The stories of how three powerful, egotistical men collided, disagreed, and grew tired of one another during the stresses of a six-month diplomatic conference make for fascinating reading. Georges Clemenceau, for example, battled both David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, as well as his own generals, to push through his vision for the security of France. He survived an assassination attempt by a deranged Frenchman along the way, and his sharp wit and acid tongue made him seem larger than life. When his finance minister, Louis-Lucien Klotz, made a simple mistake during one session on reparations, Clemenceau complained to Lloyd George in full voice that he was unlucky enough to have as his financial advisor the only Jew in Europe who knew nothing about money. Coming from a man with a well-earned reputation for protecting the rights of Jews in France, the comment was all the more surprising yet, at the same time, typical of Clemenceau.
Clemenceau and Lloyd George understood each other well enough. Both were old veterans tempered in the world of European politics and knew how to play the game. They had also worked together in the war’s final months to achieve a common victory against both the Germans and, sometimes, their own generals. They certainly had respect for one another, although whether they genuinely liked each other is much harder to determine and probably irrelevant in any case. They may in fact have been too similar to develop a true fondness for each other.
They represented states that, while in the same victorious coalition, did not share fundamental goals for the postwar world. The British people especially mistrusted French aims and worried that the treaty might weaken Germany so much that France would grow too powerful both in Europe and overseas as a result. From the British perspective there seemed little reason to defeat a German bid for hegemony only to see a French one emerge in its wake. The American general Tasker H. Bliss noted only half-jokingly that as a result of the divergence of British and French interests, making peace with Germany would be easier than making it with America’s allies.
Bliss’s president, Woodrow Wilson, was in many ways the outlier of the group. Having never seriously considered the problems of Europe before 1914, he came to the conference the least informed of the senior statesmen. Recognizing his own limits, he had formed a group called the Inquiry to advise him. He filled this group with academics and regional experts who he hoped could give him sufficient background information to make decisions of global import. Still, the members of the Inquiry got precious little of the president’s time, nor did Wilson seem terribly interested in working through the specifics of the myriad problems of Europe. Instead he told the members of the Inquiry, “Tell me what is right and I will fight for it.” Whether such a principled stand would suffice to solve the many problems that the war had either created or exacerbated remained one of the great questions in Paris in 1919.
Standing on principles prevented Wilson from using his most powerful tool, Allied war debts. The British and French together owed more than $7 billion to the United States government and $3.5 billion more to American banks. American promises to restructure or forgive parts of that debt could have provided Wilson with sufficient leverage to obtain almost any concession from the Europeans that he might have wanted, but Wilson chose instead to appeal to what he hoped was a European desire to remake the world along Wilsonian lines. His firm belief in laissez-faire capitalism also undercut any use of debt to enforce political change because to do so meant risking the stability of global markets. If Wilson could not get a new Europe from Lloyd George and Clemenceau personally, he expected that the popularity of his ideas among the European people more generally would achieve the results he wanted. The rapturous receptions that Wilson initially got from the war-weary European people on his arrival could only have reinforced that belief. Consequently, like the good son of a Presbyterian minister that he was, Wilson sought to persuade rather than compel his counterparts to see the world the way he himself saw it.
Few Europeans expected Lloyd George or Clemenceau to stand on idealistic principles. Wilson, however, had made so many idealistic (and sufficiently vague) statements about self-determination and the righting of past wrongs that millions of people across the globe thought that he was speaking to their particular grievance. He seems to have recognized the false hopes he had inspired, especially since he did not believe that his ideas applied to most non-European peoples. He told his propaganda chief, George Creel, “I am wondering whether you have not unconsciously spun a net for me from which there is no escape.” The remark is typical Wilson, blaming others for problems of his own making while simultaneously trying to soften the blow with the use of the word “unconsciously.”
