The Consequences of the Peace: The Versailles Settlement

Aftermath and Legacy 1919-2015

Alan Sharp

• Editorial: Haus Publishing
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781908323934
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

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.

1

The Peace Settlements: Versailles, an Overview

In 1914 certain key decision-makers in Europe, particularly those in Berlin and Vienna, decided that the current international order must be remade, even if that required employing the risky and unpredictable method of war. The conflict they provoked was not the short, sharp, successful war they anticipated and its consequences were much deeper and longerlasting than they imagined or intended.

The Second World War would be an even greater conflict in terms of costs and geographical reach but there can be no doubt that the seminal event of the 20th century was the First World War. It consumed more men, munitions and material than anyone in 1914 had believed possible. Governments were forced to take responsibility for aspects of the economy, finance, production, transport and supply far beyond any previous experience. The cost of the war was astronomical and shattered previously held ideas of how much credit governments could raise. In 1917 and 1918 the United States alone spent more money than the accumulated total for all federal expenditure since independence.

On both sides of the lines women took the place of men in industry, agriculture, offices and commerce, creating increased expectations about the types and conditions of employment open to them, the facilities to which they were entitled in the workplace and their future political role. The war became a test not simply of military prowess but of the ability of governments to respond to the challenges of total war – war that required the state to commit not just its armed forces but the entirety of its resources to the task. Those that failed experienced defeat and revolution in varying degrees of intensity. Some of the victors had a greater chance to control the pace of social change but victory did not guarantee the survival of the existing political structures of the state, as Italy would soon discover. No matter how much people might wish to return to what President Warren G Harding termed ‘normalcy’, the world of 1914 was shattered and could not be resurrected.

The peacemakers assembled in Paris in 1919 had thus to treat not only what they perceived to be the root causes of the conflict, but also to find solutions to problems either created or exacerbated by the War itself. Germany was no longer an imperial or naval rival but beyond that little else was clear and, as politicians in a democratic age, they were deeply aware of the bitterness of electorates who had suffered the loss of family, friends and possessions. Four great empires had collapsed, leaving much of Eastern and Central Europe without government; and, as Margaret MacMillan argued, Paris became, in the first half of 1919, the world’s emergency capital, with the huge project of restoring order to vast areas of the continent and the wider world, yet often lacking the means to enforce its decisions.¹ This put the peacemakers under great pressure, not least because they feared that Bolshevism might fill the vacuum of power if they did not act swiftly.

As the American Secretary of State Robert Lansing noted on 4 April 1919, ‘It is time to stop fiddling while the world is on fire, while violence and bestiality consume society. Everyone is clamouring for peace, for an immediate peace.’² Wilson, in particular, was acutely aware that the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin could offer an alternative communist vision to his own ideal of a reformist capitalist and democratic world. His colleagues also knew that the problems of undoing the wartime measures to mobilise national resources for total war needed urgent attention, not least because these domestic issues were very likely to affect their political futures; and it is important to remember that none was yet ready to retire from power.

In Britain Lloyd George had just won an election but with the Liberals bitterly divided between factions supporting himself and former Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, he needed to build an alternative political platform perhaps based on a more permanent alliance with the Conservatives. Vittorio Orlando had no intention of relinquishing power in Italy at that point. The American Constitution did not then debar Wilson from seeking a third term, whilst even the 77-year-old Georges Clemenceau believed that a grateful French Parliament should choose him by acclamation to replace his bitter rival Raymond Poincaré as President of the Republic when the latter’s seven year term ended in early 1920.³

Each needed to consider the political implications of his Paris decisions. Thus Wilson uneasily resisted Japanese demands for a racial equality clause in the League Covenant in deference to a perceived threat of increased Asian immigration and Orlando found himself trapped by the vigorous domestic campaign for the port of Fiume (Rijeka). The British and French publics expected Germany to pay for the cost of the war. Yet, at the same time, in accepting Wilson’s 1918 speeches as the basis for the eventual settlement in the 5 November 1918 pre-Armistice agreement with Germany, they had committed themselves to a higher moral standard of behaviour than previous peacemakers. When political reality and principles collided, as they often did in the complexity of the problems faced, the resulting compromises provided an easy target for critics seeking hypocrisy, not least because Wilson had created enormous expectations, some unintended and many undeliverable.

Politics is the art of the possible and the peacemakers in Paris were constrained by domestic expectations, the limits of their own power to implement decisions, the overwhelming nature of their task and the circumstances in which they operated. The lack of an agreed priority of issues or agenda certainly contributed to a feeling that the Conference was not well ordered. Anyone who has conducted sensitive negotiations at any level will affirm that ‘open covenants of peace, openly arrived at’ was an impossible aspiration and, although Wilson did not mean this to be taken literally, it represented another example of disappointed expectations, particularly for journalists. Direct negotiations with the Germans might have produced a better settlement, but fears that Allied unity would collapse in their course precluded that option. The absence of Russia left an enormous gap but in 1919 no one was sure who could truly be said to represent Russia. Reparations and national self-determination both generated huge controversy, arguments over principle and frustrated hopes.

