Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [60]
Lloyd George went along with Wilson’s insistence that the League should be the first task of the Peace Conference, not merely out of a cynical desire to keep the Americans happy. He was, after all, a Liberal, the leader of a party with a strong history of opposition to war. A consummate politician, he also knew the British public. “They regard with absolute horror,” he told his colleagues on Christmas Eve 1918, “the continuance of a state of affairs which might again degenerate into such a tragedy.” It would be political disaster to come back from the Peace Conference without a League of Nations. But the League never caught his imagination, perhaps because he doubted whether it could ever truly be effective. He rarely referred to it in speeches and never visited its headquarters while he was prime minister. 5
In France, where memories of past German aggression and apprehension about the future were painfully alive, there was deep pessimism about international cooperation to end war. Yet there was a willingness, especially among liberals and the left, to give the League a try. Clemenceau would have preferred to deal with the German peace first, but he was determined that it would not be said that France had blocked the League. He himself remained ambivalent, not, as is sometimes said, hostile. As he famously remarked, “I like the League, but I do not believe in it.”6
Public opinion provided general support for the League but no clear guidance as to its shape. Should it be policeman or clergyman? Should it use force or moral suasion? The French, for obvious reasons, leaned toward a League with the power to stop aggressors by force. Lawyers, especially in the English-speaking world, put their faith in international law and tribunals. For pacifists, there was still another remedy for international violence: general disarmament and a promise from all members of the League to abstain from war. And what was the League going to be like? Some sort of superstate? A club for heads of state? A conference summoned whenever there was an emergency? Whatever shape it took, it would need qualifications for membership, rules, procedures and some sort of secretariat.
The man who had put the League at the heart of the Allied peace program kept an enigmatic silence on such details during the war. Wilson spoke only in generalities, albeit inspiring ones. His League would be powerful because it would represent the organized opinion of humanity. Its members would guarantee, he said in his Fourteen Points, each other’s independence and borders. It might use force to protect these, but would probably not need to. The war had shown that ordinary people longed for such an organization; it was what they had fought for. “The counsels of plain men,” he told a huge audience in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York just before the war ended, “have become on all hands more simple and straightforward and more unified than the counsels of sophisticated men of affairs, who still retain the impression that they are playing a game of power and playing for high stakes.”7
Wilson thought it was a mistake to get down to specifics while the war was still on. That would only cause dissension among the Allies and it might give the enemy countries the impression that the League was somehow directed against them. To him it was so eminently a rational idea, the need for it so widely accepted, that it would grow on its own into a healthy organism. Even in Paris, while the League’s covenant was being drafted, he resisted what he saw as excessive detail. “Gentlemen,” he told his colleagues on the League commission, “I have no doubt that the next generation will be made up of men as intelligent as you or I, and