In the 1920s, the League largely failed in bringing about Disarmament. It was one of the key aims of the League.
The Washington Naval Conference 1921
At the Washington Naval Conference in 1921, the USA, Japan, Britain and France agreeed to limit the size of their navies but it was a far as disarmament ever got. The USA, Britain, and Japan agreed to limit size of navies according to the ratio (5-5-3 - this ratio was changed to 10-10-7 at the London Naval Conference of 1930, and the agreement collapsed altogether in 1935 when the Japanese demanded parity with the USA and Britain).
The Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments (1921)
The main problem with Disarmament efforts was how to guarantee a country's security if it gave up its weapons. This was the argument in 1921 when a Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments was set up by the League of Nations to suggest possible initiatives, plans and solutions. It discussed proposals such as prohibiting chemical warfare and the bombing of civilian populations, and limiting artillery and tanks. What made it unique was that its members were specifically appointed as private individuals, not government representatives. Even so, its members found it difficult to agree about how a country's could be guaranteed if it gave up its weapons.
The draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance rejected (1923)
In 1923, the League's first attempt at a Disarmament Treaty was accepted by France and other nations but rejected by Britain because it would tie it to defending other countries.
The Commission on Armaments presented a draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance in 1923, which proposed to make a war of aggression illegal; if a country was attacked, all countries of the League would send troops to defend it. It was discussed at the League’s Assembly of September 1923. But the Assembly rejected the draft treaty after objections from Britain, which feared to commit troops which were needed to defend the Empire. It was an example of how unanimous decisions in the Assembly could cripple effective decision-making.
Discussions for Disarmament Conference (1926 to 1931)
The League set up in 1926 the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference to prepare for a Disarmament Conference. It was a a Commission to prepare for a Conference on the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments.
The size of the different countries’ armies at this time was – France: 733,707; Russia: 562,967; Great Britain: 520,948; Italy: 308,000; Japan: 235,056; the USA: 136,560; and Germany: 99,086. Discussions were however very slow. It took five years to een agree to a 'draft convention' for the Conference and in 1933, it was rejected by Germany.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact 1928
Faced with this, therefore, the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and the US Secretary of State Frank B Kellogg worked outside the League of Nations to persuade 65 nations to sign the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, also known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact (August 1928), in which all the signatories agreed to condemn war as a means of settling disputes. At the time, it was looked on as a turning point in history, but in effect it achieved nothing. Of course everybody disapproved of an aggressive war – but the Pact said nothing about what would happen if a country was attacked.
The World Disarmament Conference 1932-1937
After six years of preparations, the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments of 1932-37 (sometimes called the World Disarmament Conference or Geneva Disarmament Conference) eventually met in Geneva under the chairmanship of former British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson.
The talks ran into difficulties from the start, because Germany demanded the same level of armaments as other powers, while France wanted Germany to be kept disarmed, and Britain and America were not prepared to offer the unlimited support that France needed to give up its armaments. Although the conference staggered on until 1937, talks in practice broke down in October 1933 when Hitler withdrew from both the Conference and the League of Nations – for the rest of the 1930s, nations were concerned to increase their armaments to get ready for the war everyone realised was coming.
Conclusion
The failure of disarmament was especially damaging to the League's reputation in Germany. Germany had disarmed. It had been forced to do so by the TOV but no other countries had disarmed to the same degree. Many countries were not prepared to give up or dreduce their own armies and they were not willing to be the first to disarm.
Even so, the failure of the LON over disarmament did not seem so serious because international agreements like the Locarno Treaty, the Kellog-Briand Pact and the Washington Naval Conference seemed to promise a more peaceful world. However, as you can see, by 1930s, disarmament as a useful approach for building international political stability and world peace was already seriously questionable.
Sunday, February 10, 2013
The League of Nations met for the last time
The League of Nations met for the last time
By Ruth Henig | Published in History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 2 2010
Political 20th Century
The League of Nations met for the last time on April 8th, 1946. Ruth Henig reassesses the importance of the League of Nations.
April 8th 1946
The conventional view of the League of Nations, which was set up by the peacemakers at the end of the First World War, is that it was a complete failure having been unable to prevent the outbreak of a second major European conflict in 1939. Some dismiss it as a total irrelevance and those who study it as ‘eccentric historians’.
It is high time that these verdicts are challenged and that the League is seen for what it was, a bold step towards international cooperation which failed in some of its aims but succeeded comprehensively in others. I am one of those ‘eccentric historians’ who has studied the League for over 30 years and who argue that its creation marked an important step on the road to our contemporary global system of international organisation, coordinated through the United Nations, which was built on the foundations of the League’s experience.
It is undoubtedly the case that expectations of what the League might be able to achieve were too high. It was hoped that some of its mechanisms would be able to prevent international crises from escalating into full-scale conflict as had happened in 1914. But they relied on means such as delay to allow impartial enquiry to take place and on member states accepting the rules and conventions of the League Covenant. It was clear early on that the League, which had no army of its own or members’ troops to enforce its will, would not be able to combat overt aggression. As Lord Balfour, a former British prime minister and foreign secretary, commented in 1924: ‘The danger I see in the future is that some powerful nation will pursue a realpolitik in the future as in the past … I do not believe we have yet found, or can find, a perfect guarantee against this calamity.’ Nor was the League able to secure agreement among the leading powers of the world to reduce their armaments.
Looking back 80 years, with the benefit of recent experience of international arms negotiations, we can see that the expectations placed on the League to bring about disarmament were completely unrealistic. But at the time, the failure of the League’s Disarmament Conference of 1932–34, coupled with its inability to secure strong and agreed action against Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, caused its leading members and their publics to lose faith in the ability of the League to promote peace.
And yet its work in some areas was groundbreaking and increasingly effective. The Permanent Court of International Justice, established under Article 14 of the League Covenant, started work in 1922 and was kept busy from the outset, giving advisory opinions to the League Council or deciding cases submitted to it by individual governments. By 1939 it had heard 66 cases and its success showed that a standing international court had a role to play ‘in the gradual acceptance by states that rules had a place in international politics’. The International Court of Justice established after the Second World War by the United Nations reproduced in almost identical form the League’s Permanent Court and has continued to extend its international authority to the present day.
The International Labour Organisation was another body operating under the aegis of the League to ensure just and humane conditions of labour in member countries and to promote the physical, moral and intellectual well-being of industrial wage-earners. It flourished in the interwar period and pursued its objectives vigorously through conferences and the adoption of labour conventions. After 1945 it became a specialist agency under the United Nations and has continued with its mission, operating virtually unchanged to the present day. Many other specialist United Nations bodies, such as the Economic and Social Council, the World Health Organisation, the International Refugee Organisation and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organisation), were built on the foundations of the pioneering work carried out by League agencies before 1939.
One of the most innovative aspects of the League’s operation was the establishment of its secretariat, organised along the lines of an international civil service, with members drawn from over 30 countries including the United States. The League’s secretariat became internationally respected for the quality of its officials and as a unique repository of information and experience relating to international organisation and administration. Moreover, the role of secretary-general carried increasing importance. Again, its structure and working methods were adopted by the United Nations and also by the European Economic Community in the late 1950s, one of whose strongest advocates was former League official Jean Monnet.
There can be no doubt that the creation of an international body in 1920, powered by the leading states of the world and able to pre-empt conflict by bringing to the table for settlement disputes which threatened to disturb international peace, was a dynamic step forward in international diplomacy. So was the establishment of an annual League Assembly at which small and medium powers could raise issues, give their views on world developments and put pressure on the great powers.
Such gatherings promoted international collaboration and compromise and helped to bring into existence what historian Susan Pedersen refers to as a ‘different dynamic of international co-operation’, when those who worked on its behalf began to craft the ‘norms and agreements by which our world is [now] regulated, if not quite governed’. It was indeed the world’s ‘first sustained and consequential experiment in internationalism’, a significant and exploratory first phase which paved the way for a second, more effective and lasting period of international collaboration under the United Nations. Rather than dwell on its weaknesses or condemn its failures, we should applaud the League’s successes, while continuing to learn important lessons from its history.
Ruth Henig is a politician and former lecturer in modern European history at the University of Lancaster. Her book The League of Nations (Haus Publishing) was published on January 10th, 2010 to mark the 90th anniversary of the birth of the League of Nations.
By Ruth Henig | Published in History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 2 2010
Political 20th Century
The League of Nations met for the last time on April 8th, 1946. Ruth Henig reassesses the importance of the League of Nations.
April 8th 1946
The conventional view of the League of Nations, which was set up by the peacemakers at the end of the First World War, is that it was a complete failure having been unable to prevent the outbreak of a second major European conflict in 1939. Some dismiss it as a total irrelevance and those who study it as ‘eccentric historians’.
It is high time that these verdicts are challenged and that the League is seen for what it was, a bold step towards international cooperation which failed in some of its aims but succeeded comprehensively in others. I am one of those ‘eccentric historians’ who has studied the League for over 30 years and who argue that its creation marked an important step on the road to our contemporary global system of international organisation, coordinated through the United Nations, which was built on the foundations of the League’s experience.
It is undoubtedly the case that expectations of what the League might be able to achieve were too high. It was hoped that some of its mechanisms would be able to prevent international crises from escalating into full-scale conflict as had happened in 1914. But they relied on means such as delay to allow impartial enquiry to take place and on member states accepting the rules and conventions of the League Covenant. It was clear early on that the League, which had no army of its own or members’ troops to enforce its will, would not be able to combat overt aggression. As Lord Balfour, a former British prime minister and foreign secretary, commented in 1924: ‘The danger I see in the future is that some powerful nation will pursue a realpolitik in the future as in the past … I do not believe we have yet found, or can find, a perfect guarantee against this calamity.’ Nor was the League able to secure agreement among the leading powers of the world to reduce their armaments.
Looking back 80 years, with the benefit of recent experience of international arms negotiations, we can see that the expectations placed on the League to bring about disarmament were completely unrealistic. But at the time, the failure of the League’s Disarmament Conference of 1932–34, coupled with its inability to secure strong and agreed action against Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, caused its leading members and their publics to lose faith in the ability of the League to promote peace.
And yet its work in some areas was groundbreaking and increasingly effective. The Permanent Court of International Justice, established under Article 14 of the League Covenant, started work in 1922 and was kept busy from the outset, giving advisory opinions to the League Council or deciding cases submitted to it by individual governments. By 1939 it had heard 66 cases and its success showed that a standing international court had a role to play ‘in the gradual acceptance by states that rules had a place in international politics’. The International Court of Justice established after the Second World War by the United Nations reproduced in almost identical form the League’s Permanent Court and has continued to extend its international authority to the present day.
The International Labour Organisation was another body operating under the aegis of the League to ensure just and humane conditions of labour in member countries and to promote the physical, moral and intellectual well-being of industrial wage-earners. It flourished in the interwar period and pursued its objectives vigorously through conferences and the adoption of labour conventions. After 1945 it became a specialist agency under the United Nations and has continued with its mission, operating virtually unchanged to the present day. Many other specialist United Nations bodies, such as the Economic and Social Council, the World Health Organisation, the International Refugee Organisation and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organisation), were built on the foundations of the pioneering work carried out by League agencies before 1939.
One of the most innovative aspects of the League’s operation was the establishment of its secretariat, organised along the lines of an international civil service, with members drawn from over 30 countries including the United States. The League’s secretariat became internationally respected for the quality of its officials and as a unique repository of information and experience relating to international organisation and administration. Moreover, the role of secretary-general carried increasing importance. Again, its structure and working methods were adopted by the United Nations and also by the European Economic Community in the late 1950s, one of whose strongest advocates was former League official Jean Monnet.
There can be no doubt that the creation of an international body in 1920, powered by the leading states of the world and able to pre-empt conflict by bringing to the table for settlement disputes which threatened to disturb international peace, was a dynamic step forward in international diplomacy. So was the establishment of an annual League Assembly at which small and medium powers could raise issues, give their views on world developments and put pressure on the great powers.
Such gatherings promoted international collaboration and compromise and helped to bring into existence what historian Susan Pedersen refers to as a ‘different dynamic of international co-operation’, when those who worked on its behalf began to craft the ‘norms and agreements by which our world is [now] regulated, if not quite governed’. It was indeed the world’s ‘first sustained and consequential experiment in internationalism’, a significant and exploratory first phase which paved the way for a second, more effective and lasting period of international collaboration under the United Nations. Rather than dwell on its weaknesses or condemn its failures, we should applaud the League’s successes, while continuing to learn important lessons from its history.
Ruth Henig is a politician and former lecturer in modern European history at the University of Lancaster. Her book The League of Nations (Haus Publishing) was published on January 10th, 2010 to mark the 90th anniversary of the birth of the League of Nations.
The League of Nations: A League of its Own
The League of Nations: A League of its Own
By Ruth Henig | Published in History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 2
Political 20th Century
The League of Nations has been much derided as a historical irrelevance, but it laid the foundations for an international court and established bodies that the United Nations maintains today, says Ruth Henig.
Chinese delegate addresses the League of Nations concerning the Manchurian Crisis in 1932.
The conventional view of the League of Nations, which was set up by the peacemakers at the end of the First World War, is that it was a complete failure having been unable to prevent the outbreak of a second major European conflict in 1939. Some dismiss it as a total irrelevance and those who study it as ‘eccentric historians’.
It is high time that these verdicts are challenged and that the League is seen for what it was, a bold step towards international cooperation which failed in some of its aims but succeeded comprehensively in others. I am one of those ‘eccentric historians’ who has studied the League for over 30 years and who argue that its creation marked an important step on the road to our contemporary global system of international organisation, coordinated through the United Nations, which was built on the foundations of the League’s experience.
It is undoubtedly the case that expectations of what the League might be able to achieve were too high. It was hoped that some of its mechanisms would be able to prevent international crises from escalating into full-scale conflict as had happened in 1914. But they relied on means such as delay to allow impartial enquiry to take place and on member states accepting the rules and conventions of the League Covenant. It was clear early on that the League, which had no army of its own or members’ troops to enforce its will, would not be able to combat overt aggression. As Lord Balfour, a former British prime minister and foreign secretary, commented in 1924: ‘The danger I see in the future is that some powerful nation will pursue a realpolitik in the future as in the past … I do not believe we have yet found, or can find, a perfect guarantee against this calamity.’ Nor was the League able to secure agreement among the leading powers of the world to reduce their armaments.
Looking back 80 years, with the benefit of recent experience of international arms negotiations, we can see that the expectations placed on the League to bring about disarmament were completely unrealistic. But at the time, the failure of the League’s Disarmament Conference of 1932–34, coupled with its inability to secure strong and agreed action against Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, caused its leading members and their publics to lose faith in the ability of the League to promote peace.
And yet its work in some areas was groundbreaking and increasingly effective. The Permanent Court of International Justice, established under Article 14 of the League Covenant, started work in 1922 and was kept busy from the outset, giving advisory opinions to the League Council or deciding cases submitted to it by individual governments. By 1939 it had heard 66 cases and its success showed that a standing international court had a role to play ‘in the gradual acceptance by states that rules had a place in international politics’. The International Court of Justice established after the Second World War by the United Nations reproduced in almost identical form the League’s Permanent Court and has continued to extend its international authority to the present day.
The International Labour Organisation was another body operating under the aegis of the League to ensure just and humane conditions of labour in member countries and to promote the physical, moral and intellectual well-being of industrial wage-earners. It flourished in the interwar period and pursued its objectives vigorously through conferences and the adoption of labour conventions. After 1945 it became a specialist agency under the United Nations and has continued with its mission, operating virtually unchanged to the present day. Many other specialist United Nations bodies, such as the Economic and Social Council, the World Health Organisation, the International Refugee Organisation and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organisation), were built on the foundations of the pioneering work carried out by League agencies before 1939.
One of the most innovative aspects of the League’s operation was the establishment of its secretariat, organised along the lines of an international civil service, with members drawn from over 30 countries including the United States. The League’s secretariat became internationally respected for the quality of its officials and as a unique repository of information and experience relating to international organisation and administration. Moreover, the role of secretary-general carried increasing importance. Again, its structure and working methods were adopted by the United Nations and also by the European Economic Community in the late 1950s, one of whose strongest advocates was former League official Jean Monnet.
There can be no doubt that the creation of an international body in 1920, powered by the leading states of the world and able to pre-empt conflict by bringing to the table for settlement disputes which threatened to disturb international peace, was a dynamic step forward in international diplomacy. So was the establishment of an annual League Assembly at which small and medium powers could raise issues, give their views on world developments and put pressure on the great powers.
Such gatherings promoted international collaboration and compromise and helped to bring into existence what historian Susan Pedersen refers to as a ‘different dynamic of international co-operation’, when those who worked on its behalf began to craft the ‘norms and agreements by which our world is [now] regulated, if not quite governed’. It was indeed the world’s ‘first sustained and consequential experiment in internationalism’, a significant and exploratory first phase which paved the way for a second, more effective and lasting period of international collaboration under the United Nations. Rather than dwell on its weaknesses or condemn its failures, we should applaud the League’s successes, while continuing to learn important lessons from its history.
Ruth Henig is a politician and former lecturer in modern European history at the University of Lancaster. Her book The League of Nations (Haus Publishing) was published on January 10th, 2010 to mark the 90th anniversary of the birth of the League of Nations.
