Land and Power

British and Allied Policy on Germany's Frontiers 1916-19

Harold I. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000008340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1963, this book examines the territorial settlement with Germany at the end of the First World War. It approaches it from the standpoint of British official attitudes and policy in order to discover the pre-Paris-Peace-Conference evolution of British governmental thinking on German boundary issues: to bring out the relationship between British attitudes and those of their allies and to determine British influence on the drafting of the territorial provisions of the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles.

PART ONE

The Wartime Background

I

INITIAL ATTITUDES ON BASIC PROBLEMS

THE British approach to peacemaking after the Great War of 1914–1918 has been variously portrayed. ‘At the Peace Conference of Paris’, according to a Chatham House study group, ‘Great Britain in keeping with her political traditions and her geographical position of semi-detachment from Europe followed a course mid-way between the idealism represented by President Wilson and the “Carthaginian” policy desired by the French.’¹ Against this picture may be set the tableau in which the dominant English leaders of that era are grouped among the practitioners of Old Diplomacy dramatically confronting Woodrow Wilson and the lesser apostles of New Diplomacy. As Ray Stannard Baker wrote privately in August 1918: ‘The men who are in control in both France and England to-day… have for the most part little or no sympathy for our war-aims as expressed by Mr. Wilson. In some cases they give these aims a kind of perfunctory lip service, but the spirit is not in them.² In a more sophisticated form this image has held captive most American scholarship on the peacemaking of 1919.

Similar controversy surrounds the dynamic, puzzling personality and role of Prime Minister Lloyd George. Charles Loch Mowat has written: ‘The foundation of Lloyd George’s foreign policy was conciliation, as advocated in his Fontainebleau memorandum. The war was over, and a lasting peace would follow not from the dominance of the victors, but from bringing back the defeated and the outcast into the comity of nations…’¹ Thomas Jones has struck a different note in his comment about the Paris negotiations: ‘At the meetings, Wilson was concerned primarily with self-determination… and the League of Nations; Clemenceau with French security and the disabling of Germany; Lloyd George with the balance of power in Europe and its restoration, and with the House of Commons which had resulted from the new election.’² By way of contrast, the phrase ‘balance of power’ does not appear in the index of Lloyd George’s apologia for his and the British delegation’s role at Paris. Lloyd George depicted his colleagues and himself as proponents of moderation, justice, and national self-determination. Indeed, the British negotiators were credited with being more liberal and conciliatory than Woodrow Wilson himself, who is cast with Clemenceau in such marginal titles as: ‘Clemenceau and Wilson irritated at British moderation’.³ Walking with dignity alongside Lloyd George, there was always the figure of Arthur James Balfour, England’s unknown foreign secretary, who frankly acknowledged his belief in the balance of power and the limitations of the principle of nationality as a foundation for peacemaking.

¹ Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Political and Strategic Interests of the United Kingdom, p. 24.

² Baker Papers, Baker to Polk, letter 16, London, August 10, 1918.

Such varying views raise intriguing questions about the peace aims and diplomacy of Great Britain and its Allies during and after the First World War. Since much new evidence is available, a reassessment of the peacemaking of that era is timely and feasible, although the results cannot be regarded as final if only because important archives remain closed.

This study is centered on the problems involved in the making of the German territorial settlement. While dealing primarily with British policy, I propose to treat that policy within a broad framework in order to illuminate both the Allied approach generally and the English approach in particular to that central issue of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

The essential elements of the German territorial problem are well known. When measured by area alone, the claims advanced against prewar German territory were formidable. In western Europe, Alsace-Lorraine, the Rhineland, and the Saar Valley were the major regions at stake. Besides the Belgian claim to Eupen and Malmedy, Belgium’s demands for the left bank of the Scheldt indirectly affected Germany. If the Dutch lost land to Belgium, they could be compensated with German territory. In the north, Germany’s defeat provided an opportunity for settling the Schleswig-Holstein question in Denmark’s favour. In fact, the French government sought to award more German territory to Denmark than the Danes wished to receive. In the east, with the re-establishment of a Polish state, the fate of East and West Prussia, of parts of Pomerania, of Upper Silesia, and of Danzig had to be determined. To the south, while prewar Imperial German lands were not involved, the problem did arise of whether to extend Germany’s frontiers to include German Austria and in whole or in part the Bohemian fringes inhabited by a German-speaking majority. Altogether, at issue was the fate of over 20,000,000 people, of some 80,000 square miles of territory, of vital raw materials such as coal and iron, of valuable heavy and light industries, of rich agricultural lands, and of important strategic positions.

¹ Charles Loch Mowat, Britain between the Wars, 1918–1940, p. 53.

² Thomas Jones, Lloyd George, p. 168.

³ David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Treaties, I, p. 720.

In the settlement of these territorial questions, Great Britain occupied a singular position between the European continent and the United States. British governments had no European territorial claims. A rearrangement of the map of Europe would not directly bring revenue, military strength, and commercial opportunity to England; quite the contrary in some respects. The cession of Alsace-Lorraine to France, for instance, could be disadvantageous to the Lancashire textile trade. Yet, geographical proximity alone made the European continent of greater importance to Great Britain than to the United States. The status of the Low Countries vitally affected the security of the Home Islands themselves. The United States had no comparable security interest in a European territorial settlement. Moreover, the nature of the postwar European balance of power and consequently the extent of Britain’s commitments in Europe would substantially affect the political, military, and naval strength of the United Kingdom throughout the non-European world. The European balance affected the United States more remotely, primarily through its effect upon the Atlantic position of England. It is doubtful whether Balfour was entirely right when he advised his government, in January 1917, to tell Washington that ‘the Government and people of the British Empire had no more direct and immediate interest than had the United States’ in the territorial changes suggested in the Allied reply to President Wilson’s peace note of December 18, 1916.¹ Yet by the very logic of its intermediate position and interests between Europe and the rest of the world, including the United States, the British government was obliged to balance between Wilson and the continental allies. Not until after the American entry into the war and the loss of Russia as an ally did the full significance and possibilities of this situation become apparent.

