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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Peacemakers: The Paris
Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War
The Blurb: After "the war to end all
wars", men and women from all over the world converged on Paris for the
Peace Conference. At its heart were the three great powers - Woodrow Wilson,
Lloyd George and Clemenceau - but thousands of others came too, each with a
different agenda. Kings, prime ministers and foreign ministers with their crowds
of advisers rubbed shoulders with journalists and lobbyists for a hundred
causes, from Armenian independence to women's rights. Everyone had business that
year - T.E. Lawrence, Queen Marie of Romania, Maynard Keynes, Ho Chi Minh. There
had never been anything like it before, and there never has been since. For six
extraordinary months the city was effectively the centre of a world government
as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This
book brings to life the personalities, ideals and prejudices of the men who
shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China and
dismissed the Arabs, struggled with the problems of Kosovo, or the Kurds, and of
a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, it has been said, failed dismally, and
above all failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they
have been made scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. They tried
to be even-handed, but their goals could never in fact be achieved by diplomacy. The reality: Margaret
MacMillan’s book is a genuinely interesting read, although I disagree with her
main conclusion. Niccolo
Machiavelli, whom they must have known about in those days, remarked that “If
an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need
not be feared.” At this, the
peacemakers failed; they nether reached out a hand to Germany nor made it
impossible for Germany to rearm and seek revenge.
They could not, of course, have predicted Hitler, but they knew of others
who accomplished what he had, Napoleon and Washington being two. The delegates presumed not only to solve the problems of
war-ravaged Europe but were happy to turn their attentions to Africa, the Middle
East and China. Margaret Macmillan seems equally comfortable discussing the
intricacies of Balkan boundaries, the creation of new states like
Czechoslovakia, war between Greece and Turkey, Zionist settlement in Palestine,
Japanese ambitions in the Pacific and a host of other subjects.
In all of those, compromise needed to be found – and they never found
the perfect solution. Japan, for
example, was allowed to continue to rape and pillage a fellow ally – China –
that left the Chinese with a legacy of distrust towards the west’s promises. Margaret Macmillan's pen portraits of the Big Three, and of
many of the other extraordinary delegates to the Peace Conference are superb. As
such, it is an excellent and fascinating description of real politic in the days
of big power hegemony. Macmillan is dismissive of the notion that the peace
devised at Paris was so flawed that another war was inevitable.
I disagree. Another war of
some kind was in the cards in at least three places, Germany, the Pacific, and
Russia. That the west was unwilling
to either honour its promises to Italy or act justly towards their new Arab
subjects just widened the chasm that the world would fall into.
Foch, hearing about the peace terms, growled, “This is not peace, it
is an armistice for twenty years.” We
know how right he was. Incidentally, buyers of the paperback edition should be
aware that it does not contain the chapter notes , apparently by agreement
between author and publisher. The result is a maddening frustration for the
reader.
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