His comments to Creel notwithstanding, Wilson came to Paris believing himself a savior to the world. The self-image did not always inspire others. One British diplomat said that Wilson appeared in Paris with the air of a debutante “entranced by the prospect of her first ball.” He was simultaneously arrogant and ill-informed, a combination that baffled his European interlocutors. Lord Robert Cecil, the British under secretary of state for foreign affairs, spoke for many when he described Wilson as a bully unwilling to compromise or even listen to the ideas of those better informed on a given topic than he was. Cecil had been an early champion of the League of Nations but grew disenchanted by Wilson’s unwillingness to listen to the League’s constructive critics, even those who shared most of Wilson’s own goals for the organization. Cecil also grew frustrated with Wilson’s ignorance of the important technical and legal details necessary to bring the League to fruition. On this and many other matters, Wilson only concerned himself with the loftiest of ideals, leaving to others the hard work of putting his ideas into operation.
Another French or British politician might well have done in broad outline what Clemenceau or Lloyd George did, but no other American politician would have approached his role in Paris in the way that Wilson did. Had Theodore Roosevelt or Wilson’s 1916 presidential rival, Charles Evans Hughes, been president it is easy to imagine an American position based more on power and a willingness to compromise rather than the uninformed idealism and personal stubbornness of Wilson. Those few voters in California in 1916 who turned the election to Wilson likely changed history much more than they could possibly have realized.
The personalities and interactions of the Big Three are fascinating, but there are other ways of seeing the workings of the Paris Peace Conference. One of the most intellectually profitable is to examine the difficulties involved in finding ways to replace four of the great Continental empires that had governed Europe for centuries, namely the Romanov (Russia), Hohenzollern (Germany), Habsburg (Austria-Hungary), and Osman (Ottoman). Few people in 1914 had expected these empires to disappear, not even the people who most ardently wished for their destruction. Even the youngest of the dynasties, the Romanov, had existed since 1613. The oldest, the Osman, dated to 1299. Even those who had referred before the war to the Ottoman Empire as the “sick man of Europe” or the Habsburgs as being on the wrong side of history had difficulty envisioning that one of them, let alone four of them, would disappear in a matter of just a few short years.
One person who had predicted their demise, Friedrich Engels, had written that a future European war would be “condensed into three or four years and spread all over the continent: famine, epidemics, general barbarization of armies and masses, provoked by sheer desperation; utter chaos in our trade, industry and commerce, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional wisdom in such a way that the crowns will roll in the gutter by the dozens and there will be nobody to pick them up.” Prophetic though those lines are in retrospect, Engels had written them in 1887, and yet the empires had survived for more than two and half decades longer. They seemed in 1914 to be permanent fixtures on the European and global stages despite their inherent weaknesses and occasional struggles to deal with the pressures of modernization and nationalism.
By the time of the Paris Peace Conference, however, the Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Osman empires were all either already confined to the dustbin of history or (in the case of the Osman) well on their way to that ignominious fate. As Engels had predicted, there was no one willing to pick up the crowns and no one willing to follow them even if someone did. Finding a way to replace the empires would be a monumental task on an order of magnitude unprecedented in European history.
Except for the unquestioned assumption in Paris that Alsace and Lorraine would return to France, redrawing the map of Europe presented far more questions than answers. At least four different rationales for the shifting of post-imperial borders in Europe presented themselves. Unfortunately, they often stood at cross purposes to one another. The most obvious, and most traditional, one would award the winners pieces of territory taken away from the losers. Thus Italy demanded the Trentino, large slices of Dalmatia, and even parts of Anatolia. France put in claims for control of the coal-rich Saar region on the basis of compensation for the damage that the Germans had done to French coal mines. Britain and France also moved quickly to claim former German colonies in Africa, and much of the scramble for power in the Middle East centered on the desires of the British and French to annex the pieces of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire. In those cases, the delegates to the Paris Peace Conference did not care about the self-determination wishes of the people living in those regions. In East Asia, Japan demanded concessions in the Shandong Peninsula and control of Germany’s Pacific island colonies as compensation. Conversely, Bulgaria and Hungary, both on the losing side, expected to face territorial losses.