Learning from the League
1. Voting - Unanimous vs. majority
Under the Covenant, decisions of the League could be made only by unanimous vote. This rule applied both to the League's Council, which had special responsibilities for maintaining peace (the equivalent of the UN's Security Council), and to the all-member Assembly (the equivalent of the UN's General Assembly). In effect, each member state of the League had the power of the veto, and, except for procedural matters and a few specified topics, a single "nay" killed any resolution. Learning from this mistake, the founders of the UN decided that all its organs and subsidiary bodies should make decisions by some type of majority vote (though, on occasion, committees dealing with a particularly controversial issue have been known to proceed by consensus). The rule of unanimity applies only to five major powers—France, China, the UK, the US, and the Russian Federation—and then only when they are acting in their capacity as permanent members of the Security Council. The Security Council also proceeds by majority vote, but on substantive (though not on procedural) matters, it must include the concurring votes of all the permanent members. (See the section on Voting in the chapter on the Security Council.)
Read more: http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/United-Nations/Comparison-with-the-League-of-Nations-VOTING.html#ixzz2KXcwGyvB
2. Settlement of Disputes - International conflicts and the settlement of disputes
The League of Nations’ primary objective was to settle disputes by any means other than outright war. However, reaching this objective depended on the willingness of the sovereign States in question to cooperate with the League of Nations and to respect the maxims of the Covenant. By the time it folded, more than 60 international disputes had been brought before the League of Nations. During the first 10 years of its existence, only eight of the 30 disputants resorted to hostilities or war. Some of the peaceful settlements included:
1920: the Aaland Islands. After the Russian Revolution, Finland declared its independence and sovereignty over these Islands. However, its Swedish-speaking population claimed it had the right to vote for Swedish governance. Before it could develop into an armed conflict, both parties accepted the solution offered by the League of Nations. Though autonomy under Finnish rule was continued, important guarantees were granted to the Aaland Islands, and demilitarization under League of Nations observance was carried out.
1922: Vilna. Both Lithuania and Poland were claiming sovereignty over Vilna, and in 1922, the League of Nations was called in. Despite the Council’s recommendation that the city be placed under Lithuanian rule however, the disputing States were unable to reach an agreement acceptable to all. Consequently, when the Conference of Ambassadors redefined the Polish border in 1923, Vilna became part of Poland.
1923: Memel. After the First World War, this previously Baltic port on the Eastern frontiers of Germany was taken over by the Allies under a provisional administration responsible to the League of Nations’ Conference of Ambassadors. After a coup d’état, the port was under Lithuanian sovereignty. Special privileges were granted to the mostly German population as well as to Poland, which received the right to use the port for transit and trade.
The Greco-Bulgarian conflict (1925) and Leticia (1932)
There existed in the Covenant a provision that empowered the League of Nations to take action and even impose sanctions (within specific guidelines) in order to settle international disputes brought before the Council by any one of its Member States.
One such case arose when, in 1925, a border conflict broke out between Greece and Bulgaria that threatened to escalate into an all-out war in the Balkans. The Bulgarian Government appealed at once to the League of Nations (under Article 10 of the Covenant) and an Extraordinary Session of the Council was called, and subsequently held in Paris. Aristide Briand, the representative of France, acted as Chairman. Under the observation of the British, French and Italian military attachés, the hostilities ceased and the evacuation of the territory occupied by Greek forces was carried out without incident. This conflict is but one of the few in which the system as outlined in the Covenant was successful; a conflict was identified, the Council met without delay, a fair hearing was given, and a general agreement arrived at for maintaining the peace and providing justice for all concerned.
A more complicated example of an international dispute requiring the League of Nations’ assistance was that which took place between Colombia and Peru over Leticia, a remote border district in the Upper Amazon valley. After several attempts to solve the problem on a regional level, the Peruvian and Colombian delegates finally turned to the League of Nations for assistance in 1933. However, it was only after Luis Sanchez Cerro, the Peruvian president, was assassinated that an agreement could be reached. After the ownership of the Letician territory was transferred to an International Commission for one year, it was returned to Colombia.
China: the Manchurian crisis of 1932
On 19 September 1931, the League of Nations was made aware of an incident provoked by anti-Japanese activists at the Japanese-owned South Manchurian railway line in China. Consequently, the Japanese army invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria. China immediately appealed to the world’s powers for their intervention. Under the chairmanship of Aristide Briand, and with the active participation of the United States of America (which had thus far refrained from recognizing the League of Nations as a global mediator), the Council attempted to negotiate a peaceful solution. However, neither the Council nor the Assembly were able to agree on the imposition of sanctions of any kind, which in accordance with the Covenant, could have been used against any Member State that had violated the principles of the League of Nations.
Four months after the initial outbreak of hostilities, the Council dispatched an Inquiry Commission to China under the leadership of the British diplomat, the Earl of Lytton. By the time the so-called Lytton Commission finally arrived in China in April of 1932, the Japanese Army had already installed the Manchurian State of Manchukuo. In order to determine the source of the conflict and to come up with possible measures to restore the peace between China and Japan, the Commission began its investigations with the assistance of George Moss, a member of the British Consular Service who was also fluent in Chinese.
On the advice of the Lytton Report (September 1932), the League of Nations refused to recognize Manchukuo as a genuine State and proposed a series of measures to re-establish the status quo. While China accepted the League of Nations’ recommendations for restoring peace in the area, Japan did not and, as a result, withdrew from the League of Nations in 1935.
Ethiopia (Abyssinia)
In 1933, the Fascist Government of Benito Mussolini planned its attack on Ethiopia with the intention to expand the colonial territory of Italy, despite the fact that in 1928 it had signed the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Friendship, Conciliation and Arbitration. In December of 1934, a clash occurred between the armed forces of the two States at Walwal on the Ethiopian side of the frontier with Italian Somaliland. Mussolini declared the incident “an act of self-defence” and, therefore, not subject to arbitration. Compensation was demanded in addition to formal recognition of the area as Italian.
When this was refused by Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie, the case was taken as a casus belli by Italy. As a Member of the League of Nations, Ethiopia brought the case before the Council, but in order to continue his pursuit of expansion, Mussolini ignored all League of Nations proposals in order to continue to mobilize his military forces in the northern Ethiopian state of Eritrea.
Rounds of talks in Geneva proved futile, a clear indication that the Council was unable to protect a small Member State from the interests of a larger and more influential one and, as a result, oil sanctions that would have halted Mussolini’s military endeavours were not imposed. Thus, armed with a deadly combination of superior weaponry and poison gas, Italy was able to launch an attack on Ethiopia in December of 1935.
Once Addis Ababa fell in May of 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie, who was in Geneva at the time, went to the Assembly and again asked the League of Nations for help, but to no avail, as Italy’s conquest had been formally recognized by most countries. However, Mussolini’s declaration of war on France and the United Kingdom provoked the latter into facilitating the Emperor’s recapture of his country, and by 1941, the Ethiopian Government was back in power and Ethiopia became an independent State.
International reconciliation and disarmament
The 1925 Locarno Pact
In 1924, with Gustav Stresemann becoming head of Germany’s Foreign Office, a more liberal foreign policy was ready to consider cooperating with the League of Nations rather than viewing the new organization as an instrument set up to suppress Germany. Thus, in December of 1924, Stresemann dispatched an application for Germany’s admission to the Council in which he requested (among other things) a seat on the Council and special treatment concerning hostile actions to be taken against any Covenant-breaking State. Because of the latter request, admission was denied.
In early 1925, Stresemann made a second attempt. Even though the Geneva Protocol was not yet in force, its principles of “security” made the follow-up application possible. Stresemann proposed to the British and French Foreign Offices his guarantee of Germany’s intent to respect the Treaty of Versailles. After the exchange of Stresemann’s proposals between London, Paris and Berlin, Sir Austen Chamberlain and Aristide Briand invited Member States to a common meeting in Locarno, Switzerland.
Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland were also invited to join the meeting. The negotiations held in October of 1925 resulted in the Locarno Pact, signed by Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. In addition, four arbitration conventions were signed between Germany and the following States: Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France and Poland. Thus, Locarno prepared the ground for reconciliation between Germany and her neighbours Belgium and France, and for Germany’s eventual entry into the League of Nations in 1926. However, in 1933, shortly after Nazism took control of the country, Germany withdrew her membership from the League of Nations.
Briand’s plan for a European Union
The original idea of a “United States of Europe” can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, it was Aristide Briand who revitalized the concept at the end of the 1920s.
Briand and those in favour of a “European Union” believed that its realization depended on the establishment of new institutions which would cooperate with those of the League of Nations, yet would be independent of them in all essential aspects. Upon further discussion, it was decided that the creation of such a union should occur entirely within the framework of the League of Nations. During the 1929 Assembly, Briand promised the 27 invited European Member States that he would submit a more detailed plan that they could then discuss.
While other Members waited without further commitment for Briand’s plan to evolve, Stresemann supported Briand’s plan and spoke out on the need for European stamps, a European Customs Union, and a European coinage in order to remain economically competitive with forces outside Europe.
By the time Briand’s proposal was ready for discussion in May of 1930, Stresemann had died and Europe was in the process of undergoing some drastic changes in the form of growing levels of unemployment and nationalism. However, Briand’s proposal was brought before the 1931 Assembly and it was agreed to go ahead with plans to establish a Commission of Inquiry for European Union. Briand was elected as Chairman and Sir Eric Drummond as Secretary.
The practical activities of the Commission of Inquiry merged with the general work of the League of Nations for the purpose of economic cooperation. In addition, the Commission was a catalyst in bringing the Soviet Union and Turkey into closer cooperation with the League of Nations after inviting the two States to join the Commission.
The Geneva Protocol and the Disarmament Conference of 1932
Disarmament was one of the most important questions to be considered by the League of Nations. The condition, however, was that Germany would agree to the Treaty of Versailles and would be the first country to reduce its arms in accordance with the Treaty.
The Advisory Commission and the Temporary Mixed Commission (later replaced by a so-called “Coordination Commission”) were bodies entrusted with the creation of a plan for disarmament. The issue was discussed in each Assembly and in many sessions of the Council and other special meetings, but all these efforts failed in the end.
One of the main obstacles faced was the belief of the main Powers that their security depended on maintaining a level of armaments equal or even superior to those of their neighbours. They also preferred to determine their own needs in armaments. Another problem was that the Soviet Union and the United States of America not being members of the League of Nations, did not take part in the process until 1932.
Thus, the 1922 Draft Treaty of Mutual Guarantees and the 1923 Treaty of Mutual Assistance, piloted by Lord Cecil with the close cooperation of Edouard Benes and the French delegation, were not accepted in the Assemblies.
The new more liberal Governments in France under Edouard Herriot and in the United Kingdom under Ramsay MacDonald brought a new spirit to the disarmament negotiations and as a result the fifth Assembly adopted the Geneva Protocol on the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, in October 1924, proposing the general disarmament of all nations linked with compulsory arbitration and security guarantees. It also pledged that a general Disarmament Conference would be convened shortly. This Conference eventually convened in 1932 and lasted, with a short interruption, for two and a half years.
Despite numerous petitions and public demand for disarmament, the countries were not ready to sacrifice their security. Thus, the Conference was a failure.
The protection of minorities
After the war, the new Eastern European States of Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia were forced to sign agreements granting religious, social and political equality to their minorities, whether or not they had been defeated. In order to supervise these agreements, the League of Nations set up the Minority Section, whose influential programmes were rather unique at that time. Its responsibilities included screening the incoming petitions, requesting responses from the accused States, forwarding cases to the ad hoc “Committee of Three”, and/or investigating matters on its own. If the case appeared before the Committee, a decision had to be made as to whether or not the Council’s involvement was warranted.
In the beginning, the reports were unofficial; however, after 1929, the Council decided that the reports were to be published in the League of Nations’ Official Journal.
Between 1920 and 1939, 883 petitions were submitted to the Minorities Section. Only 16 of the 395 petitions deemed “receivable” ever reached the attention of the Council, and of these 16, the Council very reluctantly condemned the accused State of improper treatment in only four cases.
Due to the efforts of Erik Colban, the first director of the Minority Section, a more personal approach was developed. The Section officials would investigate matters locally and pursue their findings. This close cooperation between the Section and the accused States made it possible in many cases to avoid further aggravation and alleviate future problems.
The Mandate system
As a result of the war, the Allied and associated Powers acquired the territories that were previously under the sovereignty of Germany and the Ottoman Empire. As their inhabitants were at this time considered incapable of ruling themselves, the Peace Conference of 1919 decided that they should be ruled by mandate, whereby powers were conferred upon a State chosen by the League of Nations to govern a region elsewhere in order “to secure the well-being and development of the peoples who inhabited the territories in question”. Belgium, the British Empire, and France were entrusted with the governance of the mandated territories.
In accordance with the Covenant, annual reports concerning these regions were to be submitted to the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandate Commission, established in February of 1921. It was on the basis of these reports that the Commission advised the Council as to whether or not the conditions of each mandate were being strictly observed.
The members of the Commission were nominated by the Council, and because of the need for impartiality, it was preferred that they come from non-mandated Powers. As a result, the Commission was trusted and often consulted by both mandated and non-mandated Powers during its last years. Three categories of mandates, “A”, “B” and “C”, were applied “according to the stage of the development of the people, the geographical situation of the territory, its economic conditions and other similar circumstances” (Article 22, paragraph 3).
Under the United Nations, the work of the Mandates Commission continued through the Trusteeship Council, though it was no longer composed of non-governmental representatives. However, as the previously mandated countries have become officially recognized as sovereign and independent States, its responsibilities have steadily diminished.
The Saar and the Free City of Danzig
One of the unique responsibilities assigned to the League of Nations by the Treaty of Versailles was the supervision of the former German border territories of the Saar basin and the Free City of Danzig. As stated in the 1920 Treaty, the Territory of the Saar basin was to be placed under the administration of the League of Nations for 15 years. During that time, the Saar was to be isolated from the rest of Germany, and as compensation for the war, France was given control of its coal mines.
The administration of the Saar was entrusted to a Governing Commission consisting of five members chosen by the Council of the League of Nations: one representative of France, one native German inhabitant of the Saar, and three representatives of countries other than France and Germany. On 13 January 1935, the inhabitants of the Saar determined their sovereignty by plebiscite. On that day, order was guaranteed by an International Police Force composed of British, Dutch Italian, and Swedish soldiers. Over 90 per cent of the votes cast called for the immediate reintegration of the Saar into Germany. This decision took effect on 1 March 1935.
The inhabitants of the Free City of Danzig and the territory surrounding it were primarily of German nationality. However, Poland needed to have access to the sea. In accordance with the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations established a High Commission to oversee this district. Danzig was to be self-governing, though under the League of Nations’ protection. Poland, however, was to govern the City’s foreign affairs and maintain certain transit, postal and harbour rights. The High Commissioner appointed by the Council was to reside in Danzig and make the final decision in cases when mutual agreement between disputants could not be reached.
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By Ruth Henig | Published in History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 2
Political 20th Century
The League of Nations has been much derided as a historical irrelevance, but it laid the foundations for an international court and established bodies that the United Nations maintains today, says Ruth Henig.
Chinese delegate addresses the League of Nations concerning the Manchurian Crisis in 1932.
The conventional view of the League of Nations, which was set up by the peacemakers at the end of the First World War, is that it was a complete failure having been unable to prevent the outbreak of a second major European conflict in 1939. Some dismiss it as a total irrelevance and those who study it as ‘eccentric historians’.
It is high time that these verdicts are challenged and that the League is seen for what it was, a bold step towards international cooperation which failed in some of its aims but succeeded comprehensively in others. I am one of those ‘eccentric historians’ who has studied the League for over 30 years and who argue that its creation marked an important step on the road to our contemporary global system of international organisation, coordinated through the United Nations, which was built on the foundations of the League’s experience.
It is undoubtedly the case that expectations of what the League might be able to achieve were too high. It was hoped that some of its mechanisms would be able to prevent international crises from escalating into full-scale conflict as had happened in 1914. But they relied on means such as delay to allow impartial enquiry to take place and on member states accepting the rules and conventions of the League Covenant. It was clear early on that the League, which had no army of its own or members’ troops to enforce its will, would not be able to combat overt aggression. As Lord Balfour, a former British prime minister and foreign secretary, commented in 1924: ‘The danger I see in the future is that some powerful nation will pursue a realpolitik in the future as in the past … I do not believe we have yet found, or can find, a perfect guarantee against this calamity.’ Nor was the League able to secure agreement among the leading powers of the world to reduce their armaments.
Looking back 80 years, with the benefit of recent experience of international arms negotiations, we can see that the expectations placed on the League to bring about disarmament were completely unrealistic. But at the time, the failure of the League’s Disarmament Conference of 1932–34, coupled with its inability to secure strong and agreed action against Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, caused its leading members and their publics to lose faith in the ability of the League to promote peace.
And yet its work in some areas was groundbreaking and increasingly effective. The Permanent Court of International Justice, established under Article 14 of the League Covenant, started work in 1922 and was kept busy from the outset, giving advisory opinions to the League Council or deciding cases submitted to it by individual governments. By 1939 it had heard 66 cases and its success showed that a standing international court had a role to play ‘in the gradual acceptance by states that rules had a place in international politics’. The International Court of Justice established after the Second World War by the United Nations reproduced in almost identical form the League’s Permanent Court and has continued to extend its international authority to the present day.
