A Perfidious Distortion of History

by Jurgen Tampke

  A committee to create the League of Nations, set up on 25 January, met for the first time on 3 February, and produced a comprehensive draft by 14 February. All league members were pledged to each others’ independence and territories, but the league was not to have its own military. Its primary aim, as stated in its covenant, was to prevent war through collective security and disarmament. International disputes were to be settled through negotiation and arbitration, but neither disarmament nor arbitration was compulsory. Other issues dealt with in the twenty-six paragraphs included global health and labour conditions, human and drug trafficking, the arms trade, treatment of prisoners of war, and protection of minorities in Europe. The organisation was to have a general assembly of all members, a secretariat, and an executive council made up of a member from each of the ‘big five’ — the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, and Japan — and four smaller nations, which would ensure a small majority for the major powers.

  The reality differed. The United States failed to enter the league, which encouraged deadlocks in the executive council, and this was later blamed for its ineffectiveness. Germany, at the insistence of the French, was not admitted, and would not join until 1926. But, pleased with the speedy creation and the overall structure of his pet project, Wilson left for Washington on 14 March to attend to domestic matters. When he returned on 4 April, it was decided to replace the Council of Ten, which had proven too awkward and laborious to deal with the myriad of problems it faced, with a Council of Four — Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Orlando. The Japanese, who had contributed little to the work of the Supreme Council, were excluded, and as Orlando generally participated only when Italian matters came up, the peacemaking at Paris became essentially the work of the first three.

  The question of what to do with the German navy was not easily dealt with. As far as its submarines were concerned, all but ten — which had been given to France — were destroyed. However, there was disagreement between the admiralties of the United States and Britain about the fate of the surface fleet. In line with armistice conditions, the German ships had left their base in November 1918, and were now anchored at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Lloyd George suggested that they be sunk unceremoniously in the mid Atlantic, but Wilson thought it foolish to destroy perfectly good ships. However, dividing the spoils on the basis of the contribution to the war effort or of losses incurred would have favoured the British. There were acrimonious quarrels between admirals on both sides 19 until the politicians declared a truce.

  The distribution of German colonies also proved a burdensome enterprise. By 1914, the German empire had embraced a large area of Africa divided into four colonial districts: German East Africa (today’s Tanzania); Togoland; Cameroon; and German South-West Africa (today’s Namibia). Germany also ruled parts of Melanesia and Micronesia, forming the ‘Imperial Colony of German New Guinea’, covering about 6,400 square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean.

  It was unanimously agreed that Germany, because of its maladministration and ill-treatment of the indigenous people, should lose its overseas possessions, but there was one major point of disagreement. The European Allies envisaged a swap-around in colonial administration, while president Wilson opposed a continuation of traditional colonialism. Instead, and in line with the fifth of his Fourteen Points, he stood for ‘a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’. To achieve this, he suggested the establishment of mandates, a kind of trusteeship run either directly by the league or by powers mandated by the league. The length of such mandates would depend on the progress made by local populations.

  Wilson’s ideas did not find favour with the French. Given Germany’s greater population, they wanted to be assured that in case of renewed aggression from her they could rely on soldiers drafted in from their colonies. A compromise in France’s favour was reached, but strong opposition also came from the British Dominions, in particular from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. They had been counting on outright annexation, and were critical of the mandate system — none more so than the Australian prime minister. After frantic dealing behind the scenes, a three-tier mandate system was agreed upon. Class A constituted those relatively advanced communities previously part of the Turkish empire, which were expected soon to run their own affairs. Class B included the three central African colonies. They were to be administered ‘under conditions securing freedom of conscience and religion, the prohibition of such abuses as the slave trade and the liquor trafficking’. The military training of natives other than for police purposes and the defence of territory was outlawed. All league members were to be given equal opportunity for trade and commerce in these regions. Class C covered German South-West Africa and all former German colonies in the South Pacific. They, ‘owing to the sparseness of their population, or their small sizes, or their remoteness from the centres of civilisation, or their geographical proximity to the mandatory’ would be administered by the mandate as part of its territory. However, there were the same safeguards in regard to the indigenous populations as in the African colonies. 20

  Discussion of the mandate system in the Supreme Council led to heated exchanges at times — none more vicious than the encounters between Hughes and the American president. Wilson loathed Hughes, seeing him as a ‘a pestiferous varmint’. 21 The feeling was reciprocated: the Australian held Wilson, his principles, and the league in contempt. At one point in the discussion about Australia’s claim for the New Guinea mandate, Wilson asked whether the Australian government would allow the sale of alcohol to natives. Having received an affirmative answer, he asked whether there would be unlimited access to missionaries. Of course, Hughes replied. ‘There are many days when the poor devils do not get half-enough missionaries to eat’. 22

  Two days later, after the Australian prime minister had taken a particularly stubborn stand on the Solomon Islands, Wilson angrily asked whether he was ‘to understand that if the whole civilised world asks Australia to agree to a mandate in respect of these islands, Australia is prepared still to defy the appeal of the whole civilised world?’ Hughes, who was deaf both literally and figuratively to arguments he did not want to hear, fiddled with his cumbersome hearing aids, claiming he had not heard the question. After Wilson had repeated himself, he answered, ‘That’s about the size of it, Mr. President’. Although this did not raise Hughes’ standing in Wilson eyes, it did increase his already substantial popularity among the French.

