by Adam Tooze
The significance of this offer was not lost on Clemenceau. By contrast with the territorial fixation of France’s soldiers, he placed a pre-eminent value on the political alliance between the three Western democracies.12 He understood that such a gesture by Britain and the United States was without precedent. He recognized that in any future war against Germany it gave France the best hope of eventual victory that it could possibly hope for. But after a few days of deliberation Clemenceau returned to the meeting of the Big Three to restate his demands. The Rhineland would remain as part of Germany. But it must be demilitarized and subject to joint occupation by the Allies. Allied forces must hold bridgeheads on the east bank of the Rhine, from which the German Army would be required to retreat at least 50 miles. Whether or not the Saar was separated from Germany, its coal must be reserved for France. The reaction from the British and the Americans was indignation. Lloyd George and his advisors withdrew to a mansion in Fontainebleau to draft a major restatement of the ‘liberal’ aims of the peace, distancing themselves from France and crafting the script for a generation of appeasement.13 On 7 April Wilson threatened to abandon Paris altogether.14 Ever since, Clemenceau’s failure to respond more cooperatively to the offer of a security pact has served critics of the peace as the best illustration of his bad faith. But this once more fails to take seriously what the French were saying.
The fundamental French objective was to protect their country not just against the general menace of German power, or even against the prospect of defeat, but against the threat of invasion and occupation.15 Of course the French would never forget their experiences in 1870 and 1914. But here too they were making a more general point of considerable novelty. Before the war, the conventions of international law had been developing in such a way as to insulate civilian life as far as possible from war fighting. It was this development that allowed liberal theorists such as the oft-derided Norman Angell to argue that, provided the conventions of international law were respected, from the point of view of the civilian population it ought to make little difference which civilized government they lived and worked under.16 But it was precisely those laws of war that the Kaiser’s armies had systematically violated in their occupation of Belgium and northern France. Allied propaganda was prone to exaggeration, but the Germans did not even attempt to deny that they had executed several thousand Belgian and northern French civilians, whom they chose to regard as illegal combatants.17 Nor did they deny that during their retreat to the Hindenburg line they had laid waste to a large part of northern France. Captured German documents from 1917 and 1918 convinced the French that this had been done not only for tactical advantage but to cripple their economy permanently.18
The loss to France was spectacular. In an area of devastation that amounted to only 4 per cent of the country, the Germans managed to do damage totalling between 2 and 3 billion dollars.19 To the profound frustration of the French and Belgians, when he arrived in Europe Wilson refused to tour the devastated areas, apparently because he feared that it would upset his emotional equilibrium.20 The French could not afford the luxury of such detachment. For them, Germany’s turn against the developing norms of international civility was a clear warning. This made clear that it was no longer enough for the French government to guard against defeat. It had an imperative obligation to protect its citizens against another German occupation. This was a novel territorial problem that required a territorial solution. It must be at the aggressor’s expense.
