Unlike the reshaping of Europe in 1815, there was no equivalent of Wellington to act as a restraining influence, a statesman who had thought of the consequences of embittering Germany by her treatment. Lloyd George had won the 1918 election by talking of squeezing Germany ‘until the pips squeak’. After the war Germans would become united by their belief that they had been treated unfairly at the Paris Peace Conference, and by their consequent desire for revenge. In 1815, after twenty years of French war, the allies’ policy of not treating France too harshly had ensured that she could soon return to the European family of nations in a constructive spirit. That lesson was forgotten in 1919. What has to be remembered was that the French were too fearful of Germany to treat her magnanimously. They were also determined to have their pound of flesh and make the Germans feel the same pain they had inflicted on the French after the Franco-Prussian War. Twice in forty years Germany had come close to destroying France. The French aim under Clemenceau was straightforward: it was to make certain that it never could happen again. So deep was the hatred felt by France for Germany that it was believed that in order to bind the Leviathan he must be crippled first.
Germany was no longer permitted to have a navy (apart from a small surface fleet for security in the Baltic) or air force. Her army was to be the same size as Belgium’s, a limit of 100,000 men, without a General Staff, to prevent German militarism becoming the threat to world peace it had been in 1914. Alsace and Lorraine were naturally enough returned to France, though for forty years they had been the centre of Germany’s iron production and her new steel industry. Much of Germany’s own territory was also removed from her. The Saar Basin, the centre for coal and a source of her great industrial wealth, was to be run by the League of Nations. It was to be the subject of a plebiscite in fifteen years’ time when its inhabitants could choose whether to be reunited with Germany or join France. In the interim the money raised by its coal sales went to France. Although Germany kept Holstein and southern Schleswig, northern Schleswig was also to decide its future by plebiscite.
In the east, Germany lost not only three million of her population when West Prussia and Posen became part of the new Poland, whose frontiers returned to something close to what they had been in the eighteenth century before the partitions. Germany’s remaining territory was also insultingly separated from East Prussia, spiritual home of the German Empire, by a strip of land known as the Polish Corridor which gave Poland access to the sea. She also lost many of her coalfields too, particularly after another plebiscite joined Upper Silesia to Poland, as well as much of her iron and steelworks. Owing to her entirely German population the port of Danzig (the Polish Gdansk) on the Baltic at the top of the Polish Corridor, was not given to Poland. However, in order for Poland’s trade to continue freely Danzig was made a free city administered by the League of Nations. All in all, in Europe Germany lost about four million citizens through transfers of territory.
In fact even these measures to break up Germany did not really satisfy France’s need for security. She had first demanded that her eastern frontier be advanced to the Rhine. She had to be content with a neutralized Saar Basin, the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland–that is, all Germany to the west of the Rhine and fifty kilometres to the east of it. President Woodrow Wilson pledged that with Britain the USA would guarantee France’s frontiers. As far as the Germans were concerned, the self-determination which had been one of the themes of the conference scarcely counted. But France still did not have enough.
Having been thwarted in her attempt to get the kaiser hung as a war criminal, France had to be satisfied with what appeared to be a war-guilt clause which began the reparations section of the peace treaty. This clause was intended to be a technical statement, that Germany would pay ‘compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany, by land, by sea and from the air’. But it was believed for ever more to attribute the whole guilt for the war to the German people. It was another reason for Germans to be angry about the treaty–many of them considered that the allied powers had been just as much to blame for the war. ‘The stab in the back’ theory about the republican government started to circulate in Germany: that government, it was alleged, could never be trusted, for it had signed the treacherous peace even though the German armies had never been defeated.
The war-guilt clause would have meant that only France would obtain reparations from Germany, as most of the destructive action had taken place on her territory. Lloyd George now insisted that a clause be included covering pensions for widows and orphans of British soldiers killed in action. In 1921, after much discussion, the total cost of what Germany owed the two countries was reckoned at over £6,000 million. With all Germany’s colonies also confiscated from her, so that after the war she could trade only in Europe, these reparations were beyond Germany’s capacity to pay.
Nothing was discussed in person with the German delegation; they were able to raise their objections only in writing. They scarcely had time to do so–the peace treaty was more or less imposed on them. The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, the very room in which Germany had proclaimed her new empire to the humiliation of the French in 1871. It was now used by the French to humiliate the Germans. By the end of the next decade the view that Germany had been treated too harshly at the peace conference and deserved to have the Versailles Treaty revised had become common currency in Britain. The economist John Maynard Keynes resigned as the British Treasury’s chief representative at the conference and quickly wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he expressed in vigorous language his conviction that Germany had been harshly treated.
