A Perfidious Distortion of History

by Jurgen Tampke

  Anti-French feeling in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars added to the growth of nationalism in central Europe. If France was a nation, then the German lands that had an equally proud cultural tradition should become a nation also. The 1848 Revolution was an attempt by sections of the educated European middle classes to establish nation states under a system of parliamentary democracy. When it failed, modern nationalism took a turn for the worse.

  With hindsight, it can be argued that in the slow and difficult progress of European (or, indeed, Western) civilisation towards what is today called ‘civil society’, the concept of nationalism and the idea of ‘the nation state’ contributed little. Rather, it has hindered humanity in its search for a better and fairer society by channelling resources into petty and mediocre political ideologies. These ideologies at best glorified the trivial and, at worst, led many Europeans into xenophobia, racial hatred, and, finally, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

  The challenge to dynasticism had a negative impact on Europe almost from its inception. It was originally designed to help replace absolutist inefficiency with liberal concepts, and to establish a stable and equitable civil and international order, but nationalism soon deteriorated into a doctrine that promulgated little more than crude populism. Moreover, in eastern Europe, nationalist aspirations were espoused chiefly by a small privileged elite in order to foster its vested political and/or economic ambitions. The majority of the chiefly rural population remained largely indifferent to concepts of national identity, and stayed wedded to traditional forms of loyalty.

  President Wilson first raised the principle of self-determination in his answer to German chancellor von Hertling’s reply to his Fourteen Points. There was no reference to national self-determination in those points. They stated merely that the peoples of Austria-Hungary should be accorded the ‘freest opportunity of autonomous development’, and that the nationalities under Turkish rule should be assured ‘an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development’.

  In his address to congress of 11 February 1918, Wilson had declared that the war had its roots ‘in the disregard of the rights of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and force to make good their claim to determine their own allegiance and their own form of political life’. He then listed four further principles for the peacemaking process. The second of these stated that peoples and provinces were not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game. The third demanded that every territorial settlement must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the population concerned, and not as a part of mere adjustments or compromise of claims among rival states. 5 There was nothing in these principles to indicate that the newly drawn borders should coincide precisely with ethnic frontiers. On the contrary, the fourth and final demand of the ‘Four Principles’ emphasised ‘that all well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely to break the peace of Europe, and consequently of the world’. 6

  Wilson showed little enthusiasm during the peacemaking process for endorsing the multitude of petitions from disgruntled ethnic groups from the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires who sought self-determination based on ethnicity. He had hoped that the political system of his own country — where many (white) ethnic groups lived in relative harmony, and which was based on government through the consent of the governed without reference to ethnicity — might be implemented elsewhere.

  His secretary of state, Robert Lansing, was sceptical. National self-determination, he said, ‘is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Conference and create trouble in many lands. What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalities among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent, disorder, and rebellion?’ He made the grim prediction that ‘the phrase is loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realised. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives … What a calamity the phrase was ever uttered. What misery it will cause!’ 7

  But the genie would not go back into the bottle. 8 As an American authority on the peace treaty sums it up:

  [T]he very idea of popular sovereignty, when applied to the crazy quilt of heterogeneous population in post-war Europe, inevitably acquired an ethnic dimension in spite of Wilson’s original interest. His ambiguously defined principle of self-determination became the miraculous means of salvation in the eyes of discontented folk all across the continent who were struggling against those whom they regarded as their oppressors (and who not coincidentally spoke a different language and practiced different customs). 9

  The importance placed on the term ‘national self-determination’ during the peacemaking process obscures other issues on the peacemaking agenda. Weighty factors had to be taken into consideration in the task of creating new states from the ruins of disintegrated empires. Economics were important: longstanding trade connections, communication networks, and complex matters of ownership existing in the old empires could not be simply erased. Legal and judicial traditions came into play, as did historical alliances. Geopolitical considerations were also important, particularly in the settlement with the German empire.

  Some continue to hold the view that the peace conference constituted a conflict between two opposing approaches, personified by Clemenceau on the one hand and Wilson on the other: that Clemenceau’s insistence on a vengeful and vindictive peace stood against Wilson’s fair and just ‘peace without victory’. This is pure myth.

  The president was not in a particularly German-friendly mood as he headed to Paris. Had he contemplated a peace without indemnities, he was in no position to put it into effect. The U.S. contribution to the war effort had been vital. The Allies had to rely upon American financial assistance and on American imports of food and vital war supplies. Around 600,000 U.S. soldiers had arrived in France by the summer of 1918, though they did not play a major part in the Allied breakthrough of August–September or in the subsequent defeat of the German army. The British, with the support of their empire, had fought hard and had sustained large losses. The same was true of the French, who, in addition, had seen their country devastated. Wilson could not have ignored their legitimate concerns.

