SOME PROBLEMS
OF THE
PEACE CONFERENCE
BY
CHARLES HOMER HASKINS
AND
ROBERT HOWARD LORD
[Illustration]
CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
TO
ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE
PREFACE
The purpose of the lectures here published is to give a rapid survey
of the principal elements in that territorial settlement of Europe
which has been pronounced “the most reasonable part of the work of
the Conference”[1] of Paris. Each problem is placed in its historical
setting, while at the same time the effort is made to view it as
something demanding practical solution in the treaties of peace. The
perspective of proceedings as seen at Paris has been kept in mind
throughout, although the authors have not felt at liberty to enter
into the details of negotiations which may have become known to them
in their official capacity. Limits of time and space restrict the
treatment to Europe, and to those parts of Europe which came before the
Conference for settlement. Hence Russia is necessarily omitted.
The lectures are printed substantially as delivered at the Lowell
Institute last January, with only incidental revision. In the spelling
of place names the official local usage has been followed except where
there is a well established English form.
The first four chapters were prepared by Mr. Haskins, the last four by
Mr. Lord.
Where material has been gathered from such a variety of sources,
detailed acknowledgment is impossible. The bibliographical notes
at the end of the several chapters are meant merely to indicate
the more obvious references for readers who may wish to follow out
particular topics. The authors desire to express their indebtedness to
their colleagues on the ‘Inquiry’ and the territorial section of the
American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and their appreciation of many
courtesies from the experts of the Allied delegations. They are under
special obligations to the hospitality of the American Geographical
Society and its Director, Dr. Isaiah Bowman. Mr. George W. Robinson
has made valuable suggestions in correcting the proof sheets. While
grateful for assistance from many sources, each of the authors bears
sole responsibility for the opinions he has here expressed.
C. H. H.
R. H. L.
_Cambridge, May 1920._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Charles Seignobos, in _The New Europe_, March 25, 1920.
CONTENTS
I
TASKS AND METHODS OF THE CONFERENCE 3-35
The Tasks 3
The Problem of Frontiers 10
Organization of the Conference 23
Bibliographical Note 33
II
BELGIUM AND DENMARK 37-73
Schleswig 37
The Kiel Canal and Heligoland 46
Belgium 48
Position at the Conference 49
Malmedy, Eupen, and Moresnet 54
Luxemburg 57
Limburg and the Scheldt 60
Bibliographical Note 72
III
ALSACE-LORRAINE 75-116
The Historical Background 75
The Franco-German Debate 84
The Armistice and the Treaty 105
Bibliographical Note 115
IV
THE RHINE AND THE SAAR 117-152
The Rhine 117
The Left Bank 123
The Saar Basin 132
Bibliographical Note 151
V
POLAND 153-200
The Resurrection of Poland 153
The Western Frontier and Danzig 172
Galicia 188
The Eastern Frontier 195
Bibliographical Note 199
VI
AUSTRIA 201-229
The Collapse 201
Czecho-Slovakia 213
The Germans in Bohemia 216
The Austrian Republic 222
Klagenfurt 223
The Italian Frontier 224
Bibliographical Note 228
VII
HUNGARY AND THE ADRIATIC 231-262
The End of the Old Hungarian State 231
Hungary’s Losses 237
The Slovaks 237
The Ruthenians 238
The Roumanians 239
The Yugo-Slavs 241
The Adriatic Question 244
Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria 249
Dalmatia 251
Fiume 256
Bibliographical Note 261
VIII
THE BALKANS 263-290
Bulgaria and her Neighbors 263
The Macedonian Question 267
The Dobrudja 275
Bulgaria’s New Losses 276
The Aspirations of Greece 277
Epirus and Albania 278
Thrace 281
Constantinople 285
Bibliographical Note 288
INDEX 291-307
MAPS
I. BELGIUM AND HER NEIGHBORS 74
II. ALSACE-LORRAINE AND THE SAAR VALLEY 152
III. POLAND 200
IV. TERRITORIES OF THE FORMER AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN MONARCHY 242
V. THE ADRIATIC 262
VI. THE BALKANS 290
SOME PROBLEMS
OF THE
PEACE CONFERENCE
I
TASKS AND METHODS OF THE CONFERENCE
Great peace conferences are proverbially slow bodies. The negotiators
of Münster and Osnabrück spent five years in elaborating the treaty
of Westphalia; the conferences of Paris and Vienna labored a year and
a half at undoing the work of Napoleon. Judged by these standards,
the Peace Conference of 1919 was an expeditious body. It began its
sessions January 18 and adjourned December 9. It submitted the treaty
with Germany, including the covenant of the League of Nations, May 7;
the treaty with Austria June 2 and July 20; the treaty with Bulgaria
September 19; the treaty with Hungary in November. In the early summer
it prepared various treaties with Roumania and the new states of
eastern Europe. The heaviest part of its work was done in less than six
months, before the departure of President Wilson on June 28.
