The Treaty of Versailles 2: Addressing the chaos in Europe

A new Europe was emerging at the Peace Conference

It had been Wilson’s intention to stay in Paris only for a pre-Conference before the main event started in late January 1919. Thereafter  he planned to leave America’s plans in the hands of his deputy, and well known political fixer, ‘Colonel’ Edward House. However, as the enormity of the tasks became apparent – the pre-conference barely amounted to a starter for ten – Wilson resolved to stay right through until the signing of the treaty with Germany. Early on Wilson accepted House’s proposal to meet Lloyd George and Clemenceau’s concerns about his fourteen points by adding the question of penalties for Germany and removing the point about freedom of the seas. Otherwise the negotiations and horse-trading did not get into full swing until March, after Wilson’s return from a two weeks visit home to deal with Congress anxieties about the League of Nations.

The Supreme Council was hardly starting with a clean sheet. Four of the world’s six great empires – Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russian and the Ottomans – were in chaos. The other two, Great Britain and France, were determined to preserve and increase their own influence, despite being exhausted and deeply in debt. Borders and government were already being fought over in what would become Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Greece and Turkey. All of them were vulnerable in one way or another to the civil war that was starting to play out in Russia. Wilson’s principle of self-determination was clearly going to be difficult to apply consistently to victors and vanquished. It was a reluctance to engage with these issues that contributed to the shrinking down of the Supreme Council from ten to three members.

The Japanese had been in an uncomfortable position from the outset. Proposed by Britain as members on the basis of wartime promises for naval support, they were accepted only grudgingly by the others. In the racially bigoted views of the time they were viewed as an inferior nation of ‘yellow peoples’, and their lead delegate was not a prime minister, but a diplomat – albeit an eminent one, Crown Prince Suonji. Awkward in meetings, the Japanese pressed hard for their own issues but showed little interest in the main agenda. One of their points was for inclusion of a racial equality clause in the League Charter. This would cause Wilson to make a number of concessions, and no little embarrassment. Nonetheless, by April the Japanese had been excluded from the Council. The loss of the Italian membership was a more serious matter (see Part 4) but was also born out of intransigence and self interest.

All across the land mass of Europe and Asia hot spots of instability were resulting from the rise of nationalism amongst crumbling empires; nascent revolutions and religious divisions among impoverished people. The large dominions of the British Empire were flexing their newly found political muscle. In the USA a concerned Congress scrutinised Wilson’s activities skeptically. South America, held unofficially in the sway of the USA’s Monroe doctrine (see Post 9/03/2017) was perhaps the only continent to escape interference. Africa was treated dismissively, as always, and Germany’s previous colonies there were soon and easily divided up between Britain, France and Italy. Africa was allowed no dreams of nationalism, only imperialism.

A brief review of nation state issues across Europe:

The Balkans. The powder keg that detonated WW1 was always going to be a challenge for Wilson’s self-determination principle. Muslim versus Christian religion complications (the latter divided between catholic, protestant and orthodox) added to the ongoing ethnic tensions. A patchwork of aspiring nations would comprise a land of south slavs – Jugo Slavia - initially the Kingdom of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. This much was a fait accomplit, but borders, influence and resources were another. Serbia, as the strongest to emerge from the pre-war Balkan Wars, assumed leadership and insisted on Belgrade as the capital. To the west, Austria was eviscerated, but Italy had designs on large sections of the Slovenian and Croatian Adriatic coasts, particularly the ports of Trieste and Fiume. Bosnia Herzogovina, Montenegro and Kosovo comprised an unhappy and suspicious group of fellow slav states to the south. Further south from them Albania, under pressure from all sides, was struggling to survive as an independent nation. Despite all of these issues, the biggest headache for the conference would come from setting Yugoslavia’s northern border with the newly independent Hungary.

Czechoslovakia. Another de facto new slav state was awaiting clarification on its future. Previous posts described the campaigns of Masaryk and Benes and the heroics of the Czech Legion (see Posts 11/7/2017 and 31/5/2018). As the conference began Benes and Masaryk were ensconced in Paris, confidently awaiting ratification of their proposals. But, again, there were questions to be resolved about borders and the treatment of ethnic groups within them. A sizeable German minority lived in a region later to be notorious as the Sudetenland (cue Munich 1938) but also there were disputed borders with the new states of Poland and Hungary.