On 8 April, after days of fraught bargaining, the Big Three avoided an open breakdown.21 The Saar was placed under a complex League of Nations administration with the right to opt either for return to Germany or accession to France in a plebiscite to be held in 1934. For the duration, the output of the coal mines would go to France. The Rhineland was to be fully demilitarized and subject to Allied occupation for 15 years. A phased withdrawal would be conditional on the German fulfilment of their other obligations under the Versailles Treaty and on Britain and the United States making good on their security guarantee. As Clemenceau was later to insist, he had won all that France could hope for.22 He had his hand on the German collar. He had the backing of Britain and America. Should they withdraw, it would be a disaster for France. But at least Paris would have the right under the terms of the treaty to entrench its position in the occupied areas. What Clemenceau hoped was that he had secured these guarantees whilst cementing rather than weakening the wartime alliance. The cooperation with Britain and America enjoined by the treaty was almost as important to him as its anti-German elements. British and American contingents would stand guard over Germany alongside the French Army. Overseeing German disarmament would be a shared responsibility. ‘Responsibility’ for Clemenceau was the key word. He did not believe in the binding force of treaties unless woven together with ‘drive . . . beliefs, thoughts’, and the ‘will’ to bring ‘interests traditionally opposed and sometimes even contradictory’ into a common purpose. This is what the Allies had achieved since 1917. If this wartime partnership could be turned into an ‘indestructible alliance in the peace’, France would be as secure as it could possibly be.23 What Clemenceau characteristically did not allow for was the damage done by his own pugnacious stand. He had antagonized both Britain and the United States, and whilst his cabinet gave their approval to the treaty on 4 May, he had not reconciled a large and vocal element of French opinion to what they still regarded as a naive, liberal peace.24
III
These tensions were compounded by the effort to construct a security system in the East. To guard against the strategic disaster of a Russo-German rapprochement, France needed to construct a solid cordon of East European nation states. But no ‘cruelty’ of the peace rankled the Germans more deeply than the border settlement in the East, and anglophone observers all too easily sympathized. As one American military observer remarked in April 1919: ‘In Central Europe the French uniform is everywhere . . . the imperialistic idea has seized upon the French mind like a kind of madness and the obvious effort is to create a chain of States, highly militarized, organized as far as possible under French guidance . . .’25 Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia appeared as France’s guard dogs. But to be discussing the issue in these terms was to hand the Germans a propaganda victory from the start. As Wilson himself retorted to critics of the territorial settlement, Versailles was ‘a severe treaty in the duties and penalties it imposes upon Germany, but . . . it is much more than a treaty of peace with Germany. It liberates great peoples who have never before been able to find the way to liberty.’26 Clemenceau struck the same attitude. The theme of the peace was national liberation. The peacemakers were thinking ‘less around the old than around the new’.27 In central Europe that was inevitably at the expense of the incumbent powers.
In the Czech case, to view the question as a German question at all was to start by granting the pan-German case. When it was incorporated into the Habsburg Monarchy in 1526, the kingdom of Bohemia had included a large swath of German-speaking people in its western region, later to become notorious as the Sudetenland. This territory was economically important and now constituted a natural defensive barrier for any Czech state. Its prosperous population had by 1913 grown to 3 million and had remained ethnically and linguistically German. But never in its history had any of this land belonged to any of the states that were forged into the German Reich in 1871. On the grounds of self-determination the American delegation were sceptical about handing the territory to Czechoslovakia. To arrogate it to Austria would create a bizarre geographic configuration. But to attach it to Germany would be to hand the defeated Reich a major territorial gain at the expense of the Entente’s Czech allies. This was out of the question as far as Clemenceau and Lloyd George were concerned.28 If Germany and Czechoslovakia later chose to exchange territories on terms agreeable to Prague, that would be up to them and the League – it was not a matter for the peacemakers. In truth, it took an Austrian pan-German of Hitler’s ilk to
make the Sudetenland into a grievance. The Weimar Republic did not press the case very hard.
The truly explosive question was the Polish-German boundary and the most painful question of all concerned Silesia.29 It too had once belonged to the Bohemian Crown and thus to the Habsburgs, only for it to be seized in 1742 by Frederick the Great in the most notorious of all his opportunistic campaigns. By that point, Lower Silesia had already been thoroughly ‘Germanized’. But in Upper Silesia there was a large Polish population. To further complicate matters the region was the hub of the industrial revolution in eastern Europe. The economic map had been transformed by German capital and technology combined with the entrepreneurial energy of its aristocratic magnates. Seven German feudal dynasties owned one-quarter of Silesia and most of its immense reserves of metal ores and coal. If a newly created Polish state was to have any real economic independence, it must have these industrial resources. For the same reason Poland needed access to the sea, which required carving a corridor through ethnic German territory to the Baltic shoreline at Danzig.
