How, after the solemn pledges undertaken during the War, a peace could
have been concluded which practically negatives all the principles
professed during the War and all the obligations entered into, is
easily explained when the progress of events is noted from the autumn
of 1918 to the end of the spring of 1919. I took no direct part in
those events, as I had no share in the government of Italy from
January to the end of June, 1919, the period during which the Treaties
of Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye were being prepared. The
Orlando Ministry was resigning when the Treaty of Versailles was drawn
up for signature, and the situation which confronted the Ministry
of which I was head was clearly defined. Nevertheless I asked the
Minister of Foreign Affairs and the delegates of the preceding Cabinet
to put their signatures to it. Signing was a necessity, and it fell to
me later on to put my signature to the ratification.
The Treaty of Versailles and those which have followed with Austria,
Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey have been validly signed, and they pledge
the good faith of the countries which have signed them. But in the
application of them there is need of great breadth of view; there is
need of dispassionate study to see if they can be maintained, if the
fulfilment of the impossible or unjust conditions demanded of the
conquered countries will not do more harm to the conquerors, will not,
in point of actual fact, pave the way to their ruin.
If there is one thing, Lloyd George has said, which will never be
forgotten or forgiven, it is arrogance and injustice in the hour
of triumph. We have never tired of saying that Germany is the most
barbarous among civilized countries, that under her civilization
is hidden all the barbarism of mediaeval times, that she puts into
practice the doctrine of might over right. At the present moment it is
our duty to ask ourselves if something of the principles which we have
for so long been attributing to Germany has not passed over to the
other side, if in our own hearts there is not a bitterness of hatred
clouding our judgment and robbing our programme of all action that can
do real good.
Prussia won the war against Austria-Hungary in 1866, and did not ask
for or impose any really onerous terms. It was contented with having
regained hegemony among the German people. Prussia conquered France
in 1870. It was an unjust war, and Prussia laid down two unjust
conditions: Alsace-Lorraine and the indemnity of five milliards. As
soon as the indemnity was paid--and it was an indemnity that could be
paid in one lump sum--Prussia evacuated the occupied territory. It did
not claim of France its colonies or its fleet, it did not impose the
reduction of its armaments or control of its transport after the
peace. The Treaty of Frankfort is a humanitarian act compared with the
Treaty of Versailles.
If Germany had won the War--Germany to whom we have always attributed
the worst possible intentions--what could it have done that the
Entente has not done? It is possible that, as it is gifted with more
practical common sense, it might have laid down less impossible
conditions in order to gain a secure advantage without ruining the
conquered countries.
There are about ninety millions of Germans in Europe, and perhaps
fifteen millions in different countries outside Europe. But in the
heart of Europe they represent a great ethnic unity; they are the
largest and most compact national group in that continent. With all
the good and bad points of their race, too methodical and at the same
time easily depressed by a severe setback, they are still the most
cultivated people on earth. It is impossible to imagine that they can
disappear, much less that they can reconcile themselves to live in a
condition of slavery. On the other hand, the Entente has built on a
foundation of shifting sand a Europe full of small States poisoned
with imperialism and in ruinous conditions of economy and finance, and
a too great Poland without a national basis and necessarily the enemy
of Russia and of Germany.
No people has always been victorious; the peoples who have fought most
wars in modern Europe, English, French and Germans, have had
alternate victories and defeats. A defeat often carries in its train
reconsideration which is followed by renewed energy: the greatness of
England is largely due to its steadfast determination to destroy the
Napoleonic Empire. What elevates men is this steadfast and persevering
effort, and a series of such collective efforts carries a nation to a
high place.
There is nothing lasting in the existing groupings. At the moment of
common danger eternal union and unbreakable solidarity are proclaimed;
but both are mere literary expressions.
Great Britain, the country which has the least need to make war, has
been at war for centuries with nearly all the European countries.
There is one country only against which it has never made war, not
even when a commercial challenge from the mercantile Republics of
Italy seemed possible. That country is Italy. That shows that between
the action of Italy there is not, nor can there be, contrast, and
indeed that between the two nations there is complete agreement in
European continental policy. It is the common desire of the two
nations, though perhaps for different reasons, that no one State shall
have hegemony on the continent. But between the years 1688 and 1815
Great Britain and France were at war for seventy years: for seventy
years, that is, out of a hundred and twenty-seven there was a state of
deadly hostility between the two countries.