The International Labour Organisation was another body operating under the aegis of the League to ensure just and humane conditions of labour in member countries and to promote the physical, moral and intellectual well-being of industrial wage-earners. It flourished in the interwar period and pursued its objectives vigorously through conferences and the adoption of labour conventions. After 1945 it became a specialist agency under the United Nations and has continued with its mission, operating virtually unchanged to the present day. Many other specialist United Nations bodies, such as the Economic and Social Council, the World Health Organisation, the International Refugee Organisation and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organisation), were built on the foundations of the pioneering work carried out by League agencies before 1939.
One of the most innovative aspects of the League’s operation was the establishment of its secretariat, organised along the lines of an international civil service, with members drawn from over 30 countries including the United States. The League’s secretariat became internationally respected for the quality of its officials and as a unique repository of information and experience relating to international organisation and administration. Moreover, the role of secretary-general carried increasing importance. Again, its structure and working methods were adopted by the United Nations and also by the European Economic Community in the late 1950s, one of whose strongest advocates was former League official Jean Monnet.
There can be no doubt that the creation of an international body in 1920, powered by the leading states of the world and able to pre-empt conflict by bringing to the table for settlement disputes which threatened to disturb international peace, was a dynamic step forward in international diplomacy. So was the establishment of an annual League Assembly at which small and medium powers could raise issues, give their views on world developments and put pressure on the great powers.
Such gatherings promoted international collaboration and compromise and helped to bring into existence what historian Susan Pedersen refers to as a ‘different dynamic of international co-operation’, when those who worked on its behalf began to craft the ‘norms and agreements by which our world is [now] regulated, if not quite governed’. It was indeed the world’s ‘first sustained and consequential experiment in internationalism’, a significant and exploratory first phase which paved the way for a second, more effective and lasting period of international collaboration under the United Nations. Rather than dwell on its weaknesses or condemn its failures, we should applaud the League’s successes, while continuing to learn important lessons from its history.
Ruth Henig is a politician and former lecturer in modern European history at the University of Lancaster. Her book The League of Nations (Haus Publishing) was published on January 10th, 2010 to mark the 90th anniversary of the birth of the League of Nations.
Learning from the League
1. Voting - Unanimous vs. majority
Under the Covenant, decisions of the League could be made only by unanimous vote. This rule applied both to the League's Council, which had special responsibilities for maintaining peace (the equivalent of the UN's Security Council), and to the all-member Assembly (the equivalent of the UN's General Assembly). In effect, each member state of the League had the power of the veto, and, except for procedural matters and a few specified topics, a single "nay" killed any resolution. Learning from this mistake, the founders of the UN decided that all its organs and subsidiary bodies should make decisions by some type of majority vote (though, on occasion, committees dealing with a particularly controversial issue have been known to proceed by consensus). The rule of unanimity applies only to five major powers—France, China, the UK, the US, and the Russian Federation—and then only when they are acting in their capacity as permanent members of the Security Council. The Security Council also proceeds by majority vote, but on substantive (though not on procedural) matters, it must include the concurring votes of all the permanent members. (See the section on Voting in the chapter on the Security Council.)
Read more: http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/United-Nations/Comparison-with-the-League-of-Nations-VOTING.html#ixzz2KXcwGyvB
2. Settlement of Disputes - International conflicts and the settlement of disputes
The League of Nations’ primary objective was to settle disputes by any means other than outright war. However, reaching this objective depended on the willingness of the sovereign States in question to cooperate with the League of Nations and to respect the maxims of the Covenant. By the time it folded, more than 60 international disputes had been brought before the League of Nations. During the first 10 years of its existence, only eight of the 30 disputants resorted to hostilities or war. Some of the peaceful settlements included:
1920: the Aaland Islands. After the Russian Revolution, Finland declared its independence and sovereignty over these Islands. However, its Swedish-speaking population claimed it had the right to vote for Swedish governance. Before it could develop into an armed conflict, both parties accepted the solution offered by the League of Nations. Though autonomy under Finnish rule was continued, important guarantees were granted to the Aaland Islands, and demilitarization under League of Nations observance was carried out.
1922: Vilna. Both Lithuania and Poland were claiming sovereignty over Vilna, and in 1922, the League of Nations was called in. Despite the Council’s recommendation that the city be placed under Lithuanian rule however, the disputing States were unable to reach an agreement acceptable to all. Consequently, when the Conference of Ambassadors redefined the Polish border in 1923, Vilna became part of Poland.
1923: Memel. After the First World War, this previously Baltic port on the Eastern frontiers of Germany was taken over by the Allies under a provisional administration responsible to the League of Nations’ Conference of Ambassadors. After a coup d’état, the port was under Lithuanian sovereignty. Special privileges were granted to the mostly German population as well as to Poland, which received the right to use the port for transit and trade.
The Greco-Bulgarian conflict (1925) and Leticia (1932)
There existed in the Covenant a provision that empowered the League of Nations to take action and even impose sanctions (within specific guidelines) in order to settle international disputes brought before the Council by any one of its Member States.
One such case arose when, in 1925, a border conflict broke out between Greece and Bulgaria that threatened to escalate into an all-out war in the Balkans. The Bulgarian Government appealed at once to the League of Nations (under Article 10 of the Covenant) and an Extraordinary Session of the Council was called, and subsequently held in Paris. Aristide Briand, the representative of France, acted as Chairman. Under the observation of the British, French and Italian military attachés, the hostilities ceased and the evacuation of the territory occupied by Greek forces was carried out without incident. This conflict is but one of the few in which the system as outlined in the Covenant was successful; a conflict was identified, the Council met without delay, a fair hearing was given, and a general agreement arrived at for maintaining the peace and providing justice for all concerned.
A more complicated example of an international dispute requiring the League of Nations’ assistance was that which took place between Colombia and Peru over Leticia, a remote border district in the Upper Amazon valley. After several attempts to solve the problem on a regional level, the Peruvian and Colombian delegates finally turned to the League of Nations for assistance in 1933. However, it was only after Luis Sanchez Cerro, the Peruvian president, was assassinated that an agreement could be reached. After the ownership of the Letician territory was transferred to an International Commission for one year, it was returned to Colombia.
China: the Manchurian crisis of 1932
On 19 September 1931, the League of Nations was made aware of an incident provoked by anti-Japanese activists at the Japanese-owned South Manchurian railway line in China. Consequently, the Japanese army invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria. China immediately appealed to the world’s powers for their intervention. Under the chairmanship of Aristide Briand, and with the active participation of the United States of America (which had thus far refrained from recognizing the League of Nations as a global mediator), the Council attempted to negotiate a peaceful solution. However, neither the Council nor the Assembly were able to agree on the imposition of sanctions of any kind, which in accordance with the Covenant, could have been used against any Member State that had violated the principles of the League of Nations.
Four months after the initial outbreak of hostilities, the Council dispatched an Inquiry Commission to China under the leadership of the British diplomat, the Earl of Lytton. By the time the so-called Lytton Commission finally arrived in China in April of 1932, the Japanese Army had already installed the Manchurian State of Manchukuo. In order to determine the source of the conflict and to come up with possible measures to restore the peace between China and Japan, the Commission began its investigations with the assistance of George Moss, a member of the British Consular Service who was also fluent in Chinese.
On the advice of the Lytton Report (September 1932), the League of Nations refused to recognize Manchukuo as a genuine State and proposed a series of measures to re-establish the status quo. While China accepted the League of Nations’ recommendations for restoring peace in the area, Japan did not and, as a result, withdrew from the League of Nations in 1935.
Ethiopia (Abyssinia)
In 1933, the Fascist Government of Benito Mussolini planned its attack on Ethiopia with the intention to expand the colonial territory of Italy, despite the fact that in 1928 it had signed the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of Friendship, Conciliation and Arbitration. In December of 1934, a clash occurred between the armed forces of the two States at Walwal on the Ethiopian side of the frontier with Italian Somaliland. Mussolini declared the incident “an act of self-defence” and, therefore, not subject to arbitration. Compensation was demanded in addition to formal recognition of the area as Italian.
When this was refused by Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie, the case was taken as a casus belli by Italy. As a Member of the League of Nations, Ethiopia brought the case before the Council, but in order to continue his pursuit of expansion, Mussolini ignored all League of Nations proposals in order to continue to mobilize his military forces in the northern Ethiopian state of Eritrea.
Rounds of talks in Geneva proved futile, a clear indication that the Council was unable to protect a small Member State from the interests of a larger and more influential one and, as a result, oil sanctions that would have halted Mussolini’s military endeavours were not imposed. Thus, armed with a deadly combination of superior weaponry and poison gas, Italy was able to launch an attack on Ethiopia in December of 1935.
Once Addis Ababa fell in May of 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie, who was in Geneva at the time, went to the Assembly and again asked the League of Nations for help, but to no avail, as Italy’s conquest had been formally recognized by most countries. However, Mussolini’s declaration of war on France and the United Kingdom provoked the latter into facilitating the Emperor’s recapture of his country, and by 1941, the Ethiopian Government was back in power and Ethiopia became an independent State.
International reconciliation and disarmament
The 1925 Locarno Pact
In 1924, with Gustav Stresemann becoming head of Germany’s Foreign Office, a more liberal foreign policy was ready to consider cooperating with the League of Nations rather than viewing the new organization as an instrument set up to suppress Germany. Thus, in December of 1924, Stresemann dispatched an application for Germany’s admission to the Council in which he requested (among other things) a seat on the Council and special treatment concerning hostile actions to be taken against any Covenant-breaking State. Because of the latter request, admission was denied.
In early 1925, Stresemann made a second attempt. Even though the Geneva Protocol was not yet in force, its principles of “security” made the follow-up application possible. Stresemann proposed to the British and French Foreign Offices his guarantee of Germany’s intent to respect the Treaty of Versailles. After the exchange of Stresemann’s proposals between London, Paris and Berlin, Sir Austen Chamberlain and Aristide Briand invited Member States to a common meeting in Locarno, Switzerland.
Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland were also invited to join the meeting. The negotiations held in October of 1925 resulted in the Locarno Pact, signed by Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. In addition, four arbitration conventions were signed between Germany and the following States: Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France and Poland. Thus, Locarno prepared the ground for reconciliation between Germany and her neighbours Belgium and France, and for Germany’s eventual entry into the League of Nations in 1926. However, in 1933, shortly after Nazism took control of the country, Germany withdrew her membership from the League of Nations.
Briand’s plan for a European Union
The original idea of a “United States of Europe” can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, it was Aristide Briand who revitalized the concept at the end of the 1920s.
Briand and those in favour of a “European Union” believed that its realization depended on the establishment of new institutions which would cooperate with those of the League of Nations, yet would be independent of them in all essential aspects. Upon further discussion, it was decided that the creation of such a union should occur entirely within the framework of the League of Nations. During the 1929 Assembly, Briand promised the 27 invited European Member States that he would submit a more detailed plan that they could then discuss.
While other Members waited without further commitment for Briand’s plan to evolve, Stresemann supported Briand’s plan and spoke out on the need for European stamps, a European Customs Union, and a European coinage in order to remain economically competitive with forces outside Europe.
By the time Briand’s proposal was ready for discussion in May of 1930, Stresemann had died and Europe was in the process of undergoing some drastic changes in the form of growing levels of unemployment and nationalism. However, Briand’s proposal was brought before the 1931 Assembly and it was agreed to go ahead with plans to establish a Commission of Inquiry for European Union. Briand was elected as Chairman and Sir Eric Drummond as Secretary.
The practical activities of the Commission of Inquiry merged with the general work of the League of Nations for the purpose of economic cooperation. In addition, the Commission was a catalyst in bringing the Soviet Union and Turkey into closer cooperation with the League of Nations after inviting the two States to join the Commission.
The Geneva Protocol and the Disarmament Conference of 1932
Disarmament was one of the most important questions to be considered by the League of Nations. The condition, however, was that Germany would agree to the Treaty of Versailles and would be the first country to reduce its arms in accordance with the Treaty.
The Advisory Commission and the Temporary Mixed Commission (later replaced by a so-called “Coordination Commission”) were bodies entrusted with the creation of a plan for disarmament. The issue was discussed in each Assembly and in many sessions of the Council and other special meetings, but all these efforts failed in the end.
One of the main obstacles faced was the belief of the main Powers that their security depended on maintaining a level of armaments equal or even superior to those of their neighbours. They also preferred to determine their own needs in armaments. Another problem was that the Soviet Union and the United States of America not being members of the League of Nations, did not take part in the process until 1932.
Thus, the 1922 Draft Treaty of Mutual Guarantees and the 1923 Treaty of Mutual Assistance, piloted by Lord Cecil with the close cooperation of Edouard Benes and the French delegation, were not accepted in the Assemblies.
The new more liberal Governments in France under Edouard Herriot and in the United Kingdom under Ramsay MacDonald brought a new spirit to the disarmament negotiations and as a result the fifth Assembly adopted the Geneva Protocol on the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, in October 1924, proposing the general disarmament of all nations linked with compulsory arbitration and security guarantees. It also pledged that a general Disarmament Conference would be convened shortly. This Conference eventually convened in 1932 and lasted, with a short interruption, for two and a half years.
Despite numerous petitions and public demand for disarmament, the countries were not ready to sacrifice their security. Thus, the Conference was a failure.
The protection of minorities
After the war, the new Eastern European States of Austria, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia were forced to sign agreements granting religious, social and political equality to their minorities, whether or not they had been defeated. In order to supervise these agreements, the League of Nations set up the Minority Section, whose influential programmes were rather unique at that time. Its responsibilities included screening the incoming petitions, requesting responses from the accused States, forwarding cases to the ad hoc “Committee of Three”, and/or investigating matters on its own. If the case appeared before the Committee, a decision had to be made as to whether or not the Council’s involvement was warranted.
In the beginning, the reports were unofficial; however, after 1929, the Council decided that the reports were to be published in the League of Nations’ Official Journal.
Between 1920 and 1939, 883 petitions were submitted to the Minorities Section. Only 16 of the 395 petitions deemed “receivable” ever reached the attention of the Council, and of these 16, the Council very reluctantly condemned the accused State of improper treatment in only four cases.
Due to the efforts of Erik Colban, the first director of the Minority Section, a more personal approach was developed. The Section officials would investigate matters locally and pursue their findings. This close cooperation between the Section and the accused States made it possible in many cases to avoid further aggravation and alleviate future problems.
The Mandate system
As a result of the war, the Allied and associated Powers acquired the territories that were previously under the sovereignty of Germany and the Ottoman Empire. As their inhabitants were at this time considered incapable of ruling themselves, the Peace Conference of 1919 decided that they should be ruled by mandate, whereby powers were conferred upon a State chosen by the League of Nations to govern a region elsewhere in order “to secure the well-being and development of the peoples who inhabited the territories in question”. Belgium, the British Empire, and France were entrusted with the governance of the mandated territories.
In accordance with the Covenant, annual reports concerning these regions were to be submitted to the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandate Commission, established in February of 1921. It was on the basis of these reports that the Commission advised the Council as to whether or not the conditions of each mandate were being strictly observed.
The members of the Commission were nominated by the Council, and because of the need for impartiality, it was preferred that they come from non-mandated Powers. As a result, the Commission was trusted and often consulted by both mandated and non-mandated Powers during its last years. Three categories of mandates, “A”, “B” and “C”, were applied “according to the stage of the development of the people, the geographical situation of the territory, its economic conditions and other similar circumstances” (Article 22, paragraph 3).
Under the United Nations, the work of the Mandates Commission continued through the Trusteeship Council, though it was no longer composed of non-governmental representatives. However, as the previously mandated countries have become officially recognized as sovereign and independent States, its responsibilities have steadily diminished.
The Saar and the Free City of Danzig
One of the unique responsibilities assigned to the League of Nations by the Treaty of Versailles was the supervision of the former German border territories of the Saar basin and the Free City of Danzig. As stated in the 1920 Treaty, the Territory of the Saar basin was to be placed under the administration of the League of Nations for 15 years. During that time, the Saar was to be isolated from the rest of Germany, and as compensation for the war, France was given control of its coal mines.
The administration of the Saar was entrusted to a Governing Commission consisting of five members chosen by the Council of the League of Nations: one representative of France, one native German inhabitant of the Saar, and three representatives of countries other than France and Germany. On 13 January 1935, the inhabitants of the Saar determined their sovereignty by plebiscite. On that day, order was guaranteed by an International Police Force composed of British, Dutch Italian, and Swedish soldiers. Over 90 per cent of the votes cast called for the immediate reintegration of the Saar into Germany. This decision took effect on 1 March 1935.
The inhabitants of the Free City of Danzig and the territory surrounding it were primarily of German nationality. However, Poland needed to have access to the sea. In accordance with the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations established a High Commission to oversee this district. Danzig was to be self-governing, though under the League of Nations’ protection. Poland, however, was to govern the City’s foreign affairs and maintain certain transit, postal and harbour rights. The High Commissioner appointed by the Council was to reside in Danzig and make the final decision in cases when mutual agreement between disputants could not be reached.
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The Big Four: Peacemaking in Paris in 1919
The Big Four: Peacemaking in Paris in 1919
By Alan Sharp | Published in History Review 2009
Mass demonstration in front of the Reichstag against the Treaty of Versailles ("the brutal peace")Mass demonstration in front of the Reichstag against the Treaty of Versailles ("the brutal peace")
In December 1919 John Maynard Keynes published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book which, for the next 90 years, established the framework for much of the discussion about the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War. In early June 1919 Keynes, a British academic economist, resigned from the British peace delegation in despair – an opportunity denied to millions of servicemen during the war. His book proved an instant international bestseller and one of the most effective polemics of the 20th century, doing much to promote the idea that three men, the British and French prime ministers, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, and American president, Woodrow Wilson, meeting in Wilson’s ‘hot, dry room’ in Paris, created a disastrous settlement. He made only a passing reference to Vittorio Orlando, the Italian premier, one of only several distortions of reality in the version he created.
