THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  A number of historical conclusions follow from this: first, that the war that began in 1914 must properly be seen as having continued until 1990, at which time a legitimate constitutional form of the State achieved a consensus among the great powers; second, that the constitutional mandate sought by the parties at Versailles was therefore premature, and could only come when the ideological conflict among the great powers was settled; and third, that the so-called failure of Versailles was to a very great degree preordained, and perhaps could not ultimately have been avoided. In Book I, we took up the first of these conclusions. Here we shall take up the second and third.

  Although the Versailles agreement might have been a constitution for the society of states in the way that the peace agreements at Westphalia and Vienna may be said to be, it can be quickly shown that this was not quite the case.†

  The Treaty of Versailles and the various other treaties that together form the Peace of Paris of 1919 did not constitute a settlement consensually agreed to by the great powers who fought the war. The treaty terms of Versailles were imposed upon Germany, while hostile military action—a blockade that starved thousands to death during the pendency of the Peace Conference—was still underway. A single state's constitution can of course be imposed by war, but a constitution for the society of states requires consensus because it depends upon the vanquished state playing by the rules once the war is over. Moreover, the United States refused to ratify the treaty that emerged from the Peace Conference, and the Soviet Union was excluded altogether. No constitutive agreement can emerge when so many great powers are absent or alienated.

  To be sure, there were many similarities between the Paris Peace Conference and the Congress of Vienna. Seventy plenipotentiaries from thirty-two countries came to Paris. There were 1,000 delegates. New states—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia—were created or legitimated, and the conference assumed the legal authority to abrogate pre-existing treaties, most important, the Russo-German treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Like the Vienna Congress, all the impor-tant decisions were made by a directorate of powers, which then presented the outcome to the general convocation. The Council of Four took the decisions, in secret, that determined the content of the peace treaty, just as the Committee of Four had attempted to determine the outcome of the deliberations at Vienna a century before. The draft peace treaty was presented to the Conference on May 6, 1919, just one day before it was to go to the German delegates.

  The critical difference was that the states themselves were different: they were becoming nation-states. As Osiander insightfully points out, in “order to enhance their domestic legitimacy, increasingly governments gave up their solidarity with one another on which the Vienna system had been based.”3 This development can be attributed to the different basis of legitimacy claimed by these two different state archetypes.

  The nation-state pursued a new bargain with the nation: in exchange for the release of enormous national energy, the State harnessed itself to the nation, promising more than simply its own aggrandizement and glory; it promised actual improvement in the material well-being of its citizens. Because the lot of all the citizens of a state can seldom be simultaneously improved, and because most governmental decisions produce losers as well as winners, such a task inevitably brought divisive pressures to bear within the State. In the parliamentary democracies, if they were lucky, this meant a restless changing of governments as the discontented accumulated with each decision; for the fascist states it encouraged an effort to divide the domestic polity into citizens and scapegoats, and to find foreign countries that could be frankly exploited to benefit the citizenry; for the socialist states, it invited a relentless program of class warfare, exalting one part of the citizenry at the expense of the other. None of these ideological forms, however, gained in prestige or sentiment by identification with the society of states as a whole or with the state-nation heritage of Vienna. The leaders of nation-states distanced themselves from the society of states because they simply had no choice. War itself was blamed on the society of state-nations.4 Speaking of the war that had just ended, Woodrow Wilson said: “It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellowmen as pawns and tools.”5

  Wilson insisted that there be “no odor of the Vienna settlement” at Paris.6 Insofar as the nation-state tolerated a supranational presence, it was that of all peoples, not merely governments. As Wilson put it, “there is a great voice of humanity… in the world… which he who cannot hear is deaf… We are not obeying the mandate of parties or of politics. We are obeying the mandate of humanity.”*

  Such a view of the role of peoples, of course, is not incompatible with a constitution. Indeed it is the basis of most nation-state constitutions, including that of the United States. And it is true that the U.S. constitution provided the basis for the structure and ideology of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. But before these provisions could be adopted as a constitution for the society of states a consensus was necessary on the ideological valence of the nation-state, which among other matters determines just how the public's mandate is to be ascertained. The United States was lucky to have achieved a domestic consensus on this matter early on, having fought a terrible civil war to determine its terms for the nation-state; this consensus was one the other great powers of the twentieth century did not share.

  It is commonly held that the principal blunder of the peacemakers at Paris was their harsh treatment of defeated Germany. The Allies rejected the example of the victors at Vienna, which had embraced the new French government on the grounds that France had replaced the Napoleonic adversary and was now again a legitimate member of the society of states. Instead, the victors at Versailles rejected the proposal of Colonel House that the German delegates take part in the Conference, as provided in the U.S.-German exchange of notes on November 11, 1918, and refused to permit even oral discussions with the German representatives prior to presenting them with a draft treaty that the Germans were coerced into accepting by threats of further war and by the ongoing Allied blockade that had brought famine to Germany.

