by Adam Tooze
Finally on 13 February 1919, at the ninth meeting of the Commission, the ratio was fixed in line with Wilson’s original conception at five to four in favour of the great powers.25 In a general sense this tilted the compromise toward the idea of the League not as a vehicle for great-power governance but as the representative assembly of the ‘family of nations’, the venue, as Paul Hymans the Belgian delegate put it, to affirm ‘the dignity of nations’.26 The Covenant also now avoided any categorical distinction between great and small powers. The Big Five were simply listed by name as permanent members. The rest of the Council was to be chosen from amongst ‘the other member states’. In the draft agreed in February no justification was offered for the status of the Big Five, neither their size nor their role in the war being mentioned. No distinction was drawn between great and small powers, or allies, auxiliaries and vanquished. The Covenant avoided any reference to the actual hierarchy of global power. By the same token, no criteria were specified that would allow an argument for change to be made in terms of the wording of the Covenant itself.
The same clash of visions recurred on every issue of the Covenant. Who, for instance, should be eligible for membership in the League? In Wilson’s own first drafts of the Covenant, he had included ‘popular self-government’ as a criterion to be met by applicant members, which would have made the League an association of democracies. But this clause was cut out by the legal experts. In the third meeting of the Commission on 5 February, Wilson sought to remedy this by requiring that ‘only self-governing states’ could in future become members of the League. In reply Bourgeois made a characteristically forceful intervention. Self-government by itself was not adequate. ‘Whether the form of government is republican or monarchical,’ he went on, ‘makes no difference. The question ought to be, is this government responsible to the people?’27 What was truly at stake for the French was the political ‘character’ of the League and its members. To impose the stiffest possible test they demanded that any vote for admission should be unanimous. Speaking for Britain, Cecil’s approach was characteristically flexible. Self-government, he opined, was a ‘word’ that was ‘hard to define, and it is hard to judge a country by this standard’. Crucially, Britain very much wanted to have India included, and though it was making progress towards self-government, the Commission was not willing to grant that India already qualified. This embarrassment was resolved by making India an original signatory of the Covenant to which the qualifications required of new applicants did not apply. After Jan Smuts came up with that procedural fix, Cecil was happy to agree to any formula approved by Wilson. If Germany was the main anxiety, the British felt it was best to avoid general formulae at all. On paper, after all, it could not be denied that the Reichstag had been a ‘democratic institution’. Furthermore, ‘in a few years’ time the Reichstag could have converted Germany into a constitutional government, in the true sense of the word’. To impose stiff entrance criteria for the former enemy powers, Cecil suggested that the article be amended to permit the League to ‘impose on any States seeking admission such conditions as it may think fit’. This would allow the League to ‘say to some State, you are too military; to another you are too despotic etc’.28
Disconcertingly, though it was he who was moving the amendment, Wilson refused to clarify his own terms. As he willingly admitted, he had ‘spent twenty years’ of his ‘life lecturing on self-governing states and trying all the time to define one’, but he despaired of ever being able to provide a watertight definition. In the end it came down to a kind of practical wisdom. He could, Wilson insisted, ‘recognize’ such a constitution ‘where I see it’. One should not be misled by the Reichstag or the formidable apparatus of German electoral politics. Regardless ‘of how it appeared on paper, no one would have looked at the German government before the war, and said that the nation was self-governing’.29 When the French proposed taking up Cecil’s idea of tailoring the requirements to specific applicants, Wilson responded with an even more disconcerting admission. It would be unwise, he interjected, to insist too firmly on very exclusive membership criteria, because that might involve setting up ‘standards that we have not always lived up to ourselves’. ‘Even all the states now here associated were not regarded by all other states as having good characters.’30 This only served to heighten French alarm. For a republican of Clemenceau’s stripe, it was perverse to turn the impossibility of achieving international consensus into a reason for retreating into minimalist relativism. Precisely because the world was likely to be riven with conflict, democrats must distinguish their friends from their enemies and learn to stand together. This was why the League should be equipped with clear membership criteria and effective enforcement mechanisms. But the British and Americans resisted any move in the French direction. In the end the Commission settled for a compromise that satisfied no one. Any talk of democracy or constitutionalism or responsible government was abandoned in favour of an amendment that simply required candidates for admission to be ‘fully self-governing’. This clearly ruled out colonies but left open the question of members’ internal constitutions.31
III
