SHAPING THE WORLD AT VERSAILLES: A Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR OF A SHATTERED PEACE
By Melissa Lafsky
New York Times Blogs, NY
shaping-the-world-at-versailles-a-qa-with-the-auth or-of-a-shattered-peace/
Dec 18 2007
Any history book will give you a chapter on the Treaty of Versailles,
during which delegates from around the world gathered in France
to hammer out peace terms following World War I. The men (and
occasional woman) who negotiated the outcome may have had their own
individual and national agendas, but their decisions arguably set
the stage for decades of international socio and economic turmoil,
culminating in events like Vietnam, the war in the Balkans, and the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In his new book, A Shattered Peace,
Forbes.com executive editor David Andelman tracks in extraordinary
depth what happened behind the scenes during the Versailles
negotiations, and examines how the Treaty helped shape the modern
international climate. Andelman agreed to answer our questions about
his book.
Q: You argue that oversights and errors in the Treaty contributed
directly to conflicts from Vietnam to the Cold War, and continue to
profoundly impact today’s international relations. How did it create
such strong ripple effects, and how has its influence continued almost
a century later?
A: The diplomats and politicians who became architects of the Treaty
of Versailles came to Paris in 1919 with the stated goal of remaking
the world and, while they were in session, constituted themselves as
the world’s government. With this end, and not being challenged in
granting themselves this unprecedented power, they proceeded to redraw
the boundaries and redistribute the populations of vast stretches
of the planet. With a few narrow exceptions, these boundaries and
the new nations they created, all but haphazardly, continue to the be
those we find today — territories that we are all too often defending
at gunpoint.
Because of the nature of these new states — all heterogeneous and,
above all, weak, created in the image of the Western nations that gave
them life — they became (quite intentionally) heavily dependent on
these wealthy and more powerful countries which had deep interests
in making sure that they survived by whatever means necessary.
The result is that only now, as I demonstrate in A Shattered Peace,
these nations created in Paris in 1919 are beginning to come apart —
often violently. The fault lines that existed when they were founded,
but have been hidden for nearly a century, are splitting open as
powerful internal forces of ethnicity, language, and religion began
surfacing, as well as powerful economic imperatives.
Q: What were the Treaty’s biggest mistakes? How would the international
landscape be different now if they hadn’t been made?
A: There were a host of colossal errors in fact and judgment made at
the Paris Peace Conference that gave birth to this shattered peace.
First there was the fissure between the idealism of the American
President Woodrow Wilson and the self-centered hubris of British
Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Georges
Clemenceau. Wilson sought gamely, but, in the end, fatally, to persuade
his peers that the only viable world organization would be to allow
nations and people to determine their own fate and their own system of
government. Lloyd George and Clemenceau, while playing lip service to
this fine ideal, had no intention of doing anything of the kind. Their
goal was to create a world in their image that they could manipulate,
and that would allow each leader to continue controlling the global
empires he had possessed when he’d entered the war.
The European Allies failed to understand, however, that this old
world order had already come apart economically, politically, and
diplomatically, leaving a whole new global organization with new and
different players. They also failed to understand the power of the
ethnic minorities they were shuffling around like chess pieces.
Had the right of self-determination indeed been respected, and had
nations been created for the good of their inhabitants rather than the
convenience of the major powers, it is very likely that the powerful
centrifugal forces of religions and nationalities that today are
spinning the world apart could have been tamed. Palestinians and
Jews, each with their own homeland, could have learned to live —
and prosper — side by side, as could have Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis;
and Croats, Serbs, and Kosovars.
The most costly errors, however, came when the peacemakers ignored so
many of those who came to plead their case in Paris. Nguyen Tat Thanh,
serving as a busboy at the Ritz Hotel, came to plead the case for
independence for his people in Indochina. Given the brushoff by the
western powers, he turned Communist, went off to Paris, and decades
later took the nom-de-guerre Ho Chi Minh. China’s demands to keep
Japan at bay were also ignored. The demonstrations that swept China
gave rise to the Chinese Communist Party and brought to power a young
militant named Mao Tse-Tung. Japan’s victory gave new strength to that
nation’s military leadership, which a quarter century later turned
their guns on the U.S., bringing America into the Second World War.
Q: What effect did the Treaty have on the Western economy? Eastern?
A: The Treaty had a powerful on impact on the economies of both
West and East. While it exacted severe economic and territorial
penalties on the defeated Central Powers — especially Germany, but
also Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the entire Ottoman Empire – it
also did little to repair the economic structures of the victorious
nations of Britain, France, and Italy, as well as smaller victims
like Belgium. The war did leave the U.S. as the one Western economy
all but untouched, and indeed even more prosperous than before the
fighting began.
