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Hamilton Fish Armstrong october 1932 Versailles: Retrospect Hamilton Fish Armstrong Volume 11 • Number 1 The contents of Foreign Affairs are copyrighted.©1932 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this material is permitted only with the express written consent of Foreign Affairs. Visit www.foreignaffairs.com/permissions for more information. VERSAILLES: RETROSPECT By Hamilton Fish Armstrong or "We may perceive plenty of wrong turns taken at the cross roads, time misused wasted, gold taken for dross and dross for gold, manful effort misdirected, facts misread, men no a misjudged. And yet those who have felt life stage-play, but hard campaign with some lost battles, may still resist all spirit of general insurgence in the evening of their day. The world's black catastrophe in your new age is hardly a proved and shining vic over ? tory the principles and policies of the age before it." Morley: "Recollections." was torn IN THE hundred years before 1914 Europe by the wars one which gave people after another varying degrees of was one liberty and union. In its origins the Great War of that series. It seemed like the last, for it threw practically the whole Continent into the melting pot, snapped old bonds of servitude from the Baltic to the ^.gean, ended in the complete victory of the side which as a had proclaimed self-determination guiding principle, was a men and followed by conference in which high-minded an armed with impartial and thorough documentation exercised influence unparalleled in the history of peace making. All the elements seemed to be at hand for a final decision based on ab stract justice. Unfortunately they were not so clear-cut and above was a contention that the only thing needed decision by ordinarily or even an honest men, honest decision by supermen. Old inva wars sions, and colonizations had pushed peoples this way and that, squeezed them across mountain ranges and rivers into lands races occupied by other and tribes, here mingling their blood, new there dividing fields and villages between them, opening up streams of commerce and culture and old cease damming ones, Thus lessly modifying, rearranging, mixing. along every proposed were frontier ethnic, historical and economic rights in conflict. The first mistake made by critics of the peace treaties, then, is to a say that their territorial provisions represented compromise between clear and clear In most cases right wrong. the choice which the had before them was not between and delegates ? right but wrong, between right and right the right of the victor and the of the were not right vanquished. On the whole, when rights in to on conflict, the Conference tried base its decisions high prin were ciples; when rights in conflict it usually favored the victors. These notes, it should promptly be explained, will not try to even a view of the whole but will give birdseye ? peace settlement, merely survey one part the part in which there has been little Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Foreign Affairs ® www.jstor.org 174 FOREIGN AFFAIRS or no the frontiers. In other the treaties have revision, particulars already been revised, drastically and often, notably in the sec war con tions regarding reparation, the trial of criminals, military trol and the occupation of German territory.1 It was Stresemann who won most of these victories for Germany. Had he lived to pur sue his program of piecemeal revision he doubtless would have turned next to a discussion of arms as of the ? equality part general question of disarmament and would very likely have been suc cessful. He even have found a of once for all might " way dealing ? a with Article 231? the "war guilt clause continuing psycho barrier to true Franco-German It was logical any rapprochement. Stresemann's that he saw the value to of genius Germany accept as so ing the Versailles Treaty the fundamental law of Europe, to that, strengthened by having accepted it, he might proceed de was error mand revision of palpably unjust provisions. It his that never a he educated the German people to realization of the bene fits actually secured for Germany by cooperation with France. was no And after his death there sufficiently weighty body of to German opinion force the continuation of his policy. That it had lapsed, the Anschluss fiasco of March 1931 gave definite proof. Stresemann would never have sanctioned that dangerous and ob saw was viously futile gesture. He clearly something which hidden from his Count Bethlen. Bethlen said of the Hungarian colleague, " " Treaty of the Trianon, and endlessly repeated, Nem, nem, sohal to ?"No, no, never!" He rejected it in toto. The degree which the Treaty of Versailles has been modified, while the Treaty of the Trianon remains unaltered, is a measure of how far each states man was right. at were not The delegates Paris handicapped merely by the on disarray the ethnic chessboard, but also in another way fre met quently forgotten. The Peace Conference formally for the on new first time January 18, 1919. The states of Europe had come into existence long before that, and their governments and were armies already exercising effective control within frontiers on. much the same as those officially delimited later This is not true of one most controversial part of the final settlement: the Peace Conference awarded the Corridor to Poland deliberately. as start But with this notable exception the Conference took its ing point the lines of demarcation determined locally when 1 not Interpretations of the Treaty have also been revised. Thus Mr. Lloyd George only did not hang the Kaiser, but came around to being sorry he could not hang M. Poincar?. VERSAILLES: RETROSPECT 175 hostilities ceased. The Conference did make a number of frontier rectifications, and in several debatable regions, for example insisted on Schleswig, Upper Silesia and the Klagenfurt basin, into plebiscites. But orders for sweeping alterations of the pattern autumn which Europe had fallen in the of 1918 would have had to be backed force. That was out of the even on up? by ? question, the assumption far from accepted that sweeping alterations were or were desirable would be just. Victors and vanquished alike exhausted and alike knew that communism, already entrenched in several centers, would be the only beneficiary of any such folly as renewed hostilities. In almost no cases were alterations feas on a ible scale which would have markedly changed the present or discontent and geography of Europe mitigated the fundamental desire for revision which have prevailed among the defeated peoples. of the To understand the powerful moral and material position events new states we only need try to disentangle the military war which closed the from the developments which had brought a the various national movements to head and gained them the were support of the Allied world. So closely they connected that we are at a to as cause effect. loss what put down and what On September 15,1918, the Allies (with the Serbian army bear which ing the brunt) launched the offensive in Macedonia two the crumpled up the Bulgarian front and in weeks forced to Bulgarian army capitulate (September 29). Almost simultane ously (September 18) Allenby started rolling up the Turkish front in Palestine. The collapse of Bulgaria and Turkey ushered war on western in the final phase of the the front, where the in German lines had been rocking since Haig's attack early August. On October 3 Hindenburg informed the new Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, that the military situation was desperate, and the next day the Chancellor sent his first note to President an was not Wilson asking for armistice. But Germany yet ready to recognize defeat, and military operations and negotiations continued simultaneously. The Allies broke in turn the "Sieg fried" and "Hindenburg" lines. On October 27 Austria-Hungary accepted President Wilson's conditions of Jugoslav and Czecho same slovak independence and asked for pourparlers; that date the line on the Piave was broken and on November 3 Austria an Hungary signed armistice with Italy. The Emperor Carl's last-minute offers of with the of races over compromise congeries so went which his family had ruled long almost unnoticed in their 176 FOREIGN AFFAIRS rush to their own national standards. On November 7 the German Armistice Commission left for the Allied lines, on November 9 the Kaiser abdicated, and on November 11 hostilities ceased on the western front. The next day the Emperor Carl abdicated. was over. more two were to The fighting But than months In elapse before the Peace Conference could begin its labors. the states to con interval the new-born and aggrandized hastened were solidate their positions. Those positions already very strong, due to the deliberate leaders in and ? policy adopted by England France once President Wilson had relieved them of ? partially the weight of the Treaty of London of encouraging the subject to assert and for their peoples of the Central Empires fight of the national rights. For illustration take the transformation Czech and Slovak people into the Czechoslovak Republic. The national revival of the Czechs, like that of the Poles and but took on the Jugoslavs, began early in the nineteenth century, new momentum after '48 in view of the refusal of the Austrians and Magyars to solve the nationality problem of Austria-Hun a From the start of gary in spirit of federalism and equal rights. the war the Czechs and Slovaks showed their feelings by passive secret resistance, by wholesale desertions, and by organizations making ready for the day of open action.
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