in international relations. And I think losing that entirely is something that would be bad. And we should listen to someone who did spend a lot of her career doing that and think of those key safeguards that need to be put in place if you are to make international affairs more democratic.
- [61:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Those are some very good takeaways indeed, and a lot that you've investigated from all of these different pieces, her as an individual and kind of the whole context. So what, may I ask, are you working on now? Anything you'd like to give us a sneak preview of?
- [61:54]
Dr. Andrew Park
So there's a number of things. One is also drawing on this question of peacekeeping. So historians of the origins of peacekeeping, there's only very little written on it, but effectively they look back to these plebiscites of the First World War and the Saar plebiscite as the precursors to international peacekeeping. And so that's one project I have looking at those, how that evolves. But I'm planning to, to go back even further, maybe into the mid 19th century. That's one project. There's so many projects, but. But for various reasons, I ended up actually working now in the school of public health. And so I'm actually looking at sort of the organizational aspects of public health. And so I've got a number of projects on maybe more health campaigns, health, you know, from an international relations perspective as well. So a lot of things to potentially work on.
- [62:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that definitely sounds interesting. So we'll see how that all goes, I'm sure. And of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Sarah Wambaugh and the the Turbulent History of a Democratic Alternative to War, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [63:12]
Dr. Andrew Park
Thank you so much, Brenda. I enjoyed it.