Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [314]
In the west, Germany also faced an advantageous situation. France was gravely depleted by the war, unwilling and, by the 1930s, increasingly unable to summon up the determination to oppose Germany. The guarantee from the United States and Britain was worthless after the failure of the American Senate to ratify it. France’s attempts to build alliances with the weak and quarreling nations in Central Europe were a measure of its desperation. It got little support from the British, who made it clear that their empire was their primary concern. The clearest demonstration that the peacemakers had not emasculated Germany came after 1939.
With different leadership in the Western democracies, with stronger democracy in Weimar Germany, without the damage done by the Depression, the story might have turned out differently. And without Hitler to mobilize the resentments of ordinary Germans and to play on the guilty consciences of so many in the democracies, Europe might not have had another war so soon after the first. The Treaty of Versailles is not to blame. It was never consistently enforced, or only enough to irritate German nationalism without limiting German power to disrupt the peace of Europe. With the triumph of Hitler and the Nazis in 1933, Germany had a government that was bent on destroying the Treaty of Versailles. In 1939, von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, told the victorious Germans in Danzig: “The Führer has done nothing but remedy the most serious consequences which this most unreasonable of all dictates in history imposed upon a nation and, in fact, upon the whole of Europe, in other words repair the worst mistakes committed by none other than the statesmen of the western democracies.” 65
Conclusion
WITH THE SIGNING of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, the world government in Paris dissolved. Wilson left that night, Lloyd George and what was left of the British empire delegation the following morning in a special train. (The British government later discovered to its annoyance that the French had sent a large bill for the train.) Orlando, whose government had fallen, had already gone. Clemenceau, alone of the Big Four, remained in Paris. He spent the summer shepherding the German treaty through the National Assembly and supervising the preparations for a national day of celebration in July. His only break was a brief visit to the devastated regions in the north. The Paris hotels reopened for normal business as the journalists and delegations went home. The prostitutes complained that business was off. 1 At the end of the summer, the British gave up the Majestic. Two decades later, it became the headquarters of another foreign delegation, this time the German army in occupation in Paris.
The Peace Conference continued until January 1920, but it was like a theatrical production whose stars had gone. The foreign ministers and the diplomats took over again but they never regained their old grip on foreign relations. The important decisions were always referred back to their political superiors in Rome or London or Washington and the difficult issues were hammered out in special conferences, of which Lloyd George alone attended thirty-three between 1919 and 1922.
Between January and June 1919, the peacemakers had accomplished an enormous amount: a League of Nations and an International Labour Organization, mandates handed out, the Germany treaty finished, the treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Ottoman Turkey nearly done—but there were many loose ends. Russia’s borders were still fluctuating and it was not clear which of its states along the periphery would keep their new independence. Finland? Ukraine? Georgia? Armenia? In the wreckage of empires in the center of Europe the borders were still being disputed. And the decision, taken so lightly, to let the Greeks