Aspects of British Policy and the Treaty of Versailles

Of War and Peace

B. J. C. McKercher, Erik Goldstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367856403
• eBook ISBN: 9781000050950
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science Research & Methodology
• Index: History

Aspects of British Policy and the Treaty of Versailles looks at some key issues involving British policy and the Treaty of Versailles, one of the twentieth century's most controversial international agreements.

The book discusses the role of experts and the Danzig Question at the Paris Peace Conference; the establishment of diplomatic history as a field of academic research; and the role of David Lloyd George and his Vision of Post-War Europe. Contributors also look at the restitution of cultural objects in German possession, and after the war, the Treaty's impact on both Britain's enemy, Germany, and its ally, France, revealing how it profoundly affected the European balance of power.

Aspects of British Policy and the Treaty of Versailles will be of great interest to scholars of diplomatic history as well as modern history and international relations more generally. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Diplomacy & Statecraft.

The Quest for Stability: British War Aims and Germany, 1914–1918

B. J. C. McKercher

ABSTRACT

British war aims concerning Germany developed haphazardly during the Great War of 1914–1918. The vicissitudes of unexpectedly conducting total war–one lasting more than four years–periodically deflected their consideration. Inter-Allied diplomacy and pressures from non-governmental lobbyists from Central–Eastern Europe seeking independent states to succeed the Habsburg, Romanov, and Wilhelmine empires forced reconsideration at crucial moments, for instance, after the advent of the nascent Bolshevik regime in Russia in late 1917 to early 1918. So, too, did British public opinion. Nonetheless, the British government had a clear general strategy: return stability on the European continent. In this context, the prime minister after December 1916, David Lloyd George, became central. Beyond the general aim, however, he wanted to avoid firm commitments over a range of issues touching Germany to give him flexibility in negotiating with the other Allied leaders at the eventual Peace Conference. Thus, less concerned with the minutiae of transforming war aims involving German territorial losses, disarmament, and paying for the war, he looked to make deals that might lack strategic purpose.

We are not fighting a war of aggression against the German people. Their leaders have persuaded them that they are fighting a war of self-defence against a league of rival nations bent on the destruction of Germany. That is not so.

Lloyd George, January 1918¹

Looking to re-establish stability on post-Great War Europe, British policy concerning Germany at the Paris Peace Conference devolved from David Lloyd George, the prime minister after December 1916. From August 1914 until his rise to power, the development of British war aims had been desultory at best, a function of the Liberal and coalition governments of Herbert Asquith to fight what became an unexpected total war. Lloyd George came to Downing Street because Britain’s war effort seemed to flag after the great battles of 1916–Verdun and the Somme; the government needed renewed vigour in leadership. Central to the new premier’s style of governance was to dominate all facets of statecraft, especially foreign policy and inter-Allied relations. In this process concerning Germany, his efforts had two interconnected dimensions: developing British war aims, whilst–with an eye to the return to peace–ensuring Allied solidarity when their differing objectives might blunt the joint war effort and imperil British post-war interests in Europe and the wider world. The problem in all of this was that Lloyd George stood as a pragmatic politician, one who rarely thought in strategic terms. It also meant that policy emerged largely at the government’s apex and decisions passed down.

When Britain went to war on 4 August 1914, Asquith’s Cabinet had no objective other than defeating Germany and its allies–Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and, after late October when it joined the Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire. Learning from Prussia’s success in unifying Germany between 1864 and 1871 by its Army using movement and mobility to crush enemy forces, pre-war planning in all belligerent Powers looked to the attack and assumed that any future struggle would not last beyond several months–the “cult of the offensive.”² During the 1914 “July Crisis,” whilst ensuring its political survival because some ministers and a number of backbench Liberals opposed entering the conflict–and Asquith and his foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, initially thought the crisis might be defused³ –Britain’s government ultimately had sound strategic reasons for joining its French and Russian entente partners in the European struggle: ensuring Britain’s ability to influence if not sustain the post-war continental balance of power.⁴ If staying out and the Germans and their allies triumphed, Britain’s ability to influence the balance would be eliminated. If the Franco-Russian coalition prevailed without British backing, Paris and St. Petersburg would look unkindly towards neutral Britain with the same result. Involvement in the war would give Britain a place in a peace settlement as a victor Power or, possibly if success on the battlefield could not be achieved, a leading role in a negotiated agreement with the Entente’s enemies. As Grey told the House of Commons on 3 August 1914 when he sought its support for the Cabinet’s decision to declare war on Germany if its forces did not withdraw from Belgium–the German Army had violated Belgian neutrality to outflank the strongly-defended Franco-German border in attacking France:

I do not believe for a moment, that at the end of this war, even if we stood aside and remained aside, we should be in a position, a material position, to use our force decisively to undo what had happened in the course of the war, to prevent the whole of the West of Europe opposite to us–if that had been the result of the war–falling under the domination of a single Power, and I am quite sure that our moral position would be such as to have lost us all respect.⁵

