Austria issued an ultimatum to Serbia. When her ten demands were not met in full, Vienna declared war and shelled Belgrade from across the Danube. Czar Nicholas mobilized his armies in support of Russia’s little Slav brothers. The Kaiser ordered mobilization to counter the Russians. When Russia’s ally, France, refused to declare neutrality, Germany declared war. And when the German army crossed into Belgium, the British cabinet reversed itself to back war for Belgium and France.
None were more stunned than the Marxists who had predicted that the working-class sons of Europe would never take up arms to kill one another for their rulers. The proletariat, they believed, would stand as one against a capitalists’ war. Many Marxists never recovered the faith they lost when the party in which they had invested their greatest hopes, the German Social Democrats, voted to a man for the kaiser’s war credits. The call of socialist solidarity was drowned out by the call of tribe and blood. In London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Berlin, boys and men were cheered wildly as they marched off to kill their Christian neighbors.
The Italian Socialist Party leadership denounced its sister parties in Germany and Europe, which had backed the war, and, in a 12–1 vote, passed a resolution declaring, “We will be faithful to our flag; and on this flag is written: Proletarians of all the world unite!” The sole dissenter was Benito Mussolini.12
After four years, nine million soldiers had perished and four empires had fallen. Ethnonationalism had plunged the continent and the world into the worst war in history.
PARIS, 1919
When Lenin came to power in 1917, he began to publish the secret treaties in the Romanov archives, revealing how, at war’s end, the Allies—Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Japan—had planned to carve up the world. The Great War seemed suddenly to be naught but an amoral imperial struggle for land and loot.
To counter this depiction of why millions of young men had been sent to early graves, President Wilson, whose nation had entered the war in April 1917 “to make the world safe for democracy,” issued his Fourteen Points. Here, Wilson told the world, is what we Americans are fighting for. At the heart of his vision was the idea of self-determination. On February 1, 1918, Wilson laid down his preconditions for a just and lasting peace:
There shall be no annexations.… People are not to be handed about from one sovereignty to another by an international conference.… “Self-determination” is not a mere phrase.… Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the population concerned, and not as part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival States.13
Before the peace conference opened, however, U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing had confided to his diary his alarm at the explosive potential of Wilson’s words:
The more I think about the president’s declaration as to the right of “self-determination,” the more convinced I am of the dangers of putting such ideas in the minds of certain races.…
The phrase [self-determination] is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.… What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!14
What came out of the Paris peace conference, that “riot in a parrot house,” in British diplomat Harold Nicholson’s phrase, justified Lansing’s fears and spat upon Wilson’s hopes. Wilson’s fears had been realized. The Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires were demolished, but the nations birthed through the treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Trianon, Neuilly, and Sèvres were insults to Wilson’s ideals.
After accepting an armistice based on Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Germany lost Northern Schleswig to Denmark through plebiscite, and Eupen and Malmedy to Belgium for the damage done during the German occupation. Alsace and Lorraine went to France, as this was No. 8 of Wilson’s points. The Saar was torn from Germany, along with its people, who were to be granted a vote in fifteen years on whether they wished to return. A long slice of Germany, from Silesia to the sea, cutting her in two and separating East Prussia from Berlin, was ceded to Poland. Danzig, an East Prussian town and Hanseatic League port, was put under Warsaw’s control to give Poland an outlet to the sea. Memel would be seized by Lithuania.
Versailles stripped Germany of one-tenth of her people and an eighth of her territory. By 1920, Germans chafed under the rule of Danes, Belgians, French, Italians, Czechs, Poles, and, soon, Lithuanians. The Allies had produced a peace to end all peace. Germany had proven herself the most powerful nation in Europe, having defeated Russia, Romania, and Italy, and fought Britain and France to a draw for four years, with not one foreign soldier on German soil. When Germany got back on her feet, she would come looking for those she had lost.
Ethnonationalism, the demand that lost German lands and peoples be restored, became an almost universally supported plank in the platform of the new National Socialist Party.
After Germany mounted the scaffold came the turn of the Habsburg Empire. Under the treaties of St. Germain and Trianon, that ancient empire was dissolved. Northern provinces went to Poland. Czechoslovakia, which had emerged in 1918 under Thomas Masaryk, a great favorite at Paris, was granted custody of 3.5 million ethnic Germans, 2.5 million Slovaks, 800,000 Hungarians, 500,000 Ruthenians, and 150,000 Poles. All resented being forced to live in a nation dominated by 7 million Czechs.
Whether to force 3 million Germans under a Czech rule most of them despised was fiercely debated at Paris. The U.S. delegation’s Archibald Coolidge called it a grave mistake. South Africa’s Jan Smuts warned that the Czech lust for Hungarian and German land could bring disastrous results: “With some millions of Germans already included in Bohemia in the north, the further inclusion of some 400,000 or 500,000 Magyars in the south would be a very serious matter for the young state, besides the grave violation of the principles of nationality involved.”15 The “millions of Germans” in Bohemia to whom Smuts referred lived in a place the world would come to know as the Sudetenland.