  This situation was largely due to the unusual way in which the war had ended. Germany had agreed to an armistice on the basis of the famous Fourteen Points, a paper presented by Wilson that was in important ways inconsistent with the war aims of the other allies.7 This paper was given a gloss to hold the Allies together, but this interpretation was not communicated to the Germans.8 In fact, the Allies differed among themselves on major issues and were therefore unable to present Germany with comprehensive terms prior to the convocation of the Paris Conference.9 Thus the Conference itself became the forum for hashing out terms for Germany among the contentious Allies, terms that were exaggerated in order to allow for concessions that, owing to public expectations inflated by these very exaggerations, could scarcely in fact be made. The Germans were not invited to participate because no decision was ever taken by the Allies whether the Paris Conference was a meeting to draft preliminary terms that, once negotiated with the Germans, would give way to a Congress of all parties, or a meeting to agree on a final settlement. In the event the “preliminary” agreement was so precarious among the Allies themselves that the Germans were not permitted to discuss its terms, and it metamorphosed into a final settlement driven by Allied fear that their domestic publics had lost patience.

  The German response to the treaty with which they were confronted was one of bitter dejection. In the “Observations of the German Delegation on the Conditions of Peace,” the German government expressed dismay that Germany's new constitutional arrangements—which had replaced the Kaiserreich with a parliamentary republic—had not been taken into account by the Allies. Furthermore, “[n]o recognition of [Wilson's] principles can be traced in the peace do
cument laid before us,” they wrote.

  The Allied reply to this paper was brutal:

  The Allied and Associated Powers believe that they will be false to those who have given their all to save the freedom of the world if they consent to treat this war on any other basis than as a crime against humanity… Justice is what the German delegation asks for and… justice is what Germany shall have… Somebody must suffer for the consequences of the war. Is it to be Germany, or only the people she has wronged?

  Article 231 of the Treaty included a “war-guilt” clause by which Germany took responsibility for the war. This too was a break with earlier general settlements: Westphalia, Utrecht, and Vienna had all included amnesty clauses, deliberately omitting any distinction between victors and vanquished.10 The Versailles Treaty instead provided for the extradition and trial of the kaiser.

  Of course the Allies' charges were perfectly right: Germany had caused the war, Bethmann Hollweg's celebrated remark (“How did it all happen?”) to the contrary notwithstanding. Yet the failure to discriminate between the regime that had prosecuted the war and the Weimar Republic that now ruled in Germany seems an obvious and gratuitous mistake. Had European statesmen already forgotten the counsel of Castlereagh that punitive reparations would drive the former enemy's successor regime either into disrepute with its own people or into fresh aggressions? Wilson himself had said, on January 22, 1917:

  Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon a quicksand.11

  It seems clear that the victors had lost sight of the fact that they were framing a constitution for the society of states and behaved instead as though they were drafting a bill to be paid. Only Wilson saw the work of the Conference as constitutional in nature, and he contented himself with providing the procedural provisions for such a constitution, neglecting the political consensus that had to be its foundation. By eliminating Germany from this consensus, and having excluded Russia at the outset, any consti-tutional program, such as the kind that came out of Vienna, or Westphalia, or Utrecht or Augsburg, was doomed. But was it doomed anyway?

  We have observed that the end of an epochal war provides the opportunity for creating “constitutions in the usual sense of that word because they… [establish] diplomatic and legal rules for international relations and [determine] the nature of future conflicts, not only among the former belligerents, but of other states in the state system as well.”12 Yet, with a hostile Bolshevik regime in Russia, and an undiscredited, popular fascist movement in Germany, the epochal war that began in 1914 was far from over. It was an obvious mistake—one that was clear to virtually all the contemporaries—not to try to shore up the Weimar Republic by a generous peace and to enlist its participation in the drafting of an international constitution under which it would have to live and whose support it would depend upon. Instead, Germany was not even permitted to join the League of Nations at its founding. But too little was settled by 1919 for us to conclude that the epochal war of this century had ended, and if there was no end to the war, there can have been no beginning to the constitutional peace that was to follow it.

  As a result, the Allied leaders were sharply divided between pressing for a strategic advantage over the Germans—bearing in mind always the potential for a war with Russia as well—or ratifying a conciliatory peace that would, perforce, leave Germany in a formidable military position. This accounts for the curious schizophrenia of the peace agreement, which neither reconciled Germany nor crushed her strategic power. It also accounts for the odd combination of self-determination for some nationalities and a ruthless, pawnlike treatment of others that would have bemused even the most cynical peacemakers at Vienna. Two new states, Poland and Czechoslovakia, were created on the grounds that the Polish and the Czech nations were each entitled to a nation-state, but both these new states included a substantial number of ethnic Germans who, presumably, were no less entitled to their own state. Indeed it was perfectly plain that these new countries were purposely being created with an endowment that would make them enemies to the states from which these lands were taken, Germany and Russia. That was the victors' point: to create new allies for a future war, and to weaken the adversaries they might face in such a war. Germany and Austria were prevented from amalgamating with the Sudetenland, Alsace-Lorraine, and each other, for the treaty forbade them to unify, despite the fact that, of all the peoples of Central Europe, the Germans had the clearest claim to a single state on the grounds of national self-determination.

