Some cynics added that the political system had not changed much either; for what was Lenin if not a Red Tsar, wielding absolute power through the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (which, crucially, maintained direct control over the parties in the other republics)?* Yet that was to miss the vast change of ethos that separated the new empire from the old. Though there had been ‘terrible’ Tsars in Russia’s past, the empire established by Lenin and his confederates was the first to be based on terror itself since the short-lived tyranny of the Jacobins in revolutionary France. At the same time, for all the Bolsheviks’ obsession with Western revolutionary models, theirs was a revolution that looked east more than it looked west. Asked to characterize the Russian empire as it re-emerged under Lenin, most Western commentators would not have hesitated to use the word ‘Asiatic’. That was also Trotsky’s view: ‘Our Red Army’, he argued, ‘constitutes an incomparably more powerful force in the Asian terrain of world politics than in European terrain.’ Significantly, ‘Asiatic’ was precisely the word Lenin had used to describe Stalin.
REDRAWING THE MAP
Was the port at the mouth of the River Vistula called Danzig, its German name? Or was it to be Gdańsk, as the Poles called it? Once a free, self-governing Hanseatic city under the protection of the Teutonic Knights, Danzig had recognized the sovereignty of the Polish crown from the mid-fifteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. But in 1793 it was annexed by Prussia, then, after a brief period of independence during the Napoleonic era, in 1871 it became part of the German Reich. More than 90 per cent of the town’s population were German. Most of the peasants in the surrounding countryside, however, were Polish or Slavonic Kashubes.
Danzig was one of countless questions to confront the Western leaders and their entourages when they gathered at Versailles in 1919. The great optimist and moralist among them, the Virginian-born and Presbyterian-raised US President Woodrow Wilson, believed he had the answers.† Some of these were familiar liberal nostrums, like free trade and freedom of the seas. Others built on pre-war and wartime proposals for collective security, arms control and an end to ‘secret diplomacy’; from these Wilson fashioned his League of Nations, with its biblical ‘Covenant’. The most radical of Wilson’s schemes, however, envisaged a reordering of the European map on the basis of national ‘self-determination’. From December 1914 onwards Wilson had argued that any peace settlement ‘should be for the advantage of the European nations regarded as Peoples and not for any nation imposing its governmental will upon alien people’. In May 1915 he went further, asserting unequivocally that ‘every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live’. He repeated the point in January 1917 and elaborated on its implications in points five to thirteen of his Fourteen Points. According to Wilson’s original draft of the Covenant, the League would not merely guarantee the territorial integrity of its member states but would be empowered to accommodate future territorial adjustments ‘pursuant to the principle of self-determination’. This was not entirely novel, needless to say. British liberal thinkers since John Stuart Mill had been arguing that the homogeneous nation state was the only proper setting for a liberal polity, and British poets and politicians had spasmodically stuck up for the right to independence of the Greeks and the Italians, whom they tended to romanticize. When trying to imagine an ideal map of Europe in 1857, Giuseppe Mazzini had imagined just eleven nation states ordered on the basis of nationality. But never before had a statesman proposed to make national self-determination the basis for a new European order. In combination with the League, self-determination was to take precedence over the integrity of the sovereign state, the foundation of international relations since the Treaty of Westphalia two and a half centuries before.
Applying the principle of self-determination proved far from easy, however, for two reasons. First, as we have seen, there were more than thirteen million Germans already living east of the borders of the pre-war Reich – perhaps as much as a fifth of the total German-speaking population of Europe. If self-determination were applied rigorously Germany might well end up bigger, which was certainly not the intention of Wilson’s fellow peacemakers. From the outset, then, there had to be inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in the way Germany was treated: no Anschluss of the rump Austria to the Reich – despite the fact that the post-revolutionary governments in both Berlin and Vienna voted for it – and no vote at all for the 250,000 South Tyroleans, 90 per cent of whom were Germans, on whether they wanted to become Italian, but plebiscites to determine the fate of northern Schleswig (which went to Denmark), eastern Upper Silesia (to Poland) and Eupen-Malmédy (to Belgium). France reclaimed Alsace and Lorraine, lost in 1871, despite the fact that barely one in ten of the population were French-speakers. In all, around 3.5 million German-speakers ceased to be German citizens under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Equally important, under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of St Germain-en-Laye, more than 3.2 million Germans in Bohemia, southern Moravia and the hastily constituted Austrian province of Sudetenland found themselves reluctant citizens of a new state, Czechoslovakia. There were just under three-quarters of a million Germans in the new Poland, the same number again in the mightily enlarged Romania, half a million in the new South Slav kingdom later known as Yugoslavia and another half million in the rump Hungary left over after the Treaty of Trianon.