Judged by its output in a given time, the Conference must also be
pronounced a businesslike and efficient body. Whereas the treaty of
Vienna covers some seventy pages of print, and the related conventions
perhaps a hundred and fifty pages more, the published works of the
Paris Conference fill several volumes. The treaties which it drew
up were long and detailed, each of the major treaties running to
a couple of hundred pages and comprising some hundreds of articles
and annexes--territorial, political, financial, economic, naval, and
military--besides the provisions respecting labor and the League of
Nations which are common to all.
The Conference of Paris was likewise a laborious body. The gaiety of
the Congress of Vienna has become proverbial. “The Congress does not
march,” said the Prince de Ligne, “it dances.” “Everybody dances save
Talleyrand, who has a club foot. He plays whist.” It is probable, as
recent historians of the Vienna assemblage have pointed out, that
“the unending series of balls, dinners, reviews, and fêtes did not
greatly hinder the work of those whose industry was important.”[2]
Nevertheless the presence of a crowd of kings and princes and great
ladies--the Prince de Ligne wore out his hat taking it off at every
turn--gave the Congress of Vienna an air of splendor and gaiety which
was conspicuously lacking at Paris. There were no kings at the Paris
Conference, indeed there were few kings left anywhere in Europe by
January 1919. There were no balls, no great festivities. If the
Conference did not always advance, at least it did not dance. The Marne
was too near for that, in space as well as in time. Armageddon was just
past. The Germans had barely missed marching up the Champs-Elysées
and under the Arc de Triomphe. The American delegates were within an
hour’s ride of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, where their countrymen
had, only a few months before, done “the things that can’t be done.”
Two hours would take them to the heart of the devastated region,
refugees from which still filled Paris. The regiments of _poilus_ that
marched by with steady stride had looked into the mouth of hell, and
their eyes showed it. The Paris which Castlereagh had found “a bad
place for business” in 1814 was a better place for business in 1919.
The world wanted peace, and it wanted it soon.
It was also a hungry world. Pliny tells of a fabled people of the East
so narrow-mouthed that they lived by the smell of roast meat. Even
that gladsome and satisfying odor had long since disappeared from the
nostrils of a great part of Europe, and the mouths had not shrunk. “If
they have no bread, let them eat cake,” a great lady had said at the
time of the French Revolution. The cake had gone with the bread. “The
wolf,” said Mr. Hoover, “is at the door of the world.” More than once
the Peace Conference had to turn from other matters to feed the peoples
whose frontiers it was drawing, to deal earnestly and under pressure
with problems of blockade and rationing, of transportation by land and
sea.
Back of hunger lay anarchy. Great states were on the verge of
dissolution, and it was doubtful who, if anyone, could sign the treaty
on their behalf. There were times when the Conference had also to
interrupt its labors to consider the chaos into which the world seemed
to be drifting. The day after the Bolshevist revolution in Hungary one
of the sanest of American journalists remarked, “In the race between
peace and anarchy, anarchy seems today to be ahead.”
No peace congress had ever confronted so colossal a task. The assembly
at Paris met to end a world war, then in its fifth year, which had
destroyed 9,000,000 lives and untold billions of property, and left the
world staggering under a crushing burden of debt and destruction. It
had in the first instance to liquidate the affairs of three bankrupt
empires, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Turkish. The peoples
which they had held in unwilling subjection were to be set free, and
either attached to the neighboring peoples from which they had once
been torn, or established firmly as independent and self-governing
states. “As Lord Bryce had predicted, the most knotty disputes which
faced the Conference were ‘nearly all problems that involve the claims
of peoples dissatisfied with their present rulers and seeking either
independence or union with some kindred race.’” Several thousand
miles of new boundaries had to be drawn, marking new frontiers, and
if possible these frontiers must be just and lasting. Provision must
be made for restoring the lands laid waste by war and reëstablishing
the normal commercial and industrial life of the warring countries.
Those responsible for the war must pay, and they must be punished.
Finally, if possible, effective measures must be taken to prevent the
recurrence of a similar war, whether brought about by Germany’s lust of
conquest or by any other state. If war could not be prevented, it must
at least be rendered more difficult and more abhorrent to the common
moral sense of mankind.
Far beyond the more immediate and necessary tasks of the Conference
rose the dreams of those who looked for the dawning of a new age of
peace and justice, a new social and economic era. The downtrodden and
the oppressed looked toward Paris. Visions of peace were confused with
visions of the millennium. “We were told,” said a Scotch mill-worker,
later in the winter, “that the peace would bring in the New Jerusalem.
