Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Extended Essay – fyw899

Conclusion

What were Prime Minister Hughes’s motives for sabotaging Japan’s proposal for racial equality in international affairs during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919?

The evidence points to two motives that underscored Hughes’s scuttling of racial equality at

the Paris Peace Conference. First, there is substantial evidence showing domestic support for

Hughes and his popularity grew due to his affinity with the White Australia Policy. Second,

there is evidence that Hughes was motivated to challenge the Japanese delegation for reasons

of national security, especially from an impending threat of Japan in the longer-term. In

accepting these two motivational factors, we should be wary of overlooking some nuances.

First, in promoting racial inequality on international politics, was Hughes being a leader or a

follower? Although it is clear Hughes’ gained a great deal of domestic support as a result of

his actions in Paris and the benefits can be seen in his re-election in the federal election of 1919,

I believe this ‘motivation’ should be classified more as a pressure. Thus, the pressure of the

popular racism throughout Australia was a bandwagon that Hughes could not ignore. In reality,

the strength of the white-Australia views impelled Hughes’s actions of sabotaging the Japanese

proposal of racial equality in the creation of The Covenant. Ignoring popular opinion would

have been political suicide for Hughes, who already had suffered a number of political setbacks

during the war. Thus, we should not see Hughes at Paris as a champion of Australian racist

values, but rather as a Prime Minister fighting for political survival. It is to Hughes’s good

fortune that he found a diplomatic ally in Woodrow Wilson, who ultimately used his power of

veto to overturn the majority vote and humiliate the Japanese delegation. Notwithstanding this,

Hughes claimed the ‘inequality victory’ as his own and consequently returned to Australia to

the glory of a public triumph and the accolades of the newspapers.

The second nuance is the extent to which Hughes was perspicuous in seeing the strategic threat

posed by the expansion of Japanese power in the South Pacific due to the mandate system.

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