The reparations extracted from Germany, in particular, had a
catastrophic impact far beyond that nation’s borders. Designed
by Clemenceau and Lloyd George to make certain that Germany never
rose again as a power to challenge France or Britain, the system of
reparations was destructive to the entire fabric of trade and industry
across the continent. It laid the basis for the hyper-inflation that
marked the post-war Weimar republic in Germany, and the eventual
depression that engulfed much of the Western world.
For that reason, primarily, it helped lay the basis for the rise of
Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War.
In the East, the economy of Japan, one of the victorious Allied
powers in the First World War, was dominant throughout the region,
and the Treaty assured the continued fragmentation and hegemony of
Japan over China and Korea, as well as its access to many of the
riches of Siberia. The rights Japan retained in China paved the way
for the continued impoverishment of the latter, and the ability of
the former to build a powerful military machine that would turn on
the West, and especially the U.S., in World War II. As I trace in my
book, the provisions of the Treaty assured that it would take decades
for China, with its vast wealth of natural resources and population,
to resume its leadership role as the fastest growing economy in Asia.
Q: What role did the Middle East play during the negotiations? How did
the European powers view Muslim regions, and how did the decisions made
about the Middle East affect the state of diplomatic relations today?
A: The Middle East was an important sideshow to the main Paris
Peace Conference, since many of the outlines of the region had been
predetermined by a string of secret pacts during the war. And few
of the Paris peacemakers understood the critical strategic role that
the Middle East would play in the future.
The Middle East was of far greater importance to the European powers
than to the U.S. The region was the principal transit route from the
Mediterranean to the British colonies of the sub-Continent that would
become India and Pakistan, and the French possessions in Indochina.
Oil was not yet the major force of economics and geopolitics that it
would become later. World War I was the first major conflict to be
fought with any contribution from the internal combustion engine. And
few thought the U.S. would ever need more oil than could be pumped
out of Texas.
Above all, none of the principal negotiators, or their top advisers,
had any notion of the deep passions and bitter hostilities that
divided the various tribes and nationalities in the former Ottoman
territories. The head of the Middle East committee of the Inquiry,
the think-tank Wilson brought with him to Paris, was a Columbia
professor, William Westermann, who was an expert on the Crusades. His
deep understanding of the region ended sometime before the year 1300.
So when the negotiators created what would become the nations of Iraq,
Syria, Lebanon, and Israel (then known as Palestine), they had no
conception of the forces they had set in motion, which I trace in
some detail in my book. The combinations they engineered of Sunni,
Shiite, and Kurd, and Palestinian and Jew, evolved quickly into a
volatile stew pot of heterogeneous nations where one faction would
dominate others for decades, and with pernicious consequences.
Today, only by understanding how this all began can we conceive of
unraveling these creations and returning to a simpler, and hopefully
more peaceful region.
Q: Who, besides the major historical figures, were the biggest economic
players behind the scenes during the negotiations?
A: Curiously, the single dominant economic figure at the Paris Peace
Conference was an individual who left in the middle, and who predicted
from the start that its economic provisions would be catastrophic
for the future of peace and prosperity, particularly in Europe. John
Maynard Keynes, a Cambridge University don, was a 35-year-old economic
adviser on the British delegation — a brilliant member of the famed
Bloomsbury Group that also included Virginia Woolf, her eventual
lover Vita Sackville-West, and Vita’s husband, the young diplomat
Harold Nicholson, who was also at Paris and was himself to become
deeply disillusioned over the outcome of the negotiations.
Keynes believed the system of reparations that was being discussed was
confiscatory and destructive, finally bolting from the conference
before the end to write his landmark treatise, The Economic
Consequences of the Peace, which became a runaway best-seller on both
sides of the Atlantic and forced Lloyd George to concede that Keynes
was right, while the Treaty and its negotiators were wrong.
There were many other fascinating young men who continued to serve as
behind-the scenes negotiators and advisers on the economic aspects of
the Treaty. The American delegation included John Foster Dulles (whose
brother, Allen, was a top aide to their uncle, U.S. Secretary of State
Robert Lansing), a 30-year-old attorney with the law firm Sullivan &
Cromwell; Norman Davis, a wealthy Tennessee gentleman who’d made his
fortune trading with Cuba, and Thomas Lamont, who looked after the
interests of the Morgan Bank, Wall Street and the American economy,
in that order. All warned of the folly of bankrupting Germany.