We want some of that New Jerusalem.” The day President Wilson sailed
for Brest, a worker at the Twenty-third Street Ferry, speaking for
the early crowd hurrying to their long hours in New York sweatshops,
pointed to Hoboken and said, “There goes the man who is going to change
all this for us.” Beautiful, extravagant, heart-breaking hopes were
centred on the Conference at Paris, most of all on the leader of the
American delegation and his programme. And such hopes were in large
measure inevitably doomed to disappointment. The congress could not
create a new heaven and a new earth; it could at best only make some
short advance on the road thither and show the way along which further
advance lay. Renan tells of a devout soul, who, seeing so much evil
about him, was periodically afflicted with doubts concerning the
goodness of an all-powerful God. “Perhaps,” his parish priest would
answer, “you have too high an idea of God and what he can do.” “It
was an old world,” writes Mommsen of the age which just preceded the
Christian era, “and even Caesar could not make it young again.”
A just peace, a durable peace, if possible a quick peace, could these
ends be secured? The task was one which called for compromise and
adjustment, it called also for organization. There is said to have
been a plan for quick preliminaries which should end the state of war,
followed by the leisurely and expert working out of details. If such
a course had been possible, it would probably have been the best.
Germany would have accepted terms in January at which she howled in
June, while the Allied peoples might thus have avoided the long agony
of doubt and postponement which delayed the resumption of normal
activities and the rehabilitation of the devastated regions. The world
that was malleable after the armistice soon grew cold and hard. It is,
however, a matter for serious question whether an agreement upon such
preliminaries was possible. The problems were too varied and intricate,
the conflict of interests too acute, the new ideas too new, to admit
of even provisional adjustment in a few weeks. The Conference seemed
long, too long, to the outside world which waited. If it did not dance,
like the Congress of Vienna, neither did it always seem to march,
like the Congress of Berlin, which had a cut-and-dried programme. At
times it was undoubtedly too slow; at times certain special problems,
like Fiume, consumed energy altogether out of proportion to their
importance; yet the Conference made steady and on the whole rapid
progress. It was a hard-working body, and its scanty time was well
spent.
It will be many years before the history of the Peace Conference can
be written. Its work was too vast and too varied; its records are too
scattered and too inaccessible, many of them still unwritten. We are
still too near for a true perspective. For some time we must be content
with fragmentary, partial, provisional, journalistic accounts, and
we do well to keep to the main lines of unmistakable fact. The most
obvious results of the work of the Conference, though not necessarily
the most permanent results, are its territorial decisions, the
readjustment of boundaries and sovereignties, the calling of new states
into being. These, so far as they go, are clear and definite. They
can be expressed on a map, their origin and occasion can be traced,
their nature explained. It is these, the territorial results of the
Conference, with their consequences and implications, which form the
subject of this volume. The treatment is further limited to Europe,
omitting the problems of Asia, Africa, and the isles of the Pacific.
There are those who maintain that the territorial results are unstable
and hence relatively unimportant, liable to speedy readjustment in a
fluid state of international relations, subordinated in ever increasing
degree to economic and social influences which transcend national
boundaries. All this the future must determine. For the present the
decisive fact for many millions of Europeans is that they are on one
side or another of a political frontier, members or not of the state
to which their natural allegiance gravitates; and this is a matter of
specific boundary. One may deplore the rivalries over small bits of
territory, which acquire a factitious significance in the course of the
dispute, but they cannot be ignored. The possession of land is still
a passion of peoples, and even of what our census calls ‘minor civil
divisions,’ and the history of individual ownership shows that such
passions do not grow less with the growth of other interests. So long
as states continue to exercise authority within definitely recognized
frontiers, the establishing of their territorial limits must remain a
fundamental problem of international relations. If an illustration of
the meaning of frontiers is desired nearer home, one has only to look
at the two sides of the Rio Grande.
* * * * *
Reduced to their lowest terms, the elements which enter into a national
boundary are two, the land and the people; and an ideally perfect
frontier would be at the same time geographic and ethnographic. Such
coincidences are, however, relatively rare, and the problem varies from
age to age as different geographical considerations change in relative
importance and as the human elements of race, language, and nationality
develop, shift, and grow more complex.
Thus a glance at the map of Europe shows that certain frontiers
apparently have been drawn by nature, while others are clearly the
work of man. The Spanish peninsula, Italy, the British Isles, and the
Scandinavian lands are set apart from the mass of the Continent by
broad boundaries of sea or mountain which have come to form permanent
political frontiers. On the other hand no such obvious natural
obstacles separate France from Germany, Germany from Russia, Belgium
from Holland, Austria from its neighbors, Serbia from Bulgaria. So far
as the boundaries have been drawn by geographic forces, the forces are
less obvious; if they have been drawn by the course of history, this
requires explanation and elucidation. It so happened that the Paris
congress had to do, not with the outlying regions where the physical
and the political maps generally coincide, but with those lands of
central and eastern Europe where the adjustment is most complicated. We
shall understand its work more clearly if we pause to analyze briefly
this problem of frontiers.
