Alan Sharp

Haus Histories

WHAT HAS THE VERSAILLES SETTLEMENT GOT TO DO WITH ME?

Why ever should we still be interested in a peace conference held nearly ninety years ago? Surely the world has moved on and the details of the settlement at the end of a war almost now beyond living memory can have little relevance for us? Without the events of 11/9 (the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989) and of 9/11 (the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001), it might have been easier to suggest that the results of the Paris Peace Conference and the subsequent gatherings that formally concluded the First World War had indeed faded into the background. Even then, however, the widely held view that the Treaty of Versailles, and the other treaties signed in palaces in the Parisian suburbs in 1919 and 1920, held a key responsibility for the outbreak of a new major war in 1939 and hence for its consequences, might still have offered important reasons for reconsidering their negotiation and results. 

But there are more compelling contemporary reasons. The end of the Cold War, the collapse first of the Soviet empire and then the USSR itself, have all helped unfreeze disputes and quarrels on the fringes of Russia, in the Balkans, and in parts of Europe familiar to the peacemakers of 1919. According to the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm ‘The national conflicts tearing the continent apart in the 1990s were the old chickens of Versailles coming home to roost.’ The dilemmas raised by President Woodrow Wilson’s unsettling principle of national self-determination continue to haunt us. In the 1990s television audiences across the world watched the unfolding of the hideous euphemism of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Wilson’s concept of self-determination was civic rather than ethnic, but he raised hopes of national groupings across the collapsed multi-national empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, as well as further afield in Europe’s imperial possessions in Asia and Africa, and the questions that the right to national self-determination posed for the territorial and political integrity of existing states remain relevant today. 

The fundamental building block of the international system is still the state. Increasing numbers of states base their moral authority to rule on the principle of democracy. If they contain minorities who do not wish to continue to be part of that state, do such minorities have the right, ultimately, to secede, thus destroying the state, or can that right be denied, without destroying the state’s legitimacy?  The former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was better at expressing the problem than articulating the solution in his 1992 An Agenda for Peace when he wrote: ‘The sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of States within the established international system, and the principle of self-determination for peoples, both of great value and importance, must not be permitted to work against each other in the period ahead.’ As Robert Lansing, Wilson’s Secretary of State perceptively pointed out in 1918, national self-determination was ‘a phrase simply loaded with dynamite’. The explosions are still occurring.

In 1991, (before the worst Balkan excesses had occurred) the New York Times claimed that ‘From the Baltics to the Adriatic, from the Ukraine to the Balkans, oppressed millions have given new life to his imperative – and often troublesome principle. Indeed, if results are the measure, Wilson has proved the more successful revolutionary than Lenin.’ The idea of a contest between two visionaries who never met – Wilson and Lenin – links us to another contemporary problem, that of ideological conflict and the idea of an international conspiracy against the west. The peacemakers were acutely aware that Lenin and the Bolsheviks could offer an alternative vision of the future to that of Wilson’s reformist capitalist agenda. Their fear of bolshevism (which they did not define with any precision) and their exaggerated belief in Moscow’s degree of control and direction of revolutionary acts across the globe could be seen as presaging current concerns about the power and scope of al-Qaeda, fundamentalist Islam and a jihad-mentality.

Turkey, itself a product of the war and the initial, abortive, Treaty of Sèvres, remains uneasily poised between Asia and Europe, its application to join the European Union – the first and longest-standing enlargement proposal – still unresolved, its relationship with its Kurdish subjects still a matter of concern and its secular status, carefully crafted by Kemal Ataturk after the expulsion of the Caliph and Sultan and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, uncertain. Tensions, crises and violence in the Middle East are rarely absent from our newspapers. Their origins can, in many cases, be traced back to the ambiguities caused by conflicting First World War promises by Britain to Arabs, Jews and the French, and then the post-war mapping and manipulations of the region by the great powers and the diplomatic and military manoeuvrings of the local elites. China too had good reasons to remember the settlement with resentment, while the embarrassing refusal to accord racial equality to the Japanese left a legacy of discontent in Asia. 1919 was also one of the last great imperial settlements, with all the implications which that has had for the subsequent decolonisation processes in Africa and Asia.