‘We are too timid and modest about our own achievements; there is too much criticism and not enough defence. Cannot we recognize that the settlement of 1919 was an immense advance on any similar settlement made in Europe in the past? In broad outline, it represents a peace of reason and justice, and the whole fabric of the continent depends on its maintenance.’
JAMES HEADLAM-MORLEY, 1925

Yet the Treaties did have their defenders. With the advantage of greater perspective, Headlam-Morley took a more positive view by 1925 than he had in June 1919. ‘We are too timid and modest about our own achievements; there is too much criticism and not enough defence. Cannot we recognize that the settlement of 1919 was an immense advance on any similar settlement made in Europe in the past? In broad outline, it represents a peace of reason and justice, and the whole fabric of the continent depends on its maintenance.’ The problem was that few people or states were prepared to agree and, as Harold Nicolson indicated to the Foreign Office on 20 February 1925, although the Treaties with the minor exenemy states were guaranteed by a superiority of force, ‘The Treaty of Versailles possesses no such safeguard, since the preponderance of whatever man-power would be certainly and unhesitatingly available tells against, and not in favour of, the status quo.’⁴

Nicolson points to a useful guide to measuring how stable international relations are likely to be at any given time: does an analysis of the attitudes of the principal actors suggest whether they support or oppose the present state of affairs – are they status quo or revisionist in outlook and what is the overall balance between them? There can be little doubt that many states in Europe and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s were revisionist, but whilst they might oppose the existing state of affairs they did not agree on what should replace it; and very often their views on an alternative order were deeply opposed.

The next key question is whether singly or collectively they had the power to translate aspirations into actualities. Despite Nicolson’s rather pessimistic appraisal the answer throughout the 1920s and early 1930s was that they did not, but that balance began to alter radically as the 1930s progressed. It is also interesting to note that it is normally taken that winners will favour the status quo and losers revision and, whilst this held true of the losers, this was not the case for many of the gainers from the post-war settlements.

At the eastern end of Europe the Soviet Union gradually emerged from the wreckage of Tsarist Russia as the Bolsheviks triumphed in the complicated struggles following the fall of the Romanovs. It posed a dual challenge to the settlement either in its guise as a centre of revolution or as a disgruntled state. In principle it was the ultimate revisionist, believing that the existing order of states was about to be overturned by the worldwide revolution which it was its function to promote and encourage. Normal diplomatic relations with other states were pointless since they would soon vanish. When Leon Trotsky was appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs in November 1917 he announced that he proposed to go to the Foreign Ministry, issue a few decrees and shut up shop.

Yet despite brief communist control of Munich and a slightly longer-lived regime in Hungary, by 1920 reality suggested that the world was not about to turn red. Trotsky’s successor in the Foreign Ministry, Georgy Chicherin, called the Treaty of Tartu with Estonia signed on 2 February 1920 ‘the first experiment in peaceful coexistence with bourgeois states’ – an interesting early use of a phrase more usually associated with the 1950s and 1960s.⁵ Even so, despite concluding border agreements with various neighbours, the Anglo-Russian Trade Treaty in 1921 or the more controversial Rapallo Treaty with Germany in 1922, the Soviet Union’s international stance was always ambiguous, preceding Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in confronting other states with the problem of interpreting whether their actions and ultimate aims were driven by ideology or realpolitik.

Although it was gradually able to reassert control over briefly independent areas like Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the USSR suffered major territorial losses as a result of the First World War, civil conflict and subsequent confrontations. Finland and the three Baltic states gained their independence and, after the dramatic events of the Russo-Polish War of 1920, its frontier with Poland ended much further to the east than that recommended by the Paris Peace Conference. Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union wished to reverse these losses, though its power to do so was, for the moment at least, limited.

Moving west, newly independent Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia together with Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia might have been expected to be status quo in outlook but each had unfulfilled ambitions which made relationships between them difficult. In some cases they owed their very existence to the unpredictable near simultaneous collapse of Austria-Hungary and the German and Russian Empires; and, even if Austria-Hungary had disappeared, it seemed inevitable that Russian and German power would eventually revive. In those circumstances it was essential that they cooperate to preserve their mutual independence but, failing to heed the old adage about needing to hang together to avoid hanging separately, many fell victim to the events of 1938–9. Disputes about territory and resources, like that between Czechoslovakia and Poland over Teschen, bedevilled relations between what the Germans referred to as ‘season states’ – states with limited life-spans. When Adolf Hitler dismembered Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 the actions of neighbours who swooped to satisfy old territorial scores was symbolic of this disunity, which the French, hopeful of creating some sort of menace on Germany’s eastern borders to compensate for the loss of their pre-war Russian alliance, viewed with despair, convinced as they were that Germany would attack the settlement in the east before turning west.⁶

