Editor's note: David Andelman is the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today. He recently discussed his book with Nick Schulz.
Q. It is your sense that 1919 and the Paris Conference are a poorly appreciated period of history. So many troubles in the world today have some roots in that conference. Explain.
A. The diplomats and politicians who descended on Paris in 1919 at the end of what was called then the Great War, came with the stated intention of remaking the world. Moreover, while they were in session, they considered themselves the world's government. Since they had just crushed the Central Powers--Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire including much of what is today the Middle East--there was no one to challenge them in their conceit.
The problem was that without any checks and balances, and with little sense of what the long-term consequences of their actions might be, they created a world very much in their own image and one they could continue to dominate--weak, heterogeneous nations, each heavily dependent on the great powers that had created them for their prosperity or their very survival.
The Allied statesmen gathered in 1919 paid little attention to the needs and wants of the people of these territories they were remaking or, in many cases, creating from scratch--drawing boundaries that today, in the next century, ware are often defending with our own blood. In the medium term, it was a recipe for chaos, the long term, very much a recipe for disaster.
Q. Since so much that emerged from the conference was artificial--such as the creation of Iraq--how do nations cope with the legacy going forward? For example, would it be better to let Iraq disintegrate?
A. The best possible outcome today in many parts of the world--but especially in Iraq--would be effectively to undo the errors committed by the Paris peacemakers of 1919. Would this succeed in the case of Iraq? We have only to look at one other region that has already gone through this process--the Balkans, particularly the artificial nation of Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia, as it was constituted in 1919 and continued to function until its breakup three-quarters of a century later--was a kaleidoscopes of nationalities, languages and religions, held together for much of its existence by a single communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito. Following Tito's death (and the end of communism in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe), the powerful centrifugal forces that had been pent up since its creation spun it apart into several different nations. The prosperous and advanced country of Slovenia quickly joined the European Union. Neighboring Croatia is now also on its way toward peace, prosperity and eventual membership in the EU. The more fractious nations of Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia are still struggling into the post-Yugoslav era.
Iraq is in a very similar position. In the north there is the state of Kurdistan which is prosperous and, if left alone by neighboring Turkey and the remainder of Iraq, stands a very good chance of becoming the Slovenia of what used o be known as Mesopotamia. On the south, are the oil-rich Shi'ite regions of Iraq--also potentially economically self-sufficient. In the center is the smaller Sunni-controlled area centering around Baghdad whose existence is intensely desired and its prosperity likely guaranteed by its immediate neighbor, the powerful Sunni nation of Saudi Arabia.
So the answer is "yes"--not only would it be better to allow Iraq to disintegrate, but actively to encourage its partition could well prove to be the best possible outcome of the current crisis in Mesopotamia.
Q. Were there any other comparable periods of history during which the maps of nations were so fundamentally redrawn and with such wide-ranging consequences?
A. Nearly a century before the peacemakers gathered in Paris in 1919 to create the Versailles Treaty, European leaders gathered in Vienna for the Congress of Vienna. It, too, was supposed to create a world (or at least a Europe which was then effectively the center of the civilized universe) that was peaceful and prosperous, though certainly under the sway of the western powers.
Many of the younger peacemakers who came to Paris in 1919--individuals like Britain's Harold Nicolson and John Maynard Keynes, America's Allen and John Foster Dulles--came with the expressed hope that the colossal errors made at the Congress of Vienna which perpetuated major power hegemony and the empires that marked much of the 19th century would not be repeated. They were quickly disillusioned and went home bitter and angry.
Q. What was wrong with Wilson's vision for peace?
A. There was really nothing wrong with Wilson's vision for peace--had it been adequately defined and even adequately negotiated. It was not. It was the product of a naïve and idealistic politician of an academic bent with a deeply religious background but little understanding of how the wider world worked or the motives and methods of his counterparts among the leaders of Europe.
On the S.S. George Washington that took Wilson and the American delegation to Europe, he held only one meeting on the entire crossing with his staff and advisors, largely academics that comprised his "think tank," known as The Inquiry. These were the men who would negotiate many of the most difficult issues at the Peace Conference--those who he must help understand and imbue with the spirit of the vision he was asking them to implement. I found several private, unpublished diaries of some of those who were at this meeting with Wilson. Each came away shaking their heads in dismay--that he had little or no understanding of how to implement his grand vision. Without such guidance at the top, fragmentation, disarray and eventual defeat was inevitable at the conference tables of Paris as the leaders of Western Europe successfully divided members of the American delegation, then imposed their will on them.
