Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

624 Pages·2003·2.45 MB·english

by  Margaret MacMillan

PARIS
SIX MONTHS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
1919
Margaret MacMillan
Proofed By MadMaxAU
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Foreword
Richard Holbrooke
In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures
than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be
foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in
fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate
paths and pitfalls to be avoided—in the parlance of modern
bureaucrats, lessons learned. With this in mind, it is time to look
again at what happened in Paris in 1919. Margaret MacMillan’s
engrossing account of that seminal event contains some success
stories, to be sure, but measured against the judgment of history
and consequences, it is a study of flawed decisions with terrible
consequences, many of which haunt us to this day.
In the headline version of history, the road from the Hall of
Mirrors to the German invasion of Poland only twenty years later is
usually presented as a straight line. But as MacMillan forcefully
demonstrates, this widely accepted view of history distorts the
nature of the decisions made in Paris and minimizes the importance
of actions taken in the intervening years.
The manner in which the war ended—with an “armistice” and
no fighting on German soil—played a significant role in subsequent
events. “Things might have been different,” MacMillan writes, “if
Germany had been more thoroughly defeated.” Most Germans
outside the High Command did not realize that Germany was
finished militarily, and therefore did not regard November 11, 1918,
as a day of surrender. Hitler would capitalize on this; his promise to
undo the Treaty of Versailles was a potent and popular theme
during his rise to power. But MacMillan corrects the widely held
view that the reparations payments imposed by the victors were so
onerous as to have caused the wreck of the German economy that
paved the way for Hitler.
By any standard, the cast of characters that assembled in
Paris in 1919 was remarkable, from Lawrence of Arabia to a small
Vietnamese kitchen hand later known as Ho Chi Minh. And for the
first time in history, an American stood at the center of a great
world drama. Woodrow Wilson inspired tens of millions who never
met him, and frustrated those who worked with him. He was
idealistic and remote, naive and rigid, noble and conflicted. His
strengths and weaknesses, his health, even the influence of his
overbearing and ignorant wife, were all critical factors in events of
historic importance.
In the eighty years since he left office, Wilson’s reputation has
risen and fallen regularly—but he remains as fascinating and
central to an understanding of modern American foreign policy as
ever. His many supporters, from Herbert Hoover to Robert
McNamara, have argued that his enemies in both Paris and the
United States Senate were responsible for the undoing of one of
history’s noblest dreams. Others, including Senator Jesse Helms,
have viewed Wilson’s determined adversary, Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge, as a principled protector of American sovereignty and
charged Wilson with seeking to undermine the American
Constitution. Another school of thought, especially prevalent in the
latter years of the Cold War, criticized Wilson for unrealistic, overly
moralistic goals; among its best-known practitioners are George F.
Kennan and Henry Kissinger, who accused Wilson of “extraordinary
conceit,” even while conceding that he “originated what would
become the dominant intellectual school of American foreign
policy.” (To Kissinger’s horror, his president, Richard Nixon, placed
Wilson’s portrait in the place of honor in the Cabinet Room.)
Through the fog of this never-ending debate, one thing is clear:
as Wilson arrived in France in December 1918, he ignited great
hopes throughout the world with his stirring Fourteen Points—
especially the groundbreaking concept of “self-determination.” Yet
Wilson, often ill-informed or badly prepared for detailed
negotiations, seemed vague as to what his own phrase actually
meant. “When I gave utterance to those words,” he admitted later, “I
said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which
are coming to us day after day.”
Even at the time it was recognized that the concept of self-
determination was, as MacMillan puts it, “controversial and
opaque.”
“When the President talks of ‘self-determination,’” Secretary of
State Robert Lansing asked, “what unit has he in mind? Does he
mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?… It will raise
hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of
lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream
of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late.”
Lansing was one of the first to recognize a dilemma that lies at
the core of many of today’s bitterest disputes. Still, it was not
Wilson’s dreams but his decision to compromise them (by letting
Japan take the Shantung peninsula in China, for example) that cost
the world so dearly. Ironically, when Wilson returned home, he
made the opposite mistake: by refusing to make relatively minor
compromises with Senate moderates, he lost his chance to get the
treaty (and American membership in the League of Nations) ratified.
Some of the most intractable problems of the modern world
have roots in decisions made right after the end of the Great War.
Among them one could list the four Balkan wars between 1991 and
1999; the crisis over Iraq (whose present borders resulted from
Franco-British rivalries and casual mapmaking); the continuing
quest of the Kurds for self-determination; disputes between Greece
and Turkey; and the endless struggle between Arabs and Jews over
land that each thought had been promised them.
As the peacemakers met in Paris, new nations emerged and
great empires died. Excessively ambitious, the Big Four set out to
do nothing less than fix the world, from Europe to the far Pacific.
But facing domestic pressures, events they could not control, and
conflicting claims they could not reconcile, the negotiators were, in
the end, simply overwhelmed— and made deals and compromises
that would echo down through history.
Even then, they sensed that they were laying the seeds for
future problems. “I cannot say for how many years, perhaps I
should say for how many centuries, the crisis which has begun will
