CHAPTER THREE
The retreat of the German armies through France and Belgium in November 1918 can only be described as a scorched-earth policy. The devastation was deliberate and systematic. Towns, villages, and farmsteads — already battered by four years of war — were looted and razed mercilessly, by order of the High Command. Industrial plants were removed to Germany, and factories that could not be transferred were blown up. Railway tracks were torn up, and the coalmines of north-western France were flooded. Returning POWs and people pressed to work in mines and factories painted a stark picture of the horrors.
Even as the German government sought an urgent armistice from president Wilson, the British mail-boat Leicester was sunk by a torpedo, killing 400 civilians. Not surprisingly, the term ‘the Huns’ once more abounded in the Allied media. British foreign minister Arthur Balfour, not known for his passionate speeches, summed up the prevailing spirit of the time in the House of Commons when he commented that the Germans ‘were brutes when they began the war, and, as far we can judge, brutes they remain’.1This was not to assist Germany’s cause as the peace negotiations were drawing near.
The Allies started proceedings in Paris, which, after brief consultation, had been chosen as the site for the negotiations that would shape the post-war world. President Wilson took only three weeks to arrange his departure for Europe, and on 4 December sailed on the George Washington for the French port of Brest. He was accompanied by what one historian described as ‘as high-minded a company as can ever have crossed the Atlantic since the voyage of the Mayflower’.2 They were mainly young and idealistic scholars. The delegation in the end would number 1,300 civilian and military members — probably the largest national contingent ever to attend an international conference.3 During the journey, they were privileged to hear lectures from the president about his plans for the reconstruction of a better world.
He reiterated the chief ideas he had stated in his ‘Fourteen Points’, his ‘Four Principles’, his ‘Four Ends’, and his ‘Five Particulars’, and he demanded that the old system of peoples’ oppression be dismantled. Secret alliances and warfare must be discontinued. Instead, forward-looking men and women, modern nations, and enlightened communities would aim for higher principles. The United States had entered the war because gross violations of rights had occurred; these had to be corrected, and steps had to be taken to prevent their recurrence. As he had stated in introducing the Fourteen Points, the peace should be so constructed ‘that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by other peoples of the world, as against force and selfish aggression’.4
The principle of national self-determination was the one point in the president’s statements that was to most influence the peacemaking process and, in its wake, Europe’s and the world’s history.
Nationalism can be described as a state of mind in which the supreme loyalty of the individual is felt to be due to the nation state. It was a relatively new concept in Europe. The idea of the French nation, the German nation, or the Italian nation was less than a hundred years old. Previously, the loyalty of subjects was to other forms of authority — to dynasties (the emperor, king, or duke), or to the Church, or to local oligarchies. Thus the term ‘German’ implied an ethnic or, at best, a cultural reference. A ‘German’ was a person living in an area bordered by the North and Baltic Seas and the Alps, who spoke one of several dialects. There were no political connotations. Larger states, such as the Austrian and Russian empires, or the kingdoms of France, Spain, or Prussia, were made up of many ethnic groups speaking different languages.
In the eighteenth century, enlightened thinkers — literati, intellectuals, and philosophers — began to advance ideas about reconstructing the state along more liberal and rational lines, and expanding government beyond the rule of a small section of society. Their ideas gained momentum after the French Revolution of 1789 when the revolutionaries, having cut off their king’s head, faced a crisis of legitimacy. If government was no longer to be by divine or hereditary right, new forms of authority were needed. In France, the slogan liberté, egalité, fraternité aroused the loyalty of erstwhile subjects — now citizens. The newly formed French Republic demanded that the French give their loyalty to the nation state instead of the dynasty — to la patrie, not to the ousted Louis Capet.
Anti-French feeling in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars added to the growth of nationalism in central Europe. If France was a nation, then the German lands that had an equally proud cultural tradition should become a nation also. The 1848 Revolution was an attempt by sections of the educated European middle classes to establish nation states under a system of parliamentary democracy. When it failed, modern nationalism took a turn for the worse.
With hindsight, it can be argued that in the slow and difficult progress of European (or, indeed, Western) civilisation towards what is today called ‘civil society’, the concept of nationalism and the idea of ‘the nation state’ contributed little. Rather, it has hindered humanity in its search for a better and fairer society by channelling resources into petty and mediocre political ideologies. These ideologies at best glorified the trivial and, at worst, led many Europeans into xenophobia, racial hatred, and, finally, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The challenge to dynasticism had a negative impact on Europe almost from its inception. It was originally designed to help replace absolutist inefficiency with liberal concepts, and to establish a stable and equitable civil and international order, but nationalism soon deteriorated into a doctrine that promulgated little more than crude populism. Moreover, in eastern Europe, nationalist aspirations were espoused chiefly by a small privileged elite in order to foster its vested political and/or economic ambitions. The majority of the chiefly rural population remained largely indifferent to concepts of national identity, and stayed wedded to traditional forms of loyalty.
President Wilson first raised the principle of self-determination in his answer to German chancellor von Hertling’s reply to his Fourteen Points. There was no reference to national self-determination in those points. They stated merely that the peoples of Austria-Hungary should be accorded the ‘freest opportunity of autonomous development’, and that the nationalities under Turkish rule should be assured ‘an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development’.
In his address to congress of 11 February 1918, Wilson had declared that the war had its roots ‘in the disregard of the rights of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and force to make good their claim to determine their own allegiance and their own form of political life’. He then listed four further principles for the peacemaking process. The second of these stated that peoples and provinces were not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game. The third demanded that every territorial settlement must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the population concerned, and not as a part of mere adjustments or compromise of claims among rival states.5 There was nothing in these principles to indicate that the newly drawn borders should coincide precisely with ethnic frontiers. On the contrary, the fourth and final demand of the ‘Four Principles’ emphasised ‘that all well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely to break the peace of Europe, and consequently of the world’.6
Wilson showed little enthusiasm during the peacemaking process for endorsing the multitude of petitions from disgruntled ethnic groups from the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires who sought self-determination based on ethnicity. He had hoped that the political system of his own country — where many (white) ethnic groups lived in relative harmony, and which was based on government through the consent of the governed without reference to ethnicity — might be implemented elsewhere.
His secretary of state, Robert Lansing, was sceptical. National self-determination, he said, ‘is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Conference and create trouble in many lands. What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalities among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent, disorder, and rebellion?’ He made the grim prediction that ‘the phrase is loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realised. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives … What a calamity the phrase was ever uttered. What misery it will cause!’7
But the genie would not go back into the bottle.8 As an American authority on the peace treaty sums it up:
[T]he very idea of popular sovereignty, when applied to the crazy quilt of heterogeneous population in post-war Europe, inevitably acquired an ethnic dimension in spite of Wilson’s original interest. His ambiguously defined principle of self-determination became the miraculous means of salvation in the eyes of discontented folk all across the continent who were struggling against those whom they regarded as their oppressors (and who not coincidentally spoke a different language and practiced different customs).9
The importance placed on the term ‘national self-determination’ during the peacemaking process obscures other issues on the peacemaking agenda. Weighty factors had to be taken into consideration in the task of creating new states from the ruins of disintegrated empires. Economics were important: longstanding trade connections, communication networks, and complex matters of ownership existing in the old empires could not be simply erased. Legal and judicial traditions came into play, as did historical alliances. Geopolitical considerations were also important, particularly in the settlement with the German empire.