Q. Had the terms not been so hideously unfavorable to the German people, as Keynes and others asserted, could WW II have been avoided?
A. Certainly Hitler rose to power on a platform of repudiation of the confiscatory provisions of the Treaty of Versailles that were effectively dictated to the German representatives summoned to Paris to sign the document.
Without question, these terms and their implementation, the presence of French troops on German soil to enforce some of the provisions, heightened pre-existing tensions between the two countries. Still, it's likely that a global depression that began in 1929 in the United States and spread like wildfire across Europe would have been all but inevitable anyway.Could its arrival in Germany, however, have been laid so directly at the feet of the Allies and the Treaty of Versailles by a Hitler had the onerous provisions of the Treaty of Versailles been scaled back? That's a central and compelling question that may never be answered. It's entirely conceivable, however, that domestic alternatives to Hitler might have had a stronger case for a more moderate approach without the draconian terms of the Treaty of Versailles overhanging the decades that followed its adoption.
Q. Germany is the most notorious example, but what people or nations had similar gripes in the wake of Versailles and what were the consequences?
A. There was a host of complaints about the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles and the consequences were ultimately as grave in the long run as those that ultimately threw Germany into the hands of the National Socialists.
First there was the case of China, to which I devote a long section of A Shattered Peace. China had long desired freedom from the dominance of neighboring Japan which had mounted a decades-long campaign to acquire large swaths of territory that could accelerate its growth as an empire beyond the narrow confines of its home island territories. The Treaty of Versailles, which gave Japan virtually full mastery of China, was viewed as a catastrophe across that vast nation. The protest riots that began in Beijing and swept across the country laid the foundations for the rise of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party.
Second, across the Balkans and much of Central and Eastern Europe, a host of nations and their peoples--Slovaks, Slovenes, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Serbs, Macedonians among others--found their territorial boundaries rigged against them, their populations arbitrarily shifted into new nations where they became immediately disenfranchised minorities, discriminated against, or worse.
In the Middle East, there were similarly disenfranchised individuals--Arabs in Palestine, ruled under a British mandate which awarded the territory to the Jews as their new homeland; various tribes and religions across Mesopotamia and up through Lebanon who found themselves ruled by outlanders.
Finally, there were those disenfranchised peoples who were all but entirely ignored by the peacemakers of Paris--particularly Koreans and Indochinese--and whose demands were short shrift, thereby fueling a host of future conflicts.
Q. We know about some of the losers at Versailles. Who were the winners?
A. Of course, the western powers were the victors. But they scarcely came away winners. Britain and France were prostrate after this debilitating war. Their economies were a shambles. Nearly an entire generation of their young men and been killed or crippled by years of trench warfare. In France and neighboring Belgium, the countryside was devastated, factories destroyed, entire towns and villages leveled.
Nevertheless, there were victors, and winners, among the Allies. The United States and Japan, which entered the war as relatively minor powers, emerged as the great nations of the remainder of the twentieth century. The tectonic plates of global politics were shifting. Japan was to dominate Asia for much of the rest of the century much as the United States was to dominate the western hemisphere and much of Europe and the Middle East. Its industrial machine was all but untouched by the war, indeed strengthened by the years of serving as the armory of the Allies. Equally, its banks had funded the Allied war effort. In Asia, Japan was the victor and the Treaty of Versailles only cemented its hegemony over China and much of the Asian mainland.
Finally, there was Russia, whose new Commiunist leadership under Lenin had withdrawn from the world conflict at a most opportune moment and was now well on its way to assembling what would become the Soviet Union and a Bolshevik nation that stretched from Central Europe to the Pacific. Lenin believed that the failures of the Treaty of Versailles would only accelerate the spread of Bolshevism across Europe. He was not entirely wrong.