  Moreover, a peace seen as pro-German would not have been accepted back at home. The president had just lost the mid-term Congressional elections, which had returned a Republican majority in both houses. This had been largely brought about by domestic issues unrelated to the war, but the warning was on the wall, and his opponents, in particular ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson’s lifelong opponent Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican chairman of the Senate committee on foreign relations, were thundering no end against his Points, Principles, and Particulars. According to Roosevelt, these had ‘ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people’. 10

  His critics need not have worried. Notwithstanding his numerous attempts to bring about an end to the war, by 1918 Wilson had clearly sided with the Allies. He had taken no great interest in Europe before the outbreak of the war. In his scholarly career as a political scientist, he had been greatly impressed by the democratic traditions of the United Kingdom, and he remained a lifelong Anglophile. He had also praised the administrative efficiencies brought about by Prussian reformers such as Stein, Hardenberg, and Gneist, although he was critical of what he regarded as the strongly authoritarian system of government under Kaiser Wilhelm II. When war broke out, he was bitter about German conduct, and in particular the destruction of Louvain, but he saw strict neutrality as the only course open to the United States.

  His attitude did not change until spring 1917, when he stopped advancing the idea of a ‘peace without victory’. He had become convinced that the war had been started by the ‘military masters of Germany’, who had planned and executed the
conquest of Europe and Asia ‘from Berlin to Baghdad … from Hamburg to the Persian Gulf’. He regarded Germany’s leading establishment and its political system as the embodiment of evil ‘without conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace’. 11 A compromise peace with Germany’s military rulers was out of the question. Nevertheless, he did not hold the German people responsible for the aggression of their government, seeing them as victims rather than as participants in the German empire’s drive for world domination. Once the military autocracy had been replaced by orderly democratic government, Germany would become a constructive member of the community of nations. 12

  This positive assessment of the German people changed when the rapacious terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk showed what a German peace would look like. When even the Social Democrats, whom Wilson up to that time had regarded with respect, failed to vote against Brest-Litovsk, he was once more disillusioned:

  Brest-Litovsk not only caused Wilson to drastically step up America’s military contribution to the war, it also had an effect that, in the long run, was far more fateful for Germany. The failure of the Majority Socialists to fight the annexationist peace terms seems to have convinced him that even the civilian population, if not most of the German people, had been inculcated with the spirit of militarism … he no longer exempted the German people from blame for the deeds of their rulers. On the contrary he had come to believe that in the final analysis, the German people themselves were behind German militarism. 13

  Wilson still maintained that, while Germany had to remain a viable nation state and should not be saddled with an unbearable burden, nevertheless the Germans could not escape punishment for their crimes.

  Settling peace with Germany on the principle of national self-determination would have meant that Germany’s national territory would have been far greater than Bismarck’s Reich. Its population would have increased by around ten million, and it would have gained prosperous industrial regions. As William Keylor aptly comments, ‘with a postwar redistribution of territory based purely on considerations of nationality or ethnicity, Germany’s penalty for its military defeat [and the destruction the nation had caused] would have been the acquisition of Lebensraum more extensive than the vast terrain acquired by Hitler through diplomatic intimidation by the beginning of 1939’. 14 Such a redistribution would have been absurd. Equally absurd are the claims that Austria and the German-speaking population of Bohemia should have merged with Germany — claims still found today, even in scholarly works. This view was first peddled by Germany’s chief negotiator, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, in his reply to the peace terms at Versailles on 7 May. This claim was made chiefly for domestic purposes, but it was also a first step in a long and skilfully conducted public-relations exercise by the German empire to discredit the Versailles Treaty.

  Wilson may have been idealistic, but he was neither ignorant nor incompetent. ‘Wilsonianism’ is a concept that overemphasises the nationality principle and refers ad nauseam to his ‘peace without victory’ speech. The arguments that only a Germanophile settlement would have blessed the country with a stable democracy — and that any punitive aspects would only cause damage — were not Wilson’s. These were the criticisms later made by disgruntled members of the British Treasury and Foreign Office and, above all, by John Maynard Keynes. Such arguments overlook the fact that after the ‘peace without victory’ speech came the introduction of unlimited submarine warfare, the American entry into the war and heavy U.S. casualties, the repugnant peace treaties of Bucharest, Brest-Litovsk, and Moscow, and a further eighteen months of war. Wilson himself was not a ‘Wilsonian’.

  Start of proceedings

  The George Washington reached Brest on 13 December. There, the American president was given a rapturous welcome. Thousands of people, many in traditional Breton costumes, had lined up for the jubilant and colourful reception. The music of Breton bagpipes filled the air. Wilson’s arrival in Paris was even more magnificent. Guns were fired as the train pulled into Luxembourg station, where he was greeted by French president Raymond Poincaré and the prime minister with his government. As the car ferried the president and his wife to their residence, soldiers struggled to hold back the huge, wildly cheering crowds that gathered along the streets. Most of the French media gave the impression that the League of Nations which Wilson had promised to create would be a victors’ club, an alliance to curb future German ambitions, and that the United States would play a vital part in restricting renewed Prussian militarism. After spending a few days in Paris, Wilson crossed to London, where there was a repetition of the scenes of euphoric citizens welcoming a man they considered a saviour. The same happened in Rome, where he finished his whirlwind December tour.