The positions were predictable. The Poles, backed by the French, wanted the most generous settlement possible including the transfer of the city of Danzig and all of Upper Silesia to Poland.30 The British and Americans resisted, arguing that this would do too much violence to the principle of self-determination. The arguments began in February 1919 and continued until days before the signing of the Versailles Treaty in June. Danzig, the port city that commanded the mouth of the Polish corridor to the Baltic, was removed from German sovereignty. But on the insistence of Lloyd George and Wilson, it was not allocated to Poland. Instead it was placed under League of Nations administration as a ‘Free City’. The corridor was tailored to Poland’s disadvantage to keep the size of the German ethnic minority to a minimum. On the insistence of Lloyd George, the question of deciding the final boundary in Upper Silesia was postponed at the last minute, to be settled by a plebiscite.31 Contrary to the unfounded assertions of later critics, notably John Maynard Keynes, the peacemakers did not irresponsibly ignore the disruption to an integrated industrial system caused by drawing national boundaries. The treaty of separation between Germany and Poland was one of the most comprehensive and technical settlements in the annals of diplomacy.32 Never before in Europe’s long history of territorial rearrangement had such careful consideration been given to squaring both general principles of justice and the imperatives of power with complex territorial realities. Never before had the interests of different national and ethnic groups, both political and economic, been so carefully weighed in the balance. Through painstaking committee work, the peacemakers sought to align national borders so that railways were allocated as conveniently as possible to national territories.33 Elaborate provisions were put in place to ensure that Poland could not starve Germany of coal. The minutiae of central European history were made the concern of the entire international community. The final League report on the Silesian question was drafted by delegates from Belgium, Brazil, China and Spain. A Japanese viscount acted as rapporteur. Set against the long and bitter history of territories such as Silesia, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Versailles lived up to its claim to have married diplomacy with expert decision-making in a new and enlightened fashion.
Once more, the contrast with the period after 1945 is sobering. Between 1918 and 1926 roughly half the German population of what was now Polish territory chose to emigrate.34 After the Potsdam Conference of 1945 the proceedings were far more brutal. Within three years the entire German population of much of eastern Europe had been violently expelled at the point of a gun. In Silesia that amounted to 3 million people. Almost 100,000 people were confirmed dead, with another 630,000 recorded as missing, or ‘fate unknown’.35 The same treatment was meted out to the inhabitants of the Sudetenland.
But such horrors lay in the future. In 1919 German outrage was inconsolable. The Weimar Republic was never reconciled to the new boundaries with Poland. But the resentment of the defeated Germans is by itself no proof of injustice. If the Poles and the Czechs were to have effective self-determination, what was the alternative? As Lord Balfour put it, the extinction of Poland had been ‘the great crime’ of ancien régime power politics.36 When he heard the Germans complaining of the abuse of their rights in the East, Clemenceau recalled the Polish exiles he had known and the stories they told of Prussian schoolmasters beating Polish children for reciting the Lord’s Prayer in their Slav tongue.37 There was a clear and justified sense that Versailles was not merely creating a strategic cordon sanitaire in the East, but righting historic wrongs. When the Germans claimed that the Entente was bent on the destruction of their nation, Balfour rejected the accusation. What the Entente was challenging was the ‘rather artificial creation of the modern Prussia, which includes many Slav elements which never belonged to Germany until about 140 years ago, and ought, really, not to belong to Germany at this moment’.38 It was regrettable, but ‘inevitable’, Wilson acknowledged, that as tens of millions of Poles, Czechs and Slovaks asserted independence, those Germans who chose to remain in areas of historic colonization would find themselves in the unenviable position of being ruled by Slavs.39 Precisely how many Germans suffered that dreadful fate and how that number compared to the Poles remaining under German sovereignty remains a matter of arcane dispute. Certainly the figure of 4.5 million ‘Germans’ lost in the East should be treated with suspicion.40
Furthermore, as the different reactions to the problem of German ethnic minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland suggest, much depended on which Slavs were involved. The Czech national cause was the best represented of the post-war claimants. President Tomas Masaryk was married to an American Unitarian feminist. He had spent much of the war in the US and was one of the most fluent exponents anywhere of the new language of international liberalism. Together with Foreign Minister Edvard Benes he did his best to contain the aggressive assertion of territorial claims against Hungary and Poland that accompanied independence for the Czech nation. As a result Czechoslovakia earned a reputation as the model citizen of the post-war era.41 It helped that the largest political force amongst the Sudeten Germans were the left-wing Social Democrats who were skilfully and decisively integrated into the new multi-ethnic polity.42 Independent Czechoslovakia had a formidable economic base and Prague’s management of the post-war financial issues contrasted pleasingly with the chaos amongst its neighbours. As citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic, the Sudeten Germans could count themselves fortunate to have escaped the starvation, violence and economic disorder suffered by their ethnic compatriots in Austria and Germany.
