The First World War Peace Settlements, 1919-1925

Erik Goldstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317883661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

The First World War changed the face of Europe - two empires (the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire) collapsed in its wake and as a result many of the boundaries of Europe were redrawn and new states were created. The origins of many of the international crises in the late twentieth century can be traced back to decisions taken in these critical years, Yugoslavia being the most obvious example. An understanding of the peace settlements is thus crucial for any student studying international history/international relations, which is what this book offers.
This book provides and accessible and concise introduction to this most important period of history.

Chapter One
The Eve of the Paris Peace Conference

In January 1919 leaders, diplomats, soldiers and government officials intent on building a peace settlement after the carnage of the First World War converged upon Paris. One young British diplomat voiced his hope, ‘not merely to liquidate the war, but to found a new order in Europe. We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace.’¹ The Paris Peace Conference would be the largest diplomatic gathering the world had ever known. The victors of the Great War, as the First World War was then called, had come to Paris to shape the postwar order. Although successful in the conflict that had raged for four years, they faced a world of uncertainty. The delegates assembling at Paris could not recall a war such as had just ended in the sheer scale of the devastation and human losses. Between August 1914 and November 1918 sixty million people around the world had been at war, and at the end thirty million lay dead, missing, or wounded. It was a toll that exceeded all previous experience.

The war had finally ended in November 1918 when, in a clearing in the forest near the French city of Compiègne, the German Empire agreed to an armistice. This came into effect at 11 am on 11 November; the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The reasons countries had entered the conflict now looked insignificant in comparison to the final impact upon them. France had entered the war with the hope of regaining the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to Germany in 1871, though by November 1918 France had lost more lives than the entire population of Alsace–Lorraine. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had gone to war hoping to quash the nationalist threat posed by Serbia but by the war’s end this empire had collapsed and fragmented into several states. Political turmoil was widespread. The war had seen the fall of many of the dynasties that had dominated Europe for centuries. By November 1918 the monarchs of Germany, Austria–Hungary, and Bulgaria had all fled into exile. Russia had been convulsed by revolution brought on by the turmoil of the war, the Russian tsar deposed and murdered, and the country was now in a state of civil war. Out of this chaos numerous aspiring states had emerged, often with conflicting territorial aspirations and frequently with conflicting would-be governments.

The war had involved twenty-nine countries, in a contest between two opposing camps. The Allies, led by France, Britain, Italy, and Japan, together with Russia until it withdrew from the war after the communist seizure of power in 1917, and joined by the United States in April 1917, fought the Central Powers comprising Germany, Austria–Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. As the war ground to its conclusion each of the Central Powers in turn requested an armistice from the Allies, culminating in the German armistice signed at Compiègne. It was intended that these armistices would be followed by a peace conference in which peace treaties would be negotiated between the Allied States and the Central Powers.

Of the myriad problems confronting the peacemakers as they gathered just after the New Year in Paris none was more prominent than the future settlement with Germany. Among the issues to be considered were changes to Germany’s frontiers, whether or not it should be forced to pay an indemnity, to what extent its military would be limited in the future, and whether or not there should be trials of those Germans whom the Allies considered to be war criminals. There had already been calls in the British General Election campaign to hang the Kaiser, now in exile in the Netherlands, and the idea of trying the Kaiser found popular favour in all the Allied states. The European allies had promised their electorates that Germany would be forced to pay high financial indemnities, a common practice in many peace settlements. Wilson, however, believed that Germany should only be made liable for damages that were beyond those traditionally allowed by the laws of war. As to Germany’s small overseas colonial empire, this was not only eyed avariciously by Britain and France, but Britain’s self-governing dominions were also staking their claims.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire had been growing weaker for decades, with mounting tensions between its two dominant ethnic groups, the German-speaking Austrians and the Hungarians, as well as tensions with the many other nationalities of the empire. The diversity of that empire can be seen from the fact that on the eve of the First World War mobilization orders had had to be issued in fifteen languages. Poland, which had ceased to exist as a sovereign state in the eighteenth century when it was divided among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, now re-emerged in the wake of the collapse of those empires; but defining the re-born Poland’s frontiers would pose a serious problem.

The war acted as a political cyclone, uprooting and tearing apart this multi-ethnic empire and it was unclear what would emerge out of the wreckage. Ethnic groups previously unrepresented on the international stage were now clamoring for recognition: Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, and Poles. The emergence of these proto-states, however, was only part of the problem of configuring a new political map in central and eastern Europe. Any new frontiers would still leave many minorities within these new states and the problem of how to provide protection for their rights would also have to be considered in any effort to craft a stable new political order.