Of the geographical elements which go to form frontiers, the most
obvious, after the sea, is constituted by mountains. The Pyrenees are a
perfect example of a natural frontier which is also an actual frontier,
and so in a lesser degree are the Alps and the Carpathians. Mountains
inevitably divide, turning peoples different ways, in spite of modern
means of communication, and they have always been valued as military
barriers. Rivers, on the contrary, although they have military value,
unite rather than divide, so that we need not be surprised if we find
no important instances of a river frontier in present-day Europe, save
along the Danube and where the Rhine separates Alsace and Baden. Most
frontiers are neither mountain ranges nor rivers, yet they are often
adjusted to lesser features of topography, with reference either to
defence or to means of communication. Communication notably, with
the growth of modern systems of transportation, bears an intimate
relation to boundary problems. Access to the sea, either directly or by
neutralized or internationalized rivers, has become a prime necessity
for most states, and occupied the Conference especially in the cases of
Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. Even railroad lines, especially where they
monopolize natural routes, have their place in frontier adjustments, as
in Carinthia or between East and West Prussia.
Another geographical element, essentially modern in its significance,
is found in natural resources. This has never been wholly absent from
boundary problems, at least in its early form of fertile or less
fertile land, but it has taken on a preponderant importance with the
growth of modern industrialism. Each state has been anxious to bring
within its limits supplies of mineral resources, and especially of
that foundation of modern industry, coal. Now it so happens that some
of the most important deposits of coal and mineral wealth lie on or
near disputed frontiers. The coal of Upper Silesia, Teschen, Limburg,
and the Saar, the iron of Briey and annexed Lorraine, the potash of
Upper Alsace, the mercury mines of Carniola, are all cases in point.
Prussia was affected by such considerations in drawing the frontiers of
1815 and 1871; other countries had learned the lesson by 1919.
The human elements in frontier-making are still more complex than the
geographical. Obviously we have to do not with individuals but with
groups, and with those larger groups which have acquired a full measure
of what the sociologists call ‘consciousness of kind,’ to the point of
constituting some kind of national unity or national organization. We
speak of the self-determination of peoples, but what is a people? Is it
created by race or language or political allegiance, or only by that
more subtle compound which we call nationality? How large must a people
be to have a right to stand alone? Can it stand alone without certain
economic and even military prerequisites? How far can we go in breaking
up states in order to give effect to self-determination?
Such general principles might have a very wide application. Formulated
with special reference to the Central Powers, self-determination was
seized upon by men who had a case to urge in any part of the world--in
Ireland, in Egypt, in the Philippines. A German map of last spring even
represented Hawaii, St. Thomas, Florida, and Texas as trying to escape
from their unwilling subjection to the United States[3]--a curious
evidence that German mentality had not changed since the notorious
Zimmermann note of 1917. More than once it was necessary to point
out that the function of the Paris Conference was not to do abstract
justice in every corner of the earth, but to make peace with Germany,
Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Many causes perhaps excellent in
themselves were not the business of the Conference.
Even within the self-imposed limits of the Conference, there were
difficulties. “Self-determination,” President Wilson had said, “is
not a mere phrase, it is an imperative principle of action.” But
President Wilson had also said that self-government cannot be given
but must be earned; that “liberty is the privilege of maturity, of
self-control,” that “some peoples may have it, therefore, and others
may not.”[4] However just and admirable self-determination might be,
it could be fully applied only to peoples who had some experience in
self-government and thus some means of political self-expression.
For this reason it was not applicable to the downtrodden natives of
the German colonies. And even among self-governing peoples there are
practical limitations. Self-determination may be only another name for
secession, and we fought the Civil War to prevent that; we have been
none too successful in securing the subsequent self-determination of
the negroes in the southern states. Sometimes a people may be too small
to stand alone, and sometimes, as in parts of the Balkans and Asia
Minor, the mixture of peoples may defy separation. In western Asia,
notably, national aspirations have outrun the social organization.
Wherever you apply it, self-determination runs against minorities.
Ireland has its Ulster, Bohemia its Germans, Poland its Germans
and Lithuanians. There are minorities along every frontier. Some
one remarked that there was need of a fifteenth point, the rights
of minorities. The Conference found this out, and upon the newly
established states of eastern Europe were imposed special treaties
safeguarding the rights of minority peoples--Jews, Germans, Russians,
etc.--whom past experience had shown to need such guarantees.