continue,” predicted Georges Clemenceau, whose own behavior
contributed to the failure. “Yes, this treaty will bring us burdens,
troubles, miseries, difficulties, and that will continue for long
years.”
MacMillan brings back to life some great dramas: the Italian
walkout after the failure of their effort to gain control of much of the
Yugoslav coast; the Japanese grab of the Shantung peninsula,
which launched the May Fourth Movement in China and started the
path to war and revolution in Asia; the dismemberment of Hungary,
which left millions of Hungarians permanently outside their own
country’s borders; the inability of the Big Four to deal with the new
Soviet government, other than by sending a feckless expeditionary
force into the Russian civil war; the dissolution of the Ottoman
empire and the rise of one of the twentieth century’s most
remarkable leaders, Kemal Atatürk; and last but not least, the
creation of Yugoslavia (originally, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats,
and Slovenes) out of the disparate peoples of the south Balkans.
This state would survive under Marshal Tito’s communist
dictatorship for decades, but when the patchwork put together in
1919 fell apart in the early 1990s, four wars followed—first
Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzegovina, and finally
Kosovo. (A fifth, in Macedonia, was barely averted.)
As our American negotiating team shuttled around the
Balkans in the fall of 1995 trying to end the war in Bosnia, the
Versailles treaty was not far from my mind. Reading excerpts from
Harold Nicolson’s Peacemaking 1919, we joked that our goal was to
undo Woodrow Wilson’s legacy. When we forced the leaders of
Bosnia, Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to come
together in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 and negotiate the end
of the war, we were, in effect, burying another part of Versailles. In
the spring of 2002, the last two parts of the Versailles creation still
linked as “Yugoslavia” took another step, moving to the brink of a
full and final divorce by agreeing to rename their country “Serbia
and Montenegro”—probably a way station on the path to full
separation.
At Dayton we were working on only one small part of the
puzzle; in Paris they worked on the world. Margaret MacMillan’s
brilliant portrait of the men of Paris, what they tried to do, where
they succeeded, and why they failed, is especially timely now. This
story illuminates, as only great history can, not only the past but
also the present. It could help guide us in the future. I only regret
that it was not available a decade ago. But here it is: an irresistible
voyage through history.
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Acknowledgments
This book has my name on the title page, but it would not exist
without the great many people who encouraged me to tackle such a
huge subject, who prodded me on when I got discouraged and who
bore with me when I only wanted to talk about the League of
Nations. I must single out some for particular thanks. Sandra
Hargreaves, Avi Shlaim, Peter Snow and Lord Weidenfeld helped
turn an idea into a serious project. Grant McIntyre and Matthew
Taylor provided invaluable and meticulous editing in London,
matched only by the outstanding work of Joy de Menil and her
team in New York. I owe an immeasurable intellectual debt to my
colleague and friend Bob Bothwell, who over the years helped me to
clarify my ideas not just on the Peace Conference but on the writing
of history. Orde Morton, Thomas Barcsay, David MacMillan,
Catharina MacMillan, Thomas MacMillan, Alex MacMillan, Megan
MacMillan, Ann MacMillan, Peter Snow, Daniel Snow and Barbara
Eastman read parts and gave me much-needed advice. My parents,
Eluned and Robert MacMillan, read every word, often several times,
without complaint. I had two outstanding researchers: Rebecca
Snow, who found the illustrations, and John Ondrovcik, who
checked the text and compiled the bibliography. Bob Manson, Al
Wargo and Errol Aspevig provided support for my research at
different stages.
For their consent to quote from material in their collections or
for which they hold copyright, I am grateful to the following: the
National Archives of Scotland for the Lothian Papers (GD 40/17);
Nigel Nicolson for Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919 (London:
Methuen, 1964); the Clerk of the Records, House of Lords Record
Office, acting on behalf of the Beaverbrook Foundation Trust for the
Lloyd George Papers; Princeton University Press for Arthur S. Link,
ed., The Deliberations of the Council of Four, 2 volumes (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); and the Trustees of the
British Library for the Balfour Papers. Every effort has been made
to trace copyright holders, but in the event of any omissions the
author would be glad to hear from them.
I am grateful as well to my former employer, Ryerson
University, for giving me time and to St. Antony’s College, Oxford,
for a wonderful term as a Senior Associate Member. The Snows and
MacMillans in London and the Daniel-Shlaims in Oxford offered
unstinting hospitality and encouragement. If this book does not
reflect all this, the fault is mine.
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Contents
Foreword by Richard Holbrooke
Acknowledgments
Note on Place-names
Introduction
Maps
PART ONE: GETTING READY FOR PEACE
1 . Woodrow Wilson Comes to Europe
2. First Impressions
3. Paris
4. Lloyd George and the British Empire Delegation
PART TWO: A NEW WORLD ORDER
5. We Are the League of the People
6. Russia
7. The League of Nations
8. Mandates
PART THREE: THE BALKANS AGAIN
9 . Yugoslavia
10. Rumania
11. Bulgaria
12. Midwinter Break
PART FOUR: THE GERMAN ISSUE
13. Punishment and Prevention
14. Keeping Germany Down
15. Footing the Bill
16. Deadlock Over the German Terms
PART FIVE: BETWEEN EAST AND WEST
17. Poland Reborn
18. Czechs and Slovaks
19. Austria
20. Hungary
PART SIX: A TROUBLED SPRING
2 1 . The Council of Four
22. Italy Leaves
23. Japan and Racial Equality
24. A Dagger Pointed at the Heart of China
PART SEVEN: SETTING THE MIDDLE EAST ALIGHT
25. The Greatest Greek Statesman Since Pericles
26. The End of the Ottomans
27. Arab Independence
28. Palestine
29. Atatürk and the Breaking of Sèvres
PART EIGHT: FINISHING UP
3 0 . The Hall of Mirrors
Conclusion
Pictures
Appendix: Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points
Bibliography
Notes
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