The second problem for self-determination was that none of the peacemakers saw it as applying to their own empires – only to the empires they had defeated. Wilson’s original draft of Article III of the League Covenant had explicitly stated that:
Territorial adjustments… may in the future become necessary by reason of changes in present racial conditions and aspirations or present social and political relationships, pursuant to the principle of self-determination, and… may… in the judgment of three-fourths of the Delegates be demanded by the welfare and manifest interest of the peoples concerned.
This was too much even for the other Americans at Paris. Did Wilson seriously contemplate, asked General Tasker Bliss, ‘the possibility of the League of Nations being called upon to consider such questions as the independence of Ireland, of India, etc., etc.?’ His colleague, the legal expert David Hunter Miller warned that such an Article would create permanent ‘dissatisfaction’ and ‘irredentist agitation’. As a result, Wilson’s draft was butchered. What became Article X merely reasserted the old Westphalian verity: ‘The Members of the League undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.’ As the British historian turned diplomat James Headlam-Morley sardonically noted: ‘Self determination is quite demodé.’ He and his colleagues ‘determine[d] for them [the nationalities] what they ought to wish’, though in practice they could not wholly ignore the results of the plebiscites in certain contested areas. There were, it is true, serious attempts to write ‘minority rights’ into the various peace treaties, beginning with Poland. But here again British cynicism and self-interest played an unconstructive role. Revealingly, Headlam-Morley was as sceptical of minority rights as he was of self-determination. As he noted in his Memoir of the Paris Peace Conference:
Table 5.1: Germany’s territorial and population losses under the Treaty of Versailles
Some general clause giving the League of Nations the right to protect minorities in all countries which were members… would give [it] the right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the French in Canada, quite apart from more serious problems, such as the Irish… Even if the denial of such a right elsewhere might lead to injustice and oppression, that was better than to allow everything which means the negation of the sovereignty of every state in the world.
The fate of Danzig illustrates the kind of bargains being struck. At the suggestion of the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, Danzig and the surrounding area (in all, just over 750 square miles) now reverted to its historic
status as a free city, though it was now placed under League of Nations protection; the Poles were awarded their own free port, post office and control of the railways. Danzig had its own currency and stamps, but its foreign policy was determined in Warsaw. This was just part of a larger geographical anomaly. Danzig was roughly equidistant between Berlin, beyond the River Oder, and Warsaw further down the River Vistula. But the territory to the west of Danzig was now Polish since the formerly German provinces of West Prussia and Posen had been ceded to Poland, while the territory to the east, the province of East Prussia, remained German. The creation of the ‘Polish Corridor’ running from Upper Silesia to Danzig thus left East Prussia as a bleeding chunk of Germany between the Vistula and the Niemen. Was Danzig really a free city? Or was it actually a Polish captive? And was that also the true situation of East Prussia? To assert their claims, the Poles sought to monopolize the Danzig postal service; at the same time, they constructed a rival port, Gdynia, to divert commerce away from the Free City. Danzigers who wished to travel to Germany (including Prussia) required a Polish transit visa. The poisoned atmosphere generated by such petty sources of friction is well preserved in Gü nter Grass’s Danzig trilogy, The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. It is no accident that the most memorable fictional personification of the German catastrophe, the stunted drummer Oscar Matzerath, is born in Danzig in 1924.
All over Europe there were similar collisions between the ideal of the nation state and the reality of multi-ethnic societies. Previously diversity had been accommodated by the loose structures of the old dynastic empires. Those days were now gone. The only way to proceed, if the peace was to produce viable political units, was to accept that most of the new nation states would have sizeable ethnic minorities (see Figure 5.2).
In the new Czechoslovakia, for example, 51 per cent of the population were Czechs, 16 per cent Slovaks, 22 per cent Germans, 5 per cent Hungarians and 4 per cent Ukrainians. In Poland around 14 per cent of the population were Ukrainians, 9 per cent Jews, 5 per cent Byelorussians and more than 2 per cent Germans. Roughly a third of the population of all the major cities was Jewish. Romania had reaped a handsome territorial dividend from her wartime sufferings, acquiring Bessarabia (from Russia), Bukovina (from Austria), southern Dobruja (from Bulgaria) and Transylvania (from Hungary). But the effect was that nearly one in three inhabitants of the country was not Romanian at all: 8 per cent were Hungarians, 4 per cent Germans, 3 per cent Ukrainians – in all there were eighteen ethnic minorities recorded in the 1930 census. The preponderance of non-Romanians was especially pronounced in urban areas. Even the Romanians themselves were divided along religious lines, between the Uniate Christians
Figure 5.2 Ethnic minorities in East Central European states, c. 1930-31
of Transylvania and the Orthodox Christians of the Romanian heartland, the Regat. Yugoslavia – initially known as ‘The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’, which named only three of the country’s seventeen or more ethnic groups – was another hodgepodge. The Serbs had dreamed of a South Slav kingdom that they would dominate; as if to make that point, the new state’s constitution was promulgated on June 28, 1921, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo and of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand’s assassination. In reality, Yugoslavia was an uneasy amalgam not just of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes, but also of Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Turks – not to mention Czechs, Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks and Ukrainians. Bulgaria and Hungary both retained sizeable minorities – accounting for, respectively, 19 and 13 per cent of their populations, despite having lost territory under the peace treaties. In these five countries alone, around twenty-four million people were living in states that regarded them as members of minority groups.