Some continue to hold the view that the peace conference constituted a conflict between two opposing approaches, personified by Clemenceau on the one hand and Wilson on the other: that Clemenceau’s insistence on a vengeful and vindictive peace stood against Wilson’s fair and just ‘peace without victory’. This is pure myth.
The president was not in a particularly German-friendly mood as he headed to Paris. Had he contemplated a peace without indemnities, he was in no position to put it into effect. The U.S. contribution to the war effort had been vital. The Allies had to rely upon American financial assistance and on American imports of food and vital war supplies. Around 600,000 U.S. soldiers had arrived in France by the summer of 1918, though they did not play a major part in the Allied breakthrough of August–September or in the subsequent defeat of the German army. The British, with the support of their empire, had fought hard and had sustained large losses. The same was true of the French, who, in addition, had seen their country devastated. Wilson could not have ignored their legitimate concerns.
Moreover, a peace seen as pro-German would not have been accepted back at home. The president had just lost the mid-term Congressional elections, which had returned a Republican majority in both houses. This had been largely brought about by domestic issues unrelated to the war, but the warning was on the wall, and his opponents, in particular ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson’s lifelong opponent Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican chairman of the Senate committee on foreign relations, were thundering no end against his Points, Principles, and Particulars. According to Roosevelt, these had ‘ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people’.10
His critics need not have worried. Notwithstanding his numerous attempts to bring about an end to the war, by 1918 Wilson had clearly sided with the Allies. He had taken no great interest in Europe before the outbreak of the war. In his scholarly career as a political scientist, he had been greatly impressed by the democratic traditions of the United Kingdom, and he remained a lifelong Anglophile. He had also praised the administrative efficiencies brought about by Prussian reformers such as Stein, Hardenberg, and Gneist, although he was critical of what he regarded as the strongly authoritarian system of government under Kaiser Wilhelm II. When war broke out, he was bitter about German conduct, and in particular the destruction of Louvain, but he saw strict neutrality as the only course open to the United States.
His attitude did not change until spring 1917, when he stopped advancing the idea of a ‘peace without victory’. He had become convinced that the war had been started by the ‘military masters of Germany’, who had planned and executed the conquest of Europe and Asia ‘from Berlin to Baghdad … from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf’. He regarded Germany’s leading establishment and its political system as the embodiment of evil ‘without conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace’.11 A compromise peace with Germany’s military rulers was out of the question. Nevertheless, he did not hold the German people responsible for the aggression of their government, seeing them as victims rather than as participants in the German empire’s drive for world domination. Once the military autocracy had been replaced by orderly democratic government, Germany would become a constructive member of the community of nations.12
This positive assessment of the German people changed when the rapacious terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk showed what a German peace would look like. When even the Social Democrats, whom Wilson up to that time had regarded with respect, failed to vote against Brest-Litovsk, he was once more disillusioned:
Brest-Litovsk not only caused Wilson to drastically step up America’s military contribution to the war, it also had an effect that, in the long run, was far more fateful for Germany. The failure of the Majority Socialists to fight the annexationist peace terms seems to have convinced him that even the civilian population, if not most of the German people, had been inculcated with the spirit of militarism … he no longer exempted the German people from blame for the deeds of their rulers. On the contrary he had come to believe that in the final analysis, the German people themselves were behind German militarism.13
Wilson still maintained that, while Germany had to remain a viable nation state and should not be saddled with an unbearable burden, nevertheless the Germans could not escape punishment for their crimes.
Settling peace with Germany on the principle of national self-determination would have meant that Germany’s national territory would have been far greater than Bismarck’s Reich. Its population would have increased by around ten million, and it would have gained prosperous industrial regions. As William Keylor aptly comments, ‘with a postwar redistribution of territory based purely on considerations of nationality or ethnicity, Germany’s penalty for its military defeat [and the destruction the nation had caused] would have been the acquisition of Lebensraum more extensive than the vast terrain acquired by Hitler through diplomatic intimidation by the beginning of 1939’.14 Such a redistribution would have been absurd. Equally absurd are the claims that Austria and the German-speaking population of Bohemia should have merged with Germany — claims still found today, even in scholarly works. This view was first peddled by Germany’s chief negotiator, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, in his reply to the peace terms at Versailles on 7 May. This claim was made chiefly for domestic purposes, but it was also a first step in a long and skilfully conducted public-relations exercise by the German empire to discredit the Versailles Treaty.
Wilson may have been idealistic, but he was neither ignorant nor incompetent. ‘Wilsonianism’ is a concept that overemphasises the nationality principle and refers ad nauseam to his ‘peace without victory’ speech. The arguments that only a Germanophile settlement would have blessed the country with a stable democracy — and that any punitive aspects would only cause damage — were not Wilson’s. These were the criticisms later made by disgruntled members of the British Treasury and Foreign Office and, above all, by John Maynard Keynes. Such arguments overlook the fact that after the ‘peace without victory’ speech came the introduction of unlimited submarine warfare, the American entry into the war and heavy U.S. casualties, the repugnant peace treaties of Bucharest, Brest-Litovsk, and Moscow, and a further eighteen months of war. Wilson himself was not a ‘Wilsonian’.
Start of proceedings
The George Washington reached Brest on 13 December. There, the American president was given a rapturous welcome. Thousands of people, many in traditional Breton costumes, had lined up for the jubilant and colourful reception. The music of Breton bagpipes filled the air. Wilson’s arrival in Paris was even more magnificent. Guns were fired as the train pulled into Luxembourg station, where he was greeted by French president Raymond Poincaré and the prime minister with his government. As the car ferried the president and his wife to their residence, soldiers struggled to hold back the huge, wildly cheering crowds that gathered along the streets. Most of the French media gave the impression that the League of Nations which Wilson had promised to create would be a victors’ club, an alliance to curb future German ambitions, and that the United States would play a vital part in restricting renewed Prussian militarism. After spending a few days in Paris, Wilson crossed to London, where there was a repetition of the scenes of euphoric citizens welcoming a man they considered a saviour. The same happened in Rome, where he finished his whirlwind December tour.
David Lloyd George arrived in Paris on 11 January1919. He was in a buoyant mood, having won a landslide victory in the 14 December election. The chief reason for the convincing win was his determined leadership during the war. Two catchy slogans concerning the imminent peacemaking process were thrown in to rally the electorate. The first was the demand to ‘hang the Kaiser’ — that is, to bring the German war leaders to account for the crimes they had committed during the war. The second was to make Germany pay fully for the costs of the war. Making promises that are difficult to fulfil is nothing new in electioneering. Since the dawn of democratically elected government there has always been a discrepancy between the great promises of candidates and the modesty of the goods they are able to deliver. Most of the time, gullible electorates acquiesce, and are content with partial fulfilment. In this case, loud declamations to ‘hang the Kaiser’ were impractical simply because Wilhelm II had acquired political asylum in the Netherlands, and the Dutch government had no intention of handing him over to the Allies.
