Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [41]
The lesser powers were also full of complaints and demands. Portugal, which had contributed 60,000 soldiers to the Western Front, thought it was outrageous that it should have only one official delegate while Brazil, which had sent a medical unit and some aviators, had three. Britain supported Portugal, an old ally, the United States Brazil. Recognition in Paris, the center of world power, was important for established states, and crucial for what the peacemakers christened “states in process of formation.” With the collapse of Russia, and the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire, there were many of these. Just standing in front of the Supreme Council to present a case was validation of a sort—and good for reputations back home.10
For the next five months, until the signing of the German treaty in June at Versailles, Paris housed a virtual world government. “We are the league of the people,” said Clemenceau the day before that momentous ceremony. Wilson replied, “We are the State.” And even in those very first meetings, the members of the Supreme Council were starting to act as a cabinet, within a representative system of government. Indeed, it was an analogy that they themselves used.11
Paris may have housed a world government, but that government’s power was never as great as most people, both then and since, have assumed. By the time the Supreme Council first met on January 12, Poland had been re-created, Finland and the Baltic states were well on their way to independence and Czechoslovakia had been pieced together. In the Balkans, Serbia had joined with Austria-Hungary’s South Slav territories of Croatia and Slovenia. The new entity did not yet have a name but some people were talking of a Yugoslav state. “The task of the Parisian Treaty-makers,” Lloyd George commented, “was not to decide what in fairness should be given to the liberated nationalities, but what in common honesty should be freed from their clutches when they had overstepped the bounds of self-determination.” 12
But what were those bounds? There was no clear answer—or rather, every competing nationality had a different answer. “You see those little holes?” a local asked an American visitor to Lvov, on the disputed borders between Russia and Poland. “We call them here ‘Wilson’s Points.’ They have been made with machine guns; the big gaps have been made with hand grenades. We are now engaged in self-determination, and God knows what and when the end will be.” At its first meetings the Supreme Council had to deal with fighting between Poland and its neighbors. When the Peace Conference officially ended a year later, the fighting was still going on, there and elsewhere. Tasker Bliss, the American military adviser, wrote gloomily to his wife from Paris predicting another thirty years of war in Europe. “The ‘submerged nations’ are coming to the surface and as soon as they appear, they fly at somebody’s throat. They are like mosquitoes—vicious from the moment of their birth.”13
It is tempting but misleading to compare the situation in 1919 to that in 1945. In 1919 there were no superpowers, no Soviet Union with its millions of soldiers occupying the center of Europe and no United States with its huge economy and its monopoly of the atomic bomb. In 1919, the enemy states were not utterly defeated. The peacemakers talked expansively about making and unmaking nations, but the clay was not as malleable and the strength to mold it not as great