If British and imperial interests were the first consideration of the policymakers in London, the definition of these interests in a shifting European scene and the formulation of policies to protect them were no simple matter. By and large, Lloyd George and his ministers approached the continent within the general historic framework of Britain’s European and world outlook. Their main aim was a stable European equilibrium to underpin peace, to foster trade, and to avoid British involvement in another war. As for Germany after a total allied victory, the general objective was containment, not elimination. British leaders accepted Germany’s continued existence as a nation-state and in the long run as a European Great Power. The Reich was to lose its position as a world power and was to be denied ascendancy in western and central Europe. Some way was constantly sought to block Germany’s overland route to imperial influence and domination through the Balkans to the Middle East and beyond. Through territorial adjustments, Germany’s war potential was to be weakened; that of France strengthened. In the search for a workable German and continental policy by which to realize these ends, Lloyd George and his political associates made a constant, if ultimately futile, attempt to maintain a working Anglo-American-European triangular relationship involving the commitment of United States’ power on the continent, without alienating any of the partners, without breaking British wartime obligations, and without endangering vital British interests throughout the world.

¹ David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, III, pp. 111–12.

Early in the war, Asquith defined the British government’s general war aims to be the recovery of Belgium, the protection of France against aggression, the destruction of Prussian military domination, and the defense of small nationalities.¹ His deceptively simple statement raised perplexing questions which were to worry, plague, and divide the makers of British peace policy throughout the war and after. How could the rights of the small Polish nation be upheld without offending Russia or creating an unstable European equilibrium? Could Prussian hegemony be shattered without dismembering the German nation against its will and arousing an enduring Teutonic desire for revenge? These and related questions were on the minds of British statesmen during the initial stages of the conflict, as Colonel House discovered during his European mission in the winter of 1915–16.

According to President Wilson’s emissary, Lloyd George, then British Minister of Supply, in considering peace terms, envisaged the evacuation of Belgium and France, the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France, and the establishment of an independent Poland hewed out of Russian, German, and Austrian territories. While insisting on guarantees against the recurrence of war, Lloyd George favoured ‘… a peace to make friends and not enemies, meaning that when the war is over, Germany and England should have no such differences such as were left after the Franco-Prussian War’.² Here was a constantly recurring motif in Lloyd George’s subsequent statements on peace policy. He envisaged a possibility of reconciliation which Balfour, then First Lord of the Admiralty, viewed sceptically. House found Balfour ‘unalterably distrustful of Germany, and… forever coming back to whether Germany could be counted upon to keep any bargain or play any game fairly’.³ At the same time, Balfour revealed his consistent concern for the balance of power and his fear that the re-establishment of a Polish state would weaken the European equilibrium. In his estimation, an independent Poland could leave France at the mercy of Germany because, if a new war broke out, Russia could not invade Germany without violating Polish neutrality. Since this situation could disrupt the Franco-Russian alliance, he doubted whether France and Russia for this reason alone would support such a solution of the Polish question. Although Balfour later swung round to supporting an independent Poland, his subsequent efforts to limit Polish gains at Germany’s expense showed his constant misgivings about the revival of Poland as a power.¹

¹ Oxford and Asquith, Speeches, p. 224. For an excellent summary of the evolution of Allied policy on war aims see ‘The War Aims of the Allies in the First World War’, by A. J. P. Taylor, in Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, ed. Richard Pares and A. J. P. Taylor, pp. 475–505.

² House, Diary, VIII, p. 21. See also Lloyd George, War Memoirs, II, pp. 686. et seq., and House-Wilson Correspondence, 1916, January 15, 1916. For the broader aspects of this mission see E. H. Buehrig, Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power, especially chap. VIII.

³ House, Diary, VII, pp. 24–5. House countered that if all states were leagued together and the majority followed the leadership of the United States and Great Britain, Germany could be controlled.

Asquith moved towards a fuller definition of British peace policy in August 1916, when he invited members of the War Committee of the Cabinet to state their thoughts on the subject in writing. In reply, Balfour,² Sir William Robertson,³ then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Sir Ralph Paget and Sir William Tyrrell⁴ of the Foreign Office submitted memoranda. Based upon the assumption that the postwar political and military situation would favour the Allies, the three plans raised many of the basic problems involved from an English viewpoint in defining Britain’s vital interests on the continent and consequently in redrafting the map of Europe as it affected Germany. They also foreshadowed later differences of opinion among British policymakers and among the Allied and Associated Powers.

Robertson took a highly conservative approach based upon strategical concepts of British interests on the continent. Revealing an anti-French and anti-Slav bias, the General proposed a postwar balance of power system pivoting around a strong Germanic central Europe. Germany was, accordingly, to be left strong on land while reduced to impotency on the sea. This plan seemed to assume a return to Bismarckian Germany and Europe. On the contrary, Balfour and the Foreign Office advisors assumed th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Editor’s Note
• Contents
• Maps
• Preface
• Principal Abbreviations
• Part One: The Wartime Background
• Part Two: Pre-Conference Preparations
• Part Three: The Making of the Settlement
• Bibliography
• Index