It is sometimes said that the Paris Peace settlement was flawed because the United States Senate refused to ratify it; or because it imposed such stiff economic reparations on Germany; or because its vision of an international system of collective security based on the League of Nations was not realistic. Yet the single most important reason for the fragility of peace in Europe was the fundamental contradiction between self-determination and the existence of these minorities. It was, of course, theoretically possible that all the different ethnic groups in a new state would agree to sublimate their differences in a new collective identity. But more often than not what happened was that a majority group claimed to be the sole proprietor of the nation state and its assets. In theory, there was supposed to be protection of the rights of minorities. But in practice the new governments could not resist discriminating against them.
As for the new era of peace supposedly ushered in by the Paris treaty, it was over in the blink of an eye. The borders of the new Polish state were themselves determined as much by violence as by voting or international arbitration. Between 1918 and 1921, the Poles fought small wars against the Ukraine, Germany, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia and Russia; the upshot was that Poland extended much further east than the peacemakers had planned. In Eastern Poland, Ukrainians were excluded from government employment; so hostile were they to the new Polish state that Ukrainian terrorist organizations were soon active, in turn provoking brutal pacification expeditions by the Polish authorities into the chronically unquiet kresy, the borderlands. Yet it would be too harsh to blame all this on President Wilson. It was not he who had called nationalism into being in Central and Eastern Europe; it had torn the Habsburg Empire apart even before he got to Paris. Moreover, as we have seen, Wilson had envisaged a strong League of Nations with the power to intervene and arbitrate in border disputes. It was hardly his fault that the US Senate refused to endorse this permanent ‘entanglement’ of the United States in the affairs of strife-torn Europe; hardly his fault that his efforts to sell the League to the American public precipitated a stroke which all but paralysed him for the last sixteen months of his presidency.
Two groups felt especially vulnerable in the new post-war order. The Germans, who had once been the dominant people in so much of Central and Eastern Europe, feared reprisals from the new masters of the successor states. And with good reason. German communities came under attack by Polish mobs in Bydgoszcz (formerly Bromberg) and Ostrowo (formerly Ostrow). In Czechoslovakia the Germans were effectively excluded from the 1919 elections; in clashes with Czech gendarmes and troops – the so-called massacre of Kaaden of March 14, 1919 – fifty-two Germans were killed and eighty-four wounded. Not that the Germans were in every case innocent victims. In many of the territories that were ceded by Germany and Austria they formed belligerent and often armed self-defence groups. The mood of the Germans in Bukovina was not untypical. Gregor von Rezzori had grown up near Czernowitz (now Cernaŭti) as the self-confidently German-speaking son of an Austrian official. He was bewildered by the transformation of his hometown when, along with the rest of Bukovina, it became a part of Romania. As he later recalled,
a thin foil of civilization appeared to have been superimposed on an untidily assorted ethnic conglomerate from which it could be peeled off all too readily… The Romanians holding important government posts established themselves as the new masters under the aegis of the Romanian military establishment, which flaunted the brassy glitter of its fresh victory, and they remained largely isolated from those who spoke other languages and now were the minorities… the Jews in caftans… the rabbis and solid ethnic-German burghers in their stiff shirt-collars worn, according to local tradition, with wide knickerbockers and Tyrolean hats.
Rezzori’s family withdrew into a kind of inner exile; they had, as he put it, ‘ended up in a colony deserted by its colonial masters’. They were ‘no longer masters of anything, taken over by another class to which we deemed ourselves superior but which, in fact, treated us as second-rate citizens because of the odium attached to an ethnic minority’. Romania was ‘part of the East’, whereas the Rezzoris ‘felt definitely and consciously that we were “Occidentals”’. Of course, the Germans had never
been anything other than a minority in the Bukovina. Around 38 per cent of the population were Ukrainians and 34 per cent were Romanians; a mere 9 per cent were Germans, though that proportion rose to 38 per cent in Czernowitz itself. Yet with its Habsburg bureaucracy and German university, Czernowitz had once seemed to be the gateway from ‘Half-Asia’ to ‘Germandom’. Cernauti, by contrast, was more of a German ghetto than a gateway – a place where Romanian students could with impunity storm the German Theatre to disrupt a performance of Schiller’s Die Räuber. From mastery to minority represented a precipitous fall.
The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Page 24