ABSTRACT
The final chapter in the book weighs up the pros and cons of the Peace Treaty of Riga, compares it with its counterparts reached at Versailles and, more distantly, Vienna in 1815, and offers what is essentially an apology for the Riga settlement against disparaging and dismissive evaluations put forward by earlier historians and Nowak’s contemporaries. He asks whether the 18 years of peace the Riga agreement secured were a little or a lot, but follows this up with arguments which make the question purely rhetorical, showing that without the Riga arrangement the future of Europe would have been very different – much worse, despite the next World War sometimes alleged to have been a “direct consequence” of the Peace of Riga. Andrzej Nowak finished this book in the spring of 2015, after the Russian invasion of Ukrainian Crimea. Within the lapse of a few years, history seems to be adding an extra chapter to his arguments.
