The Deluge

by Adam Tooze

  In this tense situation, the League of Nations discussion did bring relief on at least one crucial point. As Wilson himself was forced to admit, it was contradictory both to insist on the creation of a League of Nations with the power to impose an international blockade and to declare the freedom of the seas an absolute principle. The Royal Navy would clearly play a crucial role in imposing the sanctions required by the League. The ‘joke’, Wilson admitted, was ‘on him’. Talk of the freedom of the seas was quietly shelved. But would the British and American navies be able to cooperate? Was Wilson determined to push ahead to build the largest navy in the world? If the US acted unilaterally and aggressively, could Britain afford not to respond? It would make a mockery of the League of Nations if it began not with disarmament but with the greatest arms race the world had ever seen. But as the Versailles peace talks began, America’s wartime shipbuilding programme was belatedly hitting its stride.45 Any suggestion of the need to limit naval construction was apt to be interpreted as a symptom of European presumption. The result was a truly ironic inversion.

  Since 1916 Wilson had argued that America needed to threaten to build a huge navy to force the British to accept the terms of the new order. As the peace conference entered its fortnight of deepest crisis, in late March 1919 Lloyd George turned the tables on him. Wilson had returned from Washington in an embarrassing situation. His conversations with congressional leaders had made clear that the Covenant would not pass without an explicit inclusion of the Monroe Doctrine. Britain had no objection, for it had been one of the original instigators of the doctrine. And the Royal Navy had been its de facto upholder throughout the nineteenth century. But America’s claim to naval dominance was profoundly disturbing, and not just to Britain. In the first week of April as the conference reached deadlock, Lloyd George made clear that there would be no British signature on an amended Covenant including the Monroe Doctrine unless Wilson agreed to refrain from an all-out naval arms race.46 Cecil was horrified at what he deemed Lloyd George’s cynicism. But his indignation did little to dent Downing Street’s logic: ‘The first condition of success for the League of Nations is . . . a firm understanding between the British Empire and the United States of America and France and Italy that there will be no competitive building up of fleets or armies between them. Unless this is arrived at before the Covenant is signed, the League of Nations will be a sham and a mockery.’47 Rather than Wilson using American naval armaments to force Britain to fall into line with his vision of a new international order, it was Britain that held Wilson’s Covenant hostage to curb American naval armaments. Lloyd George agreed to approve an amended Covenant on 10 April only after Wilson conceded that America would reconsider the 1918 naval programme and would engage in regular talks on armaments plans.48 Thus the blank canvas of the League was filled, if not with an Anglo-American alliance, then at least with a commitment to avoid confrontation.

  14

  ‘The Truth About the Treaty’

  For France the peace talks had started badly. In the League of Nations Commission the British and Americans collaborated to block the French vision of the League. The Covenant that was to form the global framework for the post-war order contained few if any of the provisions that would be necessary to secure peace in Europe. In the struggle over the Armistice in the autumn of 1918, the British had had enough leverage to ensure that their single most important objective was met: the German Fleet was interned in Scapa Flow. By comparison, France was forced to look for its security to the draconian armistice conditions, which had to be renewed month by month. The story of Versailles was in large part defined by France’s efforts to have its interests recognized. The result by June 1919 was a treaty that in the words of Jacques Bainville, France’s most influential right-wing historian and publicist of the interwar period, was ‘too kind for all that it was cruel’.1 How had this come about? The answer first to hand was to think in terms of an unhealthy compromise between two sides. The French were responsible for the draconian measures, whereas Britain and America preened themselves as the advocates of a more liberal peace. ‘Too cruel’ was the judgement above all of British liberals like John Maynard Keynes. Bainville, like many of his compatriots, thought the peace ‘too kind’.2

