The Inside Story of the Peace Conference Part 27

This antic.i.p.ation turned out to be a delusion. Wilsonianism proved to be a very different system from that of the Fourteen Points, and its author played the part not only of an interpreter of his tenets, but also of a sort of political pope alone competent to annul the force of laws binding on all those whom he should refuse to dispense from their observance. He had to do with patriotic politicians permeated with the old ideas, desirous of providing in the peace terms for the next war and striving to secure the maximum of advantage over the foe presumptive, by dismembering his territory, depriving him of colonies, making him dependent on others for his supplies of raw stuffs, and artificially checking his natural growth. Nearly all of them had principles to invoke in favor of their claims and some had nothing else. And it was these tendencies which Mr. Wilson sought to combine with the ethical ideals to be incarnated in the Society of Nations. Now this was an impossible synthesis. The spirit of vindictiveness--for that was well represented at the Conference--was to merge and lose itself in an outflow of magnanimity; precautions against a hated enemy were to be interwoven with implicit confidence in his generosity; a military occupation would provide against a sudden onslaught, while an approach to disarmament would bear witness to the absence of suspicion. Thus Poland would discharge the function of France's ally against the Teutons in the east, but her frontiers were to leave her inefficiently protected against their future attacks from the west. Germany was dismembered, yet she was credited with self-discipline and generosity enough to steel her against the temptation to profit by the opportunity of joining together again what France had dissevered. The League of Nations was to be based upon mutual confidence and good fellows.h.i.+p, yet one of its most powerful future members was so distrusted as to be declared permanently unworthy to possess any overseas colonies. Germany's territory in the Saar Valley is admittedly inhabited by Germans, yet for fifteen years there is to be a foreign administration there, and at the end of it the people are to be asked whether they would like to cut the bonds that link them with their own state and place themselves under French sway, so that a premium is offered for French immigration into the Saar Valley.

Those are a few of the consequences of the mixture of the two irreconcilable principles.

That Germany richly deserved her punishment cannot be gainsaid. Her crime was without precedent. Some of its most sinister consequences are irremediable. Whole sections of her people are still unconscious not only of the magnitude, but of the criminal character, of their misdeeds.

None the less there is a future to be provided for, and one of the safest provisions is to influence the potential enemy's will for evil if his power cannot be paralyzed. And this the Treaty failed to do.

The Germans, when they learned the conditions, discussed them angrily, and the keynote was refusal to sign the doc.u.ment. The financial clauses were stigmatized as masked slavery. The press urged that during the war less than one-tenth of France's territory had been occupied by their countrymen and that even of this only a fragment was in the zone of combat. The entire wealth of France, they alleged, had been estimated before the war at from three hundred and fifty milliard to four hundred milliard francs, consequently for the devastated provinces hardly more than one-twentieth of that sum could fairly be demanded as reparation, whereas the claim set forth was incomparably more. They objected to the loss of their colonies because the justification alleged--that they were disqualified to administer them because of their former cruelties toward the natives--was groundless, as the Allies themselves had admitted implicitly by offering them the right of pre-emption in the case of the Portuguese and other overseas possessions on the very eve of the war.

But the most telling objections turned upon the clauses that dealt with the Saar Valley. Its population is entirely German, yet the treaty-makers provided for its occupation by the French for a term of fifteen years and its transference to them if, after that term, the German government was unable to pay a certain sum in gold for the coal mines it contained. If that sum were not forthcoming the population and the district were to be handed over to France for all time, even though the former should vote unanimously for reunion with Germany. Count Brockdorff-Rantzau remarked in his note on the Treaty "that in the history of modern times there is no other example of a civilized Power obliging a state to abandon its people to foreign domination as an equivalent for a cash payment." One of the most influential press organs complained that the Treaty "bartered German men, women, and children for coal; subjected some districts with a thoroughly German population to an obligatory plebiscite[326] under interested supervision; severed others without any consultation from the Fatherland; delivered over the proceeds of German industry to the greed of foreign capitalists for an indefinite period; ... spread over the whole country a network of alien commissions to be paid by the German nation; withdrew streams, rivers, railways, the air service, numerous industrial establishments, the entire economic system, from the sovereignty of the German state by means either of internationalization or financial control; conferred on foreign inspectors rights such as only the satraps of absolute monarchs in former ages were empowered to exercise; in a word, they put an end to the existence of the German nation as such. Germany would become a colony of white slaves...."[327]

Fortunately for the Allies, the reproach of exchanging human beings for coal was seen by their leaders to be so damaging that they modified the odious clause that warranted it. Even the comments of the friendly neutral press were extremely pungent. They found fault with the Treaty on grounds which, unhappily, cannot be reasoned away. "Why dissimulate it?" writes the foremost of these journals; "this peace is not what we were led to expect. It dislodges the old dangers, but creates new ones.

