Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (5 page)

The truth is that, during the process of settlement in eastern and central Europe, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, and during the intensive phase of urbanization which took place from the early eighteenth Century onwards, about one-quarter of the area had been occupied by mixed races (including over ten million Jews) whose allegiance had hitherto been religious and dynastic rather than national. The monarchies were the only unifying principle of these multi-racial societies, the sole guarantee (albeit often a slender one) that all would be equal before the law. Once that principle was removed, what could be substituted for it? The only one available was nationalism, and its fashionable by-product irredentism, a term derived from the Italian
Risorgimento
and signifying the union of an entire ethnic group under one state. To this was now being added a new cant phrase, ‘self-determination’, by which was understood the adjustment of frontiers by plebiscite according to ethnic preferences.

The two principal western Allies, Britain and France, had originally no desire or design to promote a peace based on nationality. Quite the contrary. Both ran multiracial, polyglot overseas empires. Britain in addition had an irredentist problem of her own in Ireland. In 1918 both were led by former progressives, Lloyd George and
Clemenceau, who under the agony of war had learned Realpolitik and a grudging respect for the old notions of ‘balance’, ‘compensation’ and so forth. When, during the peace talks, the young British diplomat Harold Nicolson urged that it was logicai for Britain to grant self-determination to the Greeks in Cyprus, he was rebuked by Sir Eyre Crowe, head of the Foreign Office: ‘Nonsense, my dear Nicolson…. Would you apply self-determination to India, Egypt, Malta and Gibraltar? If you are
not
prepared to go as far as this, then you have not [sic] right to claim that you are logicai. If you
are
prepared to go as far as this, then you had better return at once to London.’
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(He might have added that Cyprus had a large Turkish minority; and for that reason it has still not achieved self-determination in the 1980s.) Lloyd George would have been happy to strive to keep the Austro—Hungarian empire together as late as 1917 or even the beginning of 1918, in return for a separate peace. As for Clemenceau, his primary object was French security, and for this he wanted back not merely Alsace-Lorraine (most of whose people spoke German) but the Saar too, with the Rhineland hacked out of Germany as a French-oriented puppet state.

Moreover, during the war Britain, France and Russia had signed a series of secret treaties among themselves and to induce other powers to join them which ran directly contrary to nationalist principles. The French secured Russian approval for their idea of a French-dominated Rhineland, in return for giving Russia a free hand to oppress Poland, in a treaty signed on 11 March 1917.
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By the Sykes—Picot Agreement of 1916, Britain and France agreed to strip Turkey of its Arab provinces and divide them between themselves. Italy sold itself to the highest bidder: by the Secret Treaty of London of 26 April 1915 she was to receive sovereignty over millions of German-speaking Tyroleans, and of Serbs and Croats in Dalmatia. A treaty with Romania signed on 17 August 1916 gave her the whole of Transylvania and most of the Banat of Temesvar and the Bukovina, most of whose inhabitants did not speak Romanian. Another secret treaty signed on 16 February 1917 awarded Japan the Chinese province of Shantung, hitherto in Germany’s commercial sphere.
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However, with the collapse of the Tsarist regime and the refusal of the Habsburgs to make a separate peace, Britain and France began to encourage nationalism and make self-determination a ‘war aim’. On 4 June 1917 Kerensky’s provisional government in Russia recognized an independent Poland; France began to raise an army of Poles and on 3 June 1918 proclaimed the creation of a powerful Polish state a primary objective.
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Meanwhile in Britain, the Slavophile lobby headed by R.W.Seton-Watson and his journal,
The
New Europe
, was successfully urging the break-up of Austria–Hungary and the creation of new ethnic states.
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Undertakings and promises were given to many Slav and Balkan politicians-in-exile in return for resistance to ‘Germanic imperialism’. In the Middle East, the Arabophile Colonel T.E.Lawrence was authorized to promise independent kingdoms to the Emirs Feisal and Hussein as rewards for fighting the Turks. In 1917 the so-called ‘Balfour Declaration’ promised the Jews a national home in Palestine to encourage them to desert the Central Powers. Many of these promises were mutually incompatible, besides contradicting the secret treaties still in force. In effect, during the last two desperate years of fighting, the British and French recklessly issued deeds of property which in sum amounted to more than the territory they had to dispose of, and all of which could not conceivably be honoured at the peace, even assuming it was a harsh one. Some of these post-dated cheques bounced noisily.