  Not surprisingly, this simple assignment of roles has provoked rebuttal. Were the French really vindictive, the British and the Americans really liberal in their approach to Germany? Beyond this question of role assignments, are there perhaps deeper reasons for the fraught quality of Versailles? Perhaps the kindness and cruelty of Versailles are symptomatic of the unsteady emotional economy of moralistic liberalism.3 The fury of a just war generated punitive impulses that over time were always likely to become distasteful, setting up a no less unstable backlash, this time in the spirit of appeasement.4 After all, a just peace could mean both hanging the Kaiser and restraining the unreasonable Poles. But in seeking to explain Versailles’s Janus face, Bainville looked beyond the emotional cycle of crime and punishment to a deeper historical and structural feature of the peace. Whether it was cruel or kind, what struck Bainville most about the Versailles settlement was that it extended the principle of national sovereignty across all of Europe, including to Germany. Despite the disaster unleashed by Bismarck’s creation of 1871, an integral and sovereign German nation state was taken for granted as a basic element in the new order. For Bainville this assumption was the hallmark of sentimental nineteenth-century liberalism.5 The bizarre mixture of cruelty and kindness that characterized the peace was the direct result of Clemenceau’s effort to reconcile the security needs of France with his romantic attachment to the principle of nationality. Whatever we may think of Bainville’s politics, the force of his point can hardly be denied. Across the sweep of modern history since the emergence of the modern nation state system in Europe in the seventeenth century, the assumption of German national sovereignty marks the treaty of 1919 as unique. Most, if not all, of the problems peculiar to the Versailles Treaty system arose from it.

  I

  Given the French insistence on demilitarizing the Rhineland, occupying strategic bridgeheads, subjecting Germany to international inspection and stripping it of its border territories, it may seem perverse to insist that German sovereignty was a defining feature of the Versailles peace. When it suited his negotiating tactics, Clemenceau was happy to unleash the exponents of an even more radical solution. But as Bainville with his acute sense of French political history well understood, for a man of Clemenceau’s disposition, German nationality could not really be denied. Self-determination as a universal aspiration was not an idea imported to an uncomprehending Europe by an American President. Since the first French Republic had embarked on the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, the question of how to accommodate French security with the rights of other people to self-determination had been an abiding preoccupation. Furthermore, as radical republicans like Clemenceau regretfully acknowledged, France’s long history of aggression had played a disastrous role in inciting the furies of German nationalism. Above the mirrors at Versailles the friezes celebrated Louis XIV’s rampages across the Rhine. The first French revolutionaries had thought of themselves as breaking with the legacy of Bourbon power. They announced themselves as liberators of an enslaved Europe. But the just war of the revolution soon gave way to Napoleonic imperialism. The tragic torsion imparted to European history by the degeneration of the French revolution was fundamental to Clemenceau’s distinctively republican view of history.6 The Congress of Vienna of 1815 had imposed peace on Europe, but it had denied the national aspirations of Germany. The disastrous denouement came in the 1860s when the vainglorious ambition of Bonaparte’s nephew opened the door to Bismarck. If the France of Napoleon III had no friends in 1870, it was for good reason. Clemenceau did not bemoan the defeat of a regime that had imprisoned both him and his father. The disaster was that Germany’s wounded pride was now slaked by Prussia’s aggression. Clemenceau had many brutal and prejudiced things to
say about Germans. But he did not deny that the Huns of 1914 were in no small part the product of France’s own twisted history.

  It was not, of course, the singular responsibility of the French to have denied German national aspirations. The fragmenting of German sovereignty was a defining feature of every general settlement of European affairs both before and after 1919. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War, acknowledged the sovereignty of the emerging nation states of Europe, led by France, but relegated the German lands to the Holy Roman Empire, divided along lines of religion into hundreds of principalities, dukedoms and free cities. Though the map was tidied up in the wake of the Napoleonic occupation of Germany, the same basic pattern held in 1815. Invidious comparisons have often been drawn between the shabby treatment of the demoralized German delegates in Paris in 1919 and the hospitable welcome that had once been extended to Talleyrand, the representative of the defeated France at the Congress of Vienna. But this is utterly beside the point. Talleyrand represented the restored, legitimist Bourbon dynasty. In 1815 even the quietest pretension to German unity had been silenced by the secret police forces of Austria, Prussia and Russia. As recently as 1866, during the crisis that would lead to the Austro-Prussian War, the French statesman Adolphe Thiers could declare that the ‘greatest principle of European politics’ was that Germany must consist of independent states, bound together by no more than a federation.7 It was against this backdrop that Clemenceau made what at first may seem an incongruous claim: ‘... the Treaty of Versailles can make this boast . . . that it did conceive, and even in part bring about, certain relations founded on equity between nations that had been ground against one another by successive outbreaks of historical violence’.8 A consolidated German nation state would stand after Versailles at the heart of Europe. Furthermore, as one could hardly fail to notice even from the most casual inspection of the post-war map, due to the simultaneous collapse of the three eastern empires, Germany not only survived the war. In defeat in 1918 it bulked far larger than it had done in victory in 1871.