President Wilson himself optimistically believed that the League of Nations, the international body to regulate the world which was an integral part of the peace treaties, would find a way of adjusting those parts which were unworkable. No peace conference started out with more idealistic aims than that which remade Europe in 1919. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points had promised a new world order based on doing away with the old patterns of secret diplomacy, arranging equality of trading conditions and providing an impartial adjustment of all colonial claims. The levelling of the pre-1914 civilization could be a positive thing if a better world was built on the ashes of the old. Most of the world’s nations, including much of Germany, were dominated by a profound wish that never again should the destruction of war be allowed to ravage their lives.
Many of them, like Canada and other Dominions who were representing themselves for the first time instead of being spoken for by British imperial statesmen, came to the peace conference enthusiastically. They were inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations to outlaw war and to protect the rights of small nations. A worldwide reduction of armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety, which would make the world ‘safe for democracy’ as Wilson put it, offered a chance to escape from the blind destruction of the past. The League, which Wilson spent much time and effort explaining, was to be set up in Geneva, Switzerland and every nation was invited to join and send members to its international assembly.
Wilson’s novel idea, that all the peace treaties should have the League’s charter as an integral and dominating part, was adopted by all the delegates. The charter was a reflection of the peace movements which had grown up during the war, as well as of the Disarmament Conferences before 1914, to find international procedures for arbitration. The powers which signed the Covenant of the League of Nations were mindful of the uncontrollable process of acceleration by which small wars could become big ones. By putting their names to the Covenant they vowed to refer their disagreements to the League for discussion before taking up arms. They also vowed to go to the aid of any fellow member which had been attacked and to act against any member which used force against the League.
It was heady stuff. The world was so exhausted by the war that none of the statesmen in Pa
ris could imagine any country ever wanting to repeat such an experience. The dream of global peace seemed to have achieved reality. The peace conference proposed to resettle Europe along lines of self-determination to prevent the sort of quarrel the Serbs had had with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Habsburg Empire was already no more, and the Habsburgs were deposed after the armistice. Their immense territories were broken up into states on ethnic lines. By the Treaty of St Germain, signed with the new Austrian Republic, Austria became a small landlocked country of seven million people forbidden to join up with Germany. Bohemia, Moravia and part of northern Hungary, which were inhabited by western Slavs (the Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians), were united to create the Republic of Czechoslovakia. Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, inhabited by the southern Slavs, were united under Serbia to form the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Italy, though balked of Dalmatia, obtained Trentino, Trieste, South Tyrol and Istria. Hungary, meanwhile, which lost almost three-quarters of her post-1867 kingdom–Romania acquired the whole of Transylvania–in 1920 reluctantly signed the Treaty of Trianon.
Bulgaria, as an ally of the central powers, by the Treaty of Neuilly had to cede large areas to Greece and the new Yugoslavia. The independence of Finland, and of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia was preserved. Russia meanwhile would make no peace treaty. Although initially British and French troops were sent to help the White or conservative forces within Russia against the Bolsheviks, an impasse was reached and they were evacuated.
The treaty agreeing peace with the Ottoman Empire, the Treaty of Sèvres, was not completed until 1920. It destroyed the 300-year-old Ottoman Empire, more or less expelled the Turks from Europe apart from Constantinople, made Armenia and Kurdistan independent, and removed from them Arabia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Syria, Cyprus and what they owned in north Africa. Greece was to be given much of Asiatic Turkey behind Smyrna.
President Wilson intended that European imperialism should wither away. Former German colonies or Turkish possessions, even if they were taken over by the old imperial powers, were now to be called mandates. By an article of the Covenant of the League, the great powers like France and Britain were commanded to govern the mandates in the interests of their inhabitants until they were ready to be admitted to the League of Nations. Thus a better world was supposed to be remodelled at the peace conference. Unfortunately, although all the peace treaties were predicated on the League of Nations, despite his enthusiasm for the new world order President Wilson had made an elementary mistake. He failed to convince Congress of the importance of the United States guaranteeing the post-war settlement, so despite his own internationalism after the war she returned to her usual isolationism. Congress rejected US participation in the League of Nations, yet the whole new settlement was based on US support for the League. Nor would America guarantee France’s borders against Germany.
As for imperialism withering away, it was really lack of money as far as Britain was concerned–with the post-war slump and debts owed to America of £900 million–that in the end hurried forward the end of empire. Lord Curzon, foreign secretary from October 1919, and much of the India Office might be excited by the mandate system which gave Britain Mesopotania and Palestine to administer as an unofficial way of extending the empire. The importance of the oil-rich Middle East had been recognized before the war and the area offered new markets now that India had her own growing manufacturing industry. With Russia locked in internal revolution, Britain had no rival in the Middle East. But a severe post-war slump prevented Britain from imposing herself on the mandated territories as she would have done in the past. The old empire itself was under attack from nationalists in India. In Ireland a war of independence against the British broke out the year after the war ended. There was a rebellion in Egypt, which had been made a British protectorate at the beginning of the war and wanted immediate independence.