The excitement over bringing Germany’s war conduct to account soon faded. President Wilson showed little enthusiasm. He agreed to the setting up of a commission to investigate who was responsible for the war and how to punish war crimes. The German government, however, refused to hand anyone over to the special military tribunal, and the Allies eventually sent a list of a few hundred names to be tried in Germany. The list included Hindenburg and Ludendorff, as well as most members of the OHL. Twelve were eventually brought to trial, and most were immediately acquitted. A couple of submarine commanders who had sunk lifeboats of wounded survivors were sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, but, allegedly, escaped after a few weeks and were never found.15
Lloyd George’s other campaign trump card, to ‘make Germany pay’, caused him constant difficulties during the peace negotiation process. He was aware that compensation had to remain within reason, and he had emphasised ‘that members of the government should not be responsible during the election for arousing any false hopes in the minds of the electorates’.16 However, he did little to restrain the media’s demand to ‘bleed the Hun dry’. Nor did he rebuff the demand of First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, that the German government be ‘squeezed as a lemon is squeezed — until the pips squeak’. On the contrary, the prime minister himself announced in a speech at Bristol two days before election day that ‘we have an absolute right to demand the whole cost of the war … those who started it must pay to the uttermost farthing, and we shall search their pockets for it’.17
This statement was one big problem that Lloyd George faced over the next five months. The composition of the British delegation to Paris was another. The four hundred delegates comprised not only members of the British military, diplomatic, and civil service, but also delegates from the white Dominions (Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand), as well as India. Because the Dominions had played a substantial role in the defeat of the Central Powers, they were not to be pushed aside when it came to collecting the spoils. And they could be very difficult and vociferous — none more so than the Australian prime minister, William ‘Billy’ Hughes.
On 18 January 1919, the Peace Conference opened officially in the presence of plenipotentiaries from 28 countries. Among them were delegates from China, which had made a valuable contribution to the Allies’ war effort. After declaring war on Germany in the summer of 1917, about 100,000 Chinese labourers had helped in the construction and maintenance of trenches, freeing Allied soldiers for combat. The Chinese had suffered severe casualties at the front, and over 500 had died when a French ship was sunk by a German submarine. China held high hopes of regaining full possession of the Shandung peninsula. Portugal had contributed 60,000 soldiers to the Western Front, but was angered that it was allowed only one official delegate, whereas Brazil, which had sent only medical aid, was allowed three.18 Even this exceeded the contributions of Chile, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Panama, and a century later it is hard to discern why these countries should have even attended the peace process in Paris.
The day after the long-winded palaver of the pretentious plenary session, Lloyd George, Wilson, Clemenceau, Italian prime minister, Orlando, their foreign secretaries, and two Japanese representatives formed of a ‘Council of Ten’. Commonly referred to as the Supreme Council, this was the chief decision-making body for the first ten weeks of the conference. The spadework of formulating the peace conditions was delegated to 58 specialised committees, many of which were divided into sub-committees.
Laying the foundation of the League of Nations was the first item on the agenda, an act of courtesy granted the U.S. president. Although the idea of a transnational body to conduct global affairs in the post-war era was upheld unanimously, none of the other chief decision-makers shared Wilson’s enthusiasm or his unbound optimism for such an organisation. Clemenceau, in particular, was sceptical. France had lost 1,500,000 men — half its male population under thirty — and with no counter-weight in the east, it faced a large military imbalance with Germany. Clemenceau preferred an international league able to provide military protection. He wanted ‘teeth’ put into the league, but he found no backers.
A committee to create the League of Nations, set up on 25 January, met for the first time on 3 February, and produced a comprehensive draft by 14 February. All league members were pledged to each others’ independence and territories, but the league was not to have its own military. Its primary aim, as stated in its covenant, was to prevent war through collective security and disarmament. International disputes were to be settled through negotiation and arbitration, but neither disarmament nor arbitration was compulsory. Other issues dealt with in the twenty-six paragraphs included global health and labour conditions, human and drug trafficking, the arms trade, treatment of prisoners of war, and protection of minorities in Europe. The organisation was to have a general assembly of all members, a secretariat, and an executive council made up of a member from each of the ‘big five’ — the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, and Japan — and four smaller nations, which would ensure a small majority for the major powers.
The reality differed. The United States failed to enter the league, which encouraged deadlocks in the executive council, and this was later blamed for its ineffectiveness. Germany, at the insistence of the French, was not admitted, and would not join until 1926. But, pleased with the speedy creation and the overall structure of his pet project, Wilson left for Washington on 14 March to attend to domestic matters. When he returned on 4 April, it was decided to replace the Council of Ten, which had proven too awkward and laborious to deal with the myriad of problems it faced, with a Council of Four — Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando. The Japanese, who had contributed little to the work of the Supreme Council, were excluded, and as Orlando generally participated only when Italian matters came up, the peacemaking at Paris became essentially the work of the first three.
The question of what to do with the German navy was not easily dealt with. As far as its submarines were concerned, all but ten — which had been given to France — were destroyed. However, there was disagreement between the admiralties of the United States and Britain about the fate of the surface fleet. In line with armistice conditions, the German ships had left their base in November 1918, and were now anchored at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Lloyd George suggested that they be sunk unceremoniously in the mid Atlantic, but Wilson thought it foolish to destroy perfectly good ships. However, dividing the spoils on the basis of the contribution to the war effort or of losses incurred would have favoured the British. There were acrimonious quarrels between admirals on both sides19 until the politicians declared a truce.
The distribution of German colonies also proved a burdensome enterprise. By 1914, the German empire had embraced a large area of Africa divided into four colonial districts: German East Africa (today’s Tanzania); Togoland; Cameroon; and German South-West Africa (today’s Namibia). Germany also ruled parts of Melanesia and Micronesia, forming the ‘Imperial Colony of German New Guinea’, covering about 6,400 square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean.
It was unanimously agreed that Germany, because of its maladministration and ill-treatment of the indigenous people, should lose its overseas possessions, but there was one major point of disagreement. The European Allies envisaged a swap-around in colonial administration, while president Wilson opposed a continuation of traditional colonialism. Instead, and in line with the fifth of his Fourteen Points, he stood for ‘a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’. To achieve this, he suggested the establishment of mandates, a kind of trusteeship run either directly by the league or by powers mandated by the league. The length of such mandates would depend on the progress made by local populations.
