Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

258 mark baker

Leopold Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917,” Slavic

Review, (part 1) 23/4 (1964): 618–642; and (part 2) 24/1 (1965): 1–22. The landmark

studies that initiated research into the social history of the Russian revolution.

Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Conceives of the revolution as part of

a longer period of industrialized violence and modern political practices.

Jürgen Kocka, Facing Total War: German Society 1914–1918, Barbara Weinberger, trans.

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). A path-breaking investigation of the

war’s social impact.

Stephen C. MacDonald, A German Revolution: Local Change and Continuity in Prussia,

1918–1920 (New York: Garland, 1991). A very useful local study of the revolution.

Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “The German Revolution 1918–1920: Political Revolution and Social

Protest Movement,” Jane Williams, trans., in Social Change and Political Development in

Weimar Germany, R. Bessel and E. J. Feuchtwanger, eds (London: Croom Helm, 1981),

pp. 21–54. An excellent summary of the historiography.

Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (New York: St Martin’s

Press, 2001). The most thoughtful and well-researched book in English on the Habsburgs’

last 150 years.

Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919:

Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power, Rita and Robert Kimber, trans. (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). A comprehensive study of Wilson and his

impact on the German revolution.

Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815–1918, 2nd edn (London:

Longman, 2001). A controversial but stimulating set of interpretive essays on the Habsburgs’

ﬁnal years.

Ronald G. Suny, “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its

Critics,” Russian Review 53 (1994): 165–82; idem, “Toward a Social History of the October

Revolution,” American Historical Review 88 (1983): 31–52. Two thorough discussions of

the social, revisionist work on the Russian revolution.

Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

The best concise synthesis of western historians’ work on the revolution.

Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’

Revolt (March–April 1917) (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). A magisterial

study of the army’s collapse and its role in the revolution.

Part IV

The Aftermath of War

Chapter Seventeen

Peacemaking after World War I

Alan Sharp

The 1919 Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I acknowledged the end

of four great multinational empires and the emergence of nine new states, based

theoretically on national self-determination. Its mission was to encourage liberal and

democratic values where previously autocracy had prevailed. It set itself the goal of

applying higher moral standards than any previous peace conference in its decision

making. Once billed as the ﬁrst of the twentieth-century summit meetings,

the Paris

conference seems now to be rather the last of a kind – more the rearguard of the

tradition of Vienna and Berlin than the vanguard of twentieth-century peacemaking.

Neither World War II nor the Cold War was followed by such a far-reaching attempt,

in a structured meeting in one location, to reorder the affairs of a globe emerging

from conﬂict.

Indeed, it could be argued that, despite the greater magnitude, scope, and reach

of World War II, the task facing the peacemakers in 1919 was more formidable than

that in 1945. Then the victorious Anglo-American, French, and Soviet forces occu-

pied and administered the defeated states. In 1919 there had been an unprecedented

collapse of long-established rule across most of central and eastern Europe and into

the near east. At no time before or since have four major empires more or less simul-

taneously experienced revolution, the disintegration of governmental systems, and

the destruction of their hold over both their metropolitan and imperial domains.

While Germany did not experience revolution on the scale of Russia, nor imperial

implosion on the scale of Austria-Hungary, and the ending of the Ottoman Empire

seemed less immediately pressing than events nearer the heart of Europe, the sweep-

ing away of authorities that had controlled territories for centuries did set the peace-

makers in 1919 a daunting challenge, requiring executive action on a wide scale.

Given these responsibilities, and the personnel involved, Margaret MacMillan’s assess-

ment is that “In 1919 Paris was the capital of the world . . . the world’s govern-

ment,” yet as Sir Henry Wilson, the British chief of the imperial general staff

told his prime minister, David Lloyd George, “The root of evil is that the Paris writ

does not run.”

The conference might make decisions but often had no means of

enforcing them in areas where the allies had neither troops nor reliable local agents.

262 alan sharp

This unenviable position of having responsibility without power meant that the

peacemakers have often been blamed for both contemporary and subsequent events

over which they had, in reality, little control.