On the French delegation there was Louis Loucheur, a brilliant
grand-ecole graduate, who would continue to look after French interests
for decades, even as his body became consumed by a degenerative
disease and he took first to canes, then a wheelchair.
For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see here.
Q: What was the most surprising fact you learned about the Treaty?
A: It’s difficult to single out a single surprise from this vast
morass of ignorance, naivete, and cupidity that constituted the Peace
Conference and the Treaty it spawned. But I would have to say the
biggest surprise was the profound disdain exhibited by the leaders of
France and Britain for President Wilson and his moral compass. None of
these statesmen had any interest whatsoever in the creation of a League
of Nations (similar to our United Nations today) that was so central
to Wilson’s sense of how the peace they were constructing could make
the Great War that had just ended the last global conflict. But the
European victors were quite cynically prepared to play on Wilson’s
desire to win Allied approval of a League. Their strategy was to
force him to bargain away self-determination and freedom for half the
world, one nation at a time — at each turn threatening to withhold
their approval of a League of Nations if Wilson refused to give in
to their demands.
Toward the end of the Peace Conference, a small group of the top
British negotiators went for a picnic in one of the forests that
surrounded Paris. As they relaxed and laughed among themselves, one
said to his colleagues, "Well we really picked Wilson’s pockets clean,
didn’t we … down to the pocket lint."
Q: What was the biggest hidden agenda that the U.S. had during the
meetings? In what area did the U.S. have the biggest impact?
A: The hidden agendas were really brought to Paris by Britain, France,
and Japan, rather than the U.S. If the U.S. brought one such agenda,
which did not remain hidden for long, it was Wilson’s determination
to bring American boys home from Europe as quickly as possible and
avoid any further involvement in other European disputes or conflicts.
Accordingly, Wilson refused to take on any "mandate," such as the
Armenian territories of Turkey that had been victim of widespread
massacres, or embark on an invasion of Russia to assist the
anti-Bolshevik forces that were battling communist troops there.
If the U.S. had any impact, it was as a moderating influence that
prevented some of the harshest penalties that threatened to dismember
Germany entirely, spread famine across wide areas of Central and
Eastern Europe, and even accelerate the arrival of Bolshevism in
the West.
The Treaty was a catastrophe for Wilson and the U.S. Refusing to
compromise on a single provision when the Senate began the ratification
process, Wilson embarked on a coast-to-coast whistle stop campaign
to convince American voters that the Senate had to ratify the Treaty
and the League of Nations. Halfway through his trip, he suffered
a major stroke, which incapacitated him for the remainder of his
presidency. The Treaty was defeated, the U.S. never joined the League
of Nations, and less than two decades later, the world was plunged
into another global war.
Q: Did the Treaty help lead us into the Cold War? Would it have been
inevitable even if the stipulations hammered out in Versailles had
been different?
A: The Treaty did not lead us into the Cold War, but it certainly
did accelerate the process. Lenin was persuaded that before long,
communism would move westward, across Central Europe (it was already
in Hungary), through Germany, and eventually to the Atlantic. He also
believed that the failure of the Treaty of Versailles (which he viewed
as inevitable) would simply accelerate the process.
Accordingly, the conflict between Bolshevism and capitalism was set
up even before the major powers gathered in Paris in 1919.
The peacemakers did, as I describe in the book, miss several stellar
opportunities to open a dialogue with the Bolsheviks that might have
changed the course or pace of what would become the Cold War.
Certainly Wilson’s refusals to commit American troops to the
anti-Bolshevik resistance, and the eventual dispatch of Herbert
Hoover’s food to feed the famine-ravaged stretches under Bolshevik
control won favor from Lenin. Still it would have been interesting to
see whether a more open policy, even a dialogue begun at that time,
might have changed the course of the Russian revolution in any fashion,
or at least its leaders’ dealings with the West.
In the end, though, there was a fundamental disconnect. Bolsheviks
were perceived as the terrorists of the first decades of the
Twentieth century. They had taken over by force a major Western ally,
exterminated its ruling royal family, and waged an ideological war on
its capitalist enemies. Communism was winning converts throughout the
Western world. Indeed, the Bolsheviks were never truly absent from
the negotiating table. Their spirit overhung all of the proceedings.
The way they were treated by the peacemakers in Paris merely confirmed
the beliefs of most of Russia’s communist leaders – the West was not
to be trusted, and should be treated as an implacable enemy.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/