The Allies did not heed Smuts. They listened to Eduard Benes, the Czech foreign minister who promised to model Czechoslovakia on the Swiss federation, where minorities would enjoy equal standing and large measures of autonomy. On the eve of Munich, Lloyd George would accuse Benes of having lied to the Allies at Paris.
South Tyrol, with 250,000 Tyroleans, Austrian for six centuries, was ceded to Italy as war booty for switching sides and joining the Allies in 1915. Vienna, seat of one of the great empires of Christendom, became the capital of a tiny landlocked country of fewer than 7 million.
Hungary was reduced from an imperial domain of 125,000 square miles to a nation of 36,000. Nearly half the Magyar population had been transferred to foreign rule. Transylvania and its 2 million Hungarians was given to Romania for joining the Allies. Slovakia, which a largely Catholic Hungary had ruled for centuries, was given to the Czechs, along with its 800,000 Hungarians. Other Hungarian lands went to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. When Romania invaded to overthrow the Hungarian Soviet Republic of Bela Kun, which had seized power and instituted a Red Terror, Admiral Miklós Horthy led a National Army into Budapest and promised to restore all lost Magyar lands and peoples. His determination would propel the admiral into partnership with Hitler.
What made Versailles a calamity was not only the injustice of forcing millions of Hungarians and Germans under alien rule, nor the hypocrisy of the Allies, who had professed their devotion to self-determination, but what Smuts had called “the grave violation of the principles of nationality.” The Allies had signed birth certificates for nations that were as multiethnic and multilingual as the demolished Habsburg Empire, but wholly lacked that empire’s lineage and legitimacy.
The new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes contained Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Hungarians, and Bulgarians. Poland ruled millions of Germans, Ukrainians, White Russians, Jews, and Lithuanians. Romania contained millions of Hungarians and Bulgarian
s. These minorities ruled by Belgrade, Prague, Warsaw, and Bucharest had been consigned to those capitals against their will and in violation of Wilson’s promise that self-determination would be the basis of the peace. Believing they had been betrayed and subjugated, they seethed with a resentment that would explode in a second European war in which the butcher’s bill would dwarf that of the Great War.
“THE NATURAL MAP OF THE WORLD”
In his 1920 Outline of History, H. G. Wells bewailed the folly of herding ethnic groups into artificial states: “There is a natural and necessary political map of the world which transcends these things,” Wells wrote.
There is a best way possible of dividing any part of the world into administrative areas and a best possible kind of government for every area, having regard to the speech and race of its inhabitants, and it is our common concern to secure these divisions and establish those forms of government quite irrespective of diplomacies and flags, “claims” and melodramatic “loyalties,” and the existing political map of the world.16
Democracy notwithstanding, wrote Wells, “The natural political map of the world insists upon itself. It heaves and frets beneath the artificial political map like some misfitted giant.”17 Wells understood that not parchment, but language, literature, blood, soil, history, and faith make a nation; that a nation is an organic living thing, not some fabricated construct. As for the multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic nations crafted in Paris by presidents and prime ministers, they were artificial nations, ever at risk of falling apart.
It is extraordinarily inconvenient to administer together the affairs of peoples speaking different languages and so reading different literatures and having different general ideas, especially if those differences are exacerbated by religious disputes. Only some strong mutual interests, such as the common defensive needs of the Swiss mountaineers, can justify a close linking of peoples of different languages and faiths.18
Now that the natural nations of Europe had seen millions of their kinsmen consigned to the rule of alien ethnicities whom they detested, Wells sensed what was coming.
THE IRISH REBELLION
When Disraeli observed, “All is race. There is no other truth,” he meant what Churchill meant when he spoke of “this island race,” a unique people, separate from all others, united by borders, language, culture, history, and blood.19 Disraeli saw the Irish, though part of Britain, as a breed apart: “This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry [i.e., Catholicism]. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”20 The Duke of Wellington was of similar mind. Reminded that he had been born in Dublin, the Iron Duke retorted, “Being born in a stable does not make one a horse.”21 A contemporary of Wellington and Disraeli, Thomas Carlyle regarded the Irish as “human swinery.”22
The Irish saw themselves as a people apart, even when they fought alongside Englishmen and Scots. In “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” Yeats spoke for his people:
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.23
England’s cause was not Ireland’s cause. England’s enemies were not Ireland’s enemies. No sooner had the Great War ended than the Troubles began. Fresh in memory was the Easter Rising of 1916, when 2000 rebels, in that year of the Somme Offensive, seized the General Post Office in Dublin to stoke a rebellion. While a botched affair that initially earned its leaders ridicule and contempt, the British immediately villainized themselves—by arresting thousands more than had participated in the rising and sending fifteen of the leaders before firing squads, creating a fatal breach between British and Irish. Wrote Yeats, in “Easter 1916”:
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.24
Changed they were, from blunderers who had committed an act of wartime treason into martyrs of Irish independence. In 1918, needing fresh troops after the losses halting Ludendorff’s offensive, Lloyd George decided to conscript the Irish. That was the end of the Irish Parliamentary Party of John Redmond, who had lost a son in the war. Sinn Féin now spoke for Ireland.