Of these human elements in frontier-making we may begin by eliminating
race, for in Europe race is a matter of no importance in drawing
national lines. This point is emphasized, here and later, because
there has been a great deal of loose talk about race, notably on the
part of German writers. So far as it is an exact term at all, race is
a physical fact, dependent upon certain elements of stature, color,
and shape of the skull which occur and are transmitted in certain
fixed combinations or racial types. There are three such types in
Europe, the Teutonic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean, most prevalent
respectively in northern, central, and southern Europe. But in no
country do they appear in pure or unmixed form. Migration and conquest
have intermingled them to such an extent as to leave no sharp racial
frontiers and to make the people of every country a mixture of two or
three races. Thus the central or Alpine type is widely prevalent in
the south and west of Germany, and the Teutonic type in the north and
east of France. Furthermore these physical types are quite without
political significance--no one cares whether his neighbors are tall
or short, blonde or brunette, round-headed or long-headed. So far as
Europe is concerned, all talk of race has to be eliminated from serious
international discussion.
Language, on the other hand, is a matter of prime importance. Speech
is a fundamental element in creating consciousness of kind: the man in
the street knows whether he can understand the speech of his neighbor,
and has always had opprobrious epithets for those who speak an alien
tongue, from the ‘barbarians’ of the Greeks and the ‘Welsh’ of the
Teutonic Middle Ages to the ‘dagoes’ and ‘gringoes’ and ‘wops’ of
current parlance. Even differences of dialect engender similar terms,
as when the people of the Right Bank are called _Schwob_ in Alsace and
the Alsatians are stigmatized as _Wacke_ by those beyond the Rhine.
Still, language has its pitfalls as a guide to national lines of
cleavage. To begin with, while in the country districts it is
singularly persistent, it can also be learned and unlearned by a new
generation, especially when the resources of universal education
are wielded by the compulsive power of the modern state. The German
schoolmaster has labored to reduce the area of Danish in Schleswig
and of French in Alsace-Lorraine. The Russians have checked German
in the Baltic provinces. In the British Isles Celtic speech is far
less widespread than Celtic blood. Moreover, if the government cannot
always drive out minority languages, it can at least make its own
language statistics. It is easy for the census-taker to impose on the
weak or ignorant, to interpret all doubtful cases in one direction,
to adopt definitions which fall on one side. The statistics of
Polish-speaking districts in Prussia and of Italian-speaking elements
in Austria-Hungary are well known examples.
Again, language statistics, even when trustworthy, do not necessarily
yield a sharp dividing line. There may be more than two significant
elements in the population, or, as in parts of the Balkans and
Asia Minor, villages of different speech may be interspersed in a
checkerboard fashion.
Finally, language, even when accurately ascertained, is not a
certain test of political affiliation. There has been a strong
pro-French tradition among the German-speaking Alsatians. The small
German-speaking districts of Belgium are not pro-German.
After all, it is the opinion of the people concerned which we wish to
ascertain with respect to a given frontier, and language is important
chiefly as a guide to that. Unequivocal expressions of popular
opinion are, however, hard to reach, especially in times of stress
and in regions that are under dispute. At best a plebiscite may be
but a poor indication of real opinion, and the opinion it registers
well may be only transitory. Moreover, caution may be required in
giving effect to a vote or an otherwise well ascertained expression
of opinion. Thus it is open to debate whether the vote of a small
district should necessarily carry with it the disposal of a great key
deposit of mineral wealth which concerns a much wider constituency.
It is also possible that in the long run commercial intercourse and
economic interest may create ties more lasting than language or
national sentiment, and that a given boundary may do more ultimate harm
by violating the fundamental economic interests of a region than by
violating its momentary political sentiments.
Again, the political sentiment of the moment may run counter to strong
historic forces, as in Bohemia, where the considerable German element
has been settled for centuries, so that its incorporation with adjacent
German-speaking countries would tear apart the historic unity of the
Czech state. Indeed, it is a nice question how far it was the task of
the Peace Conference to right ancient territorial wrongs. “The wrong
done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine”
was a clear case for rectification, if only because, in President
Wilson’s phrase, it had “unsettled the peace of the world for nearly
fifty years.” Much the same could be said for the restoration of North
Schleswig, seized by Prussia in 1864, and even for Poland, though its
destruction dates back to the eighteenth century. On the other hand,
more recent acts of injustice, such as the Prussian annexations of
1814, the Conference left untouched, except on the Belgian frontier,
evidently considering them as internal German questions which time had
adjusted. Some notion of prescription had evidently to be admitted,
else in seeking to right ancient wrongs the Conference would have done
a greater wrong by introducing confusion into every part of the world.
The only noteworthy attempt to reach far back into history would be the
restoration of the Jews to Palestine, now inhabited by a preponderantly
Mohammedan and Christian population. Here, as in many parts of eastern
Europe, religion becomes an important element in national cleavage.