Imperfect (or worse) as it undoubtedly was in certain senses, the settlement also had a nobler side. The concept of the League of Nations embodied the wish to create a world in which war would become an increasingly rare form of dispute resolution, but it was more than that. In  Wilson’s own words – ‘My conception of the League of Nations is just this, that it shall operate as the organised moral force of men throughout the world and that whenever or wherever wrong and aggression are planned or contemplated, this searching light of conscience will be turned upon them and men everywhere will ask, “What are the purposes that you hold in your heart against the fortunes of the world?”’ The main purpose of the League was political, it failed, but despite this there was overwhelming support, after the Second World War, to try again, and the United Nations was created. The League’s beneficial role in overseeing colonial mandates, inhibiting slavery, international prostitution, and the trading of drugs, or in promoting the protection of refugees and minorities, was acknowledged at the time and by later historians. Its concerns for human rights and dignity have been maintained and enhanced by its successor. Although the attempts to confront national and political leaders with their responsibilities largely collapsed in the Leipzig war crimes trials in the 1920s, there is a clear line from Leipzig, through Nuremberg, where the principle was firmly established, to the International Criminal Court established in 2002 and currently located in The Hague.

And, for all their faults, the men who made the settlement were liberals who tried to draw their maps around people, and to provide some sort of protection for those inevitably left on the wrong side of the new frontiers. Europe today is much more ethnically homogenous than in 1919, but the means – the Holocaust, massive population shifts after 1945 and 1989, and ethnic cleansing (murder) – would have been anathema to the peacemakers. There is also another statistic that should give us pause. The Versailles settlement left 13 million Germans beyond the borders of the Reich. Those minorities offered Hitler a convenient and plausible excuse to condemn and undermine the peace.  Today there are 26 million Russians scattered about the wreck of the old Soviet empire.

On 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Arch-Duke Franz Josef, the best known of the First World War peace treaties was signed with Germany in the Hall of Mirrors in Louis XIV’s showpiece palace of Versailles. The Paris Peace Conference had opened on 18 January 1919 – a Saturday, an unusual day to begin such a gathering – but neither this, nor the location of the signing ceremony, was accidental. On 18 January 1871, following Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had proclaimed the formation of the German Empire in the same Hall of Mirrors. This process of humiliation and counter-humiliation would be rejoined when, in 1940, following the crushing success of his panzers, Adolf Hitler insisted that the armistice with France be signed in the same railway carriage, in the same clearing in the forest of Compiègne where Marshal Foch and the Allied military commanders had received the German emissaries seeking an armistice in 1918. The 1940 armistice itself reflected a mirror image of the terms imposed on defeated Germany in 1918.

Peacemaking at the end of the First World War took longer than the war itself. It began with the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to 1921, continued with subsequent meetings to complete the abortive dictation of terms to the Ottoman empire, and ended with the signature of the Treaty of Lausanne negotiated with the new secular state of Turkey in July 1924. The efforts of the peacemakers have not met with great acclaim, partly because contemporary participants and commentators had perhaps had their expectations raised to unrealistic levels by the inspirational speeches delivered by President Woodrow Wilson of the United States in 1918, the most famous of which was the Fourteen Points speech of 8 January. 

En route to Paris Wilson himself realised that his rhetoric had created undeliverable aspirations and he gloomily (and accurately) predicted that the outcome of the conference would be a ‘tragedy of disappointment’. Furthermore, the war to make the world safe for democracy and to end all wars delivered neither outcome. The dictatorships of the 1920s and 1930s and the outbreak of a second major European conflict in 1939 seemed to make a mockery of these hopes. The vitriolic scorn poured on the settlement and the peacemakers by John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequence of the Peace, written and published in the six months after Keynes left the conference in disgust in June 1919, combined with the disappointment and disillusion expressed by participants like Harold Nicolson, James Headlam-Morley, Stephen Bonsal and Isaiah Bowman left the treaties with few friends and the coming of another war seemed to confirm that the peace was a botched effort.