To complicate matters, Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized control of Russia on 25 October 1917 and at once possessed themselves of the Tsarist diplomatic archives. They turned copies of the secret treaties over to western correspondents, and on 12 December the
Manchester Guardian
began publishing them. This was accompanied by vigorous Bolshevik propaganda designed to encourage Communist revolutions throughout Europe by promising self-determination to all peoples.

Lenin’s moves had in turn a profound effect on the American President. Woodrow Wilson has been held up to ridicule for more than half a Century on the grounds that his ignorant pursuit of impossible ideals made a sensible peace impossible. This is no more than a half-truth. Wilson was a don, a political scientist, an ex-President of Princeton University. He knew he was ignorant of foreign affairs. Just before his Inauguration in 1913 he told friends, ‘It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.’
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The Democrats had been out of office for fifty-three years and Wilson regarded us diplomats as Republicans. When the war broke out he insisted Americans be ‘neutral in fact as well as name’. He got himself re-elected in 1916 on the slogan ‘He kept us out of war’. He did not want to break up the old Europe system either: he advocated ‘peace without victory’.

By early 1917 he had come to the conclusion that America would have a bigger influence on the settlement as a belligerent than as a neutral, and he did draw a narrow legal and moral distinction between Britain and Germany: the use of U-boats by Germany violated ‘human rights’, whereas British blockade-controls violated only ‘property rights’, a lesser offence.
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Once in the war he waged it vigorously but he did not regard America as an ordinary combatant.
It had entered the war, he said in his April 1917 message to Congress, ‘to vindicate the principles of peace and justice’ and to set up ‘a concert of peace and action as will henceforth ensure the observance of these principles’. Anxious to be well-prepared for the peacemaking in September 1917 he created, under his aide Colonel Edward House and Dr S.E.Mezes, an organization of 150 academic experts which was known as ‘the Inquiry’ and housed in the American Geographical Society building in New York.
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As a result, the American delegation was throughout the peace process by far the best-informed and documented, indeed on many points often the sole source of accurate information. ‘Had the Treaty of Peace been drafted solely by the American experts,’ Harold Nicolson wrote, ‘it would have been one of the wisest as well as the most scientific documents ever devised.’
⁶⁵

However, the Inquiry was based on the assumption that the peace would be a negotiated compromise, and that the best way to make it durable would be to ensure that it conformed to natural justice and so was acceptable to the peoples involved. The approach was empiricai, not ideological. In particular, Wilson at this stage was not keen on the League of Nations, a British idea first put forward on 20 March 1917. He thought it would raise difficulties with Congress. But the Bolshevik publication of the secret treaties, which placed America’s allies in the worst possible light as old-fashioned predators, threw Wilson into consternation. Lenin’s call for general self-determination also helped to force Wilson’s hand, for he felt that America, as the custodian of democratic freedom, could not be outbid by a revolutionary regime which had seized power illegally. Hence he hurriedly composed and on 8 January 1918 publicly delivered the famous ‘Fourteen Points’. The first repudiated secret treaties. The last provided for a League. Most of the rest were specific guarantees that, while conquests must be surrendered, the vanquished would not be punished by losing populations, nationality to be the determining factor. On 11 February Wilson added his ‘Four Principles’, which rammed the last point home, and on 27 September he provided the coping-stone of the ‘Five Particulars’, the first of which promised justice to friends and enemies alike.
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The corpus of twenty-three assertions was produced by Wilson independently of Britain and France.

We come now to the heart of the misunderstanding which destroyed any real chance of the peace settlement succeeding, and so prepared a second global conflict. By September 1918 it was evident that Germany, having won the war in the East, was in the process of losing it in the West. But the German army, nine million strong, was still intact and conducting an orderly retreat from its French and
Belgian conquests. Two days after Wilson issued his ‘Five Particulars’, the all-powerful General Ludendorff astounded members of his government by telling them ‘the condition of the army demands an immediate armistice in order to avoid a catastrophe’. A popular government should be formed to get in touch with Wilson.
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Ludendorff’s motive was obviously to thrust upon the democratic parties the odium of surrendering Germany’s territorial gains. But he also clearly considered Wilson’s twenty-three pronouncements collectively as a guarantee that Germany would not be dismembered or punished but would retain its integrity and power substantially intact. In the circumstances this was as much as she could reasonably have hoped for; indeed more, for the second of the 14 Points, on freedom of the seas, implied the lifting of the British blockade. The civil authorities took the same view, and on 4 October the Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, opened negotiations for an armistice with Wilson on the basis of his statements. The Austrians, on an even more optimistic assumption, followed three days later.
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Wilson, who now had an army of four million and who was universally believed to be all-powerful, with Britain and France firmly in his financial and economic grip, responded favourably. Following exchanges of notes, on 5 November he offered the Germans an armistice on the basis of the 14 Points, subject only to two Allied qualifications: the freedom of the seas (where Britain reserved her rights of interpretation) and compensation for war damage. It was on this understanding that the Germans agreed to lay down their arms.