Alsace and Lorraine are, it is true, no longer in German hands, but ...

irredentism has only changed its camp. In 1914 Germany put her faith in force because she herself wielded it. But crushed down under a peace which appears to violate the promises made to her, a peace which in her heart of hearts she will never accept, she will turn toward force anew.

It will stand out as the great misfortune of this Treaty that it has tainted the victory with a moral blight and caused the course of the German revolution to swerve.... The fundamental error of the instrument lies in the circ.u.mstance that it is a compromise between two incompatible frames of mind. It was feasible to restore peace to Europe by pulling down Germany definitely. But in order to accomplish this it would have been necessary to crush a people of seventy millions and to incapacitate them from rising to their feet again. Peace could also have been secured by the sole force of right. But in this case Germany would have had to be treated so considerately as to leave her no grievance to brood over. M. Clemenceau hindered Mr. Wilson from displaying sufficient generosity to get the moral peace, and Mr. Wilson on his side prevented M. Clemenceau from exercising severity enough to secure the material peace. And so the result, which it was easy to foresee, is a regime devoid of the real guaranties of durability."[328]

The judge of the French syndicalists was still more severe. "The Versailles peace," exclaimed M. Verfeuil, "is worse than the peace of Brest-Litovsk ... annexations, economic servitudes, overwhelming indemnities, and a caricature of the Society of Nations--these const.i.tute the balance of the new policy,"[329] The Deputy Marcel Cachin said: "The Allied armies fought to make this war the last. They fought for a just and lasting peace, but none of these boons has been bestowed on us. We are confronted with the failure of the policy of the one man in whom our party had put its confidence--President Wilson. The peace conditions ... are inacceptable from various points of view, financial, territorial, economic, social, and human."[330]

It is in this Treaty far more than in the Covenant that the principles to which Mr. Wilson at first committed himself are in decisive issue.

True, he was wont after every surrender he made during the Conference to invoke the Covenant and its concrete realization--the League of Nations--as the corrective which would set everything right in the future. But the fact can hardly be blinked that it is the Treaty and its effects that impress their character on the Covenant and not the other way round. As an eminent Swiss professor observed: "No league of nations would have hindered the Belgian people in 1830 from separating from Holland. Can the future League of Nations hinder Germany from reconst.i.tuting its geographical unity? Can it hinder the Germans of Bohemia from smiting the Czech? Can it prevent the Magyars, who at present are scattered, from working for their reunion?"[331]

These potential disturbances are so many dangers to France. For if war should break out in eastern Europe, is it to be supposed that the United States, the British colonies, or even Britain herself will send troops to take part in it? Hardly. Suppose, for instance, that the Austrians, who ardently desire to be merged in Germany, proclaim their union with her, as I am convinced they will one day, does any statesman believe that democratic America will despatch troops to coerce them back? If the Germans of Bohemia secede from the Czechoslovaks or the Croats from the Serbs, will British armies cross the sea to uphold the union which those peoples repudiate? And in the name of which of the Fourteen Points would they undertake the task? That of self-determination? France's interests, and hers alone, would be affected by such changes. And France would be left to fight single-handed. For what?

It is interesting to note how the conditions imposed upon Germany were appreciated by an influential body of Mr. Wilson's American partizans who had pinned their faith to his Fourteen Points. Their view is expressed by their press organ as follows:[332]

"France remains the strongest Power on the Continent. With her military establishment intact she faces a Germany without a general staff, without conscription, without universal military training, with a strictly limited amount of light artillery, with no air service, no fleet, with no domestic basis in raw materials for armament manufacture, with her whole western border fifty kilometers east of the Rhine demilitarized. On top of this France has a system of military alliances with the new states that touch Germany. On top of this she secured permanent representation in the Council of the League, from which Germany is excluded. On top of that economic terms which, while they cannot be fulfilled, do cripple the industrial life of her neighbor.

With such a balance of forces France demands for herself a form of protection which neither Belgium, nor Poland, nor Czechoslovakia, nor Italy is granted."

FOOTNOTES:

[326] One of the three districts of Schleswig. A curious phenomenon was this zeal of the Supreme Council for Denmark's interests, as compared with Denmark's refusal to profit by it, the champions of self-determination urging the Danes to demand a district, as Danish, which the Danes knew to be German!

[327] _Das Berliner Tageblatt_, June 4, 1919.

[328] _Le Journal de Geneve_, June 24, 1919.