Attitudes to the Settlement

The conference and its results were not well received by commentators in the ﬁrst

ﬁfty years after it met. Since the 1970s there has been some softening of attitudes

among scholars using the newly available archival material to reveal more of the

complexities of policies and attitudes of peacemakers facing a task of bewildering

proportions. As President Woodrow Wilson predicted, crossing the Atlantic en route

to the conference in December 1918, many, buoyed by a belief in his “program for

the peace of the world,” had unrealizable expectations of a peace that would satisfy

all. These hopes were shared as much by those within governments as by less

informed observers outside them. Their disappointment, eloquently expressed by

conference participants like Stephen Bonsal, James Headlam-Morley, John Maynard

Keynes, and Harold Nicolson, followed by the outbreak of a new major European

conﬂict which many blamed on the inadequacies of the peace settlement, left the

peacemakers with few friends. Only more recently – and still not yet widely dissemi-

nated in textbooks or classrooms, perhaps because it has mainly appeared in special-

ized monographs or learned journals – has there emerged an assessment that tries to

balance the shortcomings of some of the solutions advanced by the statesmen in Paris

against the immensity and intractability of the problems they faced.

This more generous interpretation – that they did the best they could in the cir-

cumstances – has made little impression on the more negative popular assessment

that the peacemakers not only failed to solve the problems with which they were

faced but also sowed the seeds of future European and world disaster. Most recent

scholarly approaches to the Paris conference stress its position in a wider process of

shifting European and world power balances before, during, and after World War I,

arguing it is neither fair nor sensible to take the situation in 1919 as a completely

fresh start without past baggage or encumbrances. In addition, there is the role of

the decision makers who replaced the peacemakers in the 1920s and 1930s and whose

implementation, neglect, or abandonment of the settlement must play a crucial part

in any explanation of 1939. Nonetheless it is clear that MacMillan’s claim that the

Versailles settlement was not exclusively, or even mainly, to blame for the outbreak

of a second major European conﬂict struck some reviewers as a new, even revolution-

ary, interpretation. This is perhaps unsurprising when respected historians like Jay

Winter continue to suggest, in a book aimed at the wider interested public, that

The Peace Conference which ended the Great War was more about punishment than

about peace. Perhaps inevitably, anger and retribution followed four years of bloodshed,

ensuring the instability and ultimate collapse of the accords signed in the Hall of Mirrors

at Versailles on 28 June 1919. The road to World War II started here.

Winter’s claim has plausibility, not least because the hopes of those who believed

that the horrors of World War I were suffered in order to end war were cruelly dashed

in 1939 (if not before). Nonetheless it is wrong, even if parts of it are true. There

peacemaking after world war i 263

can be no doubt that the peoples of the victorious states were angry and expected

Germany to pay, both literally and metaphorically, for the war. The peacemakers were

aware of these expectations and knew that, as democratic leaders, they must attempt

to satisfy their electoral masters. The election in Britain in December 1918 provided

solid evidence of desire for revenge. Georges Clemenceau, the French premier, knew

that he would have to satisfy the unforgiving constituency in France championed by

the formidable Raymond Poincaré, the president of the French Republic, and his

major ally, Ferdinand Foch, the commander-in-chief of the Allied armies, both of

whom were fretting at their lack of inﬂuence and power in the peace discussions.

Throughout the conference Clemenceau and Lloyd George reminded Woodrow

Wilson that their positions depended upon the democratic support of their parlia-

ments and peoples and that there were certain limits beyond which they dare not go.

This was not the only reason for their attitudes, and the Calvinistic beliefs of Lloyd

George and Wilson should not be underestimated. While both might wish to be fair

and just to Germany, justice might require retribution. “It was not vengeance, but

justice,” Lloyd George suggested to his cabinet in October 1918, “. . . whether we

ought not to consider lashing her [Germany] as she had lashed France.”

The dele-

gates in Paris wanted to make a lasting peace but knew they could not create a perfect

world. The conference was a staging post on the road to the outbreak of another

major European war in 1939, but it was not the point at which that road began.

The Longer View

The conference gathered in 1919 because a major war had begun in 1914. Some of

the leaders of the great powers believed that their problems required the breaking of

the existing international system and its remaking in a form more satisfactory to them.

They resorted to the highly risky and unpredictable stratagem of war. That war

“solved” only a handful of the issues at dispute. If it was a colonial contest between

Britain and France on the one hand and Germany on the other, then there was a

clear outcome. Germany’s colonies, unprotected by its expensive battle ﬂeet, were

(with the notable exception of German east Africa) rapidly overrun by British,

Dominion, or allied forces. The short-lived German overseas empire was gone.