In general, the Paris Conference was disposed to give more weight to
the principle of nationality, in its broader historic sense, than
to economic or strategic considerations. This idea of nationality
runs through the programme of President Wilson, which the members
of the Conference had accepted in advance. It is, of course, easier
to set peoples free from their rulers than from economic necessity,
and the creation of new political frontiers undoubtedly complicates
questions of trade and commercial policy. Nevertheless, it is a curious
inconsistency that some who are most eager to find discrepancies
between the programme of the Conference and its achievements should
at the same time propose to destroy the economic and political
independence of the newly liberated peoples of central Europe and the
Balkans by imposing on them a compulsory customs union after the manner
of Germany’s Mitteleuropa.[5]
Finally, the nature of the frontiers to be drawn at Paris depended on
the kind of world for which they were to be made. If Europe was to
continue to be an armed camp, divided between two competing systems
of alliances, then the strongest possible military frontiers would
be required--along the Rhine and the Danube, in the Alps and in the
Balkans--, and the strategic element must preponderate in every
boundary. If, on the other hand, some better form of international
organization could be found through a League of Nations, however
rudimentary, strategic considerations could drop into the background
in favor of the economic convenience and the political desires of the
people concerned. If colonial rivalries were to be reduced in the
interest of world peace, the German colonies ought to be subjected to
some international control, and they could not be internationalized
without creating some international authority. An international
control of ports and rivers might affect the whole problem of access
to the sea, while areas of special tension or perplexity, like Danzig
or the Saar valley, might be placed under some form of international
administration such as commissions of the League of Nations. This
explains why the problem of the League could not be postponed until
after the conclusion of peace, but formed an integral part of the
negotiations and of the treaty itself. At every turn the problem of the
League of Nations obtruded itself, and the elaboration of the plan for
a League facilitated, instead of hindering, the work of the Conference.
* * * * *
In addition to the fundamental principle of self-determination
expressed in President Wilson’s speeches, Germany and the Allies had
accepted his specific Fourteen Points as the basis of the negotiations.
This immensely simplified the task of the Conference in certain
directions, and gave a firm ground for discussion wherever these
applied; but much was required in the way of interpretation, extension,
supplementing, and application before the two pages of the Fourteen
Points could grow into the two hundred pages of the treaty with Germany
and the correspondingly long texts of the other treaties. The Fourteen
Points did not cover the whole field, and even where they were clearly
and directly applicable, much knowledge and much negotiation were
required to put them into effect.
The Congress of Vienna had its Statistical Commission, one of the most
successful parts of the Congress, which collected the statistical data
for parcelling out peoples among the various princes. It was limited,
however, to statistics of population, the counting of heads being the
only basis there admitted in the balancing of territorial adjustments.
The Paris Conference needed a far larger and more varied body of
knowledge, not only because it covered every part of the world, but
because its declared principles necessitated information of every sort
respecting the history, traditions, aspirations, ethnology, government,
resources, and economic conditions of the peoples with which it was to
deal.
Information the Conference had in huge quantities, literally by
the ton. It came in every day in scores of foreign newspapers, in
masses of pamphlets, in piles of diplomatic reports and despatches.
Every special interest was on hand, eager to present its case orally
to the Conference or its commissions, to enlighten personally the
commissioners or their subordinates, to hand in endless volumes of more
or less trustworthy ethnographical maps and statistics, of pictures and
description, of propagandist matter of every conceivable sort. A steady
head, a critical judgment, and a considerable background of fact were
required to keep one’s vision clear amidst this mass of confusing and
conflicting material.
The collecting and sifting of such information for the Conference had
begun years before. The French, systematic as always, had appointed
governmental commissions, economic, military, geographic, and had also
a special university committee with Professor Lavisse as chairman, the
Comité d’Etudes, which prepared two admirable volumes, with detailed
maps, on the European problems of the conference. The British had
printed two considerable series of Handbooks, one got out by the
Naval Intelligence Division under the guidance of Professor W. McNeil
Dixon of Glasgow, the other prepared in the Historical Section of
the Foreign Office under the editorship of Sir George Prothero. The
United States had put little into print, but more than a year before
the armistice, by direction of the President, Colonel Edward M. House
had organized a comprehensive investigation, known as the ‘Inquiry,’
with its headquarters at the building of the American Geographical
Society in New York City, whose secretary, Dr. Isaiah Bowman, served as
executive officer. It enlisted throughout the country the services of
a large number of geographers, historians, economists, statisticians,
ethnologists, and students of government and international law; and
carloads of maps, statistics, manuscript reports, and fundamental
books of reference accompanied the American Commission to Paris.
The specialists who went along or were later brought together were
organized into a group of economic advisers--Messrs. Baruch, Davis,
Lamont, McCormick, Taussig, Young, and their staffs--; two technical
advisers in international law--Messrs. David Hunter Miller and James
Brown Scott--with their assistants; and a section of territorial and
political intelligence.
