Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [6]
From the outset the Peace Conference suffered from confusion over its organization, its purpose and its procedures. The Big Four—Britain, France, Italy and the United States—had planned a preliminary conference to hammer out the terms to be offered, after which they intended to hold a full-scale peace conference to negotiate with the enemy. Immediately there were questions. When would the other allied powers be able to express their views? Japan, for example, was already an important power in the Far East. And what about the smaller powers such as Serbia and Belgium? Both had lost far more men than Japan.
The Big Four gave way, but the plenary sessions of the conference became ritual occasions. The real work was done by the Four and Japan in informal meetings, and when those in turn became too cumbersome, by the leaders of the Four alone. As the months went by, what had been a preliminary conference imperceptibly became the real thing. In a break with diplomatic precedent that infuriated the Germans, their representatives were eventually summoned to France to receive their treaty in its final form.
The peacemakers had hoped to be brisker and better organized. They had carefully studied the only available example—the Congress of Vienna, which wound up the Napoleonic Wars. The Foreign Office commissioned a distinguished historian to write a book on the Congress for guidance in Paris. (He later conceded that his work had almost no impact.3) The problems faced by the peacemakers in Vienna, large though they were, were straightforward by comparison with those in Paris. The British foreign secretary at the time, Lord Castlereagh, took just fourteen staff with him to Vienna; in 1919 the British delegation numbered nearly four hundred. In 1815 matters were settled quietly and at leisure: Castlereagh and his colleagues would have been appalled at the intense public scrutiny of 1919. There were also many more participants: more than thirty countries sent delegates to Paris, including Italy, Belgium, Rumania and Serbia, none of which had existed in 1815. The Latin American nations had still been part of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Thailand, China and Japan had been remote, mysterious lands. Now their diplomats appeared in Paris in pinstriped trousers and frock coats. Apart from a declaration condemning the slave trade, the Congress of Vienna paid no attention to the non-European world. In Paris, the subjects covered by the Peace Conference ranged from the Arctic to the Antipodes, from small islands in the Pacific to whole continents.
The Congress of Vienna also took place when the great upheavals set off by the French Revolution in 1789 had subsided. By 1815 its effects had been absorbed, but in 1919 the Russian Revolution was only two years old, its impact on the rest of the world unclear. Western leaders saw Bolshevism seeping out of Russia, threatening religion, tradition, every tie that held their societies together. In Germany and Austria, soviets of workers and soldiers were already seizing power in the cities and towns. Their own soldiers and sailors mutinied. Paris, Lyon, Brussels, Glasgow, San Francisco, even sleepy Winnipeg on the Canadian prairies had general strikes. Were these isolated outbreaks or flames from a vast underground fire?
The peacemakers of 1919 believed they were working against time. They had to draw new lines on the maps of Europe, just as their predecessors had done in Vienna, but they also