Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [59]
In diplomacy, the forms remained the same: ambassadors presented credentials, treaties were signed and sealed. The rules, however, had changed. In the game of nations it was no longer fashionable, or even acceptable, for one nation to seize territory that was full of people of a different nationality. (Colonies did not count, because those peoples were assumed to be at a lower stage of political development.) When Bismarck created Germany, he did so in the name of German unity, not conquest for his master’s Prussia. When his creation took Alsace-Lorraine from France in 1871, the German government did its best to persuade itself and the world that this was not for the sake of old-fashioned spoils of war but because the peoples of those provinces were really German at heart.
Another factor also now entered into the equation: public opinion. The spread of democracy, the growth of nationalism, the web of railway lines and telegraphs, the busy journalists and the rotary presses churning out the mass circulation newspapers, all this had summoned up a creature that governments did not much like but which they dared not ignore. At Paris, it was assumed that negotiations would be conducted under public scrutiny.
For idealists this was a good thing. The people would bring a much needed common sense to international relations. They did not want war or expensive arms races. (This faith had not been shaken by the fact that many Europeans seemed enthusiastic about war in the decades before 1914, and positively passionate in 1914 itself.) The prosperity and progress of the nineteenth century encouraged the belief that the world was becoming more civilized. A growing middle class provided a natural constituency for a peace movement preaching the virtues of compulsory arbitration of disputes, international courts, disarmament, perhaps even pledges to abstain from violence as ways to prevent wars. The opponents of war took as models their own societies, especially those in Western Europe, where governments had become more responsive to the will of their citizens, where public police forces had replaced private guards and where the rule of law was widely accepted. Surely it was possible to imagine a similar society of nations providing collective security for its members?3
In Paris, Wilson insisted on chairing the League commission, because for him the League of Nations was the centerpiece of the peace settlements. If it could be brought into being, then everything else would sooner or later fall into place. If the peace terms were imperfect, there would be plenty of time later for the League to correct them. Many new borders had to be drawn; if they were not quite right, the League would sort them out. Germany’s colonies were going to be taken away; the League would make sure that they were run properly. The Ottoman empire was defunct; the League would act as liquidator and trustee for the peoples who were not yet ready to rule themselves. And for future generations the League would oversee general prosperity and peace, encouraging the weak, chiding the wicked and, where necessary, punishing the recalcitrant. It was a pledge that humanity was making to itself, a covenant.
The picture sometimes painted of Wilson sailing across the Atlantic bearing the gift of the League of Nations from the new world to the old is compelling but, alas, false. Many Europeans had long wanted a better way of managing international relations. The war they had just survived made sense only if it produced a better world and an end to war. That was what their own governments had promised in the dark days, and that was what had kept them going. In 1919, as Europeans contemplated those catastrophic years, with the scarcely imaginable outpouring of blood, as they realized that European society had been horribly damaged, perhaps fatally, the League struck many, and not only liberals and left-wingers, as their last chance. Harold Nicolson