Arab liberalism in the 1920s” was the title of Elizabeth Thompson’s (Washington) keynote in which she demonstrated how the imperial powers broke non-European nationalist ambitions at the Treaty of Versailles and during the long aftermath of the War. Thompson used the Syrian-Arab general congress of 1920 to illustrate the continuous Western suppression of Arab liberal popular movements since the nineteenth century. She stressed that the War deepened the cleavage between liberal mass movements and a corrupted elite in Arab countries. The session was chaired by Ulrike Freitag (Berlin).
Elizabeth F. Thompson