Thus, Britain’s principal war aim was to defend the balance of power and see a return to international stability–although the Cabinet, through Grey’s 3 August speech, also emphasised “British interests, British honour, and British obligations.”⁶ In these events, the government, Parliament, and the overwhelming majority of at least the British reading public held Germany responsible for the war. For some historians, tsarist Russia might stand as a greater long-term threat to the Empire⁷ ; other Powers, say Austria-Hungary, could possess actual blame for initiating the “July Crisis.”⁸ Or, as Lloyd George later said and which is the thesis of a recent insightful analysis of immediate war origins, the Great Powers simply “slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay.”⁹ However, British mistrust of German policy did not suddenly emerge in 1914. Beginning in 1896 with Kaiser Wilhelm II publicly supporting anti-British Boer republics in Southern Africa, through the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911 both German-designed to break the Anglo-French Entente, the failure of Anglo-German accommodation negotiations between 1909 and 1911, and growing Middle East competition, all suffused by Anglo-German naval rivalry stretching back to 1899, suggested an aggressive adversary. Consequently, as July 1914 unfolded, Wilhelmine Germany constituted a lethal threat to British national and Imperial security–admittedly short-term relative to the longstanding Russian menace, but in the moment more lethal–and the German Army’s simultaneous attack on France and Russia clear evidence of Berlin’s determination to extend German hegemony over Europe. Whether these perceptions misjudged German ambitions is beside the point. The German record since at least 1896 spoke for itself–even for Lloyd George in 1911¹⁰ –hence, the British honestly believed Berlin guilty of exploiting the 1914 Balkan crisis to destroy French and Russian military strength and have Germany dominate the continent.¹¹

By late 1914–early 1915, every belligerent government recognised that the war would not be of short duration–the anticipated war of movement and mobility in Western Europe transformed into one of stasis with the advent of trench warfare along France’s eastern borders.¹² Although the Eastern Front saw more fluid lines of combat–the Middle East fell in-between–and Germany’s African, East Asian, and Pacific Ocean colonies fell easily to the British and their allies, fighting in Europe and the Balkans saw Britain and the other belligerents confront a total war conditioned by trench warfare and a strategy attrition to achieve victory.¹³ Because of the obvious fog of war in the first 18 months of fighting, beyond returning Alsace-Lorraine to France, reviving Belgium, and acquiescing in Russian territorial demands over Poland and creating a large Slav state in the Balkans,¹⁴ Asquith’s government did not expand British considerations beyond the general aim of ensuring the post-war balance. Grey related this situation to the British ambassador at St. Petersburg in mid-November 1914, “Discussion of terms of peace is academic till [the] war has progressed sufficiently to make Germany contemplate the most obvious terms of peace such as the restitution of the Lost Provinces to France.”¹⁵

Consideration of British war aims languished until summer 1916 when, despite the understandable cost of fighting the war in blood and treasure that consumed government energies, London faced pressure to delineate its goals. Admittedly, in January 1916, Woodrow Wilson, the American president, despatched his personal representative, Colonel Edward House, to Europe to seek a peace agreement. The neutral United States could facilitate a settlement, and embittered Anglo-American relations caused by Allied economic and financial warfare against the Central Powers, including a British naval blockade–which interfered with what Washington saw as its neutral right to trade with any belligerent–ameliorated. Although having obligatory talks at Paris and Berlin, House spent most of his efforts in London. Wilson, Grey learnt, looked to convoke a conference and, if Berlin either baulked at attending or rebuffed a “reasonable” settlement, the United States might enter the war on the Allied side. On 22 February 1916, although initialling a document outlining this plan, Grey offered a qualification: Britain would decide when to bring the House-Grey memorandum into effect, and only with French concurrence.¹⁶ Unsurprisingly, except perhaps to the White House, House’s mission came to nought. With the Battle of Verdun just underway and the Russians looking to push the Germans back in the East, the three Entente Powers saw no benefit in a negotiated peace agreement; moreover, Berlin wanted recognition of its post-August 1914 conquests. Most important, House appears to have exceeded his instruc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Of War and Peace: Aspects of British Policy and the Treaty of Versailles
• 1 The Quest for Stability: British War Aims and Germany, 1914–1918
• 2 “A House of Cards Which Would Not Stand”: James Headlam-Morley, the Role of Experts, and the Danzig Question at the Paris Peace Conference
• 3 “The Light of History”: Scholarship and Officialdom in the Era of the First World War
• 4 Lloyd George and the American Naval Challenge: “The Naval Battle of Paris”
• 5 From Caxton Hall to Genoa via Fontainebleau and Cannes: David Lloyd George’s Vision of Post-War Europe
• 6 Cultural Heritage, British Diplomacy, and the German Peace Settlement of 1919
• 7 Great Britain in French Policy Conceptions at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919
• 8 Germany, Versailles, and the Limits of Nationhood
• Bibliography
• Index