In the discussion of the League’s enforcement mechanisms, the difference in underlying visions became even more pointed. The French insisted that if it was to offer a truly effective security guarantee, the League must dispose of an international army. It must have a permanent general staff and a tough regime of supervised disarmament. If implemented, this would have made Marshal Foch’s supreme command over Allied forces, instituted at the final moment of crisis in the spring of 1918 and still operative in the spring of 1919, into the model for a permanent military apparatus. But this was unacceptable to both the British and Americans. When the French had the temerity to press the issue, the British revealed the power balance that was to define the scope for compromise over the League. On the morning of 11 February, Robert Cecil rounded on Léon Bourgeois, ‘speaking very frankly but in private’, he reminded him that ‘Americans had nothing to gain from the League’, that the ‘offer that was made by America for support was practically a present to France, and that to a certain but to a lesser extent this was the position of Great Britain’ as well. ‘If the League of Nations was not successful,’ Cecil warned, Britain would withdraw from the negotiations and make an offer of a separate ‘alliance between Great Britain and the United States’. With the darkest fear of French policy laid bare on the table, ‘the meeting adjourned for lunch’.32 Now that the British were acting as the enforcers, Wilson could adopt a more conciliatory tone. He gladly conceded to the French that the recent war had ‘made apparent the absolute necessity of the unity of command . . . but the unity of command only became possible because of the immediate and imminent danger which threatened civilization. To propose to realise unity of command in time of peace, would be to put forward a proposal that no nation would accept . . .’33 ‘We must make a distinction between what is possible and what is not.’34
Behind the scenes the familiar role assignment at Versailles was reversed. It was Wilson’s realism that turned the French from radical internationalists into defenders of the status quo. If their futuristic internationalist vision was rejected, then France’s minimum negotiating goal was to soften the disarmament provisions of the League Covenant so that they did not operate in such a lopsided fashion as to jeopardize French security. When the British and Americans called for an end to conscription, France replied that conscription was a ‘fundamental issue of democracy’, a ‘corollary of universal suffrage’.35 The result was a lowest common denominator compromise that suited the British and Americans far better than their allies. Under Article 8, the target level for disarmament was to be adjusted with ‘special regard to the geographical situation’ of each state. The ‘fair and reasonable’ level of forces that would be allowed to each member was to be determined by the Council according to an unspecified procedure. There was to be a ‘full and frank interchange of information’ about armame
nts between states, but no inspection or ‘control’. Instead of a standing army, the League would be equipped with a ‘permanent Commission’ to advise on disarmament and ‘military and naval questions’.
The security regime provided by the Covenant centred on Article 10, which required the High Contracting Parties to ‘respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all states’. But contrary to the claims later made by Wilson’s Republican opponents, the Covenant provided no automatic enforcement mechanism. It was up to the discretion of the Council to ‘advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled’. The true substance of the Covenant lay in the procedural mechanism it specified for delaying and mediating conflict. No party was to go to war before submitting the case to arbitration (Article 12). A ruling was to be delivered within six months. The warring parties were to respect a further three months’ waiting period before engaging in conflict. If a ruling was reached the terms were to be published, providing the basis for an emerging body of international law (Article 15). Only a unanimous report by the members of the Council other than the parties to the conflict would have binding force. No member of the League was permitted to declare war on a party to a conflict that was complying with a unanimous Council recommendation. A failure to comply with this arbitration procedure would be considered an act of aggression against all other members of the League and would license sanctions under Article 16. These included a complete and immediate economic blockade and the interdiction of all communications between citizens of the Covenant-breaking state and the rest of the world. The Executive Council was placed under a duty to consider joint military and naval action, but it was not required to take action. In the event that the Council was not unanimous, it was required merely to publish the opinions of both the majority and the minority. The attempt by the Belgians to give binding force to a mere majority vote of the Council was warded off by the British with Wilson’s backing. A no-vote in the Council could not be overridden. No great power could be forced to take action by the League.
To minimize their commitments yet further and to avoid becoming sucked into the defence of an indefensible status quo, the British had insisted that the League should have the right to adjust boundaries where appropriate. But this risked turning the League Council into the court of appeal for every revisionist and irredentist cause in the world. So, instead, under Article 24 it was the Body of the Delegates that was given the responsibility ‘from time to time’ to ‘advise the reconsideration by States members of the League, of treaties which have become inapplicable, and of international conditions of which the continuance may endanger the peace of the world’. But no procedure was specified by which such advice should be formulated, nor did the Covenant spell out the consequences of such a finding. Under Article 25, signatories were required to void any treaties incompatible with the League Covenant, but, again, no procedure was specified by which a conflict between new and old commitments might be resolved.
