From then on, he refused to compromise on anything with the fascist regime and became somewhat withdrawn, particularly on 4 June 1944 when Rome was liberated by American troops. This reserve saw him elected President of the Constituent Assembly of the New Italian Republic in June 1946. But his objections to the terms of the peace treaty signed between Italy and Austria led to his resignation in 1947. As compensation, he was elected to the Senate the following year and, among many others, ran for presidency of the Republic. But it was the Liberal Luigi Einaudi (1874-1961) who was eventually elected on 11 May 1948.
Vittorio Orlando died in Rome on 1 December 1952.
The Treaty of Versailles
A widely criticised treaty
The Treaty of Versailles has a bad reputation. It is generally held responsible for the rise of Nazism in Germany and the war that ensued. But it is often forgotten that the agreement was the result of a delicate compromise between the four Allied Powers to try to re-establish peace in the explosive context resulting from the First World War.
In 1918, the unexpected fall of the Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires led to the emergence of new countries that expected security guarantees from the victors under the rules of the nation-state, inherited from the 19th century. The three heads of state knew that, to achieve this, they would have to work together as part of a coherent institution, tasked with fairly recognising the responsibilities of both the victors and the defeated countries, at the risk of prolonging the resentment stirred by the war.
The nationality problem at the beginning of the 20th century
In the 19th century, the balance of power in Europe was arranged according to the model of the nation-state. The theoretical basis for this model of sovereignty particularly emphasised people’s freedom to live in a community within a defined territory, under a government capable of representing them and protecting them from foreign attacks. The application of this national principle, originating from Enlightenment philosophy, led to three distinct movements:
The unification of countries into coherent territorial and political entities. The unifications of Italy in 1859 and of Prussia in 1871 are the best examples of this.
The formation of national communities aiming for ethnic homogeneity to protect themselves from foreign influences. This was the case in the Balkans, where Greece, Serbia and Romania tried to assert their sovereignty against the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.
The co-existence, within these states, of several ethnicities who were dominated by the cultural model of just one, claiming a historical right to occupy the land or to call theirs the pure bloodline.
When the Empires collapsed after 1918, it was understandable that the notion of nationalities was particularly difficult to respect within territories where ethnicities were so numerous and so closely interwoven.
The organisation of the victors’ conference
On 18 January 1919, the Paris Peace Conference was opened by Raymond Poincaré. During the event, the French capital became the centre of the world. No fewer than 27 countries were invited to the negotiation table. Notable guests included the Belgian King Albert I (1875-1934) and the Queen consort Marie of Romania (1875-1938) alongside Portuguese, Polish, Greek and Serb delegations.
On 29 March, the decision was taken to create a supreme council made up of the United States, France, Britain and Italy. Japan was also invited, but its participation was limited to the matter of its colonies in East Asia.
Contrary to what had been expected, not all the formerly warring nations could be found around the negotiating table. The main absent party on the Allied side was Russia. Following the revolution in 1917, Clemenceau preferred to keep them out of it, fearing the influence the Bolsheviks might have over the negotiations. As for Germany, its responsibility for the beginnings of the war excluded it from discussions.
As the Chairman, Clemenceau opted for a rational organisation of the conference to avoid the main parties responsible for the war exploiting differences of opinion between the victorious countries.
“The greatest crime in history”
In August 1914, the German army invaded Belgium and committed acts of violence on nearly 6500 civilians. Four years later, the French government promised to prosecute German war criminals in an international tribunal to hold them responsible for the acts they had committed. For Great Britain, which had not been invaded, the recognition of Germany’s criminal responsibility also seemed essential.
On a visit to London in December, Clemenceau accused Wilhelm II of committing “the greatest crime in history” and joined Lloyd George in demanding the emperor’s extradition.
The British Prime Minister thus suggested creating an international court made up of Allied judges, with the jurisdiction to rule on the fate of those who had been accused of violating human rights. But as President Wilson refused, defending the jurisdiction of national courts to rule on war criminals, a compromise had to be found. It was therefore decided that:
The Allies had the right to publicly accuse Wilhelm II of “a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties” (Article 227 of the treaty);
Each state could judge war criminals in their respective courts, by virtue of the principal of exclusive responsibility.
On this basis, the three Allies submitted a list with the names of the 854 people they wanted to try to Germany. However, the lists seemed so incoherent that Germany refused to hand over the defendants. Therefore, under pressure from President Wilson, who was anxious to keep the authority of the German government intact, they were reduced. Following these changes, Germany agreed to try the people involved. But the trial of the criminals brought before the Reichsgericht in Leipzig, starting in May 1921, was something of a disappointment.