  By the end of January, arrangements were agreed. France acquired possession of Togo and most of the Cameroons; Britain, a small strip of Cameroon and virtually all of German East Africa. After Belgium bitterly complained that it had been left out of the African settlement, Britain reluctantly agreed to hand over the East African provinces of Rwanda and Burundi to a Belgian mandate. In the Pacific, Japan received the former German islands north of the equator, and Australia received German New Guinea. In addition, the two Pacific Dominions divided up the remaining islands south of the equator between themselves.

  Nation states and minority rights

  By the time the conference officially opened, the peacemakers faced a fait accompli in large parts of eastern and south-eastern Europe. The Czechs had set up the state of Czechoslovakia, made up of the Bohemian parts of Cislithania (the Austrian half of the Habsburg empire) and the northern parts of Translithania (the Hungarian half of the Danube Monarchy). Also referred to as Upper Hungary, the population here was chiefly Slovak. The Serbs were in the process of creating a southern Slavonic state, and Poland had become a nation again, having been wiped off the political map by its three neighbours, Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1772. Around the Baltic, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia had declared their independence, leaving the small most easterly inlet of the
Baltic Sea around Petrograd (renamed Leningrad in 1924 and St. Petersburg in 1991) as the last remnant of Russian possession.

  There were two guiding principles behind the creation of the new states that would fill the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires. First, for geopolitical, military, and economic reasons, they had to be of a sustainable size geographically and in population. Second, there was a widespread belief, particularly among the political and intellectual elites, that the era of the multinational state was over: that it was not capable of adapting to democratic principles. This belief was strengthened by the concept of national self-determination that had started to dominate the peace conference. It was now widely upheld that the modern state could only be realised in the form of the nation state. Central to this was the notion of the ‘actual’ nationality of the state, best rendered by the German term Staatsvolk. However, given the heterogeneity of these parts of Europe, the creation of a nation based on ethnicity was an impossibility. Outside observers noted again and again when asking about their nationality that peoples identified themselves as Catholic or Orthodox, as subjects of the government in Vienna, or a local ruler, or a member of a clan in the former Ottoman parts. This hurdle, it was hoped, would be overcome by the ‘minority principle’.

  The minorities treaty aimed to guarantee ethnic minorities equal rights with the majority of the Staatsvolk. It was initially designed by the Allies to provide protection for the Jewish population of Poland (which had been viciously attacked by Polish forces immediately after the proclamation of Poland’s independence). 23 Under this principle, citizens were not to be discriminated against on the grounds of their mother tongue. The state was obliged to provide schooling for minorities, which had the right to use their first languages in business and administration, in the courts, the media, and in religious observance. These rights, however, were granted to individual citizens within minority groups, not to whole communities as collective bodies. The reason for this was to safeguard the state against attempts by minority groups to secede or to join the countries of their mother tongues. As with many other decisions made in Paris, the good intentions of the peacemakers were to face grave difficulties in the turbulent post-war political life of central and eastern Europe.

  Czechoslovakia, alone among the new nations, was genuine in its pursuit of the guidelines laid down in the peacemaking process. There were five minorities in Czechoslovakia: Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenes, Ukrainians, and Poles. Edvard Beneš, who ranked as the most prominent and influential political figure in Czechoslovakia until his death in 1948, recognised the need for all the nationalities to live together harmoniously. The new system, he advocated early in 1919, would have to be similar to the Swiss. He did not mean that the new state should adopt the Swiss political model, but was referring to the spirit of Switzerland, where several nationalities co-existed peacefully. The Czechoslovak Republic granted all of its citizens full civil rights: political and legal equality; liberty of expression; freedom of association, press, and religion; access to education and basic health care; and a modest degree of social security. Policies pursued in the early years illustrate the Czechoslovak Republic’s liberal, democratic character. This positive trend could have been built on, had stability persisted. 24

  The term ‘minority’ was scarcely applicable to the German-speaking population of Czechoslovakia. Numbering over three million, it wielded immense economic, political, and cultural power. The more farsighted of the Czechoslovak leaders recognised the need to ‘win the Germans over’. 25 The second prime minister of the republic, Vlastimil Tusar, stressed that it was essential to ‘have other bonds than the peace of St Germain and Versailles to tie the Germans to the state’. 26 But the attitude of Bohemian and Moravian Germans towards the new state was ambiguous. Parties that took up a negative or irredentist position garnered small followings during the 1920s, while their opposites, referred to as ‘activists’, entered governments in the mid-1920s and held three ministerial positions. The impact of September 1929 and 30 January 1933 drove most ‘Sudeten-Germans’ to rally behind Konrad Henlein’s Sudetendeutsche Partei, which led them straight into the arms of Adolf Hitler and — eventually — into the abyss.