Keynes on the 'Big Three'
Brilliantly written, the book reflected the bitter disappointment with Wilson’s performance felt by Keynes and like-minded British and American officials and intellectuals. Keynes portrayed Wilson as naïve and inept, squandering the immense moral prestige, overwhelming economic power and growing military presence of the United States in a confrontation in which he was outwitted and bamboozled by the caustic and cynical Clemenceau and the elusive and quick-thinking Lloyd George. Between them the formidable ‘Tiger’ and the wily ‘Welsh Wizard’ (their respective nicknames) took the ponderous Presbyterian to the cleaners and created a vindictive and unworkable settlement.
Keynes had a grudging admiration for Clemenceau. He ‘was by far the most eminent member of the Council of Four and he had taken the measure of his colleagues.’ Keynes pictured le père la victoire (Old Man Victory) ‘dry in soul and empty of hope, very old and tired, but surveying the scene with a cynical and almost impish air … He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.’ His was ‘the policy of an old man, whose most vivid impressions and most lively imaginations are of the past and not of the future.’
Keynes was torn between fascination at the speed with which Lloyd George could absorb both atmosphere and complex briefs and disgust at his lack of fixed principles. He argued that the December 1918 British election caused Lloyd George to abandon his natural instincts, which were ‘right and reasonable’, in favour of implied promises to punish Germany by pursuing war criminals and extracting from it as much of the costs of the war as possible. He emphasised Lloyd George’s ‘unerring, almost medium-like, sensibility to every one immediately around him’. This enabled him to perceive ‘what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next’ and to choose ‘with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness or self-interest of his immediate auditor.’ Later he pronounced, ‘Lloyd George is rooted in nothing.’
If Lloyd George’s principles were too easily trimmed, Keynes castigated Wilson for his stubborn inability to recognise the need for the concessions that would deliver his main objectives for minimal sacrifice. He came to Paris enjoying ‘a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history.’ He was ‘the man of destiny ... coming ... to bring healing to the wounds of the ancient parent of his civilisation and to lay for us the foundations of the future.’ Instead he proved to be a ‘blind and deaf Don Quixote’ with ‘no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House.’ He was too slow-witted to cope with Lloyd George and Clemenceau and too proud to accept that he had compromised the principles that he had enunciated in his 1918 speeches, of which the Fourteen Points, delivered on 8 January, contained the most famous. Thus, even when Lloyd George repented of earlier decisions and tried, in June 1919, to revise the draft treaty, Wilson would have none of it. It proved ‘harder to debamboozle the old Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him.’
Quite apart from his compelling and vitriolic pen portraits it is easy to see why Keynes’s book proved so effective. It reduced the bewildering complexities of peacemaking after an unprecedentedly destructive war to the relationships and the decisions of three or four men. It was much easier to explain the resolution of an enormously complicated set of global problems in terms of the personalities, interests and foibles of individual statesmen than to try to make sense of the conflicting, often irreconcilable, claims and counter-claims of individuals, groups and states, large and small, friend and foe alike. Shrinking the action to the confines of a single room and the interactions of the main Allied leaders was both reassuring and seductive.
How far do his judgements and his analysis and portrayal of events stand up to scrutiny? Were these men all-powerful? Were they the main decision-makers and how fair was his characterisation of them? To what extent did the settlement depend on the interplay between their personalities? Above all, was the outcome a ‘Carthaginian’ peace?
Conference Organisation
There can be no doubt that the Council of Four, which began to meet in late March 1919, did find solutions for many of the interconnected problems which the Council of Ten had been unable to resolve. The earlier body consisted of the prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy and the president of the United States, accompanied by their foreign ministers, together with two Japanese representatives. From the opening of the conference on 18 January 1919 until the Council of Four – Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson – replaced them as the main decision-making body, the Ten met 72 times, establishing 58 sub-committees to consider various aspects of peacemaking – an indication of the number of daunting tasks facing them.
The Council of Ten proved too unwieldy. Nothing ever seemed to be decided – at its last meeting it was still discussing an unresolved issue that had arisen at its first. Meanwhile the problems of establishing the new boundaries of Germany, Europe and the wider world, of who should pay what to whom in terms of reparations, and how disarmament would work, all built up into a massive log-jam of indecisions that threatened to paralyse the conference. It needed a smaller, more incisive, body to cut through the issues and decide, and this, for better or worse, the Council of Four did in a hectic six-week period in March and April. Very aware of the pressures upon them, the Four needed to make decisions, fearing if they did not that anarchy and Bolshevism would overwhelm great areas of Europe left without firm or established government by the unprecedented near simultaneous collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires.
The Key Decision-Makers
Keynes was correct to emphasise the importance of personality and the interplay between the main characters. Simply being in the same room for long periods in each other’s company created an ambience which encouraged the leading statesmen to believe that not only should they seek solutions to the problems confronting them, but that they could actually do so. After arguments, trade-offs and compromises, some of their decisions were more imaginative than others. It needed Lloyd George’s lateral thinking to grasp that an Anglo-American military guarantee to France against unprovoked German aggression was the key to the deadlock over the future of the Rhineland and the Saar. He persuaded Wilson and together they made the offer to Clemenceau on 14 March, with Lloyd George adding the tantalising prospect of a railway tunnel under the Channel to speed British troops to France in a future conflict. In return France should abandon its claims to annex all or part of the Rhineland or to detach it from Germany.
Clemenceau was pleased but not completely satisfied. His strategy to deal with Germany, which had a younger, much larger population and more resources than France, was to try to combine measures to deprive it of territory, people and raw materials, with a continuing commitment from America and Britain to maintain the victorious wartime coalition. He saw both as vital to future French security. His problem was to balance the two strands of his policy and to calculate how far he could pursue one without jeopardising the other. He continued to press for more concessions, including an extended Allied occupation of the Rhineland and the demilitarisation of all the German territory on the French side of the Rhine and in a 50 kilometre deep zone running parallel to the river on the German side.
Neither Lloyd George nor Wilson had a problem with demilitarisation but Clemenceau managed to manoeuvre Wilson into supporting a 15-year Allied occupation of the Rhineland – much longer than Lloyd George wanted. Since Clemenceau also negotiated that Allied evacuation would be dependent on German execution of the treaty, he believed he had achieved both parts of his strategy. He had the Anglo-American guarantee. If Germany fulfilled its obligations, well and good. If, as he expected, it did not, he had provided a future French government with the perfect excuse to extend the Rhineland occupation (giving it a longer time to convince the Rhinelanders either that they were really French, or, failing that, that they were not part of Germany). As he told the French president, Raymond Poincaré, whom he cordially despised, ‘I have the 15 years. I now consider that the peace is made.’
The Rhineland debates illustrate very well the interplay between various aspects of peacemaking. Key American politicians urged Wilson to renegotiate elements of the draft League of Nations Covenant. To secure French agreement he conceded the 15-year occupation, whilst to appease Lloyd George he abandoned his demand for the freedom of the seas. Britain and the United States had long disagreed about the rights of states at war to stop and search, on the high seas, neutral shipping suspected of carrying war materials to their enemies. The Americans believed neutral shipping should proceed without interference, whilst the British held the right of blockade as vital to their security. In November 1918, Lloyd George reluctantly conceded that the question could be discussed in Paris but it was now dropped. The popular perception of the peace negotiations tends to see Wilson and Clemenceau occupying extreme positions – the liberal and generous American at one side, the hard-nosed and vengeful Frenchman at the other, with Lloyd George balancing between them. Keynes helped to create this perception: ‘The reader will thus apprehend how Mr. Lloyd George came to occupy an ostensibly middle position, and how it became his role to explain the President to Clemenceau and Clemenceau to the President and to seduce everybody all round.’ The reality was much more complex. Clemenceau did not always take the hardest line on every question – he did not, for example, as is sometimes erroneously suggested, seek to break up Germany. And this supposed cynic wept when a dusty French soldier handed him a pathetic bunch of flowers in the trenches– a bouquet that he kept until his death and which he insisted be buried with him. Wilson was much tougher than is often imagined. Lloyd George’s mercurial character meant he was always difficult to tie to a fixed position, but his underlying liberalism was rarely in doubt. Yet he shared with Wilson a strong Calvinistic impulse, with its emphasis on retribution as well as redemption. For all their Gladstonian liberalism, Wilson and Lloyd George had no intention of being soft on Germany. Recent studies of the three men confirm that they were much more fluid in their attitudes than the Keynesian stereotypes suggest.
Reparations
Keynes created the impression that the French, who ‘made in the first instance the most definite and the most extreme proposals’, were mainly responsible for the conference’s difficulties over reparations – essentially what compensation Germany and its allies should pay for wartime damage. In fact it was British representatives, most notably Lords Cunliffe and Sumner, who presented the highest demands, originally seeking £24,000,000,000, with £9,500,000,000 as their lowest offer. Lloyd George’s chosen negotiators were christened the ‘Heavenly Twins’ by their irreverent colleagues because they were always in each other’s company and demanded astronomical sums. The French suggested £8,000,000,000 with most other estimates in the region of £3,000,000,000 to £5,000,000,000, though the Americans were prepared to raise their proposal to £6,000,000,000 in the interests of achieving allied agreement. Lloyd George later claimed that he would have settled for much less but that he was trapped by the public expectations raised by the Twins’ figures. The reality seems to be that it was Lloyd George who insisted that the Twins maintain their demands, thus pursuing the high reparations policy he wanted, yet allowing him to present himself as powerless to follow his own moderate inclinations – a typical piece of Lloyd George chicanery. He would later claim credit for delaying the final naming of the German bill for two years so that tempers could cool – rather as if an arsonist, in mitigation, pleaded that he had summoned the fire brigade. For the Americans, it was the British rather than the French who presented the main obstacles to reaching agreement on a question that generated much more heat than light in Paris.
Italy
Keynes ignored Orlando but, even though Italy’s interests were less universal than those of America, Britain and France, it had a powerful impact on the settlement, sometimes with world-wide consequences. In her diary for 20 April 1919, Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary, mistress and eventual second wife, recorded a moment of high emotion. Looking across from her window she could see into Wilson’s house. ‘Suddenly Orlando appeared at the window … and put his head in his hands … I saw him take out his handkerchief and wipe his eyes and cheeks … Orlando was overcome and began to sob.’ He had failed to persuade his fellow peacemakers, and in particular Wilson, of the Italian case to annex the Adriatic port of Fiume (Rijeka). He withdrew the Italian delegation and returned to Rome.
This did not advance their case a jot. They were forced to return in early May without concessions, hence (in one of Wilson’s rare jokes) ‘fiuming’, but when the Japanese also threatened to leave the negotiations because the Americans would not permit them to annex the former German colonies in China, Wilson could not afford the absence of another major player. Against his better judgement, and very much against his principles, Wilson conceded the Japanese demands in Asia. There were also repercussions in Asia Minor, because, partly to spite the Italians for their withdrawal, the Three agreed to allow the Greeks, rather than the Italians, to try to restore order to the area and, in particular, to occupy Smyrna (Izmir). This additional humiliation for Italian ambitions proved to be, for them at least, a blessing in disguise, because the Greeks became embroiled in a long and bloody struggle with a revived Turkey led by Kemal Ataturk, which eventually ended in Greek defeat, a massacre in Izmir in 1922 – and Lloyd George’s loss of office for ever.
Expectations Unfulfilled
In her recent prize-winning study Margaret MacMillan argues that, in the first half of 1919, Paris became the world’s capital as it sought to resolve the problems that had brought about the war in the first place – very few of which the war itself had settled. Additional complications arose from the fighting and the vacuum of power caused by the collapse of four empires. Delegations and individuals seeking redress for oppression and years of alien rule converged on Paris in the hope that Wilson, in particular, would produce miraculous answers to their plight. It was an impossible task, as the President ruefully admitted: ‘What is expected of me only God could perform’. As he had feared, en route to Europe in December 1918, the outcome was, in many cases, ‘a tragedy of disappointment’. Wilson’s sense of powerlessness paralleled the wider frustrations of the Four, whose ability to enforce their decisions diminished in direct proportion to the distance of the problem from Paris. As Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, admitted: ‘The root of evil is that the Paris writ does not run.’ In certain cases in eastern Europe the only forces at the Allied disposal were German troops required to remain in territory they were occupying at the time of the armistice.
The Four were therefore not all-powerful. They did not make all the decisions in Paris – indeed many were made on the ground by local forces. The difficult and contentious problems found their way to them, but many of the new frontiers and issues considered to be of less importance were decided, or approved, by the Council of Five – the foreign ministers of America, Britain, France and Italy (Robert Lansing, Arthur Balfour, Stephen Pichon, Sidney Sonnino) and the Japanese delegate, Baron Makino. On occasions their original decisions were overturned by the Four – the frontiers of the Danzig corridor or of Upper Silesia are examples – but most were simply incorporated into the settlement. The Five were not necessarily happy about their relegation: witness Lansing’s disgruntled observations or Balfour’s frustration as Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George carved up Asia Minor with some advice from Nicolson (‘These three ignorant men with a child to lead them’) – but much of the routine procedures fell into their hands and their contribution to the final treaties tends to be neglected.
Conclusion
Keynes labelled the settlement ‘Carthaginian’– a reference to the total destruction of Carthage by the Romans at the end of the Third Punic War in 146BC. This was pure hyperbole, since the peacemakers did not seek to destroy Germany. Some wished they had. As General Mark Clark wryly pointed out in 1945, ‘We don’t seem to get much trouble from those Carthaginians these days’ – a marked contrast to his recent tough campaign in Italy against German soldiers whose health was supposedly destroyed in infancy by the treaty. But for Lloyd George and Wilson, perhaps with more scepticism from Clemenceau, Germany was part of the solution rather than the problem.
Lloyd George and Wilson, for not entirely altruistic reasons, saw the economic recovery of Germany as vital to future prosperity. Their challenge was, in anticipation of Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s prescription 70 years later, to create a European Germany rather than a German Europe – to find ways of giving Germany a place in international affairs commensurate with its strengths and talents without permitting it to overwhelm its neighbours. The hope was that a democratic Germany, conceding that it had lost the war, accepting the settlement as just and willing to make an honest attempt to execute it, would become a good European neighbour and a pillar of the new international community overseen by the League of Nations.
Sadly the Four did not deliver such an outcome, but they knew that the settlement was the starting point in the attempt to find a new era in international relations and they were willing to make adjustments with a Germany that accepted the verdict of 1918. But of course Germany did not, and Allied unity crumbled over the ensuing years. One of the paradoxes of the settlement was that it left defeated Germany no longer hemmed in by great powers as it had been in 1914 and hence, potentially, in a stronger position. Whilst Germany in 1919 might be temporarily weakened by its losses and the terms of the treaty, the only great power with which it now shared a common border was France, whose strength had been sapped by spending a much greater proportion of its young men to gain victory. Whereas German industry was unscathed and its debts internal, France faced the daunting expense of restoring the devastated battlefields of the Western Front and repaying loans to America and Britain. In place of Austria-Hungary and Russia, Germany now found itself surrounded by bite-sized states.
Germany was likely at some stage to regain its strength. If then, or subsequently, its leadership was aggressive, it could more easily dominate or even destroy its neighbours, possibly using the excuse of alleged mistreatment of the German minorities to be found in each of them. In the 1930s, under Hitler, this was what happened. Under immense pressure the Four made mistakes which contributed to future unrest, but much more of the responsibility rests on their successors and especially the economic and political calamity of 1929 which destroyed the Weimar republic and brought Hitler to power.
Issues to debate
In what ways did Keynes caricature the ‘Big Three’?
What aspects of the settlement stemmed from the interplay of the major statesmen in Paris?
Why did the Treaty of Versailles not prove more durable?
Further reading
Ruth Henig, Versailles and After 1919- 1933 (Routledge, 2nd edition, 1995)
Antony Lentin, Guilt at Versailles: Lloyd George and the Pre-history of Appeasement (Methuen, 1985)
Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (John Murray, 2001)
Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918- 1933 (Palgrave, 2nd edition, 2003)
Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking after the First World War, 1919-1923 (Palgrave, 2nd edition, 2008)
Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919- 1933 (Oxford, 2005)
Alan Sharp is Professor of International Studies and Provost of the Coleraine campus of the University of Ulster. He is general editor of the Haus biographical series, the ‘Makers of the Modern World’ on ‘The Paris Peace Conferences 1919- 1923, their aftermath and legacy’. Books already published include Harry Harmer, Friedrich Ebert: Germany; Brian Morton, Woodrow Wilson: United States of America; Alan Sharp, David Lloyd George: Great Britain; and David Watson, Georges Clemenceau: France (all Haus, 2008).
