Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [111]
On the northwest, Germany’s borders were settled relatively easily. Neutral Denmark put in a claim to the northern part of Schleswig-Holstein, a pair of duchies whose fate had much disturbed Europe in the middle of the previous century. With a mixed population of Germans and Danes and a legal status of great antiquity and bewildering complexity (Bismarck always said that only two men in Europe understood the issue—he was one and the other was in an asylum), they had been seized by Prussia as it began the creation of modern Germany. The German government had done its best to make the inhabitants German, but despite its best efforts an overwhelming majority in the northern part still spoke Danish. The Danish government beseeched the Peace Conference to act quickly. The collapse of the old German regime had produced revolutionary councils in Schleswig-Holstein as elsewhere, but they were still behaving as Germans. Danish speakers were being prevented from holding meetings, their windows were being smashed and, perhaps worst of all in such a prosperous farming area, their cows were being confiscated.11 No one wanted to reopen the old legal questions, but fortunately there was the new principle of self-determination to hand. The Supreme Council decided that the question should be referred to the committee examining Belgium’s claims against Germany. It duly reported back in favor of two plebiscites, the first of the handful ordered by the peacemakers. In February 1920, an international commission supervised a vote by all men and women over the age of twenty. The results closely mirrored the language divisions; the northern zone voted for incorporation in Denmark, the southern to stay with Germany. The border remains unchanged today.
It was not so easy to settle Germany’s borders in the west, when France’s need for compensation and security ran up against the principle of self-determination and the old British fears of a strong France dominating the Continent. At the northern tip of Alsace lay the rich German coalfields of the Saar. France needed coal, and its own mines had largely been destroyed by the Germans. Besides, as Clemenceau reminded the British ambassador just after the armistice, Britain had once thought of giving the Saar to the French at the end of the Napoleonic Wars; why not take the opportunity now to erase “any bitter recollection they might have of Waterloo”?
The Saar, however, was only a small piece of the much larger territory on the west bank of the Rhine that stretched north from Alsace-Lorraine to the Netherlands. The Rhineland, Clemenceau argued, should be removed from German control to ensure France’s security. “The Rhine was the natural boundary of Gaul and Germany.” Perhaps the Allies could create an independent state with its neutrality guaranteed, just as Belgium’s had been done, by the powers. “I can see,” reported the British ambassador, “that he intends to press for that very strongly.” Clemenceau in fact was prepared to compromise on many of France’s demands as long as the overriding goal of security was met. Indeed, he was even willing to consider, though little came of it, limited cooperation with Germany, with the two countries working together on rebuilding the devastated areas of France and perhaps developing fruitful economic links.12
Foch did not think in such terms and spoke with the authority of a military man who had spent his life facing the menace across the Rhine. France needed that river barrier; it needed the time that a Rhineland under its control would buy in the face of an attack from the east; and it needed the extra population. “Henceforward,” he insisted in a memorandum to the Peace Conference in January 1919, “Germany ought to be deprived of all entrance and assembling grounds, that is, of all territorial sovereignty on the left bank of the river, that is, of all facilities