Wilson’s ideas did not find favour with the French. Given Germany’s greater population, they wanted to be assured that in case of renewed aggression from her they could rely on soldiers drafted in from their colonies. A compromise in France’s favour was reached, but strong opposition also came from the British Dominions, in particular from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. They had been counting on outright annexation, and were critical of the mandate system — none more so than the Australian prime minister. After frantic dealing behind the scenes, a three-tier mandate system was agreed upon. Class A constituted those relatively advanced communities previously part of the Turkish empire, which were expected soon to run their own affairs. Class B included the three central African colonies. They were to be administered ‘under conditions securing freedom of conscience and religion, the prohibition of such abuses as the slave trade and the liquor trafficking’. The military training of natives other than for police purposes and the defence of territory was outlawed. All league members were to be given equal opportunity for trade and commerce in these regions. Class C covered German South-West Africa and all former German colonies in the South Pacific. They, ‘owing to the sparseness of their population, or their small sizes, or their remoteness from the centres of civilisation, or their geographical proximity to the mandatory’ would be administered by the mandate as part of its territory. However, there were the same safeguards in regard to the indigenous populations as in the African colonies.20
Discussion of the mandate system in the Supreme Council led to heated exchanges at times — none more vicious than the encounters between Hughes and the American president. Wilson loathed Hughes, seeing him as a ‘a pestiferous varmint’.21 The feeling was reciprocated: the Australian held Wilson, his principles, and the league in contempt. At one point in the discussion about Australia’s claim for the New Guinea mandate, Wilson asked whether the Australian government would allow the sale of alcohol to natives. Having received an affirmative answer, he asked whether there would be unlimited access to missionaries. Of course, Hughes replied. ‘There are many days when the poor devils do not get half-enough missionaries to eat’.22
Two days later, after the Australian prime minister had taken a particularly stubborn stand on the Solomon Islands, Wilson angrily asked whether he was ‘to understand that if the whole civilised world asks Australia to agree to a mandate in respect of these islands, Australia is prepared still to defy the appeal of the whole civilised world?’ Hughes, who was deaf both literally and figuratively to arguments he did not want to hear, fiddled with his cumbersome hearing aids, claiming he had not heard the question. After Wilson had repeated himself, he answered, ‘That’s about the size of it, Mr. President’. Although this did not raise Hughes’ standing in Wilson eyes, it did increase his already substantial popularity among the French.
By the end of January, arrangements were agreed. France acquired possession of Togo and most of the Cameroons; Britain, a small strip of Cameroon and virtually all of German East Africa. After Belgium bitterly complained that it had been left out of the African settlement, Britain reluctantly agreed to hand over the East African provinces of Rwanda and Burundi to a Belgian mandate. In the Pacific, Japan received the former German islands north of the equator, and Australia received German New Guinea. In addition, the two Pacific Dominions divided up the remaining islands south of the equator between themselves.
Nation states and minority rights
By the time the conference officially opened, the peacemakers faced a fait accompli in large parts of eastern and south-eastern Europe. The Czechs had set up the state of Czechoslovakia, made up of the Bohemian parts of Cislithania (the Austrian half of the Habsburg empire) and the northern parts of Translithania (the Hungarian half of the Danube Monarchy). Also referred to as Upper Hungary, the population here was chiefly Slovak. The Serbs were in the process of creating a southern Slavonic state, and Poland had become a nation again, having been wiped off the political map by its three neighbours, Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1772. Around the Baltic, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia had declared their independence, leaving the small most easterly inlet of the Baltic Sea around Petrograd (renamed Leningrad in 1924 and St. Petersburg in 1991) as the last remnant of Russian possession.
There were two guiding principles behind the creation of the new states that would fill the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires. First, for geopolitical, military, and economic reasons, they had to be of a sustainable size geographically and in population. Second, there was a widespread belief, particularly among the political and intellectual elites, that the era of the multinational state was over: that it was not capable of adapting to democratic principles. This belief was strengthened by the concept of national self-determination that had started to dominate the peace conference. It was now widely upheld that the modern state could only be realised in the form of the nation state. Central to this was the notion of the ‘actual’ nationality of the state, best rendered by the German term Staatsvolk. However, given the heterogeneity of these parts of Europe, the creation of a nation based on ethnicity was an impossibility. Outside observers noted again and again when asking about their nationality that peoples identified themselves as Catholic or Orthodox, as subjects of the government in Vienna, or a local ruler, or a member of a clan in the former Ottoman parts. This hurdle, it was hoped, would be overcome by the ‘minority principle’.
The minorities treaty aimed to guarantee ethnic minorities equal rights with the majority of the Staatsvolk. It was initially designed by the Allies to provide protection for the Jewish population of Poland (which had been viciously attacked by Polish forces immediately after the proclamation of Poland’s independence).23 Under this principle, citizens were not to be discriminated against on the grounds of their mother tongue. The state was obliged to provide schooling for minorities, which had the right to use their first languages in business and administration, in the courts, the media, and in religious observance. These rights, however, were granted to individual citizens within minority groups, not to whole communities as collective bodies. The reason for this was to safeguard the state against attempts by minority groups to secede or to join the countries of their mother tongues. As with many other decisions made in Paris, the good intentions of the peacemakers were to face grave difficulties in the turbulent post-war political life of central and eastern Europe.
Czechoslovakia, alone among the new nations, was genuine in its pursuit of the guidelines laid down in the peacemaking process. There were five minorities in Czechoslovakia: Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenes, Ukrainians, and Poles. Edvard Beneš, who ranked as the most prominent and influential political figure in Czechoslovakia until his death in 1948, recognised the need for all the nationalities to live together harmoniously. The new system, he advocated early in 1919, would have to be similar to the Swiss. He did not mean that the new state should adopt the Swiss political model, but was referring to the spirit of Switzerland, where several nationalities co-existed peacefully. The Czechoslovak Republic granted all of its citizens full civil rights: political and legal equality; liberty of expression; freedom of association, press, and religion; access to education and basic health care; and a modest degree of social security. Policies pursued in the early years illustrate the Czechoslovak Republic’s liberal, democratic character. This positive trend could have been built on, had stability persisted.24
The term ‘minority’ was scarcely applicable to the German-speaking population of Czechoslovakia. Numbering over three million, it wielded immense economic, political, and cultural power. The more farsighted of the Czechoslovak leaders recognised the need to ‘win the Germans over’.25 The second prime minister of the republic, Vlastimil Tusar, stressed that it was essential to ‘have other bonds than the peace of St Germain and Versailles to tie the Germans to the state’.26 But the attitude of Bohemian and Moravian Germans towards the new state was ambiguous. Parties that took up a negative or irredentist position garnered small followings during the 1920s, while their opposites, referred to as ‘activists’, entered governments in the mid-1920s and held three ministerial positions. The impact of September 1929 and 30 January 1933 drove most ‘Sudeten-Germans’ to rally behind Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutsche Partei, which led them straight into the arms of Adolf Hitler and — eventually — into the abyss.
The Germans were expelled at the end of World War II, and joined another eight million ethnic Germans forced to leave their homes in central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe. The Republic of Czechoslovakia became the ‘Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia’ and, when the end of the Soviet empire heralded the demise of socialism, the Czechs and Slovaks went their own ways peacefully. A set of friendly special clauses regulating old economic and cultural ties recall a time when they formed a single nation. Today, both the Czech and the Slovak Republics have become part of the European Union.
If one were to rate the newly emerged nations on their compliance with the benevolent principles to which they had committed themselves, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes would stand in stark contrast with Czechoslovakia. The kingdom, established by Serbia, embraced Orthodox Serbians, Catholic Croatians, and Slovenes, and the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Given the importance of religion and dynastic traditions played for the bulk of the population, basing a political unit on the sole principle of southern Slavonic ethnicity was ill-conceived, as soon became apparent. And if the concept was flawed, its execution was worse.