By Alan Sharp | Published in History Review 2009
Mass demonstration in front of the Reichstag against the Treaty of Versailles ("the brutal peace")Mass demonstration in front of the Reichstag against the Treaty of Versailles ("the brutal peace")
In December 1919 John Maynard Keynes published The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a book which, for the next 90 years, established the framework for much of the discussion about the Paris Peace Conference after the First World War. In early June 1919 Keynes, a British academic economist, resigned from the British peace delegation in despair – an opportunity denied to millions of servicemen during the war. His book proved an instant international bestseller and one of the most effective polemics of the 20th century, doing much to promote the idea that three men, the British and French prime ministers, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, and American president, Woodrow Wilson, meeting in Wilson’s ‘hot, dry room’ in Paris, created a disastrous settlement. He made only a passing reference to Vittorio Orlando, the Italian premier, one of only several distortions of reality in the version he created.
Keynes on the 'Big Three'
Brilliantly written, the book reflected the bitter disappointment with Wilson’s performance felt by Keynes and like-minded British and American officials and intellectuals. Keynes portrayed Wilson as naïve and inept, squandering the immense moral prestige, overwhelming economic power and growing military presence of the United States in a confrontation in which he was outwitted and bamboozled by the caustic and cynical Clemenceau and the elusive and quick-thinking Lloyd George. Between them the formidable ‘Tiger’ and the wily ‘Welsh Wizard’ (their respective nicknames) took the ponderous Presbyterian to the cleaners and created a vindictive and unworkable settlement.
Keynes had a grudging admiration for Clemenceau. He ‘was by far the most eminent member of the Council of Four and he had taken the measure of his colleagues.’ Keynes pictured le père la victoire (Old Man Victory) ‘dry in soul and empty of hope, very old and tired, but surveying the scene with a cynical and almost impish air … He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.’ His was ‘the policy of an old man, whose most vivid impressions and most lively imaginations are of the past and not of the future.’
Keynes was torn between fascination at the speed with which Lloyd George could absorb both atmosphere and complex briefs and disgust at his lack of fixed principles. He argued that the December 1918 British election caused Lloyd George to abandon his natural instincts, which were ‘right and reasonable’, in favour of implied promises to punish Germany by pursuing war criminals and extracting from it as much of the costs of the war as possible. He emphasised Lloyd George’s ‘unerring, almost medium-like, sensibility to every one immediately around him’. This enabled him to perceive ‘what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next’ and to choose ‘with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness or self-interest of his immediate auditor.’ Later he pronounced, ‘Lloyd George is rooted in nothing.’
If Lloyd George’s principles were too easily trimmed, Keynes castigated Wilson for his stubborn inability to recognise the need for the concessions that would deliver his main objectives for minimal sacrifice. He came to Paris enjoying ‘a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history.’ He was ‘the man of destiny ... coming ... to bring healing to the wounds of the ancient parent of his civilisation and to lay for us the foundations of the future.’ Instead he proved to be a ‘blind and deaf Don Quixote’ with ‘no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever for clothing with the flesh of life the commandments which he had thundered from the White House.’ He was too slow-witted to cope with Lloyd George and Clemenceau and too proud to accept that he had compromised the principles that he had enunciated in his 1918 speeches, of which the Fourteen Points, delivered on 8 January, contained the most famous. Thus, even when Lloyd George repented of earlier decisions and tried, in June 1919, to revise the draft treaty, Wilson would have none of it. It proved ‘harder to debamboozle the old Presbyterian than it had been to bamboozle him.’
Quite apart from his compelling and vitriolic pen portraits it is easy to see why Keynes’s book proved so effective. It reduced the bewildering complexities of peacemaking after an unprecedentedly destructive war to the relationships and the decisions of three or four men. It was much easier to explain the resolution of an enormously complicated set of global problems in terms of the personalities, interests and foibles of individual statesmen than to try to make sense of the conflicting, often irreconcilable, claims and counter-claims of individuals, groups and states, large and small, friend and foe alike. Shrinking the action to the confines of a single room and the interactions of the main Allied leaders was both reassuring and seductive.
How far do his judgements and his analysis and portrayal of events stand up to scrutiny? Were these men all-powerful? Were they the main decision-makers and how fair was his characterisation of them? To what extent did the settlement depend on the interplay between their personalities? Above all, was the outcome a ‘Carthaginian’ peace?
Conference Organisation
There can be no doubt that the Council of Four, which began to meet in late March 1919, did find solutions for many of the interconnected problems which the Council of Ten had been unable to resolve. The earlier body consisted of the prime ministers of Britain, France and Italy and the president of the United States, accompanied by their foreign ministers, together with two Japanese representatives. From the opening of the conference on 18 January 1919 until the Council of Four – Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Orlando and Wilson – replaced them as the main decision-making body, the Ten met 72 times, establishing 58 sub-committees to consider various aspects of peacemaking – an indication of the number of daunting tasks facing them.
The Council of Ten proved too unwieldy. Nothing ever seemed to be decided – at its last meeting it was still discussing an unresolved issue that had arisen at its first. Meanwhile the problems of establishing the new boundaries of Germany, Europe and the wider world, of who should pay what to whom in terms of reparations, and how disarmament would work, all built up into a massive log-jam of indecisions that threatened to paralyse the conference. It needed a smaller, more incisive, body to cut through the issues and decide, and this, for better or worse, the Council of Four did in a hectic six-week period in March and April. Very aware of the pressures upon them, the Four needed to make decisions, fearing if they did not that anarchy and Bolshevism would overwhelm great areas of Europe left without firm or established government by the unprecedented near simultaneous collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires.
The Key Decision-Makers
Keynes was correct to emphasise the importance of personality and the interplay between the main characters. Simply being in the same room for long periods in each other’s company created an ambience which encouraged the leading statesmen to believe that not only should they seek solutions to the problems confronting them, but that they could actually do so. After arguments, trade-offs and compromises, some of their decisions were more imaginative than others. It needed Lloyd George’s lateral thinking to grasp that an Anglo-American military guarantee to France against unprovoked German aggression was the key to the deadlock over the future of the Rhineland and the Saar. He persuaded Wilson and together they made the offer to Clemenceau on 14 March, with Lloyd George adding the tantalising prospect of a railway tunnel under the Channel to speed British troops to France in a future conflict. In return France should abandon its claims to annex all or part of the Rhineland or to detach it from Germany.
Clemenceau was pleased but not completely satisfied. His strategy to deal with Germany, which had a younger, much larger population and more resources than France, was to try to combine measures to deprive it of territory, people and raw materials, with a continuing commitment from America and Britain to maintain the victorious wartime coalition. He saw both as vital to future French security. His problem was to balance the two strands of his policy and to calculate how far he could pursue one without jeopardising the other. He continued to press for more concessions, including an extended Allied occupation of the Rhineland and the demilitarisation of all the German territory on the French side of the Rhine and in a 50 kilometre deep zone running parallel to the river on the German side.
Neither Lloyd George nor Wilson had a problem with demilitarisation but Clemenceau managed to manoeuvre Wilson into supporting a 15-year Allied occupation of the Rhineland – much longer than Lloyd George wanted. Since Clemenceau also negotiated that Allied evacuation would be dependent on German execution of the treaty, he believed he had achieved both parts of his strategy. He had the Anglo-American guarantee. If Germany fulfilled its obligations, well and good. If, as he expected, it did not, he had provided a future French government with the perfect excuse to extend the Rhineland occupation (giving it a longer time to convince the Rhinelanders either that they were really French, or, failing that, that they were not part of Germany). As he told the French president, Raymond Poincaré, whom he cordially despised, ‘I have the 15 years. I now consider that the peace is made.’
The Rhineland debates illustrate very well the interplay between various aspects of peacemaking. Key American politicians urged Wilson to renegotiate elements of the draft League of Nations Covenant. To secure French agreement he conceded the 15-year occupation, whilst to appease Lloyd George he abandoned his demand for the freedom of the seas. Britain and the United States had long disagreed about the rights of states at war to stop and search, on the high seas, neutral shipping suspected of carrying war materials to their enemies. The Americans believed neutral shipping should proceed without interference, whilst the British held the right of blockade as vital to their security. In November 1918, Lloyd George reluctantly conceded that the question could be discussed in Paris but it was now dropped. The popular perception of the peace negotiations tends to see Wilson and Clemenceau occupying extreme positions – the liberal and generous American at one side, the hard-nosed and vengeful Frenchman at the other, with Lloyd George balancing between them. Keynes helped to create this perception: ‘The reader will thus apprehend how Mr. Lloyd George came to occupy an ostensibly middle position, and how it became his role to explain the President to Clemenceau and Clemenceau to the President and to seduce everybody all round.’ The reality was much more complex. Clemenceau did not always take the hardest line on every question – he did not, for example, as is sometimes erroneously suggested, seek to break up Germany. And this supposed cynic wept when a dusty French soldier handed him a pathetic bunch of flowers in the trenches– a bouquet that he kept until his death and which he insisted be buried with him. Wilson was much tougher than is often imagined. Lloyd George’s mercurial character meant he was always difficult to tie to a fixed position, but his underlying liberalism was rarely in doubt. Yet he shared with Wilson a strong Calvinistic impulse, with its emphasis on retribution as well as redemption. For all their Gladstonian liberalism, Wilson and Lloyd George had no intention of being soft on Germany. Recent studies of the three men confirm that they were much more fluid in their attitudes than the Keynesian stereotypes suggest.
Reparations
Keynes created the impression that the French, who ‘made in the first instance the most definite and the most extreme proposals’, were mainly responsible for the conference’s difficulties over reparations – essentially what compensation Germany and its allies should pay for wartime damage. In fact it was British representatives, most notably Lords Cunliffe and Sumner, who presented the highest demands, originally seeking £24,000,000,000, with £9,500,000,000 as their lowest offer. Lloyd George’s chosen negotiators were christened the ‘Heavenly Twins’ by their irreverent colleagues because they were always in each other’s company and demanded astronomical sums. The French suggested £8,000,000,000 with most other estimates in the region of £3,000,000,000 to £5,000,000,000, though the Americans were prepared to raise their proposal to £6,000,000,000 in the interests of achieving allied agreement. Lloyd George later claimed that he would have settled for much less but that he was trapped by the public expectations raised by the Twins’ figures. The reality seems to be that it was Lloyd George who insisted that the Twins maintain their demands, thus pursuing the high reparations policy he wanted, yet allowing him to present himself as powerless to follow his own moderate inclinations – a typical piece of Lloyd George chicanery. He would later claim credit for delaying the final naming of the German bill for two years so that tempers could cool – rather as if an arsonist, in mitigation, pleaded that he had summoned the fire brigade. For the Americans, it was the British rather than the French who presented the main obstacles to reaching agreement on a question that generated much more heat than light in Paris.
Italy
Keynes ignored Orlando but, even though Italy’s interests were less universal than those of America, Britain and France, it had a powerful impact on the settlement, sometimes with world-wide consequences. In her diary for 20 April 1919, Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary, mistress and eventual second wife, recorded a moment of high emotion. Looking across from her window she could see into Wilson’s house. ‘Suddenly Orlando appeared at the window … and put his head in his hands … I saw him take out his handkerchief and wipe his eyes and cheeks … Orlando was overcome and began to sob.’ He had failed to persuade his fellow peacemakers, and in particular Wilson, of the Italian case to annex the Adriatic port of Fiume (Rijeka). He withdrew the Italian delegation and returned to Rome.
This did not advance their case a jot. They were forced to return in early May without concessions, hence (in one of Wilson’s rare jokes) ‘fiuming’, but when the Japanese also threatened to leave the negotiations because the Americans would not permit them to annex the former German colonies in China, Wilson could not afford the absence of another major player. Against his better judgement, and very much against his principles, Wilson conceded the Japanese demands in Asia. There were also repercussions in Asia Minor, because, partly to spite the Italians for their withdrawal, the Three agreed to allow the Greeks, rather than the Italians, to try to restore order to the area and, in particular, to occupy Smyrna (Izmir). This additional humiliation for Italian ambitions proved to be, for them at least, a blessing in disguise, because the Greeks became embroiled in a long and bloody struggle with a revived Turkey led by Kemal Ataturk, which eventually ended in Greek defeat, a massacre in Izmir in 1922 – and Lloyd George’s loss of office for ever.
Expectations Unfulfilled
In her recent prize-winning study Margaret MacMillan argues that, in the first half of 1919, Paris became the world’s capital as it sought to resolve the problems that had brought about the war in the first place – very few of which the war itself had settled. Additional complications arose from the fighting and the vacuum of power caused by the collapse of four empires. Delegations and individuals seeking redress for oppression and years of alien rule converged on Paris in the hope that Wilson, in particular, would produce miraculous answers to their plight. It was an impossible task, as the President ruefully admitted: ‘What is expected of me only God could perform’. As he had feared, en route to Europe in December 1918, the outcome was, in many cases, ‘a tragedy of disappointment’. Wilson’s sense of powerlessness paralleled the wider frustrations of the Four, whose ability to enforce their decisions diminished in direct proportion to the distance of the problem from Paris. As Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, admitted: ‘The root of evil is that the Paris writ does not run.’ In certain cases in eastern Europe the only forces at the Allied disposal were German troops required to remain in territory they were occupying at the time of the armistice.
The Four were therefore not all-powerful. They did not make all the decisions in Paris – indeed many were made on the ground by local forces. The difficult and contentious problems found their way to them, but many of the new frontiers and issues considered to be of less importance were decided, or approved, by the Council of Five – the foreign ministers of America, Britain, France and Italy (Robert Lansing, Arthur Balfour, Stephen Pichon, Sidney Sonnino) and the Japanese delegate, Baron Makino. On occasions their original decisions were overturned by the Four – the frontiers of the Danzig corridor or of Upper Silesia are examples – but most were simply incorporated into the settlement. The Five were not necessarily happy about their relegation: witness Lansing’s disgruntled observations or Balfour’s frustration as Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George carved up Asia Minor with some advice from Nicolson (‘These three ignorant men with a child to lead them’) – but much of the routine procedures fell into their hands and their contribution to the final treaties tends to be neglected.
Conclusion
Keynes labelled the settlement ‘Carthaginian’– a reference to the total destruction of Carthage by the Romans at the end of the Third Punic War in 146BC. This was pure hyperbole, since the peacemakers did not seek to destroy Germany. Some wished they had. As General Mark Clark wryly pointed out in 1945, ‘We don’t seem to get much trouble from those Carthaginians these days’ – a marked contrast to his recent tough campaign in Italy against German soldiers whose health was supposedly destroyed in infancy by the treaty. But for Lloyd George and Wilson, perhaps with more scepticism from Clemenceau, Germany was part of the solution rather than the problem.
Lloyd George and Wilson, for not entirely altruistic reasons, saw the economic recovery of Germany as vital to future prosperity. Their challenge was, in anticipation of Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s prescription 70 years later, to create a European Germany rather than a German Europe – to find ways of giving Germany a place in international affairs commensurate with its strengths and talents without permitting it to overwhelm its neighbours. The hope was that a democratic Germany, conceding that it had lost the war, accepting the settlement as just and willing to make an honest attempt to execute it, would become a good European neighbour and a pillar of the new international community overseen by the League of Nations.
Sadly the Four did not deliver such an outcome, but they knew that the settlement was the starting point in the attempt to find a new era in international relations and they were willing to make adjustments with a Germany that accepted the verdict of 1918. But of course Germany did not, and Allied unity crumbled over the ensuing years. One of the paradoxes of the settlement was that it left defeated Germany no longer hemmed in by great powers as it had been in 1914 and hence, potentially, in a stronger position. Whilst Germany in 1919 might be temporarily weakened by its losses and the terms of the treaty, the only great power with which it now shared a common border was France, whose strength had been sapped by spending a much greater proportion of its young men to gain victory. Whereas German industry was unscathed and its debts internal, France faced the daunting expense of restoring the devastated battlefields of the Western Front and repaying loans to America and Britain. In place of Austria-Hungary and Russia, Germany now found itself surrounded by bite-sized states.
Germany was likely at some stage to regain its strength. If then, or subsequently, its leadership was aggressive, it could more easily dominate or even destroy its neighbours, possibly using the excuse of alleged mistreatment of the German minorities to be found in each of them. In the 1930s, under Hitler, this was what happened. Under immense pressure the Four made mistakes which contributed to future unrest, but much more of the responsibility rests on their successors and especially the economic and political calamity of 1929 which destroyed the Weimar republic and brought Hitler to power.
Issues to debate
In what ways did Keynes caricature the ‘Big Three’?
What aspects of the settlement stemmed from the interplay of the major statesmen in Paris?
Why did the Treaty of Versailles not prove more durable?
Further reading
Ruth Henig, Versailles and After 1919- 1933 (Routledge, 2nd edition, 1995)
Antony Lentin, Guilt at Versailles: Lloyd George and the Pre-history of Appeasement (Methuen, 1985)
Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (John Murray, 2001)
Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918- 1933 (Palgrave, 2nd edition, 2003)
Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking after the First World War, 1919-1923 (Palgrave, 2nd edition, 2008)
Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919- 1933 (Oxford, 2005)
Alan Sharp is Professor of International Studies and Provost of the Coleraine campus of the University of Ulster. He is general editor of the Haus biographical series, the ‘Makers of the Modern World’ on ‘The Paris Peace Conferences 1919- 1923, their aftermath and legacy’. Books already published include Harry Harmer, Friedrich Ebert: Germany; Brian Morton, Woodrow Wilson: United States of America; Alan Sharp, David Lloyd George: Great Britain; and David Watson, Georges Clemenceau: France (all Haus, 2008).
Treaty of Versailles - Was Germany Guilty?
The Treaty of Versailles, negotiated by the fractious Allies in the wake of the First World War, did not crush Germany, nor did it bring her back into the family of nations. Antony Lentin examines a tortuous process that sowed the seeds of further conflict.