Given the awesome nature of the task of the Paris Peace Conference this was not surprising. It had to reorder the world after the greatest conflict in history to date. It had to redraw maps, reassign populations, create a new mechanism to govern international relations, establish new norms of international justice by arraigning as war criminals not just combatants accused of operational illegalities, but the political and military leaders responsible for the war and its conduct, work out who would pay to repair all the damage both to property and people caused by industrialised warfare on a massive scale, and act as an emergency government for great swathes of Europe where traditional authority had suddenly vanished. The war that was supposed to be over by the autumn of 1914, or by Christmas at the latest – the Kaiser’s ‘short and jolly war’ – had lasted over four years and killed at least 8 million young soldiers. It had seriously injured two or three times more, crippling some of these young men for life. 

There were other bills to pay: the British Treasury estimated the Allies had spent £24,000 million (in 1914 gold values) to win the war; large areas of France and Belgium were devastated; the Austro-Hungarian and German emperors lost their thrones; the Caliph, the Sultan and the Ottoman empire itself soon departed; it cost the Russian Tsar his throne and the lives of himself and his family. Four great empires that had dominated Eastern and Central Europe and the Near and Middle East for centuries collapsed in a remarkable sequence of events, beginning with the Russian revolutions of 1917 and then the defeat and implosion of Russia’s enemies, as the Ottoman empire, Austria-Hungary and Germany all sued for peace in October 1918 and themselves experienced revolution and secession. 

The Conference was huge, with over a thousand delegates and representatives congregating in the French capital. Contemporaries looked to the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna for their precedents and models, but as the British prime minister, David Lloyd George told the House of Commons in April 1919, ‘You then had to settle the affairs of Europe. It took eleven months. But the problems at the Congress of Vienna, great as they were, sink into insignificance compared with those which we have had to attempt to settle at the Paris Conference. It is not one continent that is engaged – every continent is affected.’

It is that sense of universal engagement that this exciting series conveys. It will consider the ambitions and objectives of each of the main states, or would-be states, involved in the peacemaking process, using the central negotiator or negotiators from that state as the focal point. This biographical and analytical approach will offer insights into both the personalities and the policies involved. And the conference did not lack for colourful characters: the ebullient and enigmatic Welshman, David Lloyd George, the durable and cynical French premier, Georges Clemenceau, the messianic, though perhaps politically naive American president, Woodrow Wilson, and the rather peripheral Italian premier, Vittorio Orlando, made up the Big Four, the main decision makers in the spring and early summer of 1919. 

There were the Arabs. Even the prosaic Robert Lansing was lyrical when describing the delegation leader, Feisal: ‘his manner of address and the tones of voice seemed to breathe the perfume of frankincense and to suggest the presence of richly colored divans, green turbans, and the glitter of gold and jewels’. There were the Jews, led by Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-born Manchester chemistry professor. Some were more effective than others. Eleutherios Venizelos ‘the greatest Greek statesman since Pericles’ charmed, where Ion Bratianu of Rumania hectored and bullied, while his Queen, Marie, had equal lack of success in her attempts to seduce Wilson. 

Crafty Jan Smuts of South Africa – slimme Jannie – used his barrister’s skills and Jesuitical mind to find ways around tricky problems, while the deaf and difficult William Hughes of Australia ostentatiously removed his hearing aid when he did not wish to hear what was being said. From Japan came Prince Saionji, whose main characteristics were described as ‘intelligence, indolence and indifference’ and who, like Lloyd George, brought his mistress to the conference. Unlike Frances Stevenson, however, she was too indiscreet and had to be sent away.

There were other important and influential leaders and states involved from Europe, Asia, North and South America and Africa. By examining their objectives and the character of their leaders this series will bring a both a wider, yet more intimate perspective to the process of peacemaking after the Great War than is often achieved by studies that concentrate on the Big Four or simply on the affairs of Europe. It will also stress the wider relevance of the settlement to later developments in the 1920s and 1930s, and, as this article has argued, that relevance still persists in many of our contemporary issues and problems.

© Alan Sharp, 2009