The Consequences of the Peace: The Versailles Settlement: Aftermath and Legacy 1919-2015

By Alan Sharp

The Versailles Settlement, at the time of its creation a vital part of the Paris Peace Conference, suffers today from a poor reputation: despite its lofty aim to settle the world’s affairs at a stroke, it is widely considered to have paved the way for a second major global conflict within a generation. Woodrow Wilson’s controversial principle of self-determination amplified political complexities in the Balkans, and the war and its settlement bear significant responsibility for boundaries and related conflicts in today’s Middle East. After almost a century, the settlement still casts a long shadow.

This revised and updated edition of The Consequences of the Peace sets the ramifications of the Paris Peace treaties—for good or ill—within a long-term context. Alan Sharp presents new materials in order to argue that the responsibility for Europe’s continuing interwar instability cannot be wholly attributed to the peacemakers of 1919–23. Marking the centenary of World War I and the approaching centenary of the Peace Conference itself, this book is a clear and concise guide to the global legacy of the Versailles Settlement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Feb 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781908323934

Alan Sharp

Born in 1934, Alan Sharp's career began in 1965, with the publication of his acclaimed first novel, A Green Tree in Gedde, but he completed only one more novel before migrating to Hollywood and becoming a much sought after screenwriter. Three of his screenplays are now recognized as classics of the New American Cinema of the 1970s. Since the 1980s, he has completed film projects on Sam Peckinpah's The Osterman Weekend and Rob Roy.

Book preview

Consequences of Peace

The Versailles Settlement:

Aftermath and Legacy 1919–2010

Alan Sharp

For Louise, David and Gwen

First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

Haus Publishing Ltd

70 Cadogan Place

London SW1X 9AH

www.hauspublishing.com

Copyright © Alan Sharp, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

ebook ISBN 978-1-907822-16-2

Series design by Susan Buchanan

All rights reserved.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Series Introduction

Introduction

1 The Peace Settlements: Versailles, An Overview

2 The German Problem

3 The League of Nations and the United Nations

4 National Self-Determination: Wilson’s Troublesome Principle

5 Minority Protection, Disarmament and International Law

6 Ideology and the American Century

Conclusion: ‘The Peace to end Peace’

Notes

Chronology

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Once again I would like to express my appreciation to Dr Barbara Schwepcke of Haus Publishing for her inspirational championing of this series and for her support and encouragement. Jaqueline Mitchell has again proved to be a sympathetic and constructive commissioning editor whose expertise has proved invaluable. I have learned much from the other contributors to the series and thank them and everyone at Haus connected with the project for their sterling efforts. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to good friends and colleagues who have read all or parts of the drafts of this book, corrected mistakes and made helpful suggestions. Baroness Ruth Henig, Dr Stephen Ryan and Professors Tom Fraser, Tony Lentin and Sally Marks have all been generous with their help and advice and without the enthusiasm and encouragement of Tom, Tony and Sally in particular there might not have been a concluding volume for the series at all. That would certainly have been true but for the unfailing support and love of my wife, Jen, who has patiently tolerated my relationship with my computer. I offer my sincere thanks to all concerned but any errors that remain are entirely my responsibility.

Alan Sharp

University of Ulster

Series Introduction

The publisher’s idea for Makers of the Modern World: The Peace Conferences of 1919–23 and Their Aftermath came from a painting by Sir William Orpen – The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919. After seeing it at the Imperial War Museum, Dr Barbara Schwepke envisioned a new appraisal of the settlements at the end of the First World War from the point of view of each of the victors and losers, many of whom had been assembled into Orpen’s enigmatic portrayal of the signature, part idealised, part ironic. Orpen, a Dubliner of strong views and no stranger himself to controversy – his original 1921 version of To The Unknown British Soldier in France showed two naked British soldiers guarding the Union Jack draped coffin of the Unknown Warrior and attracted both powerful approval and denunciation – was indeed an apt artist to commemorate the signature of a settlement that has divided opinion ever since.¹

There are 32 volumes in the series. With the exception of a volume on the League of Nations, three with regional focuses on South America, Central America and South East Asia and a concluding account of the longer-term consequences of the settlement, each author was asked to conform to a set pattern: The Life and the Land – an account of the career of the major peacemaker from each state and the background history of his country (and, in 1919, all the figures under consideration were men); The Paris Peace Conference – an analysis of the main aims and objectives for his country with which he approached the negotiations and a consideration of his performance at the conference; and The Legacy – an appraisal of the aftermath of the war and conference for that particular state, together with details of the later career and life of the main protagonist.

Given the wide variety of characters and states involved it was inevitable that it would be easier for some authors than others to adapt their material to this structure. The Big Four(Georges Clemenceau from France, David Lloyd George from Britain, Vittorio Orlando from Italy and Woodrow Wilson from the United States) were central figures on the conference stage throughout the first six months of 1919, representing, as they did, the most powerful of the victorious states with global or imperial aspirations. Others, whose states had much more limited ambitions and who possessed much less leverage, had only a brief moment in the Parisian limelight as they sought to sway the judgements of the main decision makers. Yet each contributed to the settlement that formed an integral part of the cataclysmic consequences of the First World War – the most destructive and devastating war in the history of mankind to that date and surely the single most significant event of the twentieth century.

Even so it might still be asked why we should still be interested in a peace conference held nearly a century ago. What relevance can the details of the settlement at the end of a war now beyond living memory have 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 11September 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 historian Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The national conflicts tearing the continent apart in the 1990s were the old chickens of Versailles coming home to roost.’² 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. Naturally enough for the president of a nation of immigrants, Wilson’s concept of self-determination was civic rather than ethnic, stressing personal choice, not race, language or place of birth, as the key factor in determining nationality. Nevertheless, whether he intended to or not, he raised hopes of national groupings across the collapsed multi-national empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey, and further afield in Europe’s imperial possessions in Asia and Africa. 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’.3 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 [Wilson’s] imperative – and often troublesome principle. Indeed, if results are the measure, Wilson has proved the more successful revolutionary than Lenin.’⁴ 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 and France to Arabs, Jews and each other, 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, whilst 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?’⁵

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 and Turkish 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 and murder after1945 and 1989 – 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.