Pic: Crowds line the streets of Berlin as German soldiers return, hailed as 'undefeated', at the end of the war, 1918Crowds line the streets of Berlin as German soldiers return, hailed as 'undefeated', at the end of the war, 1918. Corbis/Stapleton Collection
Nearly a century on, perceptions of the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles still bear the imprint of The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), which became a bestseller in the wake of the conference. Bitter fruit of Keynes’ own experience as a delegate in Paris, the book condemned what he branded ‘the Carthaginian peace’. The expression was suggested to Keynes by the South African delegate, General Jan Smuts (1870-1950), who referred to the peace concluded in 201 bc after the Second Punic War, when Rome stripped Carthage of its army, navy and overseas possessions and imposed a 50-year indemnity. Otherwise Carthage was left independent and able to recover economically, which eventually it did. Keynes actually seems to have been thinking of the ‘peace’ of 146 bc, when, after the Third Punic War, the Romans slaughtered the inhabitants of Carthage or sold them into slavery, annexing what remained of Carthaginian territory. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes quoted and endorsed the German view that the Treaty of Versailles signalled ‘the death sentence of many millions of German men, women and children’.
The book was widely translated, has never been out of print and has never lost its authority. Its success may be attributed to Keynes’ reputation as an economist and the brilliance with which he conveyed the disenchantment shared by many of his colleagues in the British delegation. Neither the acute and prophetic analysis published soon after, Jacques Bainville’s Les conséquences politiques de la paix (1920), which has never been translated into English, nor the detailed refutation of Keynes by Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or The Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes (1944), succeeded in stemming its influence, though while none of Keynes’ predictions were realised almost every one of Bainville’s were. More recent research contained in two collections of scholarly papers has fared little better. William Keylor, in his contribution to The Treaty of Versailles 75 Years After (1998), and Zara Steiner in ‘The Treaty of Versailles Revisited’, published in The Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Peace without Victory (2001), strove to correct what Steiner calls ‘the misused image of the “Carthaginian” peace’. In The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933 (2005) Steiner repeats that ‘the traditional view’ of Versailles ‘needs to be abandoned’. But still historians have failed to break the Keynesian spell. Is the accepted image wholly illusory, or does it express an aspect of the truth about the peace treaty?
After the ‘war to end war’ extravagant hopes were raised by the Paris Peace Conference, the first and greatest ‘summit conference’ of modern times. Even before the conference opened President Woodrow Wilson, en route from the United States, feared that it might end in ‘a tragedy of disappointment’. At its height, more than a thousand statesmen, diplomats and their staff, representing some 30 nations, were engaged in the business of peacemaking. The British delegation alone numbered over 200. Among them was Harold Nicolson, a junior diplomat who later published another classic of disillusionment, Peacemaking 1919 (1933). Nicolson recalls the conference resembling ‘a riot in a parrot-house’. Fifty-two commissions met in 1,646 sessions to draft reports on subjects ranging from prisoners of war to undersea cables, from the internationalisation of the Kiel Canal to responsibility for the war, all incorporated in a treaty extending to 15 chapters and 440 clauses.
The conference eclipsed any other in the scope of the responsibilities it undertook, with the frontiers of a new Europe of nation states to delineate and treaties to conclude with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, as well as with Germany. But progress suffered badly from the want of a basic organisational plan. Both Wilson and the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, mistrusted traditional diplomacy, which they believed had contributed to the outbreak of the war. They and the French premier, Georges Clemenceau, insisted on keeping both the shifting agenda and the conduct of negotiations in their own hands.
Wilson sought to establish the League of Nations, his panacea for world peace, as part and parcel of the peace treaties. The opening weeks of the conference were devoted to drafting the constitution, or Covenant, of the League. At the same time a council consisting of the five Allied leaders (of France, Britain, the US, Italy and Japan) and their foreign ministers sat through lengthy presentations of territorial claims from spokesmen of the new states. Clemenceau’s object was above all to ensure the future security of France against Germany, which he was sure would be intent on revenge. For Lloyd George the priority was reparations, which turned out to be the most time-consuming and divisive of all the problems faced.
Nicolson thought the lack of a systematic agenda vitiated the conference from the outset. Instead of getting to grips with the long-term challenge of Germany, the peacemakers found themselves struggling to cope with the distracting sideshows of a dozen minor wars and several sporadic and short-lived Communist revolutions. At the same time they were under domestic pressures from what Lloyd George called ‘the too fierce ardour of an expectant public’. He himself had done much to fan the flames with his electoral pledges to ‘make Germany pay’ and had to return periodically to London to face raucous backbenchers in his Conservative-dominated coalition. Wilson, too, returned temporarily to Washington for the opening session of a Congress dominated by his isolationist Republican opponents, whose suspicions of the League of Nations he failed to allay. Clemenceau was also briefly out of action when an assassination attempt left a bullet in his chest.
Not until the end of March 1919 – fearing that the example of Bolshevism in Russia might prove irresistible to a volatile Europe craving stability, work and bread – did Lloyd George, Wilson, Clemenceau and, to a lesser extent, Prime Minister Orlando of Italy, attempt to grasp the nettle of peace with Germany in ‘a race’, said Wilson, ‘between peace and anarchy’. Accompanied only by interpreters and advisers and meeting daily in 145 private sessions between late March and June, they took all the main decisions themselves as the Supreme Council or ‘Big Four’: ‘Four men’, said Lloyd George, ‘endeavouring to make the world spin round the way it should’.
It was from these closed sessions in stuffy rooms across six weeks of intensive bargaining that the treaty with Germany emerged as a set of improvised arrangements between Allies with different and often conflicting aims on such contentious territorial issues as Danzig, the Saar and the Rhineland, over which they deliberated at length. At various times one or other would stalk out of the room, threaten to leave the conference, or in Orlando’s case, to do so: the Big Four became the Big Three. ‘How did you get on?’ Clemenceau was asked after one stormy session with Wilson. ‘Splendidly’, he replied. ‘We disagreed about everything.’ On another occasion Clemenceau came close to blows with Lloyd George, whom he accused, not without cause, of serial duplicity. Wilson, exasperated at the demands of both Clemenceau and Lloyd George, ordered the SS George Washington to prepare for his early return. They all stuck it out – Orlando came back in the end – accepting that compromise was inevitable if the conference was not to collapse; but the compromises reached only after immense difficulty and heart-searching were between the Allies, not between them and Germany
The whole package of terms was approved unamended by the Big Three without adequate co-ordination or review in order to meet a self-imposed deadline of May 7th for presentation to the Germans. Even on May 6th the details of these ‘preliminaries of peace’ had not been collated in a single document and assorted sections were still passing to and from the printers. No one had read them in full let alone discussed their cumulative effect. ‘I hope’, said Wilson ingenuously, ‘that during the rest of my life I will have enough time to read this whole volume.’ Lloyd George admitted that he only received a complete copy at the last moment. ‘I don’t think in all history this can be matched’, commented Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
In his 14 Points Wilson had pledged himself and the Allies to a ‘peace of justice’. This required the implementation in Europe of the principle of national self-determination through the creation of nation states and the establishment of a ‘new world order’, as Wilson called it, based on the League of Nations and the re-ordering of international relations under the rule of law. This vision had to be reconciled with the demands of allies who had lavished blood and treasure for most of the war, while America remained profitably neutral. They were not going to be talked out of compensation, security and gains at the expense of a still powerful Germany, which had defeated Russia and come close to victory.
The Treaty of Versailles confiscated all of Germany’s overseas possessions and at least a tenth of her territory, population, agricultural land, coal, iron and steel. It reduced her army of half a million conscripts to a volunteer defence force of 100,000 and her fleet to little more than a coastal command. It saddled Germany with liability for a vast yet unquantified reparations debt, which it was reckoned would take a generation or more to discharge. To compensate France for the deliberate destruction of her coalmines it transferred the coal-rich Saarland to her for 15 years. All German territory on the left bank of the Rhine and a 50-kilometre strip on the right was declared a demilitarised zone, barred to German troops in perpetuity and placed under Allied occupation for a dozen years.
The Treaty also imposed what the Germans called Schmachparagrafen, ‘clauses of shame’, notably the projected trial of the ex-Kaiser for ‘a supreme offence against international morality’ and Article 231, which asserted Germany’s liability for the loss and damage caused by her ‘aggression’. The Germans immediately denounced this as a ‘war guilt clause’, which stamped the entire treaty with the intolerable character of a Schandvertrag or ‘treaty of shame’.
Versailles was a dictated peace, or Diktat. A German delegation was summoned to Versailles to receive, though not to negotiate, the draft conditions on May 7th. Two reluctant envoys were sent from Berlin to sign the final treaty on June 28th at the Palace of Versailles, in the same Hall of Mirrors where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871. These were the only occasions on which the Germans were allowed to make an appearance. But this had not been the original plan. The conference had opened in January as an inter-Allied gathering, assembled to agree a common policy and to formulate initial demands for subsequent discussion at a full congress with Germany in accordance with the norms of European diplomacy. By early March, however, it was apparent that agreement even among the Allies would be difficult. Hence negotiation with Germany was ruled out for fear that it would lead to unravelling hard-won decisions. Accordingly on May 7th the terms were formally presented to the Germans on a ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ basis at the Hotel Trianon at Versailles. Here Clemenceau, as president of the conference, set the tone with an uncompromising declaration of intent. ‘The time has come for a heavy reckoning of accounts’, he told the Germans. ‘There will be no verbal discussion, and observations must be submitted in writing.’
The German delegation had one opportunity to represent the Weimar Republic and to show the Allies, who knew little about the new Germany, a human face. Unfortunately the head of the delegation, the foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, made a poor impression. ‘A most sinister-looking person’, wrote one observer, ‘an incarnation of the whole Junker system.’
Worse still was Brockdorff-Rantzau’s presentation, delivered seated in a rasping tone and defiant manner. Far from persuading the Allies, its effect, as recorded by Philip Kerr, Lloyd George’s secretary, was to provoke their united antipathy:
At the start everybody felt a little sympathy with the Hun, but by the time Brockdorff-Rantzau had finished, most people were almost anxious to recommence the war.
‘Insolent beyond description’, said Lloyd George. He ‘felt he could get up and hit’ Brockdorff-Rantzau. Wilson agreed that it was ‘the most tactless speech I have ever heard’. Clemenceau kept his temper ‘but his face became red with anger’. The count’s demeanour and conduct gave the fatal impression that the new Germany was not so different from the old. Six weeks later this impression seemed to be confirmed when the German High Seas Fleet, interned at Scapa Flow under the terms of the Armistice, scuttled itself. The peacemakers saw this as proof of perfidy and it further hardened their attitude. Wilson spoke for all in demanding from Germany ‘an unequivocal decision … to sign or not to sign’.
Rather than sign, Brockdorff-Rantzau, his fellow delegates and the first government of the Weimar Republic resigned. In the words of the outgoing chancellor, Philip Scheidemann: ‘What hand would not wither that binds itself and us in these fetters?’ A new cabinet was formed and the constituent assembly at Weimar approved its recommendation to accept the treaty under pressure of the ongoing Allied blockade, the threat of an Allied march on Berlin and the fear that the Bismarckian Reich, not yet 50 years old, would disintegrate as its component states made separate peace with the advancing Allies. Friedrich Ebert, president of the republic, announced the government’s decision to sign, ‘yielding’, as he said, ‘to overwhelming force, but without on that account abandoning its view in regard to the unheard-of injustice of the Treaty’. This emphatic reservation explains much about the sequel.
Brockdorff-Rantzau described the treaty as a ‘death sentence’. Clemenceau’s view was: ‘If only we could get rid of Germany, there would be peace in Europe.’ The point, as the peacemakers acknowledged, was that they had no intention of breaking up the German Reich. ‘We do not wish to destroy Germany,’ Wilson confirmed, ‘and we could not do so if we wished.’ German prosperity was essential if reparations were to be paid and Lloyd George warned against killing the goose that he hoped would lay the golden egg. He wanted Germany to remain a political counterweight to France and to resume her prewar role as Britain’s chief trading partner.
Clemenceau was too much a realist to argue for putting the clock back to 1870 by a partition of Germany. Yet five times since 1814 the Germans had invaded France. Clemenceau himself had witnessed the defeat of 1870. French casualties in the First World War were the highest of all belligerents in proportion to the population: one in four Frenchmen between 18 and 27 had perished. Clemenceau sought ‘physical guarantees’ to prevent yet another invasion of France’s eastern frontier. For in that event, warned Marshal Foch, France was doomed unless the Rhineland was annexed to France or at least detached from Germany. Clemenceau championed this policy and abandoned it only after opposition from Wilson and Lloyd George to such a violation of national self-determination, the creation, warned Lloyd George, of ‘Alsace-Lorraines in reverse’. This left unsolved a chronic problem of security for a France of 40 million facing a Germany half as populous again, with a higher birthrate. By 1940 there would be twice as many Germans of military age as Frenchmen. ‘This is not peace’, predicted Foch. ‘It is an armistice for 20 years.’
How ‘Carthaginian’, then, was the treaty? Northern Schleswig was returned to Denmark after a plebiscite, to restore land taken by Prussia in 1864; Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, as stipulated in the eighth of Wilson’s 14 Points, to repair ‘the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871’; and the province of Posen, West Prussia and the Polish Corridor were transferred from Germany to the independent Polish state whose creation was pledged in Point 13. These losses left Germany a smaller but more homogenous state; they also left a legacy of bitterness. The Polish frontiers in particular were resented, cutting off East Prussia from the Reich, the Polish Corridor forming an intervening wedge of now alien territory. Germans from Posen and the Corridor, formerly the masters there, now found themselves under Polish rule. Most voted with their feet and moved to Germany proper. Those who remained formed a disgruntled and troublesome minority.
Germany had lost the war in the sense that, with the successive collapse of Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria-Hungary in the autumn of 1918, its high command accepted that victory was no longer possible and that Germany must make peace while she still could on the relatively liberal terms offered by the 14 Points. Yet at the Armistice German troops, victorious in the east, still occupied French soil and most of the continental landmass from the Belgian coast to the Caspian. No Allied soldier had entered Germany except as a prisoner of war and even though the terms of armistice made Germany powerless to resume hostilities, there was little sense of defeat. In Berlin German not Allied troops marched past the Brandenburg Gate, to be greeted by President Ebert as heroes returning ‘undefeated from the battlefield’.
The war weakened Germany far less than Germany had weakened her continental adversaries. Unlike much of Belgium, north-east France, Poland and the Balkans, German territory was virtually unscathed, infrastructure unimpaired and industry poised to outstrip that of its ex-enemies. By 1921 Germany was producing three times as much steel as France. Strategically, Germany was much advantaged. Gone were the two empires blocking her expansion to the east and south: the Russian Empire, broken by German arms and now convulsed in revolution and civil war, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had splintered into its constituent nationalities at the end of the war. From Finland to the Black Sea, across territories recently under her sway, Germany was now flanked by a string of new ‘succession-states’, weak, overstretched and vulnerable. Most contained disaffected minorities, including Germans. Far from combining, as Clemenceau hoped, to encircle and contain Germany these new states were constantly at odds between themselves and with both Germany and Russia over disputed boundaries and populations. The Balkans remained a byword for instability, but now the whole of Central and Eastern Europe was fragmented, enhancing the relative strength of Germany.
Wilson repudiated what he called ‘the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power’. Clemenceau disagreed. He knew that without powerful allies France would have lost the war. The new states on which France now depended to counterbalance Germany in the east –principally Poland and Czechoslovakia – were no substitute for her wartime alliance with imperial Russia. Clemenceau sought to maintain British and US solidarity with France, but America was soon to reject the treaty and wash its hands of military commitments. In return for Clemenceau’s abandonment of a strategic frontier on the Rhine, both Wilson and Lloyd George signed supplementary treaties guaranteeing France against future German aggression. Yet Wilson did not even submit his for approval by the Senate, while Lloyd George evaded his by a surreptitious amendment on the eve of signature making its validity dependent on ratification of its American counterpart. Within months, France, bereft both of her two main allies and of the Rhineland, sensed that despite victory in 1918 her long-term security was precarious as never before.
National self-determination created fresh trouble-spots. The most contentious issues related to Germany and arose from the territories ceded to Poland. To provide Poland with the ‘free and secure access to the sea’ promised in the 14 Points, the German port of Danzig was to be administered by the League of Nations as a so-called ‘Free City’. The Sudeten fringe of Bohemia contained over two and a half million Germans but was incorporated within Czechoslovakia, as essential to her strategic and economic wellbeing. Austria was a wholly German state of seven millions, but Austro-German unification, or Anschluss, was prohibited since it would have made Germany even larger than in 1914. True, neither Austria nor the Sudetenland, both Habsburg dominions, had belonged to Bismarck’s Germany, but the fact remained that Sudetenlanders and Austrians wished to unite with the Reich, while the Allies themselves had placed national self-determination at the heart of peacemaking. There was resentment in Germany that the self-determination granted to others was denied to fellow-Germans just across its borders.
