Christoph Ploss - "Lord Davies, The New Commonwealth Society and its German section"

 

The International Politics Research Group, the research group of the DDMI, was pleased to host a special lecture on Lord Davies and the New Commonwealth Society he organised to promote international organisation, justice, co-operation, and peace. The speaker was Christoph Ploss, a visiting PhD student in the Department of European Integration History / European Studies at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

The lecture was entitled "Lord Davies, The New Commonwealth Society and its German section." Ploss delivered his lecture in IBERS new building in Room 0.32. The event took place on 7 November.

An abstract of Ploss' PhD. project (from which his lecture was drawn) is below. Undergraduate students were encouraged to attend.

 

Abstract of Ploss' PhD project:

The project’s topic is the New Commonwealth Society (NCS), which was founded in 1932 by the Welsh politician Lord David Davies supported by experts in international law, politicians and diplomats, such as George Barnes, Georg Schwarzenberger, Henry Jouvenel and Ernst Jäckh. The society aimed at building a world-wide legal system to ensure peace and wealth. At the outset the NCS supported the League of Nations and wanted to strengthen it on an institutional level. Afterwards the NCS increasingly concentrated on the European continent and developed detailed concepts for the unification of Europe until the postwar period. The project is in an inter-disciplinary approach from a historical perspective and from the perspective of international law to verify the continuities of NCS’s activities on both a philosophical and legislative level and, subsequently, to challenge the decisive character of the year 1945 as the beginning of the supra-national European integration process.