Similarly, Anglo-German naval rivalry seemed settled when the Royal Navy and other

allied ships escorted the German High Seas ﬂeet into internment in Scapa Flow.

Despite the prewar race to build them, it had not been these massive battleships that

had constituted the near-fatal threat to Britain’s control of the seas, but Germany’s

submarines.

Little else had been resolved. Now, in addition to the problems of a changing

European power balance and a wider world international structure that had provided

the background to the outbreak of the war, there were complicated interwoven ques-

tions that the war itself had either created or exacerbated. States that had failed the

test of war had been overthrown, had collapsed, or had been severely weakened.

What should be put in their place? The experience of 1914 suggested that an inter-

national system, which had helped to prevent a general war involving all the major

European powers at once since 1815, might require radical alteration. How might

this be accomplished? The war had been expensive, both in terms of men and money.

Some 8–10 million young men had been killed in the armed forces of the belligerents,

264 alan sharp

millions more people died as collateral damage, victims of the war itself and the

ensuing smaller interstate and intrastate wars that persisted elsewhere after the armi-

stice in western Europe. Some were simply not conceived because of wartime separa-

tions; others died of famine and disease. A virulent inﬂuenza epidemic took an

estimated further 20–30 million lives of victims frequently exhausted by the strain of

war. The British treasury estimated that it had cost the allies £24 billion (in 1914

gold values) to win the war. The damage caused by industrialized warfare on a massive

scale required repair – on the western front alone a hasty postwar survey suggested

this might cost between £3–5 billion in contemporary values. The lost lives could

not be retrieved but who should meet these massive bills and who would ease the

plight of crippled soldiers, widows, and dependants?

Organizing Peace?

What struck almost all contemporary observers of the conference was a lack of orga-

nization verging on the chaotic. This was partly because the end of the war arrived

much sooner than the victors expected and their thoughts were only beginning to

turn to peace planning. They did agree on Paris as the location and that English and

French would enjoy equal status in the negotiations – these decisions foreshadowed

many other compromises that would not be palatable to all the parties concerned.

There was, however, no agreed agenda, no shared set of priorities, and no clear plan

of action. No one quite knew how peace was to be made – would it begin with an

inter-Allied meeting to establish Allied demands and priorities? Would there then be,

as there had been at the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, a preliminary

treaty between the major belligerents that would establish the boundaries of the

defeated powers, the military, territorial, and political consequences of defeat, and

the contribution payable to the victors? Would a more general gathering follow

involving prominent neutral states, again as in 1814–15, which would deal with the

wider consequences of a long war and the reordering of the international system?

Contemporary diplomatic shorthand distinguished between the two, terming the ﬁrst

a peace conference and the second a peace congress.

These issues had not been resolved when Poincaré opened the ofﬁcial proceedings,

rather strangely, on a Saturday – January 18, 1919. This was not an accident; it was

the 48th anniversary of Bismarck’s humiliating proclamation of the German Empire

in the Hall of Mirrors in Louis XIV’s palace of Versailles in 1871, after French defeat

in the Franco-Prussian war. The French saved Versailles for later, opening the confer-

ence in the Salle de l’Horloge in their foreign ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, but they

did not miss the symbolic date. Nor did Clemenceau neglect to make his own state-

ment – the British diplomat Esmé Howard noted in his diary – “I hear that when

the Delegates were putting on their hats to leave, Wilson, who saw Clemenceau

putting on an old soft felt, said, ‘I was told I must wear a tall hat for this occasion.’

‘So was I,’ retorted C., cramming his soft hat over his eyes.”

Harold Nicolson, another British diplomat participating at the conference,

explained in Peacemaking 1919 – his half-diary, half-historical reﬂection – that the

uncertainties about what would happen to their conclusions had a profound effect

on the demands presented by the various commissions established by the leading

powers to advise them on boundaries and other technical matters.

peacemaking after world war i 265

Many paragraphs of the Treaty, and especially in the economic sections, were in fact

inserted as “maximum statements” such as would provide some area of concession to

Germany at the eventual Congress. This Congress never materialized . . . Had it been

known from the outset that no negotiations would ever take place with the enemy, it is

certain that many of the less reasonable clauses of the Treaty would never have been

inserted.