* * * * *
Peace conferences are always represented as sitting around green
tables, and this pleasant fiction is perpetuated with reference to
Paris in the widely circulated advertisement of a well known fountain
pen. Now the Paris Conference never sat around a table. It is true that
for certain formal sessions of the whole Conference there was arranged
a long table lining three sides of the principal room in the French
Foreign Office on the Quai d’Orsay, and that the delegates could be
packed in here twice as close as nature meant them to sit. But there
were very few formal meetings of this sort, and they could not by any
stretch of the imagination be thought of as round-table conferences,
if indeed as conferences at all. Certain leaders delivered prepared
speeches, and rarely did lesser lights venture to break the prearranged
course of the proceedings.
It was early apparent that the Conference could not profitably meet
and do business as a whole. Twenty-seven different states were
represented, besides the five British dominions. There were seventy
authorized delegates. Such a body would have become a debating society;
it would still be in session, its labors scarcely begun. Some guiding
or steering executive committee was obviously required, and it was
early found in the delegates of the five chief Powers: America,
England, France, Italy, and Japan.
The five Great Powers themselves had thirty-four delegates, and it was
plain that this also was too large a body for doing ordinary business.
So there was early organized a Committee or Council of Ten, each state
having two members, ordinarily the chief delegate and the foreign
secretary; and this became the active agency of the Conference. It had
a secretariat; and expert advisers, civil or military, attended as they
were needed. If a military matter came up, Marshal Foch would be on
hand, member of the Conference in his capacity of Commander-in-Chief,
with his curving shoulders, fine face, and clear eye. A naval question
brought in the British sea lords, Admiral Benson, and a keen-looking
lot of Japanese. When economic questions were to the fore, the American
delegation bulked large, with the square jaw of Mr. Herbert Hoover well
in evidence.
Even the Council of Ten was not seated about a table, although it
is so imagined in an ‘inside history’ of the Conference by one who
was never inside.[6] Nor did the American delegation meet around a
table, notwithstanding the preparation of an official picture which
represents the members in a room where they never met, seated at one
end of a table and backed by an imposing array of secretaries and
assistants. The Council of Ten sat along three sides of the pleasant
office of M. Pichon, the French Foreign Secretary, its walls covered
with bright tapestries after the style of Rubens, its windows looking
out over a beautiful French garden which tempted the roving eye while
a long speech was being translated. M. Clémenceau presided, a tiger
at rest, his eyes mostly on the ceiling, sometimes bored but always
alert and never napping. Others sometimes appeared to sleep or to
distract themselves as best they could; but no one lost touch with the
proceedings. Certainly the President of the United States, long trained
by golf, kept his eye steadily on the ball.
The Council of Ten met almost daily at three. Each special interest,
each minor nationality, had a chance to come forward and state its
case, usually at considerable length. Whatever was said in French was
translated into English, and vice versa. The sessions grew long and
tiresome, and progress was slow. More and more people were called
in. One of them remarked that he would not have missed his first
meeting for a thousand dollars, but would not give ten cents to see
a second! For its last two sessions the Council moved into the large
room reserved for the plenary sessions of the Conference. One of
these meetings was reported at length in the Paris papers, and it
was alleged that undue publicity, as well as undue prolixity, was
responsible for the sudden change on March 24. After that date the
Council of Ten ceased to meet. Cartoonists represented it as seeking a
bomb-proof shelter. At times thereafter the foreign ministers met as a
Council of Five. But the real power rested with a new body, the Council
of the four principal delegates of England, France, Italy, and the
United States--Messrs. Lloyd George, Clémenceau, Orlando, and Wilson.
The Council of Four left the spacious quarters of the Quai d’Orsay.
Sometimes it met in M. Clémenceau’s office at the Ministry of War,
sometimes at Mr. Lloyd George’s apartment, most frequently at
President Wilson’s residence, either in his study, or, when several
outsiders were present, in the large drawing-room. The meetings in
the study were not always “private and unattended,” nor were the
occasional conferences upstairs the confused gatherings which an
infrequent spectator has pictured.[7] Outsiders were called in as
needed, but ordinarily the Four met by themselves, with a confidential
interpreter, Captain Mantoux, very able and very trustworthy. There
was no stenographer, not even a secretary, though secretaries were
usually outside the door to execute orders. The meetings were quite
conversational, and the records necessarily fragmentary. But the
Council at least worked rapidly, sometimes perforce too rapidly.
Steadily the main lines of the treaty emerged.