British minister Herbert Samuel (in white pith helmet, center) went to Palestine to help Britain replace the Ottoman Empire’s influence there. The Paris Peace Conference made decisions that ranged across the globe, often with unforeseen results. Library of Congress LC-M32-1919
This system of victors taking spoils was at least as old as European diplomacy itself. In the last round of major European wars (1864–71), Prussia had taken territory from Denmark, Austria, and, of course, France. Under the rules of the old game, French seizure of the Saar would have been logical and normal. But Woodrow Wilson claimed that he had come to Paris to prevent just such a repetition of the old European way, which he saw as a background cause of the region’s wars. The United States therefore did not make any territorial claims despite its own use of such claims in recent wars with Mexico (1846–48) and Spain (1898). Wilson hoped to establish a new precedent in international affairs and enforce a second rationale for peacemaking, national self-determination. In theory, national self-determination would align ethnic groups with nation-state boundaries both to reduce causes of conflict and to provide political representation to groups that felt that the old empires had denied it to them.
In theory, the idea of national self-determination held great appeal. In practice, it proved maddeningly difficult to administer. To cite just one complex example, Wilson had pledged in Point Thirteen of the Fourteen Points that “an independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations.” But finding borders that would satisfy Wilson’s requirement without at the same time alienating German, Ukrainian, and Russian minority populations would prove to be quite a challenge to an Eastern Europe that had developed under imperial, not nationalistic, lines. There was thus no “indisputably Polish” (or, for that matter, indisputably Ukrainian or Czech or Serbian) part of Europe to which all could agree. Populations were too intermingled in most parts of Europe to provide for the clean, easily demarcated borders that national self-determination required. Furthermore, many people had never identified themselves with a nation-state, only with a region or a religion or a language group. How could diplomats in Paris categorize people who did not themselves know to which nation they wished to belong?
The question of what exactly constituted a nation could plague even a seemingly open-and-shut case like Alsace-Lorraine. The French claimed that the region was not open for discussion on grounds of national self-determination because Prussia had illegally seized it in 1871. But many Alsatians did not see themselves as either French or German. Did the Alsatians therefore constitute a separate nation? What about the Germans who had lived in Alsace since 1871 and comprised a majority in many Alsatian towns? Should their rights count, or were they recent arrivals transplanted by an acquisitive German regime to cement its own influence in the region? And if one accepted the logic that the Alsatians were a separate nation, then what about the Irish, who could also claim that their land had been illegally and wrongfully taken? Did centuries of Protestant Anglo-Irish residence in Ireland give Protestants rights akin to those of the Germans in Alsace? Wilson himself denied that the Irish formed a separate nation, claiming that they were really British. Who then were the Corsicans, Bavarians, or Albanians?
Even if one could somehow define what constituted a nation based on criteria like religion or language, how could the Big Three define borders for those nations? Every part of Europe had historical debates about who rightfully owned the land and what groups rose to the ill-defined level of “nation.” The leaders at the Paris Peace Conference could not possibly have cut all those Gordian knots, and even if they could, they could never have satisfied everyone. Still, Wilson had raised expectations across Europe and across the world, as his comment to Creel attests. In Point Ten he had written: “The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development.” But who exactly were those peoples, which ones should get their own state, and where should their borders be? Were the Czechs and Slovaks similar enough to warrant their inclusion in the same state? What of the German, Polish, and other minorities who would inevitably be included in those borders? Where to find the “clearly recognizable lines of nationality” that Wilson demanded for the borders of Italy in Point Nine? What to do about the maddeningly complex problems of a polyglot place like the Balkans?
Most claims for territory came with either a historical or an ethnic argument. In the majority of cases, of course, the historical positions of one group contradicted those of one of its rivals. The Poles and Italians especially made grandiose claims for land based on ancient ownership, angering the Western diplomats charged with drawing the borders. Even Italy’s Vittorio Orlando realized the difficulty of making such claims when he joked that by the standards of some of the historical demands being made, his country ought to recover all of the lands once ruled by the Roman Empire. It was easy enough to reject some claims, like the one by French reactionaries that the Rhineland was French because it produced more wine than beer, but few cases were so absurdly clear-cut. Indeed, what part of Europe could not be claimed by multiple groups if one went back far enough into the historical record?