The French proposed an agenda for the conference in November 1918, but Wilson

rejected it. Its priorities and perspectives smacked too much of the “old diplomacy”

and it paid scant respect to Wilson’s ideas, suggesting that they lacked sufﬁcient pre-

cision to form the basis of a settlement. This not necessarily incorrect judgment was

both tactless and tardy because Lloyd George and Clemenceau had already grumpily

accepted, after Germany approached Wilson to arrange an armistice in October, that

the president’s 1918 speeches would form the basis of the eventual peace settlement.

The note by Robert Lansing, the American secretary of state, sent on November 5,

1918, was a pre-armistice contract with Germany. Wilson’s uplifting and inspiring

but often ill-deﬁned and contradictory statements were accepted as the guiding

principles and practical foundations for the forthcoming settlement. A broad spec-

trum of opinion and peoples now expected Wilson to deliver both the tone and

substance of his program.

Peace Conference Structures

Wilson had promised “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at.” His speeches

implied that great and small powers should have a role to play in these transparent

negotiations. The conference met instead behind closed doors and, although 32 states

attended, it was dominated by the great powers, among which some were clearly

greater than others. Initially, the main decision-making forum of the Paris gathering

was the Council of Ten consisting of the prime ministers of France, Great Britain,

and Italy, the American president, their respective ministers of foreign affairs, and

two Japanese delegates. The smaller powers were allowed only glimpses of the process

when they appeared as petitioners to the various commissions set up to advise the

Ten, or, like the press, attended the infrequent (eight in all) plenary sessions of the

conference. Even then their voices were rarely heard: “Are there any objections?”

asked Clemenceau, the peremptory president of the conference. “No. Adopted!”

The Council of Ten proved to be unwieldy, there were too many people milling

about, and the Japanese had only a very limited interest in European affairs, while the

Italians had their own focused agenda. It had taken very few decisions by the time it

broke into two unequal parts in mid-March 1919 – Germany’s colonies were forfeit

and the ﬁrst draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations was agreed. Yet it had

enormous responsibilities that stretched beyond the already formidable task of making

peace with Germany, not to mention the other defeated powers. In addition to dealing

with the technicalities of armistice renewal and the establishment of commissions on

territorial and military matters, it was an emergency European government, grappling

with famine relief and the dangers of the spread of revolution. It met 72 times between

January and March, and created 58 subcommittees, so it did not lack diligence, but it

found itself caught in a log-jam of interlocking and unresolved problems. These

266 alan sharp

included: the German frontiers in the east and west; ﬁnancial compensation from

Germany – its extent and basis; Polish claims to Danzig and a corridor to the sea;

Italian demands for Fiume; growing Anglo-French tensions in the middle east; and an

increasingly resentful Japan, smarting at the insult of the refusal of Wilson’s League

commission to agree to a clause embodying racial equality.

The delegates knew they had to reach decisions quickly. The premiers could ill-

afford to be absent from their national capitals as their states struggled to dismantle

the mechanisms created to ﬁght a total war. The conference also feared Bolshevism

would ﬁll the vacuum of power in eastern and central Europe unless it made rapid

decisions. Communist regimes in Munich and Hungary increased this concern. As

Lansing noted on April 4, “It is time to stop ﬁddling while the world is on ﬁre, while

violence and bestiality consume society. Everyone is clamoring for peace, for an

immediate peace.”

The Ten could not make progress; a new, more incisive body was

needed.

The Council of Four – Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson, and Vittorio Orlando,

the Italian premier – evolved during March as the crucial decision-making body of

the German settlement. It began with meetings in early March between Lloyd

George, Clemenceau, and Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s most trusted advisor.

After his mid-conference trip to the United States, Wilson replaced House. Orlando

joined them on March 24. Professor Paul Mantoux acted as interpreter and, from

early April, Sir Maurice Hankey, the secretary to the British cabinet, provided much-

needed administrative support, recording their proceedings and decisions. Their

foreign ministers, plus the Japanese delegate, became the second-string Council of

Five, which made most of the less controversial territorial decisions. But it was the

Four who had to resolve the crisis of the conference.

