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 circumstance 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 régime
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
constitute 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
reconstituting 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 Genève_, June 24, 1919.
[329] Cf. _L'Echo de Paris_, May 12, 1919.
[330] _Ibidem_.
[331] In a monograph entitled _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 chastisement 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 constitute 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 Japan and
her European allies as a cogent motive for handing over Shantung to
Japan. 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 constitute 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 circumstances, 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 Débats_ (September 20, 1919), are well worth reading.
[335] M. Auguste Gauvain.
[336] _Le Journal des Débats_, 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 institutions 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
fellowship, 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
classes 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 masses 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 hardships 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
association 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.
A parliament of peoples, then, is the only organ that can impart
viability to a society of nations worthy of the name. By joining the
Covenant with the Peace Treaty, and turning the former into an
instrument for the execution of the latter, thus subordinating the ideal
to the egotistical, Mr. Wilson deprived his plan of its sole
justification, and for the time being buried it. The philosopher
Lichtenberg[339] wrote, "One man brings forth a thought, another holds
it over the baptismal font, the third begets offspring with it, the
fourth stands at its deathbed, and the fifth buries it." Mr. Wilson has
discharged the functions of gravedigger to the idea of a pacific society
of nations, just as Lenin has done to the system of Marxism, the only
difference being that Marxism is as dead as a door-nail, whereas the
society of nations may rise again.
It was open, then, to the three principal delegates to insure the peace
of the world by moral means or by force. Having eschewed the former by
adopting the doctrines of Monroe, abandoning the freedom of the seas,
and by according to France strategic frontiers and other privileges of
the militarist order, they might have enlarged and systematized these
concessions to expediency and forged an alliance of the three states or
of two, and undertaken to keep peace on the planet against all marplots.
I wrote at the time: "The delegates are becoming conscious of the
existence of a ready-made league of nations in the shape of the
Anglo-Saxon states, which, together with France, might hinder wars,
promote good-fellowship, remold human destinies; and they are delighted
thus to possess solid foundations on which a noble edifice can be raised
in the fullness of time. Tribunals will be created, with full powers to
adjudge disputes; facilities will be accorded to litigious states, and
even an obligation will be imposed to invoke their arbitration. And the
sum total of these reforms will be known to contemporary annals as an
inchoate League of Nations. The delegates are already modestly
disavowing the intention of realizing the ideal in all its parts. That
must be left to coming generations; but what with the exhaustion of the
peoples, their aversion from warfare, and the material obstacles to the
renewal of hostilities in the near future, it is calculated that the
peace will not soon be violated. Whether more salient results will be
attained or attempted by the Conference nobody can foretell."[340]
This expedient, even had it been deliberately conceived and skilfully
wrought out, would not have been an adequate solution of the world's
difficulties, nor would it have commended itself to all the states
concerned. But it would at least have been a temporary makeshift capable
of being transmuted under favorable circumstances into something less
material and more durable. But the amateur world-reformers could not
make up their minds to choose either alternative. And the result is one
of the most lamentable failures recorded in human history.
I placed my own opinion on record at the time as frankly as the
censorship which still existed for me would permit. I wrote: "What every
delegate with sound political instinct will ask himself is, whether the
League of Nations will eliminate wars in future, and, if not, he will
feel conscientiously bound to adopt other relatively sure means of
providing against them, and these consist of alliances, strategic
frontiers, and the permanent disablement of the potential enemy. On one
or other of these alternative lines the resettlement must be devised. To
combine them would be ruinous. Now of what practical use is a league of
nations devoid of supernational forces and faced by a numerous, virile,
and united race, smarting under a sense of injustice, thirsting for the
opportunities for development denied to it, but granted to nations which
it despises as inferior? Would a league of nations combine militarily
against the gradual encroachments or sudden aggression of that Power
against its weaker neighbors? Nobody is authorized to answer this
question affirmatively. To-day the Powers cannot agree to intervene
against Bolshevism, which they deem a scourge of the world, nor can they
agree to tolerate it.
"In these circumstances, what compelling motives can be laid before
those delegates who are asked to dispense with strategic frontiers and
rely upon a league of nations for their defense? Take France's outlook.
Peace once concluded, she will be confronted with a secular enemy who
numbers some seventy millions to her forty-five millions. In ten years
the disproportion will be still greater. Discontented Russia is almost
certain to be taken in hand by Germany, befriended, reorganized,
exploited, and enlisted as an ally."[341]