Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [5]
Even before the guns fell silent in 1918 the voices, plaintive, demanding, angry, had started. “China belongs to the Chinese.” “Kurdistan must be free.” “Poland must live again.” They spoke in many languages. They made many demands. The United States must be the world’s policeman; or, The Americans must go home. The Russians need help; no, They must be left to their own devices. They complained: Slovaks about Czechs; Croats about Serbs; Arabs about Jews; Chinese about Japanese. The voices were worried, uncertain whether the new world order would be an improvement on the old. In the West, they murmured about dangerous ideas coming from the East; in the East, they pondered the threat of Western materialism. Europeans wondered if they would ever recover and how they would manage their brash new American ally. Africans feared that the world had forgotten them. Asians saw that the future was theirs; it was only the present that was the problem.
We know something of what it is to live at the end of a great war. The voices of 1919 were very like the voices of the present. When the Cold War ended in 1989 and Soviet Marxism vanished into the dustbin of history, older forces, religion and nationalism, came out of their deep freeze. Bosnia and Rwanda have reminded us of how strong those forces can be. In 1919, there was the same sense of a new order emerging as borders suddenly shifted and new economic and political ideas were in the air. It was exciting but also frightening, in a world that seemed perilously fragile. Today, some argue, resurgent Islam is the menace. In 1919, it was Russian Bolshevism. The difference is that we have not held a universal peace conference. There is not the time. The statesmen and their advisers meet in brief meetings, for two, perhaps three days, and then take flight again. Who knows which is the better way of settling the world’s problems?
To struggle with the great issues of the day and try to resolve them, statesmen, diplomats, bankers, soldiers, professors, economists and lawyers came to Paris from all corners of the world: the American president, Woodrow Wilson, and his secretary of state, Robert Lansing; Georges Clemenceau and Vittorio Orlando, the prime ministers of France and Italy; Lawrence of Arabia, wrapped in mystery and Arab robes; Eleutherios Venizelos, the great Greek patriot who brought disaster on his country; Ignace Paderewski, the pianist turned Polish politician; and many who had yet to make their mark, among them two future American secretaries of state, a future prime minister of Japan and the first president of Israel. Some had been born to power, such as Queen Marie of Rumania; others, such as David Lloyd George, the prime minister of Britain, had won it through their own efforts.
The concentration of power drew in the world’s reporters, its businessmen, and spokesmen and spokeswomen for a myriad of causes. “One only meets people off to Paris,” wrote the French ambassador in London. “Paris is going to become a place of amusement for hundreds of English, Americans, Italians and shady foreign gentlemen who are descending on us under the pretext of taking part in the peace discussions.” 1 Votes for women, rights for blacks, a charter for labor, freedom for Ireland, disarmament: the petitions and the petitioners rolled in daily from all quarters of the world. That winter and spring, Paris hummed with schemes, for a Jewish homeland, a restored Poland, an independent Ukraine, a Kurdistan,