 Good morning. I can't bring you BMW. I can't bring you Disney. I can't even give you a research center, and I don't have a PowerPoint, so it's just me for seven minutes. My career to date is defined by the history of neutrality. A word for that, for most of you will conjure up pictures of Switzerland, chocolate, ski slips, looted Nazi gold, perhaps the Red Cross, but also blandness, sorry if there are any Swiss in the audience, of non-involvement, of sticking your head in the sand and avoiding international attention, or as my TV hero in the 1990s, Ellie McBeal, explained it, and I quote, everything is neutral in Switzerland. People are even emotionally neutral in Switzerland. All they do is drink hot chocolate, work in banks, nobody gets hurt, and they get to lead nice lives right up to the point where they shoot themselves. Neutrality today is often defined by passivity and inaction, and one of my students rather daringly suggested in a class that he did not believe that neutrality was a thing for how can a state be uninvolved or uninterested in the affairs of its neighbors, and there's the rub, because of course it can't. No state exists in isolation from the world or from its neighbors. So neutrality, historically considered, was really a policy of abstentionism and non-involvement. Rather, the neutrals were countries that declared their non-belligerency at the start of a war, and in so doing they promised to behave in certain ways. They promised not to provide military assistance to any belligerent, they promised to protect their territorial integrity, and to espouse a relative degree of impartiality. In return, the neutral hoped, and it sometimes could reasonably expect that its neutrality and its non-belligerency would be respected by the belligerents, particularly in terms of its trade, in terms of access to the open seas, almost to go about its ordinary business as if there was no war on. So before the 20th century, before the First and Second World Wars particularly, neutrality was not a policy reserved for small, weak states. In fact, during the long 19th century that stretched from 1815 to 1914, neutrality was the most common foreign policy option adopted by the great powers when others went to war. So one of the ongoing tasks I have as a historian is to revise people's expectations of what it meant to be neutral, for it's not only in the popular mind that neutrals are deemed irrelevant. Most historians of warfare seem to think so too, or at least they don't ask questions of neutrals very often, and neither do many political scientists, and I ask scholars, although there are of course some. So above all, I spend a lot of my time explaining that neutrality is complex and evolving, and it has been complex and evolving since ancient times. Furthermore, I want to argue, and I do argue, that without neutrality we can't really understand the nature and scope of international relations, either today or in the past. Now I stumbled upon neutrality when I was a PhD student at the University of Canterbury. I wanted to do something on the Netherlands and war, preferably the Second World War, because of course that's the only war that has any relevance today. And my brilliant supervisor, Vincent Orange, suggested that before I pursue this path, I might write him an essay, 5,000-word essay, out of the blue, it gave me three weeks, on what the history of the Netherlands and the First World War looked like, because according to him you can't understand the Second World War without understanding the First. So I did this and I realised there was virtually nothing written on the subject and certainly nothing, virtually nothing in English. For unlike much of the rest of the world, the Dutch managed to remain neutral, the Dutch state retained its neutrality throughout the war. And the convergence of its neutrality and the fact that the topic was so little studied struck me as important. So my PhD, which was entitled Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, the Netherlands' neutrality in the military in the Great War, was subsequently published as a book called The Art of Staying Neutral, by Amsterdam University Press in 2006. It made, as one reviewer put it, a major contribution to the history of the Great War because it showed how active the Dutch state and its armed forces had to be to police, monitor and manage their neutrality. Neutrality politics involved not only maintaining good economic and diplomatic relations with the belligerents, but also monitoring and mobilising the Dutch population to persuade them that upholding the neutrality and the territorial integrity of the state were key ideas and were really quite important. Now one of my key arguments was that by 1918, by the end of the war, the Netherlands was in a precarious position and that it suffered many of the same consequences and social impacts of war as the belligerents did. In other words, what I'm trying to say is not only that the war impacted a neutral state, but also that the question, the answer to the question, what does neutrality mean or what did it mean in 1918 was something quite different from what it was in 1914, was not a constant idea. So the PhD also brought up another fascinating question, what did neutrality mean before 1914? Now I intended that to be a study of no neutral countries, so all of them small, all of them weak, like the Netherlands, like Sweden, like Switzerland, like Belgium. And my research eventually appeared as a book with the title An Age of Neutral's Great Power Politics, 1815 to 1914. It really showed that neutrality was not a policy for the small and weak. In fact, it was a policy for all states throughout the century. Based on archival materials in Britain, in the Netherlands and in Belgium, as well as a host of contemporary publications and legal publications, political publications, newspaper publications from around Europe, the book offers a new history of the 19th century and argues that neutrality underpinned the diplomacy of the era, the economics of industrializing empires. It formed the basis of the strength of the British Empire and its existence helps to explain why the 19th century was, as Hansje Morgenthau put it, a golden age of international law. Now, it's a big book covering a century of complex diplomatic, international, economic, imperial, legal and cultural developments, ranging from the neutralization of the small territory of Morsnit, which housed 300 people in a zinc mine, to the legal president set during the American Civil War from the conduct of the Crimean War to the origins of the First World War, to the idealization of neutrality as a national and internationalist ideal. This research in turn helped me to, inspired me to secure another milestone ground, but most of all to focus on a new research project which I'm working on right now, which is another big book, a global history of the two Hague peace conferences of 1899 and 1907. What I really wish to say is that it would seem that neutrality is not so irrelevant after all. Thank you.