  The Germans were expelled at the end of World War II, and joined another eight million ethnic Germans forced to leave their homes in central, eastern, and south-eastern Europe. The Republic of Czechoslovakia became the ‘Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia’ and, when the end of the Soviet empire heralded the demise of socialism, the Czechs and Slovaks went their own ways peacefully. A set of friendly special clauses regulating old economic and cultural ties recall a time when they formed a single nation. Today, both the Czech and the Slovak Republics have become part of the European Union.

  If one were to rate the newly emerged nations on their compliance with the benevolent principles to which they had committed themselves, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes would stand in stark contrast with Czechoslovakia. The kingdom, established by Serbia, embraced Orthodox Serbians, Catholic Croatians, and Slovenes, and the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Given the importance of religion and dynastic traditions played for the bulk of the population, basing a political unit on the sole principle of southern Slavonic ethnicity was ill-conceived, as soon became apparent. And if the concept was flawed, its execution was worse.

  The new nation, which in October 1929 would be renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was proclaimed on 1 December 1918 by Prince Alexander of Serbia. With the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Serbian forces quickly ensured that non-Serbian military units were disbanded. All vital positions in government and administration went to Serbs, and Belgrade was declared the capital. The Serbs’ dream of re-establishing the mediaeval empire of Stepan Dušan, held since they had liberated themselves from Ottoman rule in 1867, had come a step closer. This empire covered most of Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, and all of northern and central Greece. The newly founded state included Croatia (Serb statesmen and thinkers regarded the Croatians as Serbs) and parts of the eastern Adriatic, including Trieste, as well as large parts of Hungary. 27

  King Alexander took the oath of allegiance on 28 July, the anniversary of the battle of Kosovo, the most important day in Serb history. On this day in 1389, legend has it, the Christian Serbs, led by Prince Lazar, were through treachery defeated by the Ottoman Turks. The prince, who the night before had experienced a vision that he could have either a kingdom in heaven or one on earth, chose the former. The Serbian people, true to their faith, would one day rise again to restore the Serbian empire. Historians today have great difficulty substantiating much of this. There is little evidence of Lazar’s empire; he is seen rather as one of a number of princes struggling for dominance in the region. There is also considerable doubt that Lazar lost the battle: some records maintain that he won; others, that it was a draw. But, as the saying goes, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Lazar the martyr, and Kosovo, the supposed site of the battle, were symbols kept alive in monasteries for centuries until, in the wake of nineteenth-century nationalism, they were revived to provide the ideological backing for Serbian expansionism. 28

  The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was three times the size of the old Serbia. Once the Serbs had charted their new boundaries, the peacemakers at Paris could only rubber-stamp them. France, greatly worried about the power vacuum left by the war in eastern Europe, wanted strong successor states there, able to assist should it come to future conflict with Germany. Support for the new kingdom among its non-Serb nationalities — who comprised about half the population — was limited. Orthodoxy having been declared the state’s official religion, the attitude of other religions to the new arrangements was ambivalent. Catholic Croats and Slovenes objected — not unjustifiably — to being swept up in a Greater Serbia; they had been content as part of the Catholic Habsburg empire. Irredentist movements, confined to a few intellectuals and nationalist zealots, had no popular base. Nor did Mus
lim Bosnians welcome the fact that they were now run by Belgrade. The domestic political violence of the pre-war kingdom continued, reaching a climax in 1928 when the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić, was assassinated in the Belgrade parliament. A year later, the king declared a royal dictatorship.

  Thanks to their shameless territory-grabbing, the numbers of enemies the Serbs faced from within was matched by the numbers without — as became clear in the Second World War. The Croatian fascist Ustasha, in particular, excelled in murdering Serbs. After the War, Josip Broz (Tito) pieced Yugoslavia together again, managing to keep the nation united, not only by force and coercion, until his death in 1980. Little more than a decade later, the Serbs resorted again to violence and genocide. In July 1995, ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the Serbian army resulted in the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. In 2015, a number of high-ranking Serbian officers were sentenced at the International Court of Justice in The Hague to life imprisonment or to lengthy jail sentences for participating in the massacre at Srebrenica. Of the chief culprits, Radovan Karadžić, former president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was given 40 years’ imprisonment in March 1916, and Bosnian Serb army leader Ratko Mladić is still facing trial at the time of writing.

  The Polish state that emerged after World War I was not a creation of the peacemakers, although defining the borders of the new Poland had seen more commission meetings than any other aspect of the conference. The Polish National Committee that had been formed during the war advocated a return to the boundaries of 1772, which would have meant the inclusion of millions of Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians. The French, ever in search of a counterweight in the east against potential German aggression, favoured a strong Poland. The Lithuanians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians did not; nor did the British and Americans. They favoured a smaller Poland, along what became known as the Curzon line. Poland’s new western borders included a small strip of Pomeranian territory around the River Vistula in order to allow the Poles access to the sea, as stipulated in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. 29 Its eastern boundaries were decided in a war with Russia, which lasted from February 1919 to September 1920. The Poles were victorious, and the expanded territory added a further two million Jews, four million Ukrainians, and one million Belorussians to their minority population.