A diverse and heterogeneous Europe thus presented a multitude of challenges, especially to statesmen not familiar with its contours. More than once, a region in dispute would come up for discussion only to have several senior delegates confess that they had never heard of it. At other times, they wondered if they were not creating future disputes like the one over Alsace and Lorraine that had destabilized Europe in the aftermath of 1871. Nationalists in many parts of Europe pledged that they would not accept any borders that left fellow countrymen living outside them, even if they were minority populations in the places in which they lived.
Personalities mattered as well. The Czechs had articulate representatives who agreed on the main points of the Czech position and showed a willingness to compromise with their future neighbors. The Poles, on the other hand, disagreed even among themselves about the borders of both historical Poland and the new Poland they wished to create. Two mutually antagonistic Polish delegations pushed their cases so far that they angered not only the diplomats in Paris but their new neighbors as well. Jan Smuts gave up on them all, calling Poland a historic failure. Other groups, such as the Kurds, were absent from Paris and therefore unable to plead their case.
One possible solution to the dilemma of the diversity of Europe lay in conducting plebiscites, essentially asking the people of a region what kind of future they wanted for themselves. Even this solution, however, proved difficult. Because most self-identified Frenchmen had left Alsace-Lorraine after 1871, a plebiscite there would likely return a vote for Alsace-Lorraine staying inside Germany, an outcome totally unacceptable to the French. Because the expected results of plebiscites often ran counter to historical claims of other states, they could be sources of conflict as much as sources for solutions. Nor did the British and French necessarily like the precedent that plebiscites set, for fear that people in Ireland, Corsica, India, Indochina, or maybe even Lloyd George’s native Wales might demand a plebiscite of their own. Thus, however much Wilson might have pushed for national self-determination as the best way to reorganize Europe, it alone would not solve the problem.
A third rationale rested on strategic grounds. In short, the new states needed to have borders that they could defend. They also had to be able to play a role in stabilizing and balancing the postwar order. France especially looked to sign alliances or agreements with the new states of Eastern Europe in order to help balance Germany and possibly the Soviet Union as well. Big states could fill that role better than small states, even if making them larger worked against the Wilsonian goal of national self-determination. Thus Romania more than doubled in size despite having done little to contribute to Allied victory and despite the fact that most of the territory it added contained non-Romanians. Thus, too, the Allies decided to create one large Yugoslavia rather than several Balkan states, notwithstanding the historical animosity among groups like the Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, and Montenegrins.
Because the new states had to defend themselves, mountains, rivers, canals, and railroad lines took on enormous importance regardless of the ethnic identity of the people living nearest to them. Thus the new Czechoslovakia obtained control of the mountainous Sudetenland, even though it had large numbers of ethnic Germans. In 1919, this decision was not as controversial as it later became because the new state could not otherwise have defended itself and the Czechs promised cultural autonomy to the German minority. Still, it highlighted the contradiction between ethnic and strategic rationales for redrawing borders. It also underscored the problems of using national self-determination as a guide to national frontiers.
So, too, did discussions over the Rhineland. The people there were ethnically German and clearly identified themselves as such despite their vineyards. Still, as long as it was part of Germany, the Rhineland could present a threat to French security. A cabal of French conservatives, with Foch’s acquiescence, tried to encourage a Rhenish separatist movement, promising to exempt a future Rhenish state from postwar reparations in exchange for the Rhineland agreeing to tie itself to France via a collective security agreement and a customs union. Clemenceau found out about the schemes and put a quick stop to them, but the incident revealed the tension between strategic and ethnic rationales and led to one of the important outcomes of the treaty, the demilitarization of a Rhineland that stayed inside Germany.