  David Lloyd George arrived in Paris on 11 January1919. He was in a buoyant mood, having won a landslide victory in the 14 December election. The chief reason for the convincing win was his determined leadership during the war. Two catchy slogans concerning the imminent peacemaking process were thrown in to rally the electorate. The first was the demand to ‘hang the Kaiser’ — that is, to bring the German war leaders to account for the crimes they had committed during the war. The second was to make Germany pay fully for the costs of the war. Making promises that are difficult to fulfil is nothing new in electioneering. Since the dawn of democratically elected government there has always been a discrepancy between the great promises of candidates and the modesty of the goods they are able to deliver. Most of the time, gullible electorates acquiesce, and are content with partial fulfilment. In this case, loud declamations to ‘hang the Kaiser’ were impractical simply because Wilhelm II had acquired political asylum in the Netherlands, and the Dutch government had no intention of handing him over to the Allies.

  The excitement over bringing Germany’s war conduct to account soon faded. President Wilson showed little enthusiasm. He agreed to the setting up of a commission to investigate who was responsible for the war and how to punish war crimes. The German government, however, refused to hand anyone over to the special military tribunal, and the Allies eventually sent a list of a few hundred names to be tried in Germany. The list included Hindenburg and Ludendorff, as well as most members of the OHL. Twelve were eventually brought to trial, and most were immediately acquitted. A couple of submarine commanders who had sunk lifeboats of wounded survivors were sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, but, allegedly, escaped after a few weeks and were never found. 15

  Lloyd George’s other campaign trump card, to ‘make Germany pay’, caused him constant difficulties during the peace negotiation process. He was aware that compensation had to remain within reason, and he had emphasised ‘that members of the government should not be responsible during the election for arousing any false hopes in the minds of the electorates’. 16 However, he did little to restrain the media’s demand to ‘bleed the Hun dry’. Nor did he rebuff the demand of First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, that the German government be ‘squeezed as a lemon is squeezed — until the pips squeak’. On the contrary, the prime minister himself announced in a speech at Bristol two days before election day that ‘we have an absolute right to demand the whole cost of the war … those who started it must pay to the uttermost farthing, and we shall search their pockets for it’. 17

  This statement was one big problem that Lloyd George faced over the next five months. The composition of the British delegation to Paris was another. The four hundred delegates comprised not only members of the British military, diplomatic, and civil service, but also delegates from the white Dominions (Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand), as well as India. Because the Dominions had played a substantial role in the defeat of the Central Powers, they were not to be pushed aside when it came to collecting the spoils. And they could be very difficult and vociferous — none more so than the Australian prime minister, William ‘Billy’ Hughes.

  On 18 January 1919, the Peace Conference opened officially in the presence of plenipotentiar
ies from 28 countries. Among them were delegates from China, which had made a valuable contribution to the Allies’ war effort. After declaring war on Germany in the summer of 1917, about 100,000 Chinese labourers had helped in the construction and maintenance of trenches, freeing Allied soldiers for combat. The Chinese had suffered severe casualties at the front, and over 500 had died when a French ship was sunk by a German submarine. China held high hopes of regaining full possession of the Shandung peninsula. Portugal had contributed 60,000 soldiers to the Western Front, but was angered that it was allowed only one official delegate, whereas Brazil, which had sent only medical aid, was allowed three. 18 Even this exceeded the contributions of Chile, Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Panama, and a century later it is hard to discern why these countries should have even attended the peace process in Paris.

  The day after the long-winded palaver of the pretentious plenary session, Lloyd George, Wilson, Clemenceau, Italian prime minister, Orlando, their foreign secretaries, and two Japanese representatives formed of a ‘Council of Ten’. Commonly referred to as the Supreme Council, this was the chief decision-making body for the first ten weeks of the conference. The spadework of formulating the peace conditions was delegated to 58 specialised committees, many of which were divided into sub-committees.

  Laying the foundation of the League of Nations was the first item on the agenda, an act of courtesy granted the U.S. president. Although the idea of a transnational body to conduct global affairs in the post-war era was upheld unanimously, none of the other chief decision-makers shared Wilson’s enthusiasm or his unbound optimism for such an organisation. Clemenceau, in particular, was sceptical. France had lost 1,500,000 men — half its male population under thirty — and with no counter-weight in the east, it faced a large military imbalance with Germany. Clemenceau preferred an international league able to provide military protection. He wanted ‘teeth’ put into the league, but he found no backers.