One of the longest running problems was what had come to be know as the Eastern Question, which concerned the fate of the Ottoman Empire. Since the mid-nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had been so obviously in decline it was usually referred to as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. With the end of the war Allied forces had entered Constantinople and the Sultan, Mehmed VI, virtually became a prisoner of the Allies. During the war, in a series of secret treaties among themselves, the key European allies had already planned the final carve up of the Ottoman state. By the war’s end, however, matters were not so clear. British forces had seized much of the Middle East, including the holy city of Jerusalem, but in the process had made numerous and often conflicting promises as to the postwar settlement. In addition to the series of secret treaties with its main allies it had also supported an Arab revolt, with the implied promise of support for an Arab state, while at the same time promising support for part of the region to be made a national homeland for the Jews. To complicate matters further, President Wilson made it clear that he would have nothing to do with the secret treaties and insisted that the whole matter be resolved using the basic principles outlined in his pronouncements.

Russia was not officially a matter of concern for the peace conference, but the Russian problem permeated the thoughts of the delegates. Russia had fought together with the Allies until 1917 when the communists, led by Lenin, had seized power and withdrawn Russia from the war. This new Russian government was unrecognized by the Allies and, indeed, military support had been provided to anti-communist groups who might bring Russia back into the war in the Allied fold. The allied intervention had been precipitated by the necessities of war, but once the Great War had ended there was dissension among them as to what policy to follow in regard to this new radical regime. Some favoured continued intervention to help topple what they perceived as the wider menace of communist-promoted revolution in other states, while others preferred to move to contain Russia and leave it to its own devices. It was unclear to everyone what the outcome of the internal conflict in Russia would be and, therefore, what role it would play in the postwar world. In order to have some Russian involvement in the peace process a retired Russian foreign minister, Sazonov, was present in Paris in a semi-official capacity, but in reality he was no more than a spectre from a now vanished Russia. The reality was that the new, communist ‘red’ Russia and its leaders were the ones that had to be considered.

The war had unleashed many tensions, only some of which could be dealt with by the peace conference. Organized labour had been growing for decades in most countries, and its role had been crucial in the war effort. The rise of a communist regime in Russia, appealing directly for support to the workers was a further matter of concern. How to deal with the relationship between workers and employers and the setting of minimum standards had also become a pressing political matter.

Throughout January the delegates and their staffs were busy establishing contact with each other and attempting to make an initial assessment of each participants’ views. The key figures at Paris were the leaders of the three major allied states, the American President Woodrow Wilson, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the French premier, Georges Clemenceau, but there was also a host of equally talented leaders representing the smaller allies. Lloyd George later recalled, ‘We were all feeling our way and I had a sense that we were each of us trying to size up our colleagues, reconnoitring their respective positions, ascertaining their aims and how they stood in reference to the desiderata in which each of them was most deeply interested and involved.’²

Lloyd George had risen from humble origins in his native Wales to become one of the longest serving senior government figures. An anti-war advocate during the Boer War he had later been one of the first to signal the growing security threat to British interests emanating from Germany. After the outbreak of war he became a brilliantly successful Minister of Munitions before becoming prime minister in 1916 and he was widely credited with overseeing a successful renewal of the British war effort. A Liberal, he led a coalition government and depended upon Conservative support. When the communist regime in Russia published late in 1917 a six-point proposal for a peace settlement based on no annexations or indemnities Lloyd George was quick to respond. In January 1918 he laid out his vision of the postwar order in what became known as the Caxton Hall speech [Doc. 2]. A few days later President Wilson added his own ideas in his Fourteen Points speech. At the conference Lloyd George was able to deploy his considerable charm, forensic talent and native guile to achieve British ends.

Clemenceau was nicknamed ‘the tiger’. As a young man he had gone to the United States to fight upon the side of the North in the Civil War, arriving just as the war ended. He remained there for some years and became fluent in English, though at the conference he always insisted upon using French, thereby gaining some time as his English-speaking colleagues’ remarks were translated for him. He had become premier in 1917, when it looked as though France might not be able to continue the war, and emerged as the architect of French victory. Having twice in his lifetime seen a German invasion of his country, he was determined to achieve a peace that would prevent such an event occurring again. Clemenceau, who prided himself on being a realist, was well aware of the importance of the peace negotiations. He remarked to a colleague late on the night of 11 November after the celebrations surrounding the end of four long years of war, ‘we have won the war: now we have to win the peace, and it may be more difficult.’³

Wilson, a university professor and university president before entering politics, was an expert on constitutional practice. A fervent believer in democracy, he sought to extend to the international system the stability that constitutional mechanisms provided to the domestic affairs of democratic states. His pronouncements on the objects of the war and general ideas on the postwar order had led him to be revered as few leaders in history have been. Wilson’s decision to attend the conference in person was precedent-shattering. He became the first American president to leave the United States during his term of office. Upon his arrival in Europe Wilson was viewed as a saviour by the great crowds who turned out to see him, his picture was placed in churches along with those of the saints and, on his railway journey from the port of Brest to Paris, people knelt by the tracks as he passed.