A fourth rationale was economic. In short, there was no point in creating states that could not feed themselves. To return to the Polish issue, Wilson’s Point Thirteen called for Poland to “be assured a free and secure access to the sea.” But few Poles then lived near the coast, which was populated mostly by ethnic Germans. The obvious port for the new state, Danzig (Gdansk), had a German majority. To refuse it to Poland would deny the new state a chance to sell its goods overseas, but to take it away from Germany would violate the principle of national self-determination. The same problems confronted Memel (Klaipėda), which had at least a plurality of ethnic Germans, but Lithuanian nationalists demanded it on historical and economic grounds.
These battles over economic issues were anything but trivial. States that could not support themselves would not be able to contribute to the overall recovery of European markets, assist in the restoration of international security, or fend off destabilizing challenges from the left or the right. It is therefore not surprising that so many of the most acrimonious debates about territorial borders occurred over regions rich in coal or other minerals. In most cases, these claims contradicted the principle of national self-determination. To return to the ever-complex Polish case, the Poles demanded Upper Silesia just as the French had demanded the Saar. Both regions contained rich coal deposits, but neither had majority Polish or French populations.
One of the more intractable problems centered on the coal-rich Silesian duchy of Teschen, today the region around Cieszyn near the intersection of the borders of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Another of the places Lloyd George said he had never heard of, Poland demanded it based on a 1910 Austro-Hungarian census that claimed Polish as the dominant language of the region. The Czechs, however, disputed that claim, arguing that most of the region’s Poles were newcomers who had arrived to work in the mines; they claimed that the region’s true identity was indisputably Czech. The main rail lines of the region, moreover, went to Czech and Slovak districts, not Polish ones.
Under Austro-Hungarian rule, these distinctions did not much matter. In October 1918, however, two rival councils, one Polish and one Czech, had claimed the right to govern Teschen in the wake of the collapse of the empire’s authority. Armed forces from both sides had clashed in January and February 1919, auguring a future of violence and instability that might undermine whatever the statesmen agreed to in Paris. These types of incidents also led to a serious disillusionment among senior officials over the idea of creating the new nations and the very concept of self-determination. The American general Tasker H. Bliss wrote to his wife in late February, just as the dispute over Teschen was heating up, that “the ‘submerged nations’ are coming to the surface and as soon as they appear, they fly at somebody’s throat. They are, like mosquitos, vicious from the moment of their birth.”
That no group of statesmen, even one highly principled and well informed, could have solved such problems only speaks to the limits of trying to understand the Treaty of Versailles exclusively through the lens of the personalities of the diplomats. They themselves knew that they did not have the requisite knowledge to resolve disputes such as the one over Teschen. For reasons of their own, the British and Americans favored the Poles, and the French favored the Czechs. They all knew, moreover, that once the conference ended, Teschen would be quite far from Paris and London, to say nothing of Washington. Thus whatever they decided was unlikely to last unless the people and leaders of the region themselves bought into it. Under pressure from the Big Three, Poland and Czechoslovakia agreed to an inter-Allied commission that eventually divided Teschen and its coal fields into two with little regard for the ethnic distribution of the town’s population. Poland got the city center, Czechoslovakia got the railway. In 1938, as part of the Munich Conference’s infamous division of Czechoslovakia, Poland annexed the rest of Teschen, then called Zaolzie. A final resolution did not come until 1958, almost four decades after the Treaty of Versailles and, of course, after another world war.
No one in Paris seriously considered the forced removal of people in order to make the political and ethnic borders of Europe match more closely. Although they became a feature of the post–Second World War peace process, mandatory removals struck the diplomats of 1919 as inappropriate. Removals would also have required huge numbers of troops to enforce, with the possibility of extended violence resulting. In 1922 and 1923, however, Greece and Turkey did effect just such a removal, as 1,500,000 ethnic Greeks left Turkey and 500,000 Muslims left Greece.