General progress, evinced in various ways, above all in respect for
and in the autonomy of other peoples, is a guarantee for all. No
peoples are always victorious, none always conquered. In the time of
Napoleon the First the French derided the lack of righting spirit
in the German peoples, producers of any number of philosophers
and writers. They would have laughed at anyone who suggested the
possibility of any early German military triumph. After 1815 the
countries of the Holy Alliance would never have believed in the
possibility of the revolutionary spirit recovering; they were sure of
lasting peace in Europe. In 1871 the Germans had no doubt at all that
they had surely smothered France; now the Entente thinks that it has
surely smothered Germany.
But civilization has gained something: it has gained that collection
of rules, moral conditions, sentiments, international regulations,
which tend both to mitigate violence and to regulate in a form which
is tolerable, if not always just, relations between conquerors and
conquered, above all, a respect for the liberty and autonomy of the
latter.
Now, the treaties which have been made are, from the moral point of
view, immeasurably worse than any consummated in former days, in that
they carry Europe back to a phase of civilization which was thought
to be over and done with centuries ago. They are a danger too. For
as everyone who takes vengeance does so in a degree greater than the
damage suffered, if one supposes for a moment that the conquered
of to-day may be the conquerors of to-morrow, to what lengths of
violence, degradation and barbarism may not Europe be dragged?
Every effort, then, should now be made to follow the opposite road to
that traversed up to now, the more so in that the treaties cannot be
carried out; and if it is desired that the conquered countries shall
pay compensation to the conquerors, at least in part, for the most
serious damage, then the line to be followed must be based on
realities instead of on violence.
But before trying to see how and why the treaties cannot be carried
out, it may be well to consider how the actual system of treaties
has been reached, in complete opposition to all that was said by the
Entente during the War and to President Wilson's fourteen points. At
the same time ought to be examined the causes which led in six months
from the declarations of the Entente and of President Wilson to the
Treaty of Versailles.
The most important cause for what has happened was the choice of Paris
as the meeting-place of the Conference. After the War Paris was the
least fitted of any place for the holding of a Peace Conference, and
in the two French leaders, the President of the Republic, Poincaré,
and the President of the Council of Ministers, Clemenceau, even if the
latter was more adaptable in mind and more open to consideration of
arguments on the other side, were two temperaments driving inevitably
to extremes. Victory had come in a way that surpassed all expectation;
a people that, living through every day the War had lasted, had passed
through every sorrow, privation, agony, had now but one thought, to
destroy the enemy. The atmosphere of Paris was fiery. The decision of
the peace terms to be imposed on the enemy was to be taken in a city
which a few months before, one might really say a few weeks before,
had been under the fire of the long-range guns invented by the
Germans, in hourly dread of enemy aeroplanes. Even now it is
inexplicable that President Wilson did not realize the situation
which must inevitably come about. It is possible that the delirium of
enthusiasm with which he was received at Paris may have given him the
idea that it was in him alone that the people trusted, may have made
him take the welcome given to the representative of the deciding
factor of the War as the welcome to the principles which he had
proclaimed to the world. Months later, when he left France amid
general indifference if not distrust, President Wilson must have
realized that he had lost, not popularity, but prestige, the one sure
element of success for the head of a Government, much more so for the
head of a State. It was inevitable that a Peace Conference held
in Paris, only a few months after the War, with the direction and
preparation of the work almost entirely in French hands and with
Clemenceau at the head of everything, should conclude as it did
conclude; all the more so when Italy held apart right from the
beginning, and England, though convinced of the mistakes being made,
could not act freely and effectively.
The first duty of the Peace Conference was to restore a state of
equilibrium and re-establish conditions of life. Taking Europe as an
economic unity, broken by the War, it was necessary first of all and
in the interests of all to re-establish conditions of life which would
make it possible for the crisis to be overcome with the least possible
damage.
I do not propose to tell the story of the Conference, and it is as
well to say at once that I do not intend to make use of any document
placed in my hands for official purposes. But the story of the Paris
Conference can now be told with practical completeness after what
has been published by J.M. Keynes in his noble book on the Economic
Consequences of the War and by the American Secretary of State, Robert
Lansing, and after the statements made in the British and French
Parliaments by Lloyd George and Clemenceau. But from the political
point of view the most interesting document is still André Tardieu's
book _La Paix_, to which Clemenceau wrote a preface and which
expresses, from the point of view of the French Delegation at the
Conference, the programme which France laid before itself and what it
obtained. This book explains how the principal decisions were taken,
and indeed can be fairly considered to show in a more reliable way
than any other publication extant how the work of the Conference
proceeded. For not only was M. Tardieu one of the French Delegates to
the Conference, one of those who signed the Versailles Treaty, but
also he prepared the plan of work as well as the solutions of the most
important questions in his capacity of trusted agent of the Prime
Minister.