Wilson advocated a new approach to the handling of international affairs – the New Diplomacy. His plans for the postwar settlement spoke of an end of secret treaties, national and minority rights, and the creation of an international organization to assure international stability, an organization in which all states both great and small would be represented. Wilson had first presented his view of the postwar world in a landmark speech in January 1918, in which he enumerated fourteen points which could serve as the basis for a settlement [Doc. 3]. As the war went on he further elaborated his views in that statement, amounting to twenty-three major policy assertions by the eve of the peace conference. None of the other leaders had such a clearly articulated view of a new world order or one with such broad popular appeal.

Wilson, whose ideas were very much in the liberal tradition, argued that the war was being fought for the ideals of liberal democracy. Wilson took the view that nation-based states provided the best chance for stability, having concluded that the volatility of previous decades had been due to attempts by various national groups to assert their independent identities. Given the collapse of the old multi-ethnic eastern European empires, Wilson saw such a solution as the most likely to provide a stable structure for that region in particular.

In order for Wilson’s plan to succeed, however, he had to take into account the fundamental concerns of the Allied states. The ‘Fourteen Points’ was a carefully crafted document that acknowledged basic Allied demands, such as the return of Alsace–Lorraine to France, without which the chief allied states were unlikely to agree to any settlement. The remainder of his framework was loosely worded in order to provide the flexibility necessary to determinine detail as circumstances evolved. For Wilson, though, it was clear that the key element of any postwar settlement was the creation of an international organization, the League of Nations, intended to provide the basis for a stable postwar order. The rationale behind such a development was not just an awareness of the crises which had led to this war, but also a concern about threats to international stability already looming in the immediate future. The Fourteen Points had a twofold aim: first, to produce the basis for a peace settlement and second, to provide an ideological alternative to Lenin and the Communist regime in Russia. The old European powers had eventually turned to Wilson’s proposals both as a way to end the war and as a reason to stave off the communist threat to their own governments, and it was on the understanding that the final peace would follow the ideas of the fourteen points that the German government agreed to an armistice in November 1918.

America’s European partners, however, were not enthusiastic about all of Wilson’s plans. Clemenceau exclaimed in frustration of Wilson, ‘He exasperates me with his fourteen commandments when the good God had only ten.’⁴ Neither France nor Britain, which both possessed vast polyglot empires, were excited about national self-determination. Indeed Britain was facing immediate problems in Ireland, which had been in a state of simmering rebellion since 1916. Likewise, Wilson’s denunciation of secret diplomacy and secret treaties was extremely awkward because the European Allies had, in their series of such secret wartime agreements, agreed in advance to the division between themselves of much of the German colonial and the Turkish Middle Eastern empires.

All states attending a conference have their own ambitions, and Paris was no different. At the heart of French plans was its security concerns about Germany, and the desire therefore to acquire as great a security buffer as possible. France also hoped that Germany would be forced to pay heavy financial penalties, which would not only assist the recovery of France’s war-ravaged economy but would also act to cripple Germany for decades to come. The British, with an empire now spanning a quarter of the world, had a more complex set of concerns. In western Europe, Britain wished to see restored a balance of power that would prevent any one state dominating the region and, therefore, posing a security threat to Britain. In eastern Europe, Britain hoped to see a series of stable states emerge from the wreckage of the collapsed empires that had previously dominated the region, with the expectation that these would help maintain future stability in Europe. In the world beyond Europe Britain, which was in control of much of the territory formerly controlled by the Central Powers, was faced by a dilemma. Some old-style imperialists felt that Britain should keep everything it possibly could, others thought that Britain should take only a few key strategic locations, while yet another group was concerned that the British Empire was already greatly overextended and that it should keep as little as possible. One of the last group, Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, commented of the seemingly voracious appetites of the old-style imperialists, ‘It would be very satisfactory if we could find some convincing argument for not annexing all the territories in the world.’⁵ The United States had neither ambition nor need for territory or money. Wilson’s central aim was the creation of a League of Nations, which he believed would help prevent future wars and begin to manufacture a more stable world order. All three powers saw the peace in differing ways; Wilson’s was a long-term strategy that would take time to bear fruit, France’s concerns were immediate, while British ambitions were medium term.

There were also a host of smaller states, some of which had been newly created out of the changes wrought by the war, clamouring for extensive territorial rearrangements in their favour. Particularly in eastern Europe many of these claims were overlapping, often based on historic grounds that did not always match the contemporary ethnic reality. Wilson had argued in his Four Principles that, ‘Peoples and provinces must not be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels or pawns in a game,’ but that was just what some states wanted. One of the greatest problems the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Maps
• 1. The Eve of the Paris Peace Conference
• 2. The Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty
• 3. The New Europe
• 4. The League of Nations
• 5. Soviet Russia
• 6. The Eastern Mediterranean
• 7. Naval Rivalry and East Asian Stability
• 8. Locarno
• 9. Conclusion
• Documents
• Who's Who
• Guide to Further Reading
• Glossary
• Index
• Seminar Studies in History