The new nation, which in October 1929 would be renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was proclaimed on 1 December 1918 by Prince Alexander of Serbia. With the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Serbian forces quickly ensured that non-Serbian military units were disbanded. All vital positions in government and administration went to Serbs, and Belgrade was declared the capital. The Serbs’ dream of re-establishing the mediaeval empire of Stepan Dušan, held since they had liberated themselves from Ottoman rule in 1867, had come a step closer. This empire covered most of Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, and all of northern and central Greece. The newly founded state included Croatia (Serb statesmen and thinkers regarded the Croatians as Serbs) and parts of the eastern Adriatic, including Trieste, as well as large parts of Hungary.27
King Alexander took the oath of allegiance on 28 July, the anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, the most important day in Serb history. On this day in 1389, legend has it, the Christian Serbs, led by Prince Lazar, were through treachery defeated by the Ottoman Turks. The prince, who the night before had experienced a vision that he could have either a kingdom in heaven or one on earth, chose the former. The Serbian people, true to their faith, would one day rise again to restore the Serbian empire. Historians today have great difficulty substantiating much of this. There is little evidence of Lazar’s empire; he is seen rather as one of a number of princes struggling for dominance in the region. There is also considerable doubt that Lazar lost the battle: some records maintain that he won; others, that it was a draw. But, as the saying goes, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Lazar the martyr, and Kosovo, the supposed site of the battle, were symbols kept alive in monasteries for centuries until, in the wake of nineteenth-century nationalism, they were revived to provide the ideological backing for Serbian expansionism.28
The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was three times the size of the old Serbia. Once the Serbs had charted their new boundaries, the peacemakers at Paris could only rubber-stamp them. France, greatly worried about the power vacuum left by the war in eastern Europe, wanted strong successor states there, able to assist should it come to future conflict with Germany. Support for the new kingdom among its non-Serb nationalities — who comprised about half the population — was limited. Orthodoxy having been declared the state’s official religion, the attitude of other religions to the new arrangements was ambivalent. Catholic Croats and Slovenes objected — not unjustifiably — to being swept up in a Greater Serbia; they had been content as part of the Catholic Habsburg empire. Irredentist movements, confined to a few intellectuals and nationalist zealots, had no popular base. Nor did Muslim Bosnians welcome the fact that they were now run by Belgrade. The domestic political violence of the pre-war kingdom continued, reaching a climax in 1928 when the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić, was assassinated in the Belgrade parliament. A year later, the king declared a royal dictatorship.
Thanks to their shameless territory-grabbing, the numbers of enemies the Serbs faced from within was matched by the numbers without — as became clear in the Second World War. The Croatian fascist Ustasha, in particular, excelled in murdering Serbs. After the War, Josip Broz (Tito) pieced Yugoslavia together again, managing to keep the nation united, not only by force and coercion, until his death in 1980. Little more than a decade later, the Serbs resorted again to violence and genocide. In July 1995, ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Serbian army resulted in the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. In 2015, a number of high-ranking Serbian officers were sentenced at the International Court of Justice in The Hague to life imprisonment or to lengthy jail sentences for participating in the massacre at Srebrenica. Of the chief culprits, Radovan Karadžić, former president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was given 40 years’ imprisonment in March 1916, and Bosnian Serb army leader Ratko Mladić is still facing trial at the time of writing.
The Polish state that emerged after World War I was not a creation of the peacemakers, although defining the borders of the new Poland had seen more commission meetings than any other aspect of the conference. The Polish National Committee that had been formed during the war advocated a return to the boundaries of 1772, which would have meant the inclusion of millions of Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians. The French, ever in search of a counterweight in the east against potential German aggression, favoured a strong Poland. The Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians did not; nor did the British and Americans. They favoured a smaller Poland, along what became known as the Curzon line. Poland’s new western borders included a small strip of Pomeranian territory around the River Vistula in order to allow the Poles access to the sea, as stipulated in Wilson’s Fourteen Points.29 Its eastern boundaries were decided in a war with Russia, which lasted from February 1919 to September 1920. The Poles were victorious, and the expanded territory added a further two million Jews, four million Ukrainians, and one million Belorussians to their minority population.
Initially, this large state was governed by the Sejm, a democratically elected parliament based on the French model. However, the 92 political parties, the introduction of proportional representation, and the exuberant individualism of the Polish intelligentsia made parliamentary government difficult. In 1927, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who had played a major part in the formation of the new Poland, decided to end the ‘chaos’, and established a military dictatorship. His government lasted for twelve years before it was terminated by Hitler and Stalin. After the Second World War, the country was stripped of its eastern ‘minorities’, and the German-speaking population was expelled. Poland became the homogenous nation it is today.
Romania, although it had played only a minor part in the defeat of the Central Powers, did well in Paris, where it received Bukovina from Austria, and the Banat and Transylvania from Hungary, doubling its population and territory. In 1920, it also wrested Bessarabia from Russia. Like their Polish and Yugoslav counterparts, the Romanian leaders had been loud in their support for ethnic self-determination when it came to their neighbours, but did little to follow such principles at home. Impressive lists of minority rights had been enacted, but they were scarcely adhered to, leaving large populations dissatisfied and unwilling to be mobilised when the need arose.
The new states — characteristically referred to by the Germans as ‘season states’ — looked impressive on paper, but they failed to provide domestic stability. To this was added their failure to ensure harmonious relations between themselves. Consider, for example, the fate of the small duchy of Teschen, located in the west of the former Austrian province of Galicia, which bordered the Upper-Silesian coalfield. The population of half a million people was around two to one Polish. The Czechs claimed Teschen because its coal was vital to Czechoslovakia and because the railway junction there connected the Bohemian and Slovak parts of the new state. Although little stood in the way of a cordial settlement, Teschen led to acrimonious quarrels between the Czechs and Poles during the peace conference and after, until a compromise pleasing neither side was reached.30 A close political and military alliance between the two countries would have benefited both, but as a result of the Teschen conflict, relations remained tense in the inter-war period. This was symptomatic of the entire region, and French hopes that Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia would provide a reliable counter-balance to Germany in the east did not eventuate.
Of the defeated powers, Bulgaria escaped relatively unscathed. The Treaty of Neuilly stipulated that it had to return some of the lands it had gained in the peace of Bucharest, and the Bulgarians lost access to the Aegean Sea, about 10 per cent of their territory. They also had to pay reparations of £90 million and reduce their army to 20,000 men, neither of which they ever did.
Austria and Hungary, the two pillars of the Habsburg Monarchy, did not fare well. Both were reduced to rump states. Hungary received harsher treatment because at the time of the peacemaking its government was in the hands of a Soviet council.31 Austria was politically isolated and economically cut off from its traditional trade links, and found it hard to make ends meet in the inter-war years. This helps to explain why the Austrians accorded their fellow countryman Adolf Hitler such a tumultuous welcome in Vienna on 12 March 1938. The aspect of the St. Germaine peace treaty the Austrians most resented was the loss of South Tyrol, a German-speaking region south of the Brenner Pass. This was awarded to Italy.