The determination in the mind of President Wilson when he came to
Paris was to carry through his programme of the League of Nations. He
was fickle in his infallibility, but he had the firmest faith that he
was working for the peace of the world and above all for the glory of
the United States. Of European things he was supremely ignorant. We
are bound to recognize his good faith, but we are not in the least
bound on that account to admit his capacity to tackle the problems
which with his academic simplicity he set himself to solve. When he
arrived in Europe he had not even prepared in outline a scheme of what
the League of Nations was to be; the principal problems found him
unprepared, and the duty of the crowd of experts (sometimes not too
expert) who followed him seemed rather to be to demonstrate the
truth of his idea than to prepare material for seriously thought out
decisions.
He could have made no greater mistake than he did in coming to Europe
to take part in the meetings of the Conference. His figure lost relief
at once, in a way it seemed to lose dignity. The head of a State was
taking part in meetings of heads of Governments, one of the latter
presiding. It was a giant compelled to live in a cellar and thereby
sacrificing his height. He was surrounded by formal respect and in
some decisions he exercised almost despotic authority, but his work
was none the less disordered; there was a semblance of giving in to
him while he was giving away his entire programme without being aware
of it.
In his ignorance of European things he was brought, without
recognizing it, to accept a series of decisions not superficially in
opposition to his fourteen points but which did actually nullify them.
Great Britain is part of Europe but is not on the Continent of Europe.
While Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Hungary, Holland,
Belgium, etc., live the same life, are one in thought, Great Britain
lives in her superb insularity. If she had any moment of supreme
anxiety during the War, it was in the spring and summer of 1917 during
the terrible threat of the destruction of her shipping by submarines
and the inability of construction to keep pace with it. But after
the defeat of Germany Great Britain found herself with a fleet far
superior to those of all the rest of Europe put together; once more
she broke away from Continental Europe.
Lloyd George, with swiftly acting brain and clear insight, undoubtedly
the most remarkable man at the Paris Conference, found himself in a
difficult situation between President Wilson's pronouncements, some
of them, like that regarding the freedom of the seas, undefined and
dangerous, and the claims of France tending, after the brutal attack
it had had to meet, not towards a true peace and the reconstruction of
Europe, but towards the vivisection of Germany. In one of the first
moments, just before the General Elections, Lloyd George, too,
promised measures of the greatest severity, the trial of the Kaiser,
the punishment of all guilty of atrocities, compensation for all who
had suffered from the War, the widest and most complete indemnity. But
such pronouncements gave way before his clear realization of facts,
and later on he tried in vain to put the Conference on the plane of
such realization.
Italy, as M. Tardieu says very plainly, carried no weight in the
Conference. In the meetings of the Prime Ministers and President
Wilson _le ton était celui de la conversation; nul apparat, nulle
pose. M. Orlando parlait peu; l'activité de l'Italie à la conference
a été, jusqu'à l'excès, absorbée par la question de Fiume, et sa part
dans les débats a été de ce fait trop réduite. Restait un dialogue à
trois: Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George_. The Italian Government came
into the War in May, 1915, on the basis of the London Agreement of the
preceding April, and it had never thought of claiming Fiume either
before the War when it was free to lay down conditions or during the
progress of the War.
The Italian people had always been kept in ignorance of the principles
established in the London Agreement. One of the men chiefly
responsible for the American policy openly complained to me that when
the United States came into the War no notification was given them of
the London Agreement in which were defined the future conditions
of part of Europe. A far worse mistake was made in the failure to
communicate the London Agreement to Serbia, which would certainly have
accepted it without hesitation in the terrible position in which it
then was.
But the most serious thing of all was that Italian Ministers were
unaware of its provisions till after its publication in London by the
organ of the Jugo-Slavs, which had evidently received the text from
Petrograd, where the Bolsheviks had published it. In Italy the London
Agreement was a mystery to everyone; its text was known only to the
Presidents of the Council and the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the
War Cabinets. Thus only four or five people knew about it, secrecy was
strictly kept, and, moreover, it cannot possibly be said that it was
in accordance either with national ideals or the currents of public
opinion, much less with any intelligent conception of Italy's needs
and Italy's future.
The framers of the London Agreement never thought of Fiume. Indeed
they specifically expressed their willingness that it should go to
Croatia, whether in the case of Austria-Hungary remaining united or of
the detachment of Croatia from it. It is not true that it was through
the opposition of Russia or of France that the Italian framers of the
London Agreement gave up all claim to Fiume. There was no opposition
because there was no claim. The representatives of Russia and France
have told me officially that no renunciation took place through any
action on the part of their Governments, because no claim was ever
made to them. On the other hand, after the armistice, and when it
became known through the newspapers that the London Agreement gave
Fiume to Croatia, a very strong movement for Fiume arose, fanned by
the Government itself, and an equally strong movement in Fiume also.