Reparations, even when scaled down, helped to keep grievances alive. Periodic crises over German defaults provoked Allied military incursions beyond the Rhine, culminating in 1923 with the French occupation of the Ruhr. Versailles was also blamed, inaccurately but obsessively, for Germany’s home-grown ills: for inflation, a consequence of the war rather than of the peace; for hyperinflation, unleashed by the German government’s reckless issue of paper money during the Ruhr crisis; and for the six million Germans thrown out of work by the Great Depression of 1929. Even before the Wall Street Crash, on Germany’s national day of mourning to mark the 10th anniversary of Versailles, an official manifesto stressed that the war-guilt clause ‘leaves our people no peace of mind’. Demands for the evacuation of the Rhineland, the return of the Saar and revision of the Polish frontiers increased in stridency.
In their written observations on the treaty, the only form of communication with the Allies permitted to them at the conference, the Germans stressed the contractual nature of the pre-Armistice agreement of November 5th, 1918 under which the 14 Points and Wilson’s supplementary Principles and Particulars constituted the legal basis of the ‘Wilson peace’, as they called it, invoking his promises of a peace characterised by ‘impartial justice for all the parties in the war’, by ‘open covenants of peace, openly arrived at’, by their ‘free acceptance … by the people involved’ and by ‘even-handed and dispassionate justice for Germany’. Wilson, harrowed, worn down and ill from the continual strains of the conference, concluded by March 1919 that Germany deserved a hard, deterrent peace in view of her ‘very great offence against civilisation’ and that the League of Nations would iron out injustices.
Many in the British delegation were unconvinced. ‘Are we making a good peace?’ Nicolson wrote in his diary in early March. Smuts remonstrated with Lloyd George at the end of the month, instancing the separation from Germany of Danzig, the Polish Corridor and the Saarland. ‘Are we in our sober senses’, he asked, ‘or suffering from shellshock? What has become of Wilson’s 14 Points?’ The German observations confirmed his own:
They raise the point to the very forefront which I have always considered vital, viz., that we are bound ... to make a Wilson peace – that is, one within the four corners of the Wilson Points and speeches.
Smuts pleaded for radical revision and ‘appeasement’ – concessions from strength and the removal from the treaty both of major grievances and gratuitous ‘pinpricks’.
Misgivings at Paris were matched by unease among opinion-formers in Britain. ‘The fundamental question’, declared the Manchester Guardian, on May 8th, ‘is whether we desire a peace of appeasement or a peace of violence’. A fortnight later, Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, contemplated issuing a public pronouncement. He wrote to Lloyd George that the effect of the treaty was ‘to ask impossibilities’, a view in which the primate was confirmed by letters he was receiving from ‘weighty and trustworthy people’. He besought the prime minister to bring home a peace ‘such that we can ask God’s blessing upon it’.
Disillusion intensified among the British delegates. ‘If I were the Germans’, wrote Nicolson, ‘I shouldn’t sign for a moment.’ Keynes resigned in protest and returned to England to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Smuts put his finger on the cardinal error of the conference and the fundamental flaw of the treaty. ‘For the sake of the future’, he warned Lloyd George, the Germans ‘should not be made to sign at the point of the bayonet … The Treaty should not be capable of moral repudiation by the German people hereafter’. The Allies ‘should as far as possible carry the German delegates with us’ and ‘we should listen to what they have to say’. He proposed the appointment of three Allied representatives ‘to meet them in oral discussion’ and go through the treaty ‘as a whole’. In this way it would be purged of ‘all appearance of one-sidedness and unnecessary dictation’ and its ‘moral authority’ would be ‘all the greater and more binding’.
A most significant episode in the conference took place in Paris over the weekend of Friday May 30th to Sunday June 1st at a series of meetings chaired by Lloyd George of the British Empire delegation together with most of his coalition colleagues, summoned from London. The purpose of the gathering was to reconsider the treaty in the light of the German observations, which had made a profound impression.
The counterproposals offered unilateral German disarmament; the voluntary cession to France of Alsace-Lorraine, subject to a plebiscite; Poland to gain most of the province of Posen with rights of access to German ports under international guarantees; free deliveries of coal to France and Belgium; direct assistance in repairing the devastated areas and an offer on reparations of £5 billion. It required the establishment of a neutral enquiry into war guilt and Germany’s immediate admission to the League. The offers were contingent on major concessions, but they were also open to negotiation. For H.A.L. Fisher, historian and minister of education, who took part in these final discussions, they were ‘the most brilliant treaty that victors had ever imposed upon conquered’.
Issues of greatest concern, which Lloyd George was authorised to re-open with Wilson and Clemenceau, were Poland’s frontiers and the occupation of the Rhineland. It was agreed that reparations should also be reconsidered and that Germany should join the League. Lloyd George failed, however, to persuade Wilson and Clemenceau. The most he was able to obtain was their agreement to plebiscites in Silesia and other areas assigned to Poland, concessions which Smuts dismissed as ‘paltry’ by comparison with the radical revision he thought necessary.
‘Appeasement’ – a readiness to address recognised grievances – took firm root at the conference. Almost to the last Smuts was determined not to sign the treaty; when he did, he issued a statement regretting that the promises of ‘a new international order and a fairer, better world are not written in this treaty’. A month before, many of the British foreign office delegates in Paris had met to found what became the Royal Institute of International Affairs. This inaugural meeting was held in an avowed spirit of revisionism. ‘There is no single person in this room’, its chairman, Lord Robert Cecil, declared, ‘who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted.’
Far from being a Carthaginian peace, the Treaty of Versailles is better understood in the words of Jacques Bainville, as ‘too mild for its severity’. ‘Undoubtedly very severe indeed’, as Woodrow Wilson agreed, it neither crushed Germany nor conciliated her. It was a dictated peace which no German could accept as fair or morally binding and which the victors lacked the will to enforce. It gave Germany cause for resentment while leaving her the wherewithal to obtain revenge. Its principal sanction, the occupation of the Rhineland, would come to an end just when Germany would again become formidable.
In both Germany and Britain, however, the perception of a Carthaginian peace as ruinous and vindictive was of no less significance than the reality. While ultimately energising Germany, it engendered in Britain a sense of guilt that sapped the will to uphold a treaty felt to be unjust. As late as February 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who 20 years before had derided the ‘appeasers’ of 1919, now acknowledged that Versailles had given the Germans ‘good cause to ask for consideration of their grievances’. Keynes’ book uncorked a genie that no one has succeeded in putting back in the bottle, or can succeed, since its undeniable presence at the conference produced the psychological consequences of the peace.
Antony Lentin is a Senior Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of two studies of Lloyd George and Versailles and a biography of Lord Sumner. He is currently working on The Rise and Fall of Sir Edgar Speyer for Haus.
In this 1919 cartoon, France is avenged for its loss of the Franco-Prussian War by the terms of the peace treaty. Mary Evans Picture Library
Under the terms of the treaty Danzig's majority German population came under Polish rule. Nazi Germany's first act of the Second World War was to reclaim the city. Getty Images/Hulton Archiv
Pic: Crowds line the streets of Berlin as German soldiers return, hailed as 'undefeated', at the end of the war, 1918Crowds line the streets of Berlin as German soldiers return, hailed as 'undefeated', at the end of the war, 1918. Corbis/Stapleton Collection
Nearly a century on, perceptions of the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles still bear the imprint of The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), which became a bestseller in the wake of the conference. Bitter fruit of Keynes’ own experience as a delegate in Paris, the book condemned what he branded ‘the Carthaginian peace’. The expression was suggested to Keynes by the South African delegate, General Jan Smuts (1870-1950), who referred to the peace concluded in 201 bc after the Second Punic War, when Rome stripped Carthage of its army, navy and overseas possessions and imposed a 50-year indemnity. Otherwise Carthage was left independent and able to recover economically, which eventually it did. Keynes actually seems to have been thinking of the ‘peace’ of 146 bc, when, after the Third Punic War, the Romans slaughtered the inhabitants of Carthage or sold them into slavery, annexing what remained of Carthaginian territory. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes quoted and endorsed the German view that the Treaty of Versailles signalled ‘the death sentence of many millions of German men, women and children’.
The book was widely translated, has never been out of print and has never lost its authority. Its success may be attributed to Keynes’ reputation as an economist and the brilliance with which he conveyed the disenchantment shared by many of his colleagues in the British delegation. Neither the acute and prophetic analysis published soon after, Jacques Bainville’s Les conséquences politiques de la paix (1920), which has never been translated into English, nor the detailed refutation of Keynes by Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or The Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes (1944), succeeded in stemming its influence, though while none of Keynes’ predictions were realised almost every one of Bainville’s were. More recent research contained in two collections of scholarly papers has fared little better. William Keylor, in his contribution to The Treaty of Versailles 75 Years After (1998), and Zara Steiner in ‘The Treaty of Versailles Revisited’, published in The Paris Peace Conference, 1919: Peace without Victory (2001), strove to correct what Steiner calls ‘the misused image of the “Carthaginian” peace’. In The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933 (2005) Steiner repeats that ‘the traditional view’ of Versailles ‘needs to be abandoned’. But still historians have failed to break the Keynesian spell. Is the accepted image wholly illusory, or does it express an aspect of the truth about the peace treaty?
After the ‘war to end war’ extravagant hopes were raised by the Paris Peace Conference, the first and greatest ‘summit conference’ of modern times. Even before the conference opened President Woodrow Wilson, en route from the United States, feared that it might end in ‘a tragedy of disappointment’. At its height, more than a thousand statesmen, diplomats and their staff, representing some 30 nations, were engaged in the business of peacemaking. The British delegation alone numbered over 200. Among them was Harold Nicolson, a junior diplomat who later published another classic of disillusionment, Peacemaking 1919 (1933). Nicolson recalls the conference resembling ‘a riot in a parrot-house’. Fifty-two commissions met in 1,646 sessions to draft reports on subjects ranging from prisoners of war to undersea cables, from the internationalisation of the Kiel Canal to responsibility for the war, all incorporated in a treaty extending to 15 chapters and 440 clauses.
The conference eclipsed any other in the scope of the responsibilities it undertook, with the frontiers of a new Europe of nation states to delineate and treaties to conclude with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, as well as with Germany. But progress suffered badly from the want of a basic organisational plan. Both Wilson and the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, mistrusted traditional diplomacy, which they believed had contributed to the outbreak of the war. They and the French premier, Georges Clemenceau, insisted on keeping both the shifting agenda and the conduct of negotiations in their own hands.
Wilson sought to establish the League of Nations, his panacea for world peace, as part and parcel of the peace treaties. The opening weeks of the conference were devoted to drafting the constitution, or Covenant, of the League. At the same time a council consisting of the five Allied leaders (of France, Britain, the US, Italy and Japan) and their foreign ministers sat through lengthy presentations of territorial claims from spokesmen of the new states. Clemenceau’s object was above all to ensure the future security of France against Germany, which he was sure would be intent on revenge. For Lloyd George the priority was reparations, which turned out to be the most time-consuming and divisive of all the problems faced.
Nicolson thought the lack of a systematic agenda vitiated the conference from the outset. Instead of getting to grips with the long-term challenge of Germany, the peacemakers found themselves struggling to cope with the distracting sideshows of a dozen minor wars and several sporadic and short-lived Communist revolutions. At the same time they were under domestic pressures from what Lloyd George called ‘the too fierce ardour of an expectant public’. He himself had done much to fan the flames with his electoral pledges to ‘make Germany pay’ and had to return periodically to London to face raucous backbenchers in his Conservative-dominated coalition. Wilson, too, returned temporarily to Washington for the opening session of a Congress dominated by his isolationist Republican opponents, whose suspicions of the League of Nations he failed to allay. Clemenceau was also briefly out of action when an assassination attempt left a bullet in his chest.
Not until the end of March 1919 – fearing that the example of Bolshevism in Russia might prove irresistible to a volatile Europe craving stability, work and bread – did Lloyd George, Wilson, Clemenceau and, to a lesser extent, Prime Minister Orlando of Italy, attempt to grasp the nettle of peace with Germany in ‘a race’, said Wilson, ‘between peace and anarchy’. Accompanied only by interpreters and advisers and meeting daily in 145 private sessions between late March and June, they took all the main decisions themselves as the Supreme Council or ‘Big Four’: ‘Four men’, said Lloyd George, ‘endeavouring to make the world spin round the way it should’.
It was from these closed sessions in stuffy rooms across six weeks of intensive bargaining that the treaty with Germany emerged as a set of improvised arrangements between Allies with different and often conflicting aims on such contentious territorial issues as Danzig, the Saar and the Rhineland, over which they deliberated at length. At various times one or other would stalk out of the room, threaten to leave the conference, or in Orlando’s case, to do so: the Big Four became the Big Three. ‘How did you get on?’ Clemenceau was asked after one stormy session with Wilson. ‘Splendidly’, he replied. ‘We disagreed about everything.’ On another occasion Clemenceau came close to blows with Lloyd George, whom he accused, not without cause, of serial duplicity. Wilson, exasperated at the demands of both Clemenceau and Lloyd George, ordered the SS George Washington to prepare for his early return. They all stuck it out – Orlando came back in the end – accepting that compromise was inevitable if the conference was not to collapse; but the compromises reached only after immense difficulty and heart-searching were between the Allies, not between them and Germany
The whole package of terms was approved unamended by the Big Three without adequate co-ordination or review in order to meet a self-imposed deadline of May 7th for presentation to the Germans. Even on May 6th the details of these ‘preliminaries of peace’ had not been collated in a single document and assorted sections were still passing to and from the printers. No one had read them in full let alone discussed their cumulative effect. ‘I hope’, said Wilson ingenuously, ‘that during the rest of my life I will have enough time to read this whole volume.’ Lloyd George admitted that he only received a complete copy at the last moment. ‘I don’t think in all history this can be matched’, commented Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
In his 14 Points Wilson had pledged himself and the Allies to a ‘peace of justice’. This required the implementation in Europe of the principle of national self-determination through the creation of nation states and the establishment of a ‘new world order’, as Wilson called it, based on the League of Nations and the re-ordering of international relations under the rule of law. This vision had to be reconciled with the demands of allies who had lavished blood and treasure for most of the war, while America remained profitably neutral. They were not going to be talked out of compensation, security and gains at the expense of a still powerful Germany, which had defeated Russia and come close to victory.
The Treaty of Versailles confiscated all of Germany’s overseas possessions and at least a tenth of her territory, population, agricultural land, coal, iron and steel. It reduced her army of half a million conscripts to a volunteer defence force of 100,000 and her fleet to little more than a coastal command. It saddled Germany with liability for a vast yet unquantified reparations debt, which it was reckoned would take a generation or more to discharge. To compensate France for the deliberate destruction of her coalmines it transferred the coal-rich Saarland to her for 15 years. All German territory on the left bank of the Rhine and a 50-kilometre strip on the right was declared a demilitarised zone, barred to German troops in perpetuity and placed under Allied occupation for a dozen years.
The Treaty also imposed what the Germans called Schmachparagrafen, ‘clauses of shame’, notably the projected trial of the ex-Kaiser for ‘a supreme offence against international morality’ and Article 231, which asserted Germany’s liability for the loss and damage caused by her ‘aggression’. The Germans immediately denounced this as a ‘war guilt clause’, which stamped the entire treaty with the intolerable character of a Schandvertrag or ‘treaty of shame’.
Versailles was a dictated peace, or Diktat. A German delegation was summoned to Versailles to receive, though not to negotiate, the draft conditions on May 7th. Two reluctant envoys were sent from Berlin to sign the final treaty on June 28th at the Palace of Versailles, in the same Hall of Mirrors where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871. These were the only occasions on which the Germans were allowed to make an appearance. But this had not been the original plan. The conference had opened in January as an inter-Allied gathering, assembled to agree a common policy and to formulate initial demands for subsequent discussion at a full congress with Germany in accordance with the norms of European diplomacy. By early March, however, it was apparent that agreement even among the Allies would be difficult. Hence negotiation with Germany was ruled out for fear that it would lead to unravelling hard-won decisions. Accordingly on May 7th the terms were formally presented to the Germans on a ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ basis at the Hotel Trianon at Versailles. Here Clemenceau, as president of the conference, set the tone with an uncompromising declaration of intent. ‘The time has come for a heavy reckoning of accounts’, he told the Germans. ‘There will be no verbal discussion, and observations must be submitted in writing.’
The German delegation had one opportunity to represent the Weimar Republic and to show the Allies, who knew little about the new Germany, a human face. Unfortunately the head of the delegation, the foreign minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, made a poor impression. ‘A most sinister-looking person’, wrote one observer, ‘an incarnation of the whole Junker system.’
Worse still was Brockdorff-Rantzau’s presentation, delivered seated in a rasping tone and defiant manner. Far from persuading the Allies, its effect, as recorded by Philip Kerr, Lloyd George’s secretary, was to provoke their united antipathy:
At the start everybody felt a little sympathy with the Hun, but by the time Brockdorff-Rantzau had finished, most people were almost anxious to recommence the war.
‘Insolent beyond description’, said Lloyd George. He ‘felt he could get up and hit’ Brockdorff-Rantzau. Wilson agreed that it was ‘the most tactless speech I have ever heard’. Clemenceau kept his temper ‘but his face became red with anger’. The count’s demeanour and conduct gave the fatal impression that the new Germany was not so different from the old. Six weeks later this impression seemed to be confirmed when the German High Seas Fleet, interned at Scapa Flow under the terms of the Armistice, scuttled itself. The peacemakers saw this as proof of perfidy and it further hardened their attitude. Wilson spoke for all in demanding from Germany ‘an unequivocal decision … to sign or not to sign’.
