You can only understand today's world by reflecting on yesterday

The In Flanders Fields Museum – named after the famous poem by Canadian soldier John McCrae – tells the historical story of the First World War in the province of West Flanders. It is located in the rebuilt Cloth Hall of Ypres, an important symbol of war and resurrection.

The museum also has a knowledge centre, which carries out historical research and organizes conferences about it – or supports them, as may be the case with your association or PCO’s conference. The driving force behind these initiatives is Dominiek Dendooven, doctor of history at the University of Kent and the University of Antwerp.

The war that made modern China and India

Dominiek Dendooven: “Wars and conferences have long gone hand in hand. The most important conference ever was surely the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which resulted in the Treaty of Versailles. That treaty, which still determines how our world looks today, is the subject of an international conference about the Middle East that we are organizing in September. You can only understand the current situation in that part of the world in the light of the 1919 conference. The promise to make Palestine a Jewish homeland, the failure to grant the Kurds a similar national homeland, the current borders between Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Syria – it all stemmed from that conference. It was the last time that Western powers divided the world amongst themselves, without taking into account the aspirations of the people on the ground.

You can only understand today’s world by reflecting on yesterday. One of my research areas is the 140,000 Chinese workers who came to Flanders during the First World War, and about whom I organized a five-day conference. China is now a world power. They are actively seeking moments in history when their country played a role on the international stage. The fact that those tens of thousands of Chinese workers were here has indirectly played an important role in the creation of modern China with its communist ideology.

Another example is India’s involvement in the First World War. Until 1914, the Indian elite and the nationalists of the Congress Party reasoned that: if we loyally support the British, then they will reward us with self-government after the war. The 1919 bloodbath in Amritsar (where British troops shot and killed hundreds of unarmed protesters, red.) and the Treaty of Versailles betrayed that trust. From that moment, the goal was a completely independent Indian republic.”