A heavy debt for Germany
In addition to its crimes, Germany’s responsibility was fully brought to light when the negotiators introduced the notion of war reparations into the treaty. Recognised as the only party responsible for the damages caused to the Allies during the war, Germany was forced to pay them compensation (Article 231). This idea was important to Clemenceau, who insisted on introducing it into the Armistice protocol, as France had suffered the most damage.
He wanted to weaken Germany’s position by demanding reparations from them, but also by forcing them to give up Alsace-Lorraine and their colonies in Asia and Africa. Its army was reduced to 100 000 men. For Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, these conditions were too severe. While Germany certainly had to pay the price for initiating the war, the application of the reparation clauses meant that they were demanding much more than Germany could pay. Lloyd George consequently wanted to guarantee safeguards instead, to allow Germany to regain its position in Europe.
The people’s right to self-determination
From the very start of the conference, Germany’s situation highlighted the need to legally recognise, the respective statuses of the new nations that had emerged from the collapse of the Central Powers. Unlike Clemenceau and Lloyd George, who wanted to make this balance subordinate to the rights of the victors, Wilson was the only one who took a different approach by suggesting the principle of people’s right to self-determination. This policy, known as the ‘Open Door Policy’, had the advantage of ending the pointless territorial expansion at the origins of the war, by giving each nation its own area of economic influence within a common, secure market.
The president also tried to influence the traditional sense of European diplomacy by encouraging his French and British counterparts to incorporate a clause providing for the creation of a League of Nations, whose role would be to monitor the collective security of the states and their good economic relations – particularly with the United States. While Clemenceau and Lloyd George agreed to include this project in the treaty’s preamble, Wilson nonetheless did not get everything he wanted. For the European
s, the re-establishment of peace was conditional on demands of independence and on power ratios in strategic territories that the Allies often allocated in their own interests. This partial way of defining nations’ rights led to several lively debates around the negotiating table.
Among the subjects debated, Polish independence was one of the issues that raised the most questions. As they had fought on their side during the war, the Allies wanted to reward Poland by honouring Wilson’s 13th point, which promised to restore an “indisputably Polish” territory to them. But the matter became more complicated when it was time to establish the borders of the new state.
In June 1919, the Treaty of Versailles officially recognised Polish independence, which had been proclaimed several months earlier. Aiming to create a stable buffer state to prevent the extension of Soviet influence into Western Europe, the Allies set the borders following the former Russo-German front line of 1918. Poland thus gained the Western half of East Prussia and the rich mining territory of Posen. The Danzig corridor was also given by the Allied commission to Poland, thus enabling their access to the Baltic, but refusing to recognise the 1920 referendum that showed a preference for re-joining the Reich. This decision seriously compromised the balance of the Eastern borders, and in the end nobody was truly satisfied with the outline imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. This explosive situation led to a new conflict between Poland and Russia beginning in February 1919. It would only end in December 1922, with the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
The Allies’ concern of reorganising Europe around a weakened Germany for the benefit of their own supremacy led them to draft an unbalanced treaty in June 1919. It was marked with the seal of the victors and cut off from the reality of the people whose interests it was supposed to represent in international law. In such conditions, having Germany accept it was something of a challenge.
A tense signature
The Germans struggled to ratify this treaty as it removed parts of their territory, limited their army and stripped them of their colonies. Faced with the Allies’ refusal to negotiate, the Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert (1871-1925) were far from pleased. But refusing would jeopardise peace and expose the country to foreign invasion – as the French Marshal Foch was claiming his readiness to storm Berlin if the situation worsened. Consequently, on 22 June 1919, the Reichstag eventually accepted the Allies’ conditions, by 237 votes to 158.
Signing the Treaty of Versailles.
On 28 June 1919, the Hall of Mirrors, where the event was held, was filled with tables and chairs. The delegations of the 27 victorious states, as well as the generals and the many infantrymen – for whom seats were reserved – were eager to witness the signing of the peace treaty. A crowd from all over Paris was also present to cheer the three heroes of the day: Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau.
At around 3pm, the two German ministers, Hermann Müller (1876-1931) and Johannes Bell (1868-1949) entered the Hall. The crowd gave them a rather less warm welcome, and they signed what they called the diktat of Versailles. There is little doubt that this signature would give Adolf Hitler one of his main arguments for getting the Nazi party into power.
A treaty challenged
When the Treaty of Versailles was ratified in January 1920, no state was truly satisfied with it, and two of the three leaders who drafted it lost their power: Wilson was defeated by Warren Harding, while Clemenceau lost to Alexandre Millerand (1859-1943).
In the United States, the treaty was rejected by Congress, notably due to the impossibility of Europe paying back the debt to them that it had incurred during the offensive in October 1918. This crisis led not only to the end of Wilson’s career, but also to the refusal of the United States to join the League of Nations.