Neither plebiscite nor ethnic removal nor inter-Allied commission could have satisfactorily resolved the two most controversial disputes on the conference agenda, Fiume and Shandong. The economic development of Fiume (today Slovenia’s Rijeka) had been one of Austria-Hungary’s main industrial projects; it eventually became one of southern Europe’s largest ports and a commercial rival to places like Marseille and Naples. With the town’s economic boom came migration and population growth from all across the empire, including thousands of ethnic Italians, Croats, Hungarians, Slovenes, and Germans. As in Teschen, rival administrations moved in to govern Fiume as Austro-Hungarian authority disintegrated. Italy claimed the right to Fiume based on the majority Italian population in the city itself, but the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (soon to be called Yugoslavia) countered that most of the Italians were recent arrivals and that, in any case, the surrounding region was overwhelmingly Croatian and Slovenian. Italian threats to boycott the League of Nations and Orlando’s departure from Paris in April in protest of Allied opposition to Italian claims to Fiume made it that much harder for the Big Three to make decisions that had a chance of surviving.
Halfway around the world, a similar situation developed over the Shandong Peninsula. Almost entirely Chinese by ethnicity, it had been under German control until Japanese troops seized it early in the war. By all Wilsonian logic, the transfer of Shandong to full Chinese sovereignty should have been a foregone conclusion. But Japanese troops held the region and were determined to establish exclusionary economic concessions there. Like the Italians in regard to Fiume, the Japanese delegates threatened to withdraw their support for the League of Nations if they did not get effective control of Shandong. The obvious unwillingness of the Big Three to give Japan its other diplomatic aim, a racial equality clause, made it all the more difficult to deny it Shandong as well.
Many important mid-level officials in Paris hated what they saw happening. They knew that the Big Three were leaning toward giving in to Japanese demands because Britain and Japan had a naval alliance and Wilson was cowed by the Japanese threat to boycott the League of Nations. Japan in 1919 certainly looked to be the strongest Asian power; the Big Three therefore had an incentive to minimize conflict with Japan for as long as possible. Still, allowing Shandong to become the sacrificial lamb to Japanese imperialism meant invalidating every principle Wilson and the Americans had come to Paris to enforce. Both Tasker H. Bliss and Secretary of State Robert Lansing considered resigning in protest if Japan got what it wanted in Shandong, though neither actually did. Bliss wrote a sharp letter to Wilson that urged him to call Italy’s and Japan’s bluffs and, if necessary, form the League of Nations without them. Bliss was also furious with the secret, back-room way in which the Big Three debated Shandong. “It can’t be right to do wrong even to make peace,” he wrote. He predicted that decisions made on any basis but self-determination would only sow seeds of future problems.
Bliss also worried that the Big Three were fueling future crises by choosing sides and sending surplus weapons to the armies of the new states. “The arms which we brought to Europe in order to kill militarism and to bring an era of lasting peace,” he complained to Robert Lansing, “we are going to sell over the bargain counter to the new nations which we boasted that we were going to usher into a world of peace.” Better, Bliss argued, to dump the weapons into the Atlantic Ocean as American ships returned to the United States.
Fiume and Shandong removed whatever idealism had remained when the conference opened. With hopes so high in January, it was inevitable that some level of disillusion would set in. As Bliss himself realized, part of the problem came from the attempt of the Big Three to adjudicate essentially unresolvable conflicts. American ideals by themselves most certainly could not do so. As Sidney Sonnino shouted at Wilson during one session, “Is it possible to change the world from a room, through the actions of some diplomats? Go to the Balkans and try an experiment with the Fourteen Points.”
Teschen, Fiume, Shandong, and myriad other points on the map showed the complexity of the Wilsonian experiment. The fates of Teschen and Fiume eventually fell under the authority of other treaties signed at the Paris Peace Conference, but the statesmen negotiating in Paris in 1919 did not subdivide the issues in that way. They were all subject to the same tensions and contradictions of the ethnic, strategic, and economic rationales. They therefore reveal the countervailing pressures that the statesmen faced as they looked to find solutions both to old disputes and to the new ones that had arisen in the wake of the collapse of the old order. It was perhaps inevitable that unpopular compromises characterized so many of the resolutions they finally decided to try to implement in the Treaty of Versailles.