Rather than sign, Brockdorff-Rantzau, his fellow delegates and the first government of the Weimar Republic resigned. In the words of the outgoing chancellor, Philip Scheidemann: ‘What hand would not wither that binds itself and us in these fetters?’ A new cabinet was formed and the constituent assembly at Weimar approved its recommendation to accept the treaty under pressure of the ongoing Allied blockade, the threat of an Allied march on Berlin and the fear that the Bismarckian Reich, not yet 50 years old, would disintegrate as its component states made separate peace with the advancing Allies. Friedrich Ebert, president of the republic, announced the government’s decision to sign, ‘yielding’, as he said, ‘to overwhelming force, but without on that account abandoning its view in regard to the unheard-of injustice of the Treaty’. This emphatic reservation explains much about the sequel.
Brockdorff-Rantzau described the treaty as a ‘death sentence’. Clemenceau’s view was: ‘If only we could get rid of Germany, there would be peace in Europe.’ The point, as the peacemakers acknowledged, was that they had no intention of breaking up the German Reich. ‘We do not wish to destroy Germany,’ Wilson confirmed, ‘and we could not do so if we wished.’ German prosperity was essential if reparations were to be paid and Lloyd George warned against killing the goose that he hoped would lay the golden egg. He wanted Germany to remain a political counterweight to France and to resume her prewar role as Britain’s chief trading partner.
Clemenceau was too much a realist to argue for putting the clock back to 1870 by a partition of Germany. Yet five times since 1814 the Germans had invaded France. Clemenceau himself had witnessed the defeat of 1870. French casualties in the First World War were the highest of all belligerents in proportion to the population: one in four Frenchmen between 18 and 27 had perished. Clemenceau sought ‘physical guarantees’ to prevent yet another invasion of France’s eastern frontier. For in that event, warned Marshal Foch, France was doomed unless the Rhineland was annexed to France or at least detached from Germany. Clemenceau championed this policy and abandoned it only after opposition from Wilson and Lloyd George to such a violation of national self-determination, the creation, warned Lloyd George, of ‘Alsace-Lorraines in reverse’. This left unsolved a chronic problem of security for a France of 40 million facing a Germany half as populous again, with a higher birthrate. By 1940 there would be twice as many Germans of military age as Frenchmen. ‘This is not peace’, predicted Foch. ‘It is an armistice for 20 years.’
How ‘Carthaginian’, then, was the treaty? Northern Schleswig was returned to Denmark after a plebiscite, to restore land taken by Prussia in 1864; Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, as stipulated in the eighth of Wilson’s 14 Points, to repair ‘the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871’; and the province of Posen, West Prussia and the Polish Corridor were transferred from Germany to the independent Polish state whose creation was pledged in Point 13. These losses left Germany a smaller but more homogenous state; they also left a legacy of bitterness. The Polish frontiers in particular were resented, cutting off East Prussia from the Reich, the Polish Corridor forming an intervening wedge of now alien territory. Germans from Posen and the Corridor, formerly the masters there, now found themselves under Polish rule. Most voted with their feet and moved to Germany proper. Those who remained formed a disgruntled and troublesome minority.
Germany had lost the war in the sense that, with the successive collapse of Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria-Hungary in the autumn of 1918, its high command accepted that victory was no longer possible and that Germany must make peace while she still could on the relatively liberal terms offered by the 14 Points. Yet at the Armistice German troops, victorious in the east, still occupied French soil and most of the continental landmass from the Belgian coast to the Caspian. No Allied soldier had entered Germany except as a prisoner of war and even though the terms of armistice made Germany powerless to resume hostilities, there was little sense of defeat. In Berlin German not Allied troops marched past the Brandenburg Gate, to be greeted by President Ebert as heroes returning ‘undefeated from the battlefield’.
The war weakened Germany far less than Germany had weakened her continental adversaries. Unlike much of Belgium, north-east France, Poland and the Balkans, German territory was virtually unscathed, infrastructure unimpaired and industry poised to outstrip that of its ex-enemies. By 1921 Germany was producing three times as much steel as France. Strategically, Germany was much advantaged. Gone were the two empires blocking her expansion to the east and south: the Russian Empire, broken by German arms and now convulsed in revolution and civil war, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had splintered into its constituent nationalities at the end of the war. From Finland to the Black Sea, across territories recently under her sway, Germany was now flanked by a string of new ‘succession-states’, weak, overstretched and vulnerable. Most contained disaffected minorities, including Germans. Far from combining, as Clemenceau hoped, to encircle and contain Germany these new states were constantly at odds between themselves and with both Germany and Russia over disputed boundaries and populations. The Balkans remained a byword for instability, but now the whole of Central and Eastern Europe was fragmented, enhancing the relative strength of Germany.
Wilson repudiated what he called ‘the great game, now forever discredited, of the balance of power’. Clemenceau disagreed. He knew that without powerful allies France would have lost the war. The new states on which France now depended to counterbalance Germany in the east –principally Poland and Czechoslovakia – were no substitute for her wartime alliance with imperial Russia. Clemenceau sought to maintain British and US solidarity with France, but America was soon to reject the treaty and wash its hands of military commitments. In return for Clemenceau’s abandonment of a strategic frontier on the Rhine, both Wilson and Lloyd George signed supplementary treaties guaranteeing France against future German aggression. Yet Wilson did not even submit his for approval by the Senate, while Lloyd George evaded his by a surreptitious amendment on the eve of signature making its validity dependent on ratification of its American counterpart. Within months, France, bereft both of her two main allies and of the Rhineland, sensed that despite victory in 1918 her long-term security was precarious as never before.
National self-determination created fresh trouble-spots. The most contentious issues related to Germany and arose from the territories ceded to Poland. To provide Poland with the ‘free and secure access to the sea’ promised in the 14 Points, the German port of Danzig was to be administered by the League of Nations as a so-called ‘Free City’. The Sudeten fringe of Bohemia contained over two and a half million Germans but was incorporated within Czechoslovakia, as essential to her strategic and economic wellbeing. Austria was a wholly German state of seven millions, but Austro-German unification, or Anschluss, was prohibited since it would have made Germany even larger than in 1914. True, neither Austria nor the Sudetenland, both Habsburg dominions, had belonged to Bismarck’s Germany, but the fact remained that Sudetenlanders and Austrians wished to unite with the Reich, while the Allies themselves had placed national self-determination at the heart of peacemaking. There was resentment in Germany that the self-determination granted to others was denied to fellow-Germans just across its borders.
Reparations, even when scaled down, helped to keep grievances alive. Periodic crises over German defaults provoked Allied military incursions beyond the Rhine, culminating in 1923 with the French occupation of the Ruhr. Versailles was also blamed, inaccurately but obsessively, for Germany’s home-grown ills: for inflation, a consequence of the war rather than of the peace; for hyperinflation, unleashed by the German government’s reckless issue of paper money during the Ruhr crisis; and for the six million Germans thrown out of work by the Great Depression of 1929. Even before the Wall Street Crash, on Germany’s national day of mourning to mark the 10th anniversary of Versailles, an official manifesto stressed that the war-guilt clause ‘leaves our people no peace of mind’. Demands for the evacuation of the Rhineland, the return of the Saar and revision of the Polish frontiers increased in stridency.
In their written observations on the treaty, the only form of communication with the Allies permitted to them at the conference, the Germans stressed the contractual nature of the pre-Armistice agreement of November 5th, 1918 under which the 14 Points and Wilson’s supplementary Principles and Particulars constituted the legal basis of the ‘Wilson peace’, as they called it, invoking his promises of a peace characterised by ‘impartial justice for all the parties in the war’, by ‘open covenants of peace, openly arrived at’, by their ‘free acceptance … by the people involved’ and by ‘even-handed and dispassionate justice for Germany’. Wilson, harrowed, worn down and ill from the continual strains of the conference, concluded by March 1919 that Germany deserved a hard, deterrent peace in view of her ‘very great offence against civilisation’ and that the League of Nations would iron out injustices.
Many in the British delegation were unconvinced. ‘Are we making a good peace?’ Nicolson wrote in his diary in early March. Smuts remonstrated with Lloyd George at the end of the month, instancing the separation from Germany of Danzig, the Polish Corridor and the Saarland. ‘Are we in our sober senses’, he asked, ‘or suffering from shellshock? What has become of Wilson’s 14 Points?’ The German observations confirmed his own:
They raise the point to the very forefront which I have always considered vital, viz., that we are bound ... to make a Wilson peace – that is, one within the four corners of the Wilson Points and speeches.
Smuts pleaded for radical revision and ‘appeasement’ – concessions from strength and the removal from the treaty both of major grievances and gratuitous ‘pinpricks’.
Misgivings at Paris were matched by unease among opinion-formers in Britain. ‘The fundamental question’, declared the Manchester Guardian, on May 8th, ‘is whether we desire a peace of appeasement or a peace of violence’. A fortnight later, Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, contemplated issuing a public pronouncement. He wrote to Lloyd George that the effect of the treaty was ‘to ask impossibilities’, a view in which the primate was confirmed by letters he was receiving from ‘weighty and trustworthy people’. He besought the prime minister to bring home a peace ‘such that we can ask God’s blessing upon it’.
Disillusion intensified among the British delegates. ‘If I were the Germans’, wrote Nicolson, ‘I shouldn’t sign for a moment.’ Keynes resigned in protest and returned to England to write The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Smuts put his finger on the cardinal error of the conference and the fundamental flaw of the treaty. ‘For the sake of the future’, he warned Lloyd George, the Germans ‘should not be made to sign at the point of the bayonet … The Treaty should not be capable of moral repudiation by the German people hereafter’. The Allies ‘should as far as possible carry the German delegates with us’ and ‘we should listen to what they have to say’. He proposed the appointment of three Allied representatives ‘to meet them in oral discussion’ and go through the treaty ‘as a whole’. In this way it would be purged of ‘all appearance of one-sidedness and unnecessary dictation’ and its ‘moral authority’ would be ‘all the greater and more binding’.
A most significant episode in the conference took place in Paris over the weekend of Friday May 30th to Sunday June 1st at a series of meetings chaired by Lloyd George of the British Empire delegation together with most of his coalition colleagues, summoned from London. The purpose of the gathering was to reconsider the treaty in the light of the German observations, which had made a profound impression.
The counterproposals offered unilateral German disarmament; the voluntary cession to France of Alsace-Lorraine, subject to a plebiscite; Poland to gain most of the province of Posen with rights of access to German ports under international guarantees; free deliveries of coal to France and Belgium; direct assistance in repairing the devastated areas and an offer on reparations of £5 billion. It required the establishment of a neutral enquiry into war guilt and Germany’s immediate admission to the League. The offers were contingent on major concessions, but they were also open to negotiation. For H.A.L. Fisher, historian and minister of education, who took part in these final discussions, they were ‘the most brilliant treaty that victors had ever imposed upon conquered’.
Issues of greatest concern, which Lloyd George was authorised to re-open with Wilson and Clemenceau, were Poland’s frontiers and the occupation of the Rhineland. It was agreed that reparations should also be reconsidered and that Germany should join the League. Lloyd George failed, however, to persuade Wilson and Clemenceau. The most he was able to obtain was their agreement to plebiscites in Silesia and other areas assigned to Poland, concessions which Smuts dismissed as ‘paltry’ by comparison with the radical revision he thought necessary.
‘Appeasement’ – a readiness to address recognised grievances – took firm root at the conference. Almost to the last Smuts was determined not to sign the treaty; when he did, he issued a statement regretting that the promises of ‘a new international order and a fairer, better world are not written in this treaty’. A month before, many of the British foreign office delegates in Paris had met to found what became the Royal Institute of International Affairs. This inaugural meeting was held in an avowed spirit of revisionism. ‘There is no single person in this room’, its chairman, Lord Robert Cecil, declared, ‘who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted.’
Far from being a Carthaginian peace, the Treaty of Versailles is better understood in the words of Jacques Bainville, as ‘too mild for its severity’. ‘Undoubtedly very severe indeed’, as Woodrow Wilson agreed, it neither crushed Germany nor conciliated her. It was a dictated peace which no German could accept as fair or morally binding and which the victors lacked the will to enforce. It gave Germany cause for resentment while leaving her the wherewithal to obtain revenge. Its principal sanction, the occupation of the Rhineland, would come to an end just when Germany would again become formidable.
In both Germany and Britain, however, the perception of a Carthaginian peace as ruinous and vindictive was of no less significance than the reality. While ultimately energising Germany, it engendered in Britain a sense of guilt that sapped the will to uphold a treaty felt to be unjust. As late as February 1939 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who 20 years before had derided the ‘appeasers’ of 1919, now acknowledged that Versailles had given the Germans ‘good cause to ask for consideration of their grievances’. Keynes’ book uncorked a genie that no one has succeeded in putting back in the bottle, or can succeed, since its undeniable presence at the conference produced the psychological consequences of the peace.
Antony Lentin is a Senior Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of two studies of Lloyd George and Versailles and a biography of Lord Sumner. He is currently working on The Rise and Fall of Sir Edgar Speyer for Haus.
In this 1919 cartoon, France is avenged for its loss of the Franco-Prussian War by the terms of the peace treaty. Mary Evans Picture Library
Under the terms of the treaty Danzig's majority German population came under Polish rule. Nazi Germany's first act of the Second World War was to reclaim the city. Getty Images/Hulton Archiv
Friday, February 8, 2013
Soviet Female Ace of WW2
Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak (left) was the young fighter pilot with the bouquet of wildflowers in her cockpit who shot down a dozen of the Luftwaffe's best pilots to become the highest scoring woman air ace of all time, writes author Bill Yenne.
She was a study in contrasts, a shy girl who matured into a young woman who dared to aspire to be a warrior, in part to defend the reputation of her family name, dishonoured by the lies which had shamed her father (who was swept up in Stalin's purges of 1937), and in part to save her beloved Motherland from Hitler's invading Wehrmacht.
She is seen as representing many, and symbolic of much.
Lidiya - known as 'Lilya' - helped symbolize a generation of young women, barely old enough not to be called schoolgirls, who answered the call in 1941 to fight the Germans, and who became heroines in the armed forces of the Soviet Union, the only nation to regularly use women in combat roles in World War II.
Though she would never have imagined it, she can also be seen to symbolize the spirit of the 21st Century military women who heroically fight and die on the world's battlefronts.
The fact that popular culture has portrayed her as the "White Rose of Stalingrad," when it was actually a white lily which she painted on the side of her Yak-1 fighter aircraft is illustrative of how, in death, the story of her short life has become as much myth as legend.
Yet, in the making of history, the myths, in the literary sense, are the elements of the story which elevate certain events and certain people to prominence above others.
In the beginning, Lilya was merely an unpretentious girl who wanted to fly airplanes. She was born in Moscow in 1921, on August 18, the day which, on her 12th birthday, became "Soviet Aviation Day." She later joked with her friends that they picked that date because it was her birthday.
While still in her teens, she learned at a flying club and became an exceptional pilot. When the war began, Lilya volunteered for one of the three all-woman aviation regiments that were being organized by the celebrated, record-setting Soviet woman pilot Marina Raskova.
In September 1942, as the lines were being drawn for the crucial Battle of Stalingrad, Lilya and a small cadre of other women were transferred to an elite fighter regiment. Having established their reputations for skill and daring, they were being thrown into the great cauldron that was to be the turning point of the war.
Doing battle with some of the Luftwaffe's best fighter pilots, Lilya shot one down, and then another. By the end of her first month in combat, she had downed five, to become history's first woman ace.
Through the coming months, Lilya entered combat dozens of times. She experienced having her plywood fighter plane being hammered by explosive shells the size of a young woman's forearm.
Soviet paranoia
She suffered life-threatening injuries, but she persevered. She entered one-on-one combat with Germany's knights of the air and emerged victorious about a dozen times. Record keeping in the Soviet Union was not the best in those days, but her total score of aerial victories may well have been more than a dozen.
On the first day of August in 1943, as the white cumulus of the afternoon billowed against a deep blue sky over the slightly rolling hills of Ukraine, Lilya Litvyak fought her last battle and disappeared without a trace. She was less than three weeks short of her 22nd birthday.
By this time, she had graced magazine covers and had received numerous decorations for bravery. She had accomplished the requisite number of aerial victories to be awarded the highest decoration for valour, the red star of the Hero of the Soviet Union.
However, in the world of Stalin's institutional paranoia, those who were missing in action could not receive this award posthumously. Stalin feared that those who were missing might turn up as defectors.
And so it was that the celebrated heroine slipped into obscurity. It was not until 1979 that remains identified as Lilya's were recovered, and not until 1986, that the slow-moving Soviet bureaucracy officially removed her from the "missing" list, declaring her to have been "killed in action."
On May 5, 1990, four long years after the bureaucracy had spoken, Lilya's name was spoken in the Kremlin. It had been 47 years since she had limped the streets of Moscow on a leg injured in combat.
The Soviet Union itself was in its final days, but celebrating its finest moment.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last of Stalin's successors, was in the midst of a round of commemorations of the 45th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory in the war, and amid the medal ceremonies, Lilya Litvyak was finally awarded her decades overdue Hero of the Soviet Union.
Bill Yenne is the author of several military biographies, including The White Rose of Stalingrad.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/0/21329663
Battle of Stalingrad
In the spring of 1942, Hitler launched what he believed would be his final offensive in the East
More than 1,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Stalingrad
The average life-expectancy of a Soviet private soldier during the battle was 24 hours
Of all the major air forces that were engaged in WWII, only the Red Air Force had all-women units
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