By March the expert work of the Conference had been largely organized
into commissions, not systematically and at the outset, as the French
had proposed in January, but haltingly and irregularly, as necessity
compelled. Foresight and organizing ability were not the strong
points of the congress. One by one there were created commissions
on Poland, on Greece, on Morocco, on Roumania, etc., on reparation,
finance, waterways, and the principal economic problems of the
conference. Ordinarily a commission consisted of two members from
each of the five great powers, with a secretary from each and special
advisers as required. Their proceedings were regularly noted, and
formal minutes of each session were approved in print. Each country
expressed its opinion, but efforts were made to reach and report a
unanimous conclusion. On one occasion a Japanese delegate, perplexed
by a detailed problem of local topography, gave as his vote, “I agree
with the majority.” As the commission had just divided, two to two, he
scarcely clarified the situation.
Some of the best work of the Conference was done in these commissions,
and it is to be regretted that the system was not organized earlier
and used more widely. Some matters were never referred to commissions,
delicate questions like Fiume and Dalmatia and the Rhine frontier
being reserved for the exclusive consideration of the Four. Problems
of an intermediate sort were sent to special committees, extemporized
and set to work at double speed. Such were the Saar valley and
Alsace-Lorraine, referred to a committee of three, Messrs. Tardieu,
Headlam-Morley, and Haskins. Not being an organized commission, this
body had no secretariat. Economic and legal advisers might be present,
but often there were only the three. This committee met for a certain
period very steadily, sometimes twice a day. It reported unanimously
the chapters of the treaty on the Saar and Alsace-Lorraine, and
was present at the meetings of the Council of Four each time these
questions came up.
One naturally asks how far the recommendations of these commissions
and special committees were followed in framing the final draft of the
treaty. To this it is hard to give a general answer, for in the nature
of the case there was no uniform policy. The printed minutes of the
commissions will some day be public and can then be compared with the
several clauses of the treaty. In general, the territorial commissions
were thought of in the first instance as gatherers and sifters of
evidence, rather than as framers of treaty articles, questions of
policy being reserved for the ultimate consideration of the Council
of Ten. As time went on, the commissions tended to acquire more
responsibility and to throw their reports into the form of specific
articles or sections of a treaty. These naturally required coördination
with the work of other bodies, such as the commissions on finance,
reparation, or waterways, and a general correlation of the territorial
reports was attempted by a Central Territorial Commission of five.
Some final suggestions were also made by the Drafting Commission. The
reports of the commissions were, however, first made directly to the
Ten or the Four or the Five, as the case might be. Each report had
its place on the docket, and the members of the commission were then
present, each at the elbow of his principal, to furnish any necessary
explanations in his ear, but not to speak out. Later in the summer
members of the commissions were allowed to take part in the discussions
of the Council of Five.
Sometimes the report, presented in print, would be accepted without
debate. Sometimes a particular question would be considered at length,
perhaps with the result of recommitting the report. Unanimous reports
were likely to go through rapidly. A session of the Council of Four
might take an important report clause by clause, with explanations from
the committee and suggestions from members of the Council, but without
fundamental modifications. On the other hand important changes in one
chapter of the treaty were made at the last moment by the Four without
any consultation of the commission concerned.
In general, the American delegation was disposed to trust its experts,
both on matters of fact and on matters of judgment, and trusted them
in greater measure as the Conference wore on. It did not dictate
or even suggest their decisions, but left them free to form their
opinions on the basis of the evidence. They could have been used to
better advantage if they had been set to work earlier, and there were
unfortunate instances where they were consulted too late; but in
general this is to be explained by the haste and confusion inevitable
in the rapid movement of events rather than by any desire to ignore
the facts or the judgment based upon them. Certainly none of the
chief delegates was more eager for the facts of the case than was
the President of the United States, and none was able to assimilate
them more quickly or use them more effectively in the discussion of
territorial problems.
* * * * *
The treaty of Versailles, like the other treaties drawn up at Paris,
is by no means a perfect instrument. Those who took part in framing it
would be the last to believe it verbally inspired. It is necessarily
a peace of compromise and adjustment, and that means that it does not
embody completely the desires of any one person or any one country. It
was also framed rapidly, not always with sufficient preliminary study,
and in some places it bears the marks of haste. But it represents an
honest effort to secure a just and durable settlement, and neither
the Conference in general nor the United States in particular need
be ashamed of it. It is easy to criticise in detail, easy to magnify
the defects and forget the substantial results achieved, just as it
was easy to criticise the Constitution of the United States when it
issued from the Convention of 1787, and to discover therein dangers
which history has shown to be imaginary. For one result of the Paris
treaties, however, their framers are not responsible, namely the delays
in ratification and enforcement. The treaties were drawn for the world
of 1919 by men of 1919, on the assumption that what was needed was an
early peace as well as a just settlement. The governing commissions and
mandates were to begin at once, the plebiscites were to be held as soon
as possible, the disarmament of Germany was to be prompt and real, the
difficult work of reparation was to be taken up immediately. None of
these expectations has been realized, and the responsibility lies less
with the Peace Conference than with the failure of America to ratify
the treaties and to take part in carrying out their provisions.