The Italians had originally been part of the Triple Alliance with the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, but did not join the war in 1914. For nine months they watched to see which way the wind blew. They joined the Allies in May 1915, enticed by the promise of rich rewards, among them South Tyrol. Thus the Allies were saved from having to fight on another front, and one potential enemy had joined their own ranks. In practice, Italy’s military contribution to the defeat of the Central Powers was modest. All attempts to invade Austria-Hungary from the south were rebuffed, the attackers suffering huge losses. The Allies, however, kept their promise, offering up a sizeable stretch of territory around the northern Adriatic coast and South Tyrol. President Wilson had qualms about allocating this German-speaking community to Italy, because Point Nine of the Fourteen Points held that the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognisable lines of nationality. The Italians, however, reasoned that without possession of the lands south of the Brenner Pass, their country would be left open to future aggression from the north, and to this Wilson assented. Nevertheless, the original list of Italian expectations had been much longer,32 and they were angered in particular by not being awarded the city of Fiume. Dissatisfaction with the peace treaties, coupled with never-ending political and economic instability — the post-war Italian governments stumbled from one crisis to the next — led to Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ on 28 October 1922. Italy would become the first country to fall to fascism.
The ink on the treaties had not dried before loud claims were being made that the Allied peacemakers had dealt arrogantly with the fate of millions — assigning national minorities here, taking whole folks-groups away there, and all by the stroke of a pen. Such claims are too generalised, and in many instances false. To have imposed every condition of the Fourteen Points would have involved major military intervention, something that was out of the question in 1919 or early 1920. Given the ethnic pluralism of the region, no border was immune from the cry of foul play from those who claimed to have lost out. As stated above, the peacemakers faced a fait accompli in central and eastern Europe, and they agreed to borders that had been established by the states themselves. The development of fair, co-operative, and productive policies that might have led to a better outcome for the post-war world was in the hands of the rulers of the new ‘nation states’. Their failure to develop such policies contributed to the catastrophic course history was to take in the 1930s and 1940s.
Key issues
In making peace with the German empire, which was the chief item on the Paris agenda, the Allies were confronted by two key issues: how to set compensation for the costs of war, and how to provide France with security against an eastern neighbour whose superiority in size and industrial potential could not be altered even after its defeat in war. In his various announcements during the war, president Wilson had stated that the settling of war costs should not include indemnities, payments for expenditure incurred in military operations, and the staging of the war. These, to him, were relics of a bygone age. Restitution was only to be made for unlawful acts of war.
This vague concept met opposition from the Europeans. They were not willing to abandon the traditional principle ruling European peacemaking for the past hundred years: loser pays, winner takes all. In the November 1815 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Napoleonic chapter in French history, France was made to pay 700 billion francs and the cost of an occupation army of 150,000 men for three years. The Kingdom of Prussia, together with Austria, collected handsomely from Denmark after winning the first of Bismarck’s ‘unification wars’, the Kingdom of Denmark losing one-third of its territory and almost half of its population. Prussia did even better from the ‘Second Unification War’ fought chiefly against Austria. The Kingdom of Hanover was annexed outright, and Bismarck also confiscated the assets of the royal dynasty, the Guelphs, amounting to about five million goldmarks. The electorate of Hesse and the Free City of Frankfurt were also annexed, the citizens of Frankfurt having to pay an indemnity of over 30 million guilders. The Kingdoms of Bavaria and Württemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden, too, paid heavily for siding with the Austrians. Bavaria, for example, was obliged to pay an indemnity of 51 million goldmarks, making the 32 million Ludwig II needed for the construction of his fanciful castles, which so enraged the Bavarian political establishment of his time, look relatively modest. The thrifty Bavarians could not know that the Neuenschwanstein Castle would, a century later, rank as the state’s main tourist attraction, and, courtesy of Walt Disney, would become the fairly-tale castle par excellence, giving joy to millions of children around the world.
For strategic reasons, Austria was let off the hook, although the Austrian emperor had to give assurances that the empire would never again meddle in German affairs. In the peace of Frankfurt that ended the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, France had to pay to the newly founded Second German empire 20 billion goldmarks, in addition to occupation costs. The plundering of defeated enemies peaked in the Treaties of Bucharest with Romania — which had to cede large territories to the Habsburg Monarchy and Bulgaria and its oilfields to Germany — and the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Moscow with Russia.
For the European Allies, it was now Germany’s turn to pay. They had no intention of plundering Germany but, not unreasonably, they wanted to be reimbursed for the damage done by German occupation and to recover at least part of their outlays.
The Pre-Armistice Agreement of November 1918 had stipulated that Germany had to make compensation for all the damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by its aggression on land, sea, and air. This suited France, where most of the fighting on the Western Front had taken place. In the ten French departments that had seen the heaviest fighting, around 600,000 houses, 20,000 factories, and 6,500 schools had been destroyed, 4,000 villages levelled, and three million people driven from their homes. This region also contained the centres of the French iron, coal, wool, and cotton industries. Under a strict interpretation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement, France (and Belgium) could expect to receive the largest reparation payments.
The British did not share this point of view. Limiting reparations to damage done to civilians would mean that they could claim reimbursement only for the loss of merchant shipping. Yet Britain’s war expenditure had been greater than that of France’s, huge loans having to be raised to meet the costs. Britain owed the U.S. government loans amounting to $4.7 billion, and a further $2 billion to U.S. banks. The British had also lent large sums to Russia, which had defaulted on its debts, and to other European nations such as Italy and Romania, which were in no position to repay. France itself owed Britain $4 billion. In the emotion-charged aftermath of the war, it would have been difficult to explain to the people why their taxes had to pay for the costs of the war. The British Dominions, in particular, raised strong objections to a peace without compensation. The Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, became their spokesman.
Hughes was convinced that he had a strong case. Australia had suffered a high casualty rate, and its soldiers had made valuable contributions to the defeat of Germany. Australian General John Monash had led the Australian and Canadian Corps in their breakthrough of the German trenches on the Somme on 8 August 1918,33 and had contributed to the collapse of the Hindenburg Line a month later. Australian troops had also distinguished themselves by halting some of the most advanced units of the German March offensive at Villers-Bretonneux, the beginning of the collapse of Operation Michael. Hughes had already bitterly attacked the Pre-Armistice Agreement, being among the first to recognise its implications. In a series of passionate speeches and letters to the press, he maintained that, by accepting the agreement, Britain had forfeited her rights to war indemnities and that this would have dire consequences for the Dominions.34 If Wilson’s views were to be sustained, Belgium, which had contributed little to the outcome of war, would be compensated, while countries like Australia would go empty-handed. To Hughes, there was no valid distinction between restoration and compensation:
Australia lost nearly 60,000 men killed and many more maimed for life. She has incurred a war debt of some £300,000,000 — a crushing burden for 5,000,000 people. And what is true of Australia, is true mutatis mutandis of the other Dominions and peoples of the British Empire. In the way of the destruction of civilian life and property, they may have suffered little. Yet the sacrifice they have made and damage they have suffered, have not been less. There must be for them, as for all the Allies full compensation.35
He dismissed the American rejection of high reparations as unprincipled and self-serving.36
Hughes’ criticism was not unfounded. For all Wilson’s talk of the ‘moral advantage’ in not claiming reparations, the United States did well out of the war. Its civilian war damage was small, as was the size of the its war debt. The United States had seized twice as many German merchant ships as it had lost, and had confiscated German property in North America to the value of $425 billion.37 The United States also reaped enormous war profits from Europe. The French and British governments had hoped that the U.S. would provide financial assistance in the settling of their obligations. Indeed, there were even suggestions of cancelling outright all intra-allied debts. But neither president Wilson nor his government was interested in this.