Bela Kun - Communist
Revolutionary who seized
power in Hungary in 1919

Hungary. As a defeated nation, Hungary was in a weaker position, but tried to paint itself as a new liberal democracy, freed from the shackles of Austria’s Habsburgs. Its difficulty lay in its several substantial ethnic minority groups – Slovaks, Rumanians and Slavs – that had been badly treated in the past by the ruling Magyars, and all these new neighbours wanted their slice of Hungarian territory. The main disputes were over Transylvania (a large mountain region viewed as its own by Rumania) and the Banat. The latter was an area on the lower Danube coveted by 'Yugoslavia', and important for trade and communications. A further small area of land in Carinthia was the cause of violent struggles between Czechoslovaks and Hungarians. Matters became a whole lot more alarming for the conference in late March, when an unknown communist, Bela Kun, seized power with a coup in Budapest, bringing Bolshevism to the heart of Europe. The Supreme Council dispatched representatives to Budapest to argue for interim neutral zones, and possibly to discover whether Kun might be a conduit to negotiating with Lenin. Italy proposed that the jugoslavs should advance into the Banat (hoping this would help compensate their own demands for Trieste and Fiume) and the French military commander in the region authorised it. The Rumanians began their moves into Transylvania, and the ‘peace’ conference found itself struggling to prevent an all out war. Stability of a sort did not return until some months after the Treaty in June.

Ignacy Paderewski.
First Polish PM after
Versailles

Poland. An independent Poland was included as the thirteenth of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but once again borders and the rights of ethnic minority groups created tensions and complexity. As with Hungary, definitive borders would not be agreed until long after the Treaty on 29^th June, and poor Poland would hold on to them for only twenty years. The conference’s expert panel on Poland held “more meetings than any other at the conference*”. The borders of a new Poland were not in any way defined, although Wilson’s Point 13 had required it to have access to the sea – a difficult promise to keep. This laid the path for the ‘Danzig Corridor' (cue Hitler 1939). Macmillan describes the regions as “hundreds of miles from Paris… a protean world of shifting allegiances, civil wars, refugees and bandit groups”. Clemenceau was in favour of a strong Poland (to replace Russia as an ally to Germany’s east). Two strong Polish characters vied with each other for control of the negotiations process. In Paris, the Polish national committee was headed by Roman Dmovski, an ambitious moderniser who wanted to take as much land for Poland as possible. In Warsaw a government was being organised by Josef Pilsudski, military leader of a new but effective Polish Legion. A remarkable man, Pilsudski was a romantic nationalist, willing to settle for less territory if it delivered a pre-partition 18^th century Poland. Dmovski and Pilsudski detested each other, and the Allies could not see a way to a compromise. Then an inspired move brought the world’s most famous Pole to the table to bang heads together. Ignace Paderewski was the greatest pianist of the era, and had lived (along with four million other Poles) as an immigrant in the USA for some years. He was a distant and powerful supporter of Polish independence (some felt it was his private performances at the White house that nudged Wilson towards his point 13). Paderewski travelled from New York to Poznan and Warsaw at the end of 1918. He received rapturous welcomes and generally revived the passion for Polish nationalism, manifested as the "Greater Poland Uprising". He travelled on to Paris to join Dmovski. In a series of events beyond the scope of this blog, Poland emerged with the mixed backing of the Allies and remnants of the German army from the old eastern front. They were contracted as mercenaries – the Freikorps – to keep the Red Army Bolsheviks at bay to the east. It was the Red threat that convinced the Allies to send more funds and supplies to Poland, even though they had no control over events.

Baltic States. On a line running due north from Lemberg (Lviv today) in Ukraine almost to St. Petersburg, all territory to the west – the Polish salient and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia had been lost by Russia in the Brest- Litovsk treaty (See Post 22/1/2018). The three Baltic states were caught between newly awakened nationalism and the uncertainties of the Russian civil war. As with Poland, neither the Red nor the White Russian factions wanted to see their independence. The most northerly state, Finland, was a different case. Lenin had approved Finland’s independence early in 1918 but fighting continued, involving British, Finnish German and Russian troops, as the uncertainties over the control of Archangel continued (See Post 31/5/2018).

Greece. At the other end of Europe Greece, a late and ambivalent entrant to WW1, was becoming the most influential country in its region. This was entirely down to the character and persuasiveness of Eleftherios Venizelos, now Prime Minister again during his long running feud with the Germanophile King Constantine (See Post 18/8/2017). Venizelos proved to be one of the most impressive, charismatic statesmen at the conference. He won over the Big Three – Lloyd George in particular was entranced by his rhetoric – to his case for a greater Greece based on its glorious history and some dubious statistics about the size of Greek minorities in surrounding countries **. He wanted territory from Albania, Thrace, Macedonia and Bulgaria, and return of all of the Greek islands. But his main ambitions were to the east – Turkey and Asia Minor. Lloyd George’s unstinting support for the Venizelos vision would have tragic consequences that played out over the next four years.

* Margaret Macmillan. Paris 1919 (2003) p207

** The absence of any reliable population demographics proved to be a useful tactic used by all the supplicant nations to some degree.