From the point of view of those who had hoped to create a robust international security regime, this was deeply disappointing. But as far as Wilson was concerned, the mistrust and insecurity that animated these discussions was the wrong place to start. ‘It must not be supposed,’ Wilson insisted, ‘that any of the members of the League will remain isolated if it is attacked . . . We are ready to fly to the assistance of those who are attacked, but we cannot offer more than the condition of the world enables us to give . . . When danger comes, we too will come, and we will help you, but you must trust us. We must all depend on our mutual good faith.’36 Bourgeois and Larnaude were too polite to point out that less than four years earlier President Wilson had declared himself ‘too proud’ to fight, or that, even at the moment of greatest danger in the spring of 1918, America’s soldiers had hardly ‘flown’ to the defence of France. Instead, the French asked for some token of the ‘mutual good faith’ to which Wilson so eloquently appealed to be written into the Covenant. Should it not include some explicit statement of solidarity, acknowledging the blood spilled in common in the war? But on this the French were repeatedly thwarted by the British and Americans. They insisted that the League should not be ‘burdened’ with the rancour of the war. But if wartime solidarity was not to be invoked, what was the common bond to which Wilson was appealing?
As a substitute, Bourgeois suggested that the League of Nations should invoke the legacy of the pre-war Hague Peace Arbitration Treaties. That experience had taught bitter lessons. The advocates of internationalism had to stand together, because their project was not, as Wilson fondly imagined, supported by an irresistible groundswell of public opinion. The advocates of The Hague Treaties, Bourgeois reminded the Commission, had had ‘jokes and raillery’ heaped on them by ‘opponents of Right’, self-proclaimed ‘realists’ and narrow-minded exponents of national egotism. They had faced a barrage of criticism from those who had ‘tried to cast discredit on the first great enterprise for the organization of right in the world’. And Bourgeois finished with a heartfelt appeal: ‘I foresee, I announce and I want it to be written in the minutes that, against the work we are now undertaking, the same criticisms and the same raillery will be made, and that they will even try to say that this work is useless and ineffective.’ Such denunciations were not inconsequential. The mocking criticism directed against The Hague Treaties had helped to erode the support of those ‘who ought to have been the staunchest upholders’. Given this fragility, as Larnaude insisted, ‘Not to mention The Hague Conference is not only ingratitude, but it is something more, it may be a disregard of the interest we have, not to deviate from the conventions which have truly played a part in this war.’37 But the British were not moved. Standing in for Wilson as chairman, Cecil dismissed the whole issue as merely a ‘question of form’. Colonel House also objected, but on different grounds. Since the US Congress had ratified The Hague Convention only with reservations, even to mention The Hague in the League Covenant was a ‘question of form’ that might raise ‘vast and very difficult’ problems.
IV
Clemenceau was no simple-minded realist when it came to international affairs. On the contrary, in early April 1919 he would make an impassioned appeal for the Versailles Treaty to set a dramatic precedent by bringing the Kaiser to trial as an international criminal.38 But the frustration that Larnaude and Bourgeois experienced in the Commission confirmed Clemenceau in his suspicion that the League was a lost cause as far as France was concerned. Making the best of a bad situation, Clemenceau joined the British and Americans in distancing himself from Bourgeois’ impractical demands, all the better, he hoped, to consolidate the trilateral transatlantic pact with Britain and America that was his true goal.39 Provided that a democratic alliance was in place, France could live with an empty League. The real risk from the point of view of Paris was that the League might have become an exclusive Anglo-American duopoly. Both at the time and since, critics would argue that the League served as a convenient vehicle for the upholding of an Anglo-American imperium.40 But what substance was there to these claims? Certainly the British hoped to turn the League into the forum for a transatlantic condominium and this vision was attractive to at least some Republican senators.41 But the attitude of the Wilson administration was not encouraging. And they were least encouraging where it mattered most – regarding money and ships.
There was some talk over the winter of 1918–19 from the Entente side of making the League into the vehicle for an international financial settlement. But as we shall see, those plans were rapidly quashed. Wilson’s stance on naval affairs was, if anything, even more worrying. In advance of his visit to London in December, he gave a carefully scripted interview to The Times in which he spoke of the need for ‘the most generous understanding between the two great English-speaking Democracies’.42 But what did this mean for the future organization of naval power? In his independent armistice exchanges with the Germans in October 191
8, Wilson had reiterated the call for the freedom of the seas that was anathema to the British. To further increase the pressure, in late October he asked Congress to appropriate funds for a second three-year naval spending programme. And in unguarded moments on the passage to Europe in early December he made clear what this meant. If Britain would not come to terms, America would ‘build the biggest Navy in the world, matching theirs and exceeding it . . . and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map’.43 When Wilson arrived in Europe there seemed little prospect of Britain gaining either of its main objectives: a cordial power-sharing agreement with the United States, or recognition by the US of the exceptional naval needs of a worldwide empire. Caught between these conflicting impulses, by the end of March 1919 relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other.44