Peacemaking at the end of the First World War took longer than the war itself. It began with Paris Peace Conference of1919 to 1920, 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 state of Turkey in July 1923. 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.⁶

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. 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, poured vitriolic scorn on the settlement and the peacemakers. This, combined with the disappointment and disillusion expressed by participants like Harold Nicolson, James Headlam-Morley, Stephen Bonsal and Robert Lansing, left the treaties with few friends. The coming of another war seemed to confirm that the peace was a botched affair.⁷

Given the formidable 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 swaths 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 crowns; 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 1917and 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, accompanied by their supporting staffs. 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.’⁸

It is that sense of universal engagement that this series seeks to convey.

By examining the objectives and the character of their leaders and the aims and ambitions of their states its volumes hope to bring 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 the simply on the affairs of Europe. There was never any question of imposing an editorial prescription upon the verdicts reached by individual authors and their diverse interpretations of the settlement reflect their differing perspectives and opinions. What their varying approaches all emphasise is the complexity, range and difficulty of the tasks facing the peacemakers and this should serve to give pause to those who would too readily seek to condemn men working under enormous pressure and faced with an awesome responsibility. The volumes also stress the wider relevance of the settlement to later developments in the 1920s and 1930s, a relevance that still persists in many of our contemporary issues and problems. Together they make a compelling argument for the overall title of the series: The Makers of the Modern World.

Alan Sharp

General Series Editor

Introduction

‘There is no single person in this room who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted.’

Lord Robert Cecil, Paris, 30 May 1919¹

The Peace Treaties signed in various Parisian palaces and suburbs at the end of the First World War have not enjoyed a sparkling reputation. In the words of Jan Christian Smuts, the South African delegate and close colleague of the British Premier, David Lloyd George, ‘such a chance comes but once in a whole era of history – and we missed it.’² The prevailing perception remains that this was a huge opportunity spurned; that the Treaties at the end of the war to end war and to make the world safe for democracy delivered neither outcome, and that they had a large responsibility for the establishment of the dictatorships of the inter-war period and the outbreak of a second conflagration in 1939. In the post-Second World War and Cold War eras they continue to attract condemnation for their legacies in the Balkans, the Middle East, the Russian borderlands, the former European empires in Africa and Asia, and indeed worldwide, particularly in the wake of two seminal events, 11/9 (the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989) and 9/11 (the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001).

‘I have not found one single person here who approves of it as a whole. While in most cases particular clauses can be defended, the total effect is, I am sure, quite indefensible and in fact is, I think, quite unworkable.’

JAMES HEADLAM-MORLEY, JUNE 1919

Smuts’ disappointment, shared by Lord Robert Cecil, who had also played a prominent role in the drafting of the League of Nations Covenant, was typical of many attending a meeting of British and American experts in May 1919. They were anxious to embody their Peace Conference cooperation and experience into an organisation with parallel branches in each country designed to deliver an essential aspect of President Woodrow Wilson’s brave new world – an informed, aware and trusted public opinion which might encourage leaders to revisit and make the much needed improvements to the settlement. Their misgivings were expressed by Alfred Zimmern, who told Arnold Toynbee, a fellow member of the influential British Political Intelligence Department, that ‘Paris disgusted and depressed me more than I can say. The Majestic and the Crillon [the main hotels in which the British and American delegations were based] were full of unease and heartbroken men’. The PID’s effective leader, James Headlam-Morley, who had helped to find solutions to difficult questions such as the future of the Saar, Danzig and the protection of national minorities, added his testimony, writing to his brother on the eve of the signature of the Treaty of Versailles, that ‘I have not found one single person here who approves of it as a whole. While in most cases particular clauses can be defended, the total effect is, I am sure, quite indefensible and in fact is, I think, quite unworkable.’³

Their disquiet was emphasised and publicised by another former Conference participant, John Maynard Keynes, a Treasury official who resigned from the British delegation in June 1919 to write one of the most influential polemics of the 20th century, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in December 1919. This stinging attack on the Allied leaders and all their works, in particular reflecting Keynes’ bitter disappointment with Wilson, has played a major role since in shaping the widely held perception of the settlement as a failure and a missed opportunity. Later memoirs by Conference members such as Harold Nicolson, Headlam-Morley, Stephen Bonsal and Robert Lansing did little to dispel the contemporary conclusion of a distinguished British soldier, Archibald Wavell, who served in both World Wars, that ‘After the war to end war they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a Peace to end Peace.’ The outbreak of a second major continental war in September 1939 seemed to confirm both Wavell’s observation and the verdict of the French Commander of the Allied Forces on the Western Front, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who allegedly declared of the Treaty, ‘This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.’⁴

The renewed conflict in Europe in 1939, which escalated into a new world war in 1941, incurred costs and consequences even more far-reaching than the inconceivable losses, by contemporary standards, of the First World War. Unsurprisingly, in those circumstances, later commentators continued to endorse the contemporary condemnations of the settlement and particularly the Treaty of Versailles. The American diplomat George Kennan wrote in 1985, ‘I think it’s increasingly recognized that the Second World War was an almost unavoidable prolongation of the first one, resulting from the very silly, humiliating and punitive peace imposed on Germany after World War I.’ Kennan’s conclusion is echoed by the dust-jacket blurb of foreign correspondent David Andelman’s 2008