Mesopotamia was in a state of revolt and despite her oilfields most members of the British government had no wish to spend money on subduing her. Though the British retained a great deal of influence, in 1921 they made her into the kingdom of Iraq. Eleven years later in 1932 the mandate ended and Iraq achieved full independence. Faisal, the son of the Hashemite Sharif Hussein, became her king as a reward for his father’s help during the war. This partly offset the obligation on the British to fulfil their wartime promise of creating an independent Arab state in Syria and Palestine, as did carving the independent mandate of Jordan out of their mandate for Palestine. Faisal’s brother, Hussein’s other son Abdullah, became Jordan’s emir. Though a British resident initially controlled both her economic and her financial policy, in 1946 the mandated territory became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Palestine posed more of a problem because of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had been critical in keeping influential Jewish opinion in America onside during the war. This recognized the rights of the Jewish race to establish a national homeland in Palestine, so long as no harm was inflicted on the native Arab inhabitants. At the end of the nineteenth century, the victimization of Jews (especially in eastern Europe) had seen the growth of a powerful Zionist movement, whose objective was to establish a homeland for the Jews in their ancestral home of Palestine. In consequence, between 1882 and 1914 Palestine attracted 60,000 Jewish immigrants, bringing the Jewish population to about 85,000. The question of how many Jewish people could settle in the Jewish homeland without upsetting the lives of the 600,000 Arab Palestinians was to be the subject of much debate within the British government over the next twenty-five years. Sympathy for Jewish settlers who were attacked by Arabs wrestled with official British fears that the poorly educated Palestinians would soon be at a disadvantage in a small country with a land shortage.
The First World War had made the territorial extent of the British Empire greater than ever, but it dramatically loosened its already lax bonds. Before 1914 the imperial government was in the last resort responsible for the foreign policy of the entire empire. But by the end of the war the effect of their vast losses, their separate representation at the peace conference and their membership of the League of Nations set the Dominions on the path to real nationhood. They began to make it clear that in future wars their assistance could not be taken for granted. Separate ambassadorial representation to other countries, a lack of imperial ships to defend the empire east of Suez and a definitive Imperial Conference in 1926 resulted in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. This recognized the changed and wholly independent status of the Dominions, though they remained ‘united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of nations’.
But India was not part of the magic circle of the Dominions. She was very disappointed at not being rewarded as she had hoped after her efforts during the war. One and a half million Indians had fought for the empire, and India had been admitted to the Imperial Conference in 1917. Like the Dominions, India had achieved separate representation in the Assembly of the League of Nations. Many Indians, particularly Mohandas Gandhi, who had studied law in London and was a member of the Inner Temple, had believed in the liberty-loving nature of a Britain ruled by Parliament. They had assumed that India would achieve Dominion status immediately after the war. But it did not happen.
The Indian professional classes felt fobbed off by the 1919 Government of India Act which they were offered instead. It gave India a two-chambered Parliamentary system and allowed Indians to form the majority on the Central Legislative Council, but the diarchal arrangement kept law and order and taxation in the hands of non-Indians. Moreover the legislature could not remove the executive. The notorious Amritsar Massacre in 1919, when General Dyer shot dead 379 unarmed civilians in the Punjab who were protesting against new security laws, crystallized the growing discontent with British rule. People lost faith in the Raj’s promises. For the next seven years, led by Gandhi, India embarked on a new movement for independence with frequent strikes and the boycotting of British goods.
India was inspired by the empire’s other ‘poor relation’, Ireland. In a series of dramatic moves she was casting off British authority. The harsh punishment of those Irishmen involved in the Easter Rising caused Sinn Fein and the revolutionaries to triumph over the moderate Home Rulers in the first election after the war and withdraw from Westminster. Seventy-three of them gathered in the Mansion House in Dublin and announced that they constituted an independent Irish Parliament, which they called the Dáil Éireann, meaning the Parliament of the Irish Republic. A provisional government was elected with De Valera as president. By 1919 there was all-out war between Britain and southern Ireland.
The charismatic Michael Collins, known as the ‘big fella’, minister of finance in the new Dáil, was southern Ireland’s commander. His unorthodox army, the old National Volunteers, who wore trench coats and trilby hats, vanished into the shadows after each guerrilla exploit. His charm and his daring refusal to wear much disguise while bicycling about Dublin gave Collins the status of a folk hero. Even though 8,000 ex-soldiers were drafted in to supplement the Royal Irish Constabulary, the south of Ireland became ungovernable. Because the RIC did not have enough of their usual dark-green uniforms, the new policemen wore khaki, with the black belts and dark-green caps of the RIC. The savagery with which they hunted down the Irish guerrillas got them the caustic nickname of the Black and Tans, after a pack of hounds from County Tipperary. British politicians became sickened by what was going on in Ireland and demanded a political solution.
The Story of Britain Page 84