[329] Cf. _L'Echo de Paris_, May 12, 1919.

[330] _Ibidem_.

[331] In a monograph ent.i.tled _Plus Jamais_.

[332] Cf. _The New Republic_, August 13, 1919, p. 43.

XV

THE TREATY WITH BULGARIA

Among all the strange products of the many-sided outbursts of the leading delegates' reconstructive activity, the Treaty with Bulgaria stands out in bold relief. It reveals the high-water mark reached by those secret, elusive, and decisive influences which swayed so many of the mysterious decisions adopted by the Conference. As Bulgaria disposed of an abundant source of those influences, her chastis.e.m.e.nt partakes of some of the characteristics of a reward. Not only did she not fare as the treacherous enemy that she showed herself, but she emerged from the ordeal much better off than several of the victorious states. Unlike Serbia, Rumania, France, and Belgium, she escaped the horrors of a foreign invasion and she possessed and fructified all her resources down to the day when the armistice was concluded. Her peasant population made huge profits during the campaign and her armies despoiled Serbia, Rumania, and Greek Macedonia and sent home enormous booty. In a word, she is richer and more prosperous than before she entered the arena against her protectors and former allies.

For, owing to the intercession of her powerful friends, she was treated with a degree of indulgence which, although expected by all who were initiated into the secrets of "open diplomacy," scandalized those who were anxious that at least some simulacrum of justice should be maintained. Germany was forced to sign a blank check which her enemies will one day fill in. Austria was reduced to the status of a parasite living on the bounty of the Great Powers and denied the right of self-determination. Even France, exhausted by five years' superhuman efforts, beholds with alarm her financial future entirely dependent upon the ability or inability of Germany to pay the damages to which she was condemned.

But the Prussia of the Balkans, owing to the intercession of influential anonymous friends, had no such consequences to deplore. Although she contracted heavy debts toward Germany, she was relieved of the effort to pay them. Her financial obligations were first transferred[333] to the Allies and then magnanimously wiped out by these, who then limited all her liabilities for reparations to two and a quarter milliard francs. An Inter-Allied commission in Sofia is to find and return the loot to its lawful owners, but it is to charge no indemnity for the damage done. Nor will it contain representatives of the states whose property the Bulgars abstracted. Serbia is allowed neither indemnity nor reparation. She is to receive a share which the Treaty neglected to fix of the two and a quarter milliard francs on a date which has also been left undetermined.

She is not even to get back the herds of cattle of which the Bulgars robbed her. The lawgivers in Paris considered that justice would be met by obliging the Bulgars to restore 28,000 head of cattle in lieu of the 3,200,000 driven off, so that even if the ill-starred Serbs should identify, say, one million more, they would have no right to enforce their claim.[334]

Nor is that the only disconcerting detail in the Treaty. The Supreme Council, which sanctioned the military occupation of a part of Germany as a guaranty for the fulfilment of the peace conditions, dispenses Bulgaria from any such irksome conditions. Bulgaria's good faith appeared sufficient to the politicians who drafted the instrument. "For reasons which one hardly dares touch upon," writes an eminent French publicist,[335] "several of the Powers that const.i.tute the famous world areopagus count on the future co-operation of Bulgaria. We shrink in dismay from the perspective thus opened to our gaze."[336]

The territorial changes which the Prussia of the Balkans was condemned to undergo are neither very considerable nor unjust. Rumania receives no Bulgarian territory, the frontiers of 1913 remaining unaltered. Serbia nets some on grounds which cannot be called in question, and a large part of Thrace which is inhabited, not by Bulgars, but mainly by Greeks and Turks, was taken from Bulgaria, but allotted to no state in particular. The upshot of the Treaty, as it appeared to most of the leading publicists on the Continent of Europe, was to leave Bulgaria, whose cruelty and destructiveness are described by official and unofficial reports as unparalleled, in a position of economic superiority to Serbia, Greece, and Rumania. And in the Inter-Allied commission Bulgaria is to have a representative, while Serbia, Greece, and Rumania, a part of whose stolen property the commission has to recover, will have none.