The same could not be said of Poland. The challenges facing that new state were monumental. The Polish Republic had to be assembled out of the territories of three defunct empires – German, Austrian and Russian – with radically different political traditions and wildly mixed populations. By 1919 the Polish lands were poor, overpopulated and ravaged by years of fighting. A supreme effort of determined and wise political leadership would have been required to construct a successful nation state on such foundations. The preconditions were not promising. The Polish political parties were legendary for their infighting. A deep fissure ran between the ethnic nationalism of the National Democrats predominant in Russian Poland, whose chauvinism and anti-Semitism were notorious, and the more progressive nationalism of Austrian and German Poland, whose leading figurehead was the renegade socialist Jozef Pilsudski.43 Their bitter disagreements spilled over into an adventurist foreign policy that led Poland to wage no fewer than six wars between 1918 and 1920, including attacks on the Baltic states, the Ukraine and a near-fatal assault on the Soviet Union.44 At the same time, to integrate the new nation, Poland launched a dramatic programme of welfare spending without the financial means to support it. The result was ruinous inflation.45
There were good reasons, therefore, for Germans to regret their incorporation into the Polish Republic. But fundamentally the German hostility
toward any solution to their border disputes with Poland was rooted in something other than mere rational calculation. It expressed a deep strain of ethnic prejudice and racial animosity. The mere thought of being ruled by Poles was enough to send a shiver through the soul of any authentic German nationalist. The year 1919 saw not just a rearrangement of boundaries in Europe. It was truly a post-colonial moment. Established hierarchies of politics, culture and ethnicity were overturned. This sense of revolutionary change in turn helps to explain the attitude of suspicion and fear shared by those who had to decide the Polish question at Paris.46
On 25 March 1919, at the height of the crisis between the Big Three, Poland was a key issue in the Fontainebleau meeting from which Lloyd George hoped to relaunch the British claim to moral leadership. Interpreted in terms of the emotional cycle of liberalism, the Fontainebleau memorandum was the moment at which guilt gained the upper hand. For the sake of peace, Germany must be given a more generous settlement. The greatest danger, Lloyd George announced, was to create in the East a new Alsace-Lorraine. ‘I cannot conceive of any greater cause of future war,’ he was happy to state, ‘than that the German people, who have certainly proved themselves one of the most vigorous and powerful races in the world, should be surrounded by a number of small states, many of them consisting of people who have never previously set up a stable government for themselves, but each of them containing large masses of Germans clamouring for reunion with their native land. The proposal of the Polish Commission that we should place 2,100,000 Germans under the control of a people which is of a different religion and which has never proved its capacity for stable self-government throughout its history must, in my judgement, lead sooner or later to a new war . . .’47 In more unbuttoned moments Lloyd George referred to the Poles as ‘hopeless’. Lord Cecil regarded them as ‘orientalised Irish’. Jan Smuts resorted to his South African idiom. As far as he was concerned the Poles were simply ‘kaffir’.48