Hungary was the really big European loser in the post-war settlement. Under the Treaty of Trianon Hungary lost twothirds of its pre-war territory and nearly 60 per cent of its people, consigning some one-third of its Magyar population to become minorities in neighbouring states. It was a bitter revisionist throughout the inter-war period, moving closer to Hitler’s Germany and eventually joining the Axis powers in the Second World War. Unlike Germany, however, Hungary did not have the power to support its demands for the revision of a settlement that emerged in June 1920 partly from decisions already taken about other states at a time when, as one Hungarian official perceptively remarked, the Allies ‘were frightfully bored by the whole Paris Peace Conference.’ In the words of its leading modern poet, Gyulla Illyés, writing in 1980, ‘Trianon to us bears the meaning of a human slaughterhouse: it is there that every third Hungarian was crushed into subsistence under foreign rule; it is there that the territories of our native language were torn to pieces.’⁷

The other remnant of Austria-Hungary, the tiny Germanspeaking rump state of Austria, had no wish, in 1919, to be independent, instead wanting to join Germany, something that the French, in particular, opposed. Given the difficulty the Allies had experienced in defeating Germany, and no matter what the tenets of self-determination might suggest, they were never going to allow Germany to increase its population by 8 million Austrians or 3 million Sudetenlanders from Czechoslovakia, or to gain strategic advantages ensuring domination of the Balkans. Despite this unhappy beginning, compounded by enormous financial and economic problems, the Austrian Republic came to value its national sovereignty before Hitler’s forced Anschluss in March 1938 and re-emerged as an independent state after the Second World War. It might be classed, therefore, as one of the unexpected successes of the settlement.⁸

Germany clearly did not regard the settlement as a success; and throughout the period of the Weimar Republic the electorate made it plain they expected their leaders to seek revision of the Treaty, preferably by peaceful means. Most, including Hitler in Mein Kampf, accepted the loss of Alsace- Lorraine and few resented the transfer of part of Schleswig to Denmark, after a plebiscite, promised by Otto von Bismarck in 1864 but long postponed. The territory ceded to Poland was a very different matter. Germans regarded Poland as a failed state whose people had proved incapable of self-government in the 18th century and saw the transfer of Germans to Polish rule as intolerable. They resented the forced disarmament imposed by the Treaty and saw reparations as a harsh burden. Gustav Stresemann, often portrayed as the acceptable face of Germany in the inter-war period, made no secret of the initial changes he wished to implement in the wake of the Dawes Plan, which seemed to have provided an answer to the problem of reparations, and the Locarno Agreements under which he had accepted Germany’s western frontiers – the return of Upper Silesia, Eupen-Malmédy and Danzig, a renegotiation of the access rights of the Polish Corridor, the reinstatement of full German sovereignty over its own territory and policies, proper protection for German minorities abroad and the recognition of Germany as a major power, to be symbolised by a permanent seat on the League of Nations Council and the right to hold colonial mandates. He hinted at further demands once Germany regained its military strength. Germany may have suffered much fewer losses proportionately than Hungary but its greater international weight meant that it was the most important revisionist state even before Hitler came to power.⁹

German National Socialism’s ideology was an adaptation and development of Social Darwinism, with its gradation of races, its justification of imperial rule and its belief that life was a struggle in which races and states were either increasing their power or in decline. Since Hitler made it plain that the restoration of Germany’s 1914 frontiers and possessions would not be sufficient to satisfy his vision of its world-power status, he can hardly be called a revisionist, no matter how carefully he disguised his early demands in that light. His aim was rather the reversal of the result of the First World War and then further German expansion and conquest. Historians dispute whether his ambitions were bounded by Europe and its ‘near abroad’ or were limitless.

Fearing for the future of France, with its smaller and ageing population, Clemenceau declared to the Senate on 11 October 1919, ‘The treaty does not state that France will have many children, but it is the first thing that should have been written there. For if France does not have large families, it will be in vain that you put all the finest clauses in the treaty, that you take away all the German guns. France will be lost because there will be no more French.’¹⁰ He was acutely aware of the disparity both in population and birth rates between Germany and France, and thought that, no matter what adjustments the settlement might make, a restored Germany would be much more powerful than a France which owed its present victory to a coalition of powers secured by a combination of skill and luck. In an ideal world France too would be a revisionist power – seeking to make the Treaty even tougher – and indeed Poincaré’s occupation of the Ruhr basin in January 1923 may have had this amongst its aims.¹¹

For the most part, however, French leaders accepted that Clemenceau had negotiated the best deal he could get, given that he had (apparently) secured a guarantee of French security from Britain and the United States, a long-term occupation of the Rhineland with the right to remain if Germany did not execute the Treaty, a share of reparations, various restrictions on Germany’s military and economic capacity, diminutions of German resources, including the product of the Saar coalfields for France, and a reduction of Germany’s population and territory. In these circumstances France was thus the major status quo power of the inter-war period and the main defender of the post-war settlement in Europe though not necessarily elsewhere, for example in the Near East. Its hope was that Britain would be its major partner in execut...