In 1919, a guerrilla war began with the killing of constables and Irish collaborators of the British government. London sent in veterans of the Western Front, the Black and Tans. From 1919 to 1921, hundreds died on each side until rebel commander Michael Collins went to London to negotiate peace with Churchill. An Irish Free State was created, but six northern counties of Ulster remained with the United Kingdom. The treaty Collins brought home ignited a civil war that ended only with his assassination.
Few better examples exist of the power of ethnonationalism. Here were British subjects, citizens of a free nation who enjoyed all the rights of Englishmen, who were represented in Parliament, who belonged to the greatest empire since Rome at the apogee of her power and glory and in the hour of her greatest triumph. Yet they wished to be free of her, and were willing to fight and die to have Ireland, an impoverished land of a few million, take her place alongside the nations of the world. What caused the Irish to prefer separation to union?
Ethnonationalism. Though they had lived alongside the English for centuries, the Irish saw themselves as the English saw them: as separate. They were Celts, not Anglo-Saxons, Church of Rome, not Church of England. Gaelic was their language, not English. The history on which they brooded was not the history of England or the empire but a centuries-long catalog of crimes against the Irish—from Drogheda and Wexford to the Penal Laws and the Potato Famine to the executions of the Easter Rising. Long after their war for independence had been won, hatred of England was a defining feature of diaspora Irish, a part of their DNA.
When, in 1939, Britain declared war against Hitler’s Germany, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia declared war in solidarity with the Mother Country. Ireland proclaimed a neutrality that she maintained through Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and America’s entry—indeed, to the end of the war.
England’s war was not Ireland’s war.
THE YOUNG TURKS
Unlike the secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905, many new ethno-states of the twentieth century were birthed in blood.
In the first decade of the century the Ottoman Empire, the “Sick Man of Europe,” in the cruel depiction attributed to Czar Nicholas I, had begun to die, and Western powers and former subject nations had begun to bite off provinces. In 1908, “Young Turks” first executed a coup in Salonika. From 1911 to 1918, Enver Bey, the future Enver Pasha, ran a virtual military dictatorship. His goal was to “Turkify” the empire by forcing subjects to use the Turkish language, accept national education, and have their sons serve in a national army. As there were millions of Christian Slavs, Greeks, and Armenians (as well as Muslim Arabs and Kurds) in the empire that stretched from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia, Turkification was resisted. In 1914, Turkey cast its lot with the Central Powers and won a legendary victory at Gallipoli after repelling a British-French fleet in the Dardanelles. That Allied naval disaster cost First Lord Winston Churchill his post. In that same year, 1915, the Turks, enraged at Armenians fighting alongside an invading Russian army, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions of their Armenian subjects that may have cost as many as 1.5 million lives. Armenians and others regard what the Turks did as genocide.
In 1918 the Turks went down to defeat, and the Treaty of Sèvres, imposed in Paris in 1920, marked the end of the empi
re. Under the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, Palestine, Transjordan, and Mesopotamia went to the British, and Syria and Lebanon to France. Arabs were denied the independence promised by Lawrence of Arabia. Three of the victorious Allies, France, Italy, and Britain, occupied parts of Turkey, while Greeks controlled western Anatolia almost to Ankara. Offered a mandate over Constantinople, in which Wilson was interested, the Americans wisely declined. The United States had never declared war on Turkey.
Came now the hour of Ataturk.
His army first forced out the French and Italians, then drove the Greeks out of Anatolia, slaughtering thousands in Smyrna, then confronted the British at Chanak. The British stood down and sailed away. By the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, ethnic cleansing was legitimized. Some 1.4 million Greeks were forced to leave Turkey and 400,000 Turks were forced out of lands that now belonged to Greece.
The caliph was put on the Orient Express. Mehmet VI, the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, left Constantinople on a British warship. Under the hero of Gallipoli, the Republic of Turkey was born as a secular nation, its institutions modeled on the West. Save for the Kurds, whose ethnonational drive for a home of their own would bedevil her to this day, Turkey was a land of, by, and for Turks alone. Out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire had come the first modern ethnonational state in the Middle East.
The tribal conflict between Greek and Turk endures on the island of Cyprus. The Turks invaded in 1974 to prevent annexation by Greece and a Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus remains a headache for NATO.
“EIN VOLK”
That Hitler was the personification of the German race was dogma in his party. And it was the treaties of Versailles and St. Germain that forced millions of Germans under alien rule that provided Hitler with the program he rode to power. To understand the rage in the German soul Hitler stoked, one must understand the history of the Great War, from the German point of view. By spring 1918, Germany was victorious on three fronts. Romania had been routed in 1916. The royal family had fled. The Italians had been broken at Caporetto in 1917. The Russians had thrown down their rifles, the czar had abdicated, and the Bolsheviks had signed away Russia’s European empire at Brest-Litovsk by March 1918. By spring, Ludendorff was back on the Marne. Had it not been for the Americans pouring into Allied lines at the rate of 250,000 soldiers a month, Germany might have won an armistice that would have left her undefeated on the Western Front and triumphant in the east.
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 29