  Georges Clemenceau is the dark figure who is blamed for injecting a venomous revanchism into the peace agreement, abetted by David Lloyd George, largely on the grounds of campaign promises made to British voters that the Germans would pay Britain's war debt (and perhaps more), and only slightly diverted by a hopelessly naïve and ineffectual Woodrow Wilson. This was Keynes's famous portrait of the world's leaders at any rate, and it has been adopted generally by historians and politicians (it is quoted in Chapter 14).

  There was, of course, merit in Keynes's analysis that the reparations burden placed on Germany could not possibly have been fully liquidated, and the peace agreement generally was a punitive one. Perhaps when World War II came, as Keynes* predicted it would, he felt that this analysis had been vindicated. However that may be, the attitude that Germany had been treated unjustly, widespread among intellectuals and journalists of the period, had much to do with the feckless appeasement of the interwar years after the Nazis came to power, and the refusal by the Allies to enforce the terms of Versailles when these were contemptuously violated by Germany. The Versailles terms gave Hitler a rhetorical stick with which to beat the Weimar Republic: either the republic's politicians could attempt to comply with the agreement or negotiate a reduction in its terms—in either case they would be groveling supplicants to their oppressors and traitors to the German people—or they could rebel. But if they rebelled, they sacrificed the one link that gave parliamentary governance legitimacy in Germany, namely its connection to the other parliamentary states. As the German delegates had petitioned the Peace Conference in 1919: “In view of the inter-connection which exists today between conditions throughout the world no people can, however, stand alone in its development but each one, if it is to be an efficient and trustworthy member of the family of nations, needs the support of its neighbors…”13 And in any case, if the German people wished to rebel against the society of states, they would not turn to the politicians of Weimar to lead such a revolution.

  But was Keynes right to imply that a more generous peace would have lasted? Was Clemenceau so obviously wrong? For all of his ridicule of Wilson, it is Keynes who sounds disturbingly naive in imagining that a reduction in reparations debts—which in the event were, in fact, dramatically reduced, as Lloyd George and others fully expected—would reconcile the German public to its defeat. It is Keynes, not Clemenceau, who treated the German and British states as if they were fungible, and who ignored the ideological strife going on with deadly earnestness in Germany and on the continent. It can surely be argued that a more generous settlement and a refusal to take territory from Germany or prevent its national consolidation would have merely made a stronger Third Reich. This point was pressed by Clemenceau in this exchange with Wilson.

  WILSON: I trust that, in principle, you are agreed with Mr. Lloyd George as to the moderation which must be shown toward Germany. We do not want to destroy Germany and we could not do so: our greatest mistake would be to furnish her with powerful reasons for seeking revenge at some future time…. We must not give our enemies even an impression of injustice.

  CLEMENCEAU: My principles are the same as yours; I am considering only their application… [W]hat we regard as just here in this room will not necessarily be accepted as such by the Germans… Their idea
of justice, I assure you, is not ours… Shortly before he died Napoleon said, “Nothing permanent is founded on force.” I am not so sure… You wish to do justice to the Germans. Do not believe that they will ever forgive us; they will only seek the chance for revenge.14

  I am inclined to believe that German war resurgence had less to do with the eternal German spirit, as Clemenceau claimed to believe, than with the unsettled constitution of the German nation-state, the legitimacy of which was very much contested. It was not simply revenge that drove German politics, but the strife that resulted from three closely matched ideological candidates for control of the nation-state. Until this competition was settled, Germany could not have been a competent partner to a new constitution for the society of states. This can be seen clearly in the example of Italy, which neither suffered the loser's dismemberment nor manifested an especially warlike spirit.

  Indeed Italy had been a member of the victorious alliance. Its premier, Orlando, was included in the Council of Four. On a visit to Italy in January 1919, Wilson had given his support to Italy's claim to the strategic Brenner Pass. This meant an extension of Italian rule to a large ethnically German population and was in direct contradiction to Point Nine of the Fourteen Points, which provided that a “readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” When the Peace Conference later convened and Italy pressed for more territorial concessions at the expense of Yugoslavia, Wilson balked and effectively checked Italian claims. The consequence was the dramatic abandonment of the Conference by Orlando, a wounded refusal to sign the Treaty, and a persistent claim for aggrandizement that the Italian fascists could exploit. It was the weakness of Orlando's domestic position and the strength of Italian fascism that allowed such a claim to become a passionate and effective means of tormenting the Italian parliamentary government in Rome. So long as the new nation-state did not have a sure ground of legitimacy, the Peace Conference could only offer opportunities for further political struggle. It could not end the domestic political conflict. Yet without ending such conflicts, the Conference itself could not produce a consensual constitution: there were not sufficient legitimate regimes that would ratify it, whatever its content.