A comparison between the indulgence lavished upon Bulgaria and the severity displayed toward Rumania is calculated to disconcert the stanchest friends of the Supreme Council. The Rumanian government, in a dignified note to the Conference, explained its refusal to sign the Treaty with Austria by enumerating a series of facts which amount to a scathing condemnation of the work of the Supreme Council. On the one hand the Council pleaded the engagements entered into between j.a.pan and her European allies as a cogent motive for handing over Shantung to j.a.pan. For treaties must be respected. And the argument is sound. On the other hand, they were bound by a similar treaty[337] to give Rumania the whole Banat, the Rumanian districts of Hungary and the Bukovina as far as the river Pruth. But at the Conference they repudiated this engagement. In 1916 they stipulated that if Rumania entered the war they would co-operate with ample military forces. They failed to redeem their promise. And they further undertook that "Rumania shall have the same rights as the Allies in the peace preliminaries and negotiations and also in discussing the issues which shall be laid before the Peace Conference for its decisions." Yet, as we saw, she was denied these rights, and her delegates were not informed of the subjects under discussion nor allowed to see the terms of peace, which were in the hands of the enemies, and were only twice admitted to the presence of the Supreme Council.

It has been observed in various countries and by the Allied and the neutral press that between the German view about the sacredness of treaties and that of the Supreme Council there is no substantial difference.[338] Comments of this nature are all the more distressing that they cannot be thrust aside as calumnious. Again it will not be denied that Rumania rendered inestimable services to the Allies. She sacrificed three hundred thousand of her sons to their cause. Her soil was invaded and her property stolen or ruined. Yet she has been deprived of part of her sovereignty by the Allies to whom she gave this help. The Supreme Council, not content with her law conferring equal rights on all her citizens, to whatever race or religion they may belong, ordered her to submit to the direction of a foreign board in everything concerning her minorities and demanded from her a promise of obedience in advance to their future decrees respecting her policy in matters of international trade and transit. These stipulations const.i.tute a noteworthy curtailment of her sovereignty.

That any set of public men should be carried by extrinsical motives thus far away from justice, fair play, and good faith would be a misfortune under any circ.u.mstances, but that at a conjuncture like the present it should befall the men who set up as the moral guides of mankind and wield the power to loosen the fabric of society is indeed a dire disaster.

FOOTNOTES:

[333] In June, 1919.

[334] The comments on these terms, published by M. Gauvain in the _Journal des Debats_ (September 20, 1919), are well worth reading.

[335] M. Auguste Gauvain.

[336] _Le Journal des Debats_, September 20, 1919.

[337] Concluded in the year 1916.

[338] Cf. _The Daily Mail_ (Paris edition), September 21, 1919.

XVI

THE COVENANT AND MINORITIES

In Mr. Wilson's scheme for the establishment of a society of nations there was nothing new but his pledge to have it realized. And that pledge has still to be redeemed under conditions which he himself has made much more unfavorable than they were. The idea itself--floating in the political atmosphere for ages--has come to seem less vague and unattainable since the days of Kant. The only heads of states who had set themselves to embody it in inst.i.tutions before President Wilson took it up not only disappointed the peoples who believed in them, but discredited the idea itself.

That a merely mechanical organization such as the American statesman seems to have had in mind, formed by parliamentary politicians deliberating in secret, could bind nations and peoples together in moral fellows.h.i.+p, is conceivable in the abstract. But if we turn to the reality, we shall find that in that direction nothing durable can be effected without a radical change in the ideas, aspirations, and temper of the leaders who speak for the nations to-day, and, indeed, in those of large sections of the nations themselves. For to organize society on those unfamiliar lines is to modify some of the deepest-rooted instincts of human nature. And that cannot be achieved overnight, certainly not in the span of thirty minutes, which sufficed for the drafting of the Covenant. The bulk of mankind might not need to be converted, but whole cla.s.ses must first be educated, and in some countries re-educated, which is perhaps still more difficult. Mental and moral training must complement and reinforce each other, and each political unit be brought to realize that the interests of the vaster community take precedence over those of any part of it. And to impress these novel views upon the peoples of the world takes time.

An indispensable condition of success is that the compact binding the members together must be entered into by the peoples, not merely by their governments. For it is upon the ma.s.ses that the burden of the war lies heaviest. It is the bulk of the population that supplies the soldiers, the money, and the work for the belligerent states, and endures the hards.h.i.+ps and makes the sacrifices requisite to sustain it.

Therefore, the peoples are primarily interested in the abolition of the old ordering and the forging of the new. Moreover, as latter-day campaigns are waged with all the resources of the warring peoples, and as the possession of certain of these resources is often both the cause of the conflict and the objective of the aggressor, it follows that no mere political enactments will meet contemporary requirements. An a.s.sociation of nations renouncing the sword as a means of settling disputes must also reduce as far as possible the surface over which friction with its neighbors is likely to take place. And nowadays most of that surface is economic. The possession of raw materials is a more potent attraction than territorial aggrandizement. Indeed, the latter is coveted mainly as a means of securing or safeguarding the former. On these and other grounds, in drawing up a charter for a society of nations, the political aspect should play but a subsidiary part. In Paris it was the only aspect that counted for anything.