  Could the existence of a German nation state have been reversed? In 1918 there was excited talk amongst journalists, senior military figures and even in the Quai d’Orsay of a ‘new Westphalia’. Perhaps France could regain the dominant position it had enjoyed under Louis XIV. Perhaps German nationalism could be curbed or turned against itself. After all, the unification of Germany was a work of violence. In 1849 Prussian troops had crushed a patriotic liberal revolution in southern Germany. In the summer of 1866, in what is commonly but misleadingly referred to as the Austro-Prussian War, Prussia had faced not Austria alone, but a coalition consisting of Saxony, Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Hesse, Hanover and Nassau. Over 100,000 Germans had been killed or wounded in what amounted to a North-South civil war. Why should a state, united so recently and with such violence, not be disassembled? But attractive as such visions may have been for anyone thinking from a narrowly French perspective, they ignored the consolidation of German national sentiment since 1871. As Clemenceau recognized, German patriotism was not a figment of the romantic liberal imagination. It was a fact, dramatically reaffirmed by the war. More fundamentally, fantasies of a re-division of Germany begged the question of force. Even if France acting alone might sponsor the separation of the Rhineland, how could it hope to sustain such a partition? The treaties of Westphalia and Vienna were Europe-wide agreements upheld by collective guarantees. It was not impossible to imagine such a solution in the twentieth century. A division of Germany was precisely what was imposed after 1945. But the conditions that made the partition of Germany after World War II into a stable feature of the European order for almost two generations illuminate the full extent of the dilemma facing France in 1919.

  The reconstruction of West Germany after World War II has gone down in history as a warrant for the possibility of successful ‘regime change’. It also frequently serves as a foil against which to contrast the ‘failure’ of 1919. But one should not underestimate the massive commitment of money and political capital involved in the reconstruction after World War II, resources that all the victorious powers found far harder to mobilize after World War I. Nor should one prettify the coercive international framework within which such reconstruction was accomplished. The peace settlement after 1945 was far more drastic in its implications for German sovereignty than anything contemplated in 1919. It was World War II that made true many of the horrors envisioned by enraged nationalists after World War I. The country was occupied with massive force. Its territory was torn apart. Eleven million Germans were ethnically cleansed from the contested borderlands in the East. The casualties still defy precise enumeration. But resentful nationalists claim as many as 1 million German civilian victims of this exodus. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped. Reparations and occupation costs were extracted from every part of Germany. War criminals were hunted down. Several thousand were executed, tens of thousands imprisoned and permanently debarred from public life. In both the Eastern and Western zones the entire political, legal, social and cultural system was subject to intrusive and widely resented re-engineering. It was a reconstruction whose success and legitimacy was eventually acknowledged only in the Federal Republic, never in East Germany. Even in West Germany it took the effort of several generations of engaged citizens who doggedly and often with considerable bravery insisted on the need to break with their country’s past. The Communist dictatorship in the East had to rely on one of the most intensive police states in history. The entire story was given a happy ending only in 1989 with the collapse of Soviet power and reunification. But even in 1990, the ‘Two Plus Four’ negotiations that ratified reunification demonstrated not so much the restoration of complete German sovereignty as the multiple conditions to which it continues to be subject through NATO and the European Union.