On 10 February, Hughes was made chair of the Commission on Reparation. Most members of the commission were hardliners on reparations. Lord Cunliffe, a retired governor of the Bank of England, was a member, as was Lord Sumner, a Law Lord. They were supported by the Northcliffe Press, and took up a catch-cry on bleeding the Hun dry. The pair was called the ‘heavenly twins’ because of the astronomical estimates they advanced — initially $120 billion. This figure was reduced to $47 billion, but was still in striking contrast to sums suggested by the Treasury, whose representative, John Maynard Keynes, argued that Germany could pay $10 billion at the most. This sum, however, would have been unpalatable to an Allied public that had been promised rich rewards for its efforts in the defeat of the enemy. Eventually, to the relief of Lloyd George and Clemenceau, who had both made vast promises to their people, it was decided to leave settling the final sum to the work of a further commission.
The establishment of this commission helped to solve the impasse between Wilson and the European leaders. The South African minister for defence, General Jan Smuts, maintained that the Pre-Armistice Agreement allowed the Allies to include separation allowances for soldiers’ families, as well as pensions for widows and orphans. This was seen by opponents of the treaty as a further example of the piling up surrealistic reparation claims. In reality, the inclusion of allowances and pensions did not add to the final bill owed by Germany, but it did affect the amount each ally was to receive.38 The share gained by Britain, which had suffered relatively little physical damage requiring repair, but had huge unfunded pension liabilities, was increased by reducing the shares of other allies.39
It had also been agreed by then that there was to be an unlimited theoretical responsibility, but a much smaller actual German liability. Lloyd George and Clemenceau had explicitly insisted that Germany should acknowledge an obligation for all the war costs. The Americans feared that this would be a violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement, and offered a compromise that would assign unlimited theoretical and moral responsibility for all the damage caused by the war to Germany and its allies, but confine the actual German liability to specific damages. This would greatly reduce the amount Germany was expected to pay. The British and French agreed to the compromise, which was placed in the reparation chapter of the Versailles Treaty (in paragraphs 231 and 232).
Solving the problem of France’s future position towards her powerful eastern neighbour proved equally difficult, threatening at times to break up the conference. It was important for the French to be compensated adequately for the devastation caused by war and occupation. Although the minister for finance, Louis-Lucien Klotz — according to Clemenceau, the only Jew who knew nothing about finance — joined for a time the ranks of those demanding surrealistic figures, French reparation expectations were on the modest side. As with so much regarding the reparation issue, the discrepancy of the sums given to the public and the amount realistically expected was vast. The future of French security, however, was of paramount importance. Twice within fifty years, the country had been invaded by Germany, the second invasion amounting to near apocalypse. In addition to the physical destruction of the countryside, towns, and cities, and the damage done to French industry, France had lost 1.5 million men. Double that number had been injured. Although two million young Germans had also died, Germany would still have a post-war population of around 75 million, compared to France’s 40 million. No foreign soldier had set foot on German soil, no village been razed, no industrial compound dismantled or blown to pieces. The Rhenish-Westphalian industrial region — Europe’s largest coal-mining and steel-producing area — was still able to work at full capacity.
France’s hopes rested on two pillars: to confine Germany to the east of the River Rhine, and to continue the wartime alliance with the United Kingdom and the United States. French president Raymond Poincaré demanded that the peace treaty should push the French border with Germany to the Rhine, a position shared by the bulk of the media and a large part of the population. This would mean that the Saarland, the Rhenish Palatinate, and the Rhineland would become part of France. The Rhine had been the German border in the past, and the Rhenish, it was claimed, were in character and lifestyle much closer to the French than to the Prussians. Like the French, they were Catholic, enjoyed good food and wine, and (by reputation) took a more joyful approach to life than their eastern compatriots.40 Such a view found no support with Lloyd George or the American president, who reasoned that downright incorporation of the left bank would create a new Alsace-Lorraine, a certain recipe for future disaster. As they could expect no assistance from the Allies, Clemenceau pointed out to those of his countrymen demanding this frontier the sacrifices that French occupation of the region would entail. Two hundred and fifty thousand men would have to be withdrawn from the workforce to guard the Rhine, stifling economic growth, and there would have to be wholesale reform of the region’s administration and governing structures.
French army chief Foch also wanted to restrict Germany to the east of the Rhine, but his suggestion was for the creation of an independent buffer state militarily and economically linked to France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Britain. This, too, was rejected outright by Lloyd George and Wilson.
There is another reason Foch’s scheme would have been impractical. Konrad Adenauer, the mayor of Cologne and the later the first chancellor of the Federal Republic, seemed willing to participate in the secession of the Rhineland from the Reich. Early in 1919, he joined a group of Centre Party members who had become concerned about the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils that had formed during the November Revolution. They feared the spread of socialism, and they were apprehensive about the Berlin government’s school policy, which they saw as an assault on the Catholic religion and on local autonomy.
However, Adenauer soon found out that the Rhenish had no desire to be separated. This was in no way surprising. The Rhineland, assigned to Prussia in the Peace of Vienna, had (along with Westphalia) become Germany’s industrial leader during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. This had brought rich benefits to its inhabitants. Many of their sons and daughters had died in what they saw as the defence of their fatherland. To now be forced to join a new state under the tutelage of the enemy was deeply resented. Adenauer carefully tested the possibility of an autonomous Rhineland state within the Reich to escape what was feared to be Prussian-Socialist domination, but his scheme found no significant support among the population.
Clemenceau could claim some success for his efforts. The French were given temporary ownership of the Saar coalmines for fifteen years. The League of Nations was to administer the region, and in 1933 the inhabitants were to decide in a plebiscite whether to remain independent, or become part of France, or re-unite with Germany. The Rhineland was to be demilitarised, and the French Rhenish occupation zones around the three bridgeheads would continue. The northern zone around the bridgehead of Cologne was to be evacuated in five years, the second zone around the bridgehead of Koblenz in ten years, and the third zone in the south around the bridgehead of Mainz in fifteen years — subject to Germany’s having met its reparation commitments. The Anglo-American Alliance was to continue under a separate Treaty of Guarantee with Britain and the United States.
The terms were attacked by Clemenceau’s opponents. President Poincaré described him as morally blind, a pawn in the pocket of the Anglo-Saxons, a swollen-head and sleepwalker, a scatterbrain and blunderer who, having signed the Armistice prematurely, was now bound to lead the nation into the abyss.41 Foch wanted to indict Clemenceau for high treason before the High Court. But in the end their rage withered away. On 25 April, the French Council of Ministers unanimously backed the prime minister.