They did so, still working without a ﬁrm agenda, though it had by then become

clear that there would be no real negotiations with the Germans. Mindful of the

difﬁculties they had in reaching even tentative and grudging agreements between

themselves on a number of questions, and aware of the havoc in the victorious alli-

ance wrought by Talleyrand, the French delegate in Vienna in 1815, the current

winners tacitly agreed to dictate a peace to Germany. An offer of dubious sincerity

by Lloyd George and Wilson to guarantee the full support of Britain and the United

States if Germany again attacked France encouraged Clemenceau to be more ﬂexible

on the fate of the Rhineland. Gradually the log-jam was released, with agreements

on the fate of the Saar, Danzig, the Polish Corridor, and a decision to postpone a

decision on the extent of Germany’s liability to pay compensation for the damage

caused by the war. They decided the mandatories for the former German colonies

and they made some progress about the future of former Ottoman territory in the

near and middle east. The Four became Three when Orlando stormed from the

conference on April 21, unable to persuade Wilson that the Adriatic port of Fiume

should become part of Italy. This tactic was singularly unsuccessful and, when a

frustrated Orlando returned “ﬁuming” to the conference on May 7, he discovered

that Italy (probably very fortunately) had also missed out in the near east, where the

Greeks had been authorized to land troops at Smyrna (Izmir). The main beneﬁciaries

of the Italian walk-out were the Japanese because Wilson dare not risk a second major

ally quitting the conference, and thus conceded their claims to the former German

concessions in China, despite deploring them.

peacemaking after world war i 267

On May 7 the allies handed the Germans their draft terms. To many, particularly

in the British delegation, the effect of the proposed treaty was greater than the sum

of its parts. It incorporated undiminished all the demands that the commissions had

expected to be the subject of bargaining. The Germans were now permitted to make

written representations about the terms, but such few alterations that were made

before the ﬁnal signature were the result of British rather than German intervention.

The unease in the British camp encouraged Lloyd George to seek a mandate for

treaty revision from his cabinet, brought to Paris for the meeting. Their major con-

cerns were reparations, the Rhineland occupation, Germany’s exclusion from the

League, and the need for a plebiscite in Upper Silesia rather than its automatic transfer

from Germany to Poland. The Silesian plebiscite was Lloyd George’s only success

(one he may have come to regret). The German government prevaricated, then

resigned, but the new government had no choice – sign the treaty or face invasion.

It capitulated, and the signing ceremony in Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles on June

28 completed the symbolic revenge for 1871.

By this time Orlando had left ofﬁce, but even when present he was often the

peripheral ﬁgure of the Four. It was Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau that

became the principal targets of The Economic Consequences of the Peace. This magniﬁ-

cent polemic was penned by John Maynard Keynes, then a British treasury advisor

at the conference. His vitriolic attack on the conference and all its works has had a

huge impact on public and scholarly perceptions of the peacemakers since its publica-

tion in late 1919.

Part of its appeal was that it offered a manageable explanation of

the enormous complexities of the postwar world by reducing them to the decisions

of three men, caricatured as the wily Welsh wizard, the cynical defender of France,

and the failed American philosopher-king. Any treatment of the conference faces such

an organizational dilemma because, if the different areas of peacemaking – the terri-

torial settlements, the League, reparations and so on – are treated as discrete entities,

with a chronological and analytical explanation of how the ﬁnal decision evolved in

each case, one loses sight of the interconnected, persistent, and debilitating effect of

their totality. An alternative approach might show the peacemakers moving from issue

to issue, hour by hour, day by day, but would risk overwhelming the reader with the

same confusion and exhaustion that they experienced.

An Overview

The remainder of this chapter will offer a brief overview and then consider three key

aspects of the settlement: national self-determination, the League, and reparations.

Chronologically, the period of peacemaking might be divided into four: from October

1918 to January 1919; January to March 1919; March to June 1919; and July 1919

to July 1923. The ﬁrst period was dominated by wartime bodies and had to cope

with the end of the war, the armistice, and preliminary peace planning. The ﬁrst half

of 1919 was mainly concerned with drawing up the peace treaty with Germany. The

ﬁrst quarter was the era of the Council of Ten, the second that of the Council of

Four. The ﬁnal four years cover the period between the signatures of the treaties of

Versailles and Lausanne. Versailles on June 28, 1919, was followed by Saint Germain

with Austria on August 20 and Neuilly with Bulgaria on November 27. The Paris

conference wound down to be replaced by a rather confused period of conﬂicting