In France, Clemenceau was dismissed for being unable to obtain all the reparations necessary to the country’s restoration from Germany. Nonetheless, this did not stop the National Assembly from ratifying the treaty on 13 July 1920. The return of Poincaré, who was from Lorraine, to the forefront of politics allowed him to modify certain clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, by allowing France to occupy the Ruhr valley as a guarantee that their reparations would be paid.
Beyond the interests of the three main Allied countries, the agreement did not manage to resolve essential problems, such as the establishment of the Polish borders. These gaps paved the way for fierce nationalist campaigns. Thus, across Europe, the application of a poorly conceived idea of nationality allowed political demagogues to lay the groundwork for wars on the pretext national sovereignty.
Impact
The failure of the Treaty of Versailles
In many ways, the Treaty of Versailles turned out to be a failure. The reasons for this can be found in the organisation of the peace meetings, but also in the consequences that certain clauses had.
Firstly, excluding Russia and Germany from the negotiations heralded more of a settling of scores than a balanced peace agreement that would take into account the interests of two countries who were crucial to European balance. It was therefore a thirst for revenge that led the three main negotiators to make the defeated parties pay by proving themselves inflexible on their demands – particularly the reparations owed by Germany – and not leaving any room for negotiation.
It is also essential to note the importance given to the Allied Supreme Council in the implementation of the treaties, in contrast to the weak powers given to the League of Nations in its role as mediator. Additionally, the institutions established by the Treaty of Versailles strengthened France and Britain’s control over their colonies.
The League of Nations, an inefficient international institution
The treaties made the League of Nations a body for maintaining peace following the First World War. Its mission was to minimise the risks of war by resolving disagreements between states. However, the lack of supranational authorities made it subordinate to the interests of the Allied Supreme Council, and limited its powers during the interwar period. Nonetheless, recourse to mediation allowed the status of some strategical territories that they administered in the 1920s to be clarified on several occasions. Thus, the Treaty of Versailles stipulated, for example, that a referendum had to be organised in Upper Silesia to find out if the region wanted to be part of the Weimar Republic or the Republic of Poland. In 1922, the League of Nations was invited to resolve the matter and managed to have the division of the territory between the two countries accepted. In the same way, it was entrusted with the management of the Saarland for France and the Free City of Danzig for Poland until 1923.
Aside from this aspect, the League of Nations was merely a mediation body whose arbitration could be effective in quelling crises limited to precise territories. But its effectiveness remained very limited when Europe’s stability was compromised by more dramatic conflicts. Thus, the most important matters remained in the hands of the Allied Supreme Council. Consequently, the League of Nations soon started to seem like an obedient tool for global reorganisation, dominated by the European vision.
A breeding ground for the Second World War
Despite some notable success, the League of Nations soon showed itself to be incapable of responding to the many provocations of the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) which led to the start of the Second World War (1939-1945).
In Germany, the treaty was immediately met with the anger of the general public, and riots broke out. To show their anger, the residents of Berlin burned the French flags they had taken in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War so as to not have to give them back. The most radical German leaders took advantage of this context to try to stir up people’s anger with speeches that emphasised the humiliation Germany had suffered. Among them, an army officer named Adolf Hitler took advantage of these sentiments to unite workers’ groups within the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and motivated them to action by promising to reunite all t
he German minorities that had been separated from the country by the “traitors of Versailles” into an “immortal Reich”. This policy manifested itself in Germany’s military redeployment, which remilitarised the Rhineland and annexed, starting in 1938, the Sudetenland (Germans in Bohemia) and Austria, with the approval of Allied heads of state who had gathered in Munich for the occasion.
In 1933, the Reich left the League of Nations, soon followed by Japan and fascist Italy in 1937, who refused to see their foreign policy, followed at the expense of China and Ethiopia respectively, subject to its judgement.
The League’s inability to handle German claims to the Free City of Danzig marked its definitive failure. This crisis eventually convinced Hitler to invade Poland, on 1 September 1939.
Self-determination, a ‘loaded’ expression
When the treaty was signed, the Allies decided to make the principle of people’s right to self-determination the basis of the new states’ legitimacy, a concept that they linked to a radical application of the rights of birth and descent. These principles were soon understood by various European regimes as a threat to their stability.
When a state derived its legitimacy from the consent of the population – perceived as a nation – the presence of other ethnic groups was perceived as a threat for those who believed in their right to occupy the land. It turned out to be difficult for the Allies to give around 60 million people a state which was their own, without reducing other groups to the rank of minorities. This was notably the case in the Balkans, where the reforming of states which were otherwise too small to be viable made it necessary to unite populations which were not linked by nationality. Thus, nearly 3.2 million Germans could be found in Czechoslovakia, out of a population of 13 million. This imbalance was dangerous, as it meant that this small, central-European state was at risk of subversion by imposing minorities. The annexation of the Sudetenland by the Reich in 1938 was a good example of this.
The Treaty of Versailles Page 2