It soon turned out that Clemenceau had little reason to celebrate his success. The United States’ Senate failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which also meant the end of the Special Treaty with France. Senators had asked for amendments to the Versailles Treaty, but Wilson insisted on all or nothing. Not a single alteration was to be to his handiwork. Even his lifelong Republican opponent Henry Cabot Lodge regretted that the president made no effort to save his life’s great ambition, the creation of a global organisation to secure the peace and harmony of a democratic world. For France, the Special Treaty with the U.S. was not worth the proverbial crumpet. And the same can be said about the Treaty of Guarantee with Britain: it was dependent upon American acceptance of the Versailles Treaty.42
Germany arrives
Germany’s unexpected and rapid transition from monarchy to republic initially took place under peaceful conditions. Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils that had formed all over Germany governed the country for ten weeks until the first democratic elections on 19 January 1919. The Majority Social Democrats had rediscovered their revolutionary spirit, and joined the Independent Socialists in the Council of Peoples’ Deputies that had taken over government in Berlin. The moderate Social Democrats wanted to ensure that there would be an orderly beginning to the life of the Republic, and that things would not drift towards chaos as in Russia a year earlier. There was widespread fear among the Germans, and also among the Allies, that Germany might follow the path of the Bolsheviks. This fear was unfounded because left-wing extremism was confined to a small minority on the fringe of the workers’ movements. Speedy agreements between the Majority Social Democrats and the army and industry leadership calmed anxiety. The election of 19 January 1919 ended the period of revolutionary government, and led to the formation of coalition government made up of Majority Social Democrats and members of the Centre Party and Liberal Parties.
Demobilisation of the armed forces was the first task to be completed. In some places there were scuffles between army officers and local Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, but by and large the returning soldiers were given a hero’s welcome. In Berlin, they were greeted by the leader of the Majority Social Democrats, Friedrich Ebert, soon to become the Republic’s first president, who praised them for their bravery and claimed that ‘no enemy has conquered you’. Similar scenes were repeated in many cities and towns. The fact that Germany had actually lost the war seems to have been ignored.
The country’s desperate food shortage was given prime importance. The cessation of hostilities led to a slight increase in the weekly food rations. Whereas previously the army was given priority, the end of the war enabled a more equitable division. In particular, the release from army service of a large numbers of draught horses led to a temporary abundance of horse-meat, putting to an end the meatless weeks that had caused much hardship among the civilian population. Food imports were vitally important, and the Allies had agreed as an Armistice condition that Germany be allowed to bring in food, provided it used its own merchant shipping. But German ship-owners refused, because they feared that their ships, having left their harbours, would be confiscated.
A further difficulty arose over the method of payment. The German government suggested it could pay for its food purchases with a loan from the United States. When the Allies objected that such a loan would never pass Congress, the Germans offered to pay with their gold reserves. This caused anxiety among the French, who wanted the German gold for reparations. After several weeks, however, the French caved in, and by late March American food was arriving.
The Germans initially had great faith in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, despite the fact that they spelt out clearly that post-war Germany would be different and that the differences would not be in Germany’s favour. As German theologist and liberal politician Ernst Tröltsch saw it, people were living in a ‘dreamland’, ‘where everyone, without grasping the conditions and consequences, could portray the future in fantastic, pessimistic or heroic terms’.43 Perhaps, as one historian suggests, the terrible sacrifices and efforts of the war had destroyed people’s ability to realistically judge their place in history.44 In any case, most Germans viewed the post-war situation with optimism. Some sort of indemnity would have to be paid, but this would stay within reason and would not involve the costs of war. They expected, too, that the Republic would become a member of the League of Nations, that there was to be no significant territorial amputation, that Germany would keep its colonies, and that the principal of self-determination would decide whether the Austrians and Bohemians would become part of the nation.
Wishful thinking also extended to Germany’s political leaders. They would have had sufficient information about the Allies’ attitudes, but continued to believe that they were receiving full parity in Paris. They did not expect that the harsh treatment they had meted out to others would be reciprocated. When the Allies rejected complaints about their proposals by referring to the treaties imposed on France at Frankfurt and on Russia at Brest-Litovsk, the Germans insisted that negotiations should only be on the basis of the Fourteen Points and the Armistice. The German political leadership interpreted, or wilfully misinterpreted, the Fourteen Points and the Armistice conditions as and when it suited them — something they continued to do throughout the course of the reparations.45 The position Germany would take at Paris was to ignore the military verdict of the war and the fact that ‘peace without victory’ had long been overtaken by events, while trying to resume as much of its negotiating strength as was possible. Sally Marks’ assessment of the German stance on the reparation issue can be applied to the whole treaty:
As to tactics, [the German cabinet] agreed on loud and constant repetition of its views, numerous countercharges, and maximum propaganda to rouse world opinion, especially socialists, and to split the Entente, which it hoped was crumbling. Further, Germany would insist on absolute equality and an equal voice, demand neutral arbiters, and make an inflated offer, proposing to pay it in paper marks at the 1914 exchange rate or roughly triple their current value on neutral exchanges. In addition every means was to be used to lure the Allies into negotiation.46
The Allies would not have a bar of any of this. They agreed that Germany should not be consulted formally before the peacemakers in Paris had formulated a common draft. The Allies’ statesmen, facing a myriad of domestic problems in the aftermath of the war, were neither willing nor able to be bogged down in lengthy negotiations with the former enemy. They knew the Germans would attempt to follow the example set by the French a century earlier during the Congress of Vienna — to draw out proceedings, attempt to split the alliance of their victorious opponents (which the French did successfully), and then use division in their ranks to achieve favourable terms for the loser. But almost a hundred years had passed. International communications and the media had advanced, illiteracy had almost been wiped out, and there were now democratic governments. The public was better informed, and was able to challenge policies that greatly disadvantaged or exploited them. Under the dynastic system, rulers could ride roughshod over their subjects. In 1919, after all the damage and blood-letting, the public would not have accepted that their leaders sit down with the enemy and leisurely put the war to rest.
There is still a view, and not only in Germany, that German participation in the Paris peacemaking process would have led to a more successful post-war arrangement. There is no evidence to support this view. The position of the German delegation that made its way to Paris at the end of April was that of the government: to retain the status quo of 1916 and to resist any attempt to reduce Germany’s pre-war territory or industrial capacity. The chief of the delegation, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the physical epitome of the stereotypical Prussian aristocrat, was just as arrogant. He had been selected because of his criticism of some of the extreme war policies of the OHL. The economic experts in the German delegation had all been members of the old industrial and commercial elite, and included Otto Wiedtfeld, a Krupp director; Wilhelm Cuno and Philipp Heineken, directors of the HAPAG and Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping lines; and Ewald Hilger, an Upper Silesian mining magnate. These men could be expected to object to a treaty that, apart from ceding Alsace-Lorraine, temporarily mortgaged a proportion of Germany’s future coal production, surrendered most of her merchant fleet, and threatened to sever Upper Silesia from the Reich.
The French government had ordered that the trains bringing the delegation to Paris should loiter so that their passengers might see first-hand the results of their invasion. The sight of miles upon miles of a devastated landscape and razed towns and villages affected some of the delegates. After seeing this, how could they not be daunted by the prospect of what they faced in the negotiations? Arriving at the station, they were carted away in heavily guarded buses to the Hôtel des Réservoir, where their luggage had been dumped in the courtyard. They had to carry it themselves to their rooms. The Hôtel des Réservoir was where the French leaders had stayed during the negotiations with Bismarck in 1871. It was now surrounded by a stockade, the French claiming — with some truth — that this was for the delegation’s own security. The writing was clearly on the wall.