  The unprecedented commitment of the Western Powers was one crucial precondition in enabling this remarkable trajectory. But a no less indispensable element in the equation was the massive coercive force of the Red Army. After 1945 it was the very real threat of a Soviet takeover that drove West Germany willy-nilly into the arms of the West and kept it there. And this too marks 1919 as a singular moment in European history. Since the eighteenth century, Russia had overshadowed German history.9 Germany’s military defeat of Russia in 1917 removed this basic parameter of European power politics. For France as for Germany this had dramatic implications. In the 1890s it was the common fear of the unified Reich that had brought Tsarist autocracy and republican France together in an incongruous alliance. For French strategists of Clemenceau’s ilk this was always profoundly uncongenial. The coincidence of the Russian revolution with America’s entry into the war in 1917 made both impossible and unnecessary any resumption of a Franco-Russian alliance against Germany. Instead, the French Republic would place its security on a far more congenial basis by means of a political and strategic alliance with the United States and Britain. This transatlantic democratic alliance would be strong enough both to accommodate and to control a unified Germany. To the East, Germany would be safely separated from Russia by Allied sponsorship of the substantial new states of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The fundamental question was whether France could extend into the peace its epoch-making wartime cooperation with Britain and America.

  By the autumn of 1918 both London and Washington had agreed to the French claim that Alsace-Lorraine should be restored without a plebiscite. In January 1919 when addressing the French Senate, President Wilson appeared to go further. France, he declaimed, stood ‘at the frontier of freedom’. It would ‘never again’ have to face a ‘lonely peril’ or have to ask ‘the question who would come to her assistance’. France should know that ‘the same thing will happen always that happened this time, there shall never be any doubt or waiting or surmise, but that whenever France or any other free people is threatened the whole world will be ready to vindicate its liberty’.10 Setting aside the memories of ‘too proud
to fight’ and ‘peace without victory’, if the notion of a ‘frontier of freedom’ was more than an empty phrase it had radical implications. It implied a specific, absolute, territorial demarcation between different spheres of political value – on the one side freedom, on the other side its enemies. It was the kind of language that President Truman would adopt in 1947 to justify containment, the Marshall Plan and NATO. But Wilson, to the profound regret of the French, showed no recognition of the import of his words. In the League of Nations Commission he reverted only a few weeks later to a language of moral equivalence. Over the League Covenant the French chose to retreat. When it came to Germany, they could not.

  II

  The first French goal was to disarm Germany. On this, the Americans abstained and the disagreements with the British were technical. They were settled in February 1919 by agreeing both to ban conscription and to limit the German Army to a force of 100,000 lightly armed volunteers. The next French goal was to ensure that what remained of the German Army was pushed well back from its frontier. To the north of Alsace, they wanted to transfer the coal-mining region of the Saar to French control. Its pits would provide France with the coal of which it had been robbed when the retreating German Army flooded the pits of France’s northern industrial region. As the Rhine flowed further north towards Holland, the German Rhineland extended west of the river. Generalissimo Foch and the baying pack of nationalist opinion demanded that it should be separated from Germany to form a separate republic which could either be grouped together with Belgium and Luxemburg or neutralized. During the war Clemenceau had silenced all such talk, but on 25 February 1919 he permitted his closest advisor, André Tardieu, to ventilate the radical case in front of the conference. But Clemenceau chose his moment carefully. He avoided a direct confrontation with Wilson, who was absent from Paris selling the League to Congress. On Wilson’s return on 14 March the stage was set for the climactic crisis of the peace conference. Wilson was horrified by the scale of the French demands. But Clemenceau was adamant. Fearing that the conference would collapse in an embarrassing debacle, Lloyd George suggested a dramatic solution. He proposed to Wilson that the British Empire and the United States should offer France a trilateral security guarantee. Though this was a dramatic departure for both countries and though such a separate military alliance was in contradiction with several of Wilson’s well-known pronouncements on the League, the President was persuaded that he must consent or see the conference and with it the League Covenant fail.11