What the Germans and the Austrians did not know was that, on 29 October, Colonel House, Wilson’s special envoy and US representative on the Allied Supreme War Council, had held a long secret meeting with Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The French and British leaders voiced all their doubts and reservations about the Wilsonian pronouncements, and had them accepted by House who drew them up in the form of a ‘Commentary’, subsequently cabled to Wilson in Washington. The ‘Commentary’, which was never communicated to the Germans and Austrians, effectively removed all the advantages of Wilson’s points, so far as the Central Powers were concerned. Indeed it adumbrated all the features of the subsequent Versailles Treaty to which they took the strongest objection, including the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, the loss of Germany’s colonies, the break-up of Prussia by a Polish corridor, and reparations.
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What is still more notable, it not only based itself upon the premise of German ‘war guilt’ (which was, arguably, implicit in Wilson’s twenty-three points), but revolved around the principle of ‘rewards’ for the victors and ‘punishments’ for the vanquished, which Wilson
had specifically repudiated. It is true that during the October negotiations Wilson, who had never actually had to deal with the Germans before, was becoming more hostile to them in consequence. He was, in particular, incensed by the torpedoing of the Irish civilian ferry
Leinster
, with the loss of 450 lives, including many women and children, on 12 October, more than a week after the Germans had asked him for an armistice. All the same, it is strange that he accepted the Commentary, and quite astounding that he gave no hint of it to the Germans. They, for their part, were incompetent in not asking for clarification of some of the points, for Wilson’s style, as the British Foreign Secretary, A.J.Balfour, told the cabinet ‘is very inaccurate. He is a first-rate rhetorician and a very bad draftsman.’
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But the prime responsibility for this fatal failure in communication was Wilson’s. And it was not an error on the side of idealism.

The second blunder, which compounded the first and turned it into a catastrophe, was one of organization. The peace conference was not given a deliberate structure. It just happened, acquiring a shape and momentum of its own, and developing an increasingly anti-German pattern in the process, both in substance and, equally important, in form. At the beginning, everyone had vaguely assumed that preliminary terms would be drawn up by the Allies among themselves, after which the Germans and their partners would appear and the actual peace-treaty be negotiated. That is what had happened at the Congress of Vienna. A conference programme on these lines was actually drawn up by the logical French, and handed to Wilson by the French ambassador in Washington as early as 29 November 1918. This document had the further merit of stipulating the immediate cancellation of all the secret treaties. But its wording irritated Wilson and nothing more was heard of it. So the conference met without an agreed programme of procedure and never acquired one.
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The
modus operandi
was made still more ragged by Wilson’s own determination to cross the Atlantic and participate in it. This meant that the supposedly ‘most powerful man in the world’ could no longer be held in reserve, as a
deus ex machina
, to pronounce from on high whenever the Allies were deadlocked. By coming to Paris he became just a prime minister like the rest, and in fact lost as many arguments as he won. But this was partly because, as the negotiations got under way, Wilson’s interest shifted decisively from his own twenty-three points, and the actual terms of the treaty, to concentrate almost exclusively on the League and its Covenant. To him the proposed new world organization, about which he had hitherto been sceptical, became the whole object of the conference. Its operations would redeem any failings in the treaty itself. This had two dire consequences. First, the French were able to get agreed
much harsher terms, including a ‘big’ Poland which cut Prussia in two and stripped Germany of its Silesian industrial belt, a fifteen-year Allied occupation of the Rhineland, and enormous indemnities. Second, the idea of a preliminary set of terms was dropped. Wilson was determined to insert the League Covenant into the preliminary document. His Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, advised him that even such a putative agreement legally constituted a treaty and therefore required Congressional ratification. Fearing trouble in the Senate, Wilson then decided to go straight for a final treaty.
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Of course there were other factors. Marshai Foch, the French generalissimo, feared that the announcement of agreed preliminary terms would accelerate the demobilization of France’s allies, and so strengthen Germany’s hand in the final stage. And agreement even between the Allies was proving so difficult on so many points that all dreaded the introduction of new and hostile negotiating parties, whose activities would unravel anything so far achieved. So the idea of preliminary terms was dropped.
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