Q. To what extent is the present wave of Islamist extremism traced to Paris in 1919?
A. When Feisal ibn Hussein arrived in Paris with T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) representing the Arab people of the Ottoman Empire, the young sheikh from the Hejaz met with some top members of the American delegation. He presented his scenario for a peaceful Middle East--effectively a confederation of semi-independent states, along tribal lines, that he likened to the original conception of the United States (48 states, at the time, each with its own individuality, united by a single central authority). Without that, he warned, there were already rumblings of considerable and violent unrest. He described a group called al-Fatah which he feared could provoke violence across a region embittered by failure of the West to understand their neeeds and wants.
He was not wrong. Indeed the small, weak and dependant nations, their borders drawn by the ill-informed negotiators in Paris and ruled by individuals imposed by their creators, laid the foundations for violent confrontations with the West. Effectively forcing Sunnis and Shiites, Palestinians and Jews to share the same territories where they had for centuries been avoiding each other--or clashing violently on the rare occurrences when their tribal cultures did come into conflict--was a recipe for the type of disaster we are seeing today across the region. The difference? In 1919, these forces had no means of projecting their violent rebellions beyond their region. Today, it is a matter of simple airplane ride and a small backpack for such protesters to wreak havoc on those they see as their oppressors.
Q. Baby boomers who developed their political views during Vietnam might be surprised to know that a young Ho Chi Minh was there. Describe what he was doing and what he took from it.
A. In 1917, a young Vietnamese busboy named Nguyen Tat Thanh (Nguyen Who Will Succeed) arrived in Paris, determined to find some way of winning freedom for his people back home in Indochina. While he waited tables at the Ritz Hotel, serving many of the distinguished delegates and their advisors of the Paris conference, he was also drafting an historic document--"Eight Demands of the Vietnamese People." And he began knocking on doors of a host of delegates, French politicians, anyone who he thought might help win recognition of his demands. All his activities really did was to call his attention to members of the French Surete, who placed him under surveillance.
The only real support he found came from the French Socialist Party, to which he gravitated out of frustration as his political efforts were met elsewhere with stony silence or a derisive wave of the hand. Deeply frustrated, he drifted increasingly toward the party's radical wing, embraced communism and finally fled to Moscow where he became a valuable agitator for the Comintern in the Third World. Decades later, he returned to his native Vietnam to lead a rebellion against its French overlord and adopted the nom de guerre of Ho Chi Minh. How might the history of the 20th century been different had some far-sighted diplomat in Paris understood the needs and desires of Nguyen Tat Thanh and his people.
Q. If American policymakers had a better handle on the legacy of Paris and Versailles, what would they be doing differently today?
A. They would be making every effort to implement the principles that Wilson so eloquently enunciated and so dismally failed to carry out--self-determination for people, natural frontiers, open agreements openly arrived at.
The concepts that Wilson enunciated in his document, "The Fourteen Points"--the principles on which America entered the war in Europe--were valid, indeed essential if the west was to remake the world into a place where lasting peace would replace periodic and increasingly lethal conflicts. Those young diplomats who arrived in Paris full of hope that the vast errors of the Congress of Vienna a century earlier would be avoided and Wilson's doctrine embraced, came away bitterly disillusioned.
Imagine if the Emir Feisal's vision of the Middle East had provided a homeland to Palestinians as well as Jews, to Sunnis and Kurds as well as Shi'ites. Imagine if the negotiators who constituted themselves as the world's government had provided measures of self-determination to Slovaks and Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese--establishing natural frontiers of united, homogeneous peoples. Imagine if the negotiators in Paris in 1919 had sufficient self-confidence in the viability and ultimate strength of their own systems of governance and industry to have opened a line of communication to alternatives like Bolshevism. Finally, imagine if those who arrived in Paris hobbled by secret agreements concluded in the passions of war had elected to tear up these documents. Instead, they would begin again to remake the map of the world and shift the tectonic plates toward a system that depended not on an ineffectual, multi-national debating society on the shores of Lake Geneva called the League of Nations but on the real needs and desires of the people who lived in all these territories.
Today, if negotiators understood the colossal errors committed nearly a century ago and the value of undoing them--not at the point of a gun but around a conference table--we could be moving more quickly to restoring a status quo that depended less on a military solution than on the good will and aspirations of citizens who would guarantee their own peaceful and prosperous future.
Nick Schulz is the director of government relations at AEI and a senior editor of The American.