If, in the London Agreement, instead of claiming large areas of
Dalmatia which are entirely or almost entirely Slav, provision had
been made for the constitution of a State of Fiume placed in a
condition to guarantee not only the people of Italian nationality but
the economic interests of all the peoples in it and surrounding it,
there is no doubt that such a claim on the part of Italy would have
gone through without opposition.
During the Paris Conference the representatives of Italy showed hardly
any interest at all in the problems concerning the peace of Europe,
the situation of the conquered peoples, the distribution of raw
materials, the regulation of the new states and their relations with
the victor countries. They concentrated all their efforts on the
question of Fiume, that is to say on the one point in which Italian
action was fundamentally weak in that, when it was free to enter into
the War and lay down conditions of peace, at the moment when the
Entente was without America's invaluable assistance and was beginning
to doubt the capacity of Russia to carry on, it had never even asked
for Fiume in its War Treaty, that it had made the inexplicable mistake
of neglecting to communicate that treaty to the United States when
that country came into the War and to Serbia at the moment when
Italy's effort was most valuable for its help. At the conference Italy
had no directing policy. It had been a part of the system of
the German Alliance, but it had left its Allies, Germany and
Austria-Hungary, because it recognized that the War was unjust, and
had remained neutral for ten months. Then, entering into the War
freely and without obligation, there was one road for it to follow,
that of proclaiming solemnly and defending the principles of democracy
and justice. Indeed, that was a moral duty in that the break with the
two countries with which Italy had been in alliance for thirty-three
years became a matter not only of honesty but of duty solely through
the injustice of the cause for which they had proclaimed an offensive
war. It was not possible for Italy to go to war to realize the dream
of uniting the Italian lands to the nation, for she had entered the
system of Alliance of the Central Empires and had stayed there long
years while having all the time Italian territories unjustly subjected
to Austria-Hungary. The annexation of the Italian lands to the
Kingdom of Italy had to be the consequence of the affirmation of the
principles of nationality, not the reason for going to war. In any
case, for Italy, which had laid on itself in the London Agreement
the most absurd limitations, which had confined its war aims within
exceedingly modest limits, which had no share in the distribution
of the wealth of the conquered countries, which came out of the War
without raw materials and without any share in Germany's colonial
empire, it was a matter not only of high duty but of the greatest
utility to proclaim and uphold all those principles which the Entente
had so often and so publicly proclaimed as its war policy and its war
aims. But in the Paris Conference Italy hardly counted. Without any
definite idea of its own policy, it followed France and the United
States, sometimes it followed Great Britain. There was no affirmation
of principles at all. The country which, among all the European
warring Powers, had suffered most severely in proportion to its
resources and should have made the greatest effort to free itself
from the burdens imposed on it, took no part in the most important
decisions. It has to be added that these were arrived at between March
24 and May 7, while the Italian representatives were absent from Paris
or had returned there humbled without having been recalled.
After interminable discussions which decided very little, especially
with regard to the League of Nations which arose before the nations
were constituted and could live, real vital questions were tackled, as
is seen from the report of the Conference, on March 24, and it is a
fact that between that date and May 7 the whole treaty was put in
shape: territorial questions, financial questions, economic questions,
colonial questions. Now, at that very moment, on account of the
question of Fiume and Fiume alone, for some inscrutable reason the
Italian delegates thought good to retire from the Conference, to which
they returned later without being invited, and during that time all
the demonstrations against President Wilson took place in Italy, not
without some grave responsibility on the part of the government. Italy
received least consideration in the peace treaties among all the
conquering countries. It was practically put on one side.
It has to be noted that both in the armistice and in the peace treaty
the most serious decisions were arrived at almost incidentally;
moreover they were always vitiated by slight concessions apparently
of importance. On November 2, 1917, when the representatives of the
different nations met at Paris to fix the terms of armistice, M.
Tardieu relates, the question of reparation for damages was decided
quite incidentally. It is worth while reproducing what he says in his
book, taken from the official report:
M. CLEMENCEAU: _Je voudrais venir maintenant sur la question des
réparations et des tonnages. On ne comprenderait pas chez nous, en
France, que nous n'inscrivions pas dans l'armistice une clause à
cet effet. Ce que je vous demande c'est l'addition de trois mots:
"Réparations des dommages" sans autre commentaire.
Le dialogue suivant s'établit_: