Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [2]
Even at the time it was recognized that the concept of self-determination was, as MacMillan puts it, “controversial and opaque.” “When the President talks of ‘self-determination,’ ” Secretary of State Robert Lansing asked, “what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community? . . . It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late.”
Lansing was one of the first to recognize a dilemma that lies at the core of many of today’s bitterest disputes. Still, it was not Wilson’s dreams but his decision to compromise them (by letting Japan take the Shantung peninsula in China, for example) that cost the world so dearly. Ironically, when Wilson returned home, he made the opposite mistake: by refusing to make relatively minor compromises with Senate moderates, he lost his chance to get the treaty (and American membership in the League of Nations) ratified.
Some of the most intractable problems of the modern world have roots in decisions made right after the end of the Great War. Among them one could list the four Balkan wars between 1991 and 1999; the crisis over Iraq (whose present borders resulted from Franco-British rivalries and casual mapmaking); the continuing quest of the Kurds for self-determination; disputes between Greece and Turkey; and the endless struggle between Arabs and Jews over land that each thought had been promised them.
As the peacemakers met in Paris, new nations emerged and great empires died. Excessively ambitious, the Big Four set out to do nothing less than fix the world, from Europe to the far Pacific. But facing domestic pressures, events they could not control, and conflicting claims they could not reconcile, the negotiators were, in the end, simply overwhelmed— and made deals and compromises that would echo down through history.
Even then, they sensed that they were laying the seeds for future problems. “I cannot say for how many years, perhaps I should say for how many centuries, the crisis which has begun will continue,” predicted Georges Clemenceau, whose own behavior contributed to the failure. “Yes, this treaty will bring us burdens, troubles, miseries, difficulties, and that will continue for long years.”
MacMillan brings back to life some great dramas: the Italian walkout after the failure of their effort to gain control of much of the Yugoslav coast; the Japanese grab of the Shantung peninsula, which launched the May Fourth Movement in China and started the path to war and revolution in Asia; the dismemberment of Hungary, which left millions of Hungarians permanently outside their own country’s borders; the inability of the Big Four to deal with the new Soviet government, other than by sending a feckless expeditionary force into the Russian civil war; the dissolution of the Ottoman empire and the rise of one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable leaders, Kemal Atatürk; and last but not least, the creation of Yugoslavia (originally, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes) out of the disparate peoples of the south Balkans. This state would survive under Marshal Tito’s communist dictatorship for decades, but when the patchwork put together in 1919 fell apart in the early 1990s, four wars followed—first Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzegovina, and finally Kosovo. (A fifth, in Macedonia, was barely averted.)
As our American negotiating team shuttled around the Balkans in the fall of 1995 trying to end the war in Bosnia, the Versailles treaty was not far from my mind. Reading excerpts from Harold Nicolson’s Peacemaking 1919, we joked that