Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Censorship and the Propaganda bureaus worked together in Britain as well as elsewhere. The former concealed all stories of Entente violations of the laws of war or of the rules of humanity, and reports on their own military mistakes or their own war plans and less altruistic war aims, while the Propaganda Bureau widely publicized the violations and crudities of the Central Powers, their prewar schemes for mobilization, and their agreements regarding war aims. The German violation of Belgian neutrality was constantly bewailed, while nothing was said of the Entente violation of Greek neutrality. A great deal was made of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, while the Russian mobilization which had precipitated the war was hardly mentioned. In the Central Powers a great deal was made of the Entente “encirclement,” while nothing was said of the Kaiser’s demands for “a place in the sun” or the High Command’s refusal to renounce annexation of any part of Belgium. In general, manufacture of outright lies by propaganda agencies was infrequent, and the desired picture of the enemy was built up by a process of selection and distortion of evidence until, by 1918, many in the West regarded the Germans as bloodthirsty and sadistic militarists, while the Germans regarded the Russians as “subhuman monsters.” A great deal was made, especially by the British, of “atrocity” propaganda; stories of German mutilation of bodies, violation of women, cutting off of children’s hands, desecration of churches and shrines, and crucifixions of Belgians were widely believed in the West by 1916. Lord Bryce headed a committee which produced a volume of such stories in 1915, and it is quite evident that this well-educated man, “the greatest English authority on the United States,” was completely taken in by his own stories. Here, again, outright manufacture of falsehoods was infrequent, although General Henry Charteris in 1917 created a story that the Germans were cooking human bodies to extract glycerine, and produced pictures to prove it. Again, photographs of mutilated bodies in a Russian anti-Semitic outrage in 1905 were circulated as pictures of Belgians in 1915. There were several reasons for the use of such atrocity stories: (a) to build up the fighting spirit of the mass army; (b) to stiffen civilian morale; (c) to encourage enlistments, especially in England, where volunteers were used for one and a half years; (d) to increase subscriptions for war bonds; (e) to justify one’s own breaches of international law or the customs of war; (f) to destroy the chances of negotiating peace (as in December 1916) or to justify a severe final peace (as Germany did in respect to Brest-Litovsk); and (g) to win the support of neutrals. On the whole, the relative innocence and credulity of the average person, who was not yet immunized to propaganda assaults through mediums of mass communication in 1914, made the use of such stories relatively effective. But the discovery, in the period after 1919, that they had been hoaxed gave rise to a skepticism toward all government communications which was especially noticeable in the Second World War.

VI THE VERSAILLES SYSTEM AND THE RETURN TO “NORMALCY,” 1919-1929

The Peace Settlements, 1919-1923

Security, 1919-1935

Disarmament, 1919-1935

Reparations, 1919-1932

The Peace Settlements, 1919-1923

The First World War was ended by dozens of treaties signed in the period 1919-1923. Of these, the five chief documents were the five treaties of peace with the defeated Powers, named from the sites in the neighborhood of Paris where they were signed. These were:

Treaty of Versailles with Germany, June 28, 1919

Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria, September 10, 1919

Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria, November 27, 1919

Treaty of Trianon with Hungary, June 4, 1920

Treaty of Sevres with Turkey, August 20, 1920

The last of these, the Treaty of Sevres with Turkey, was never ratified and was replaced by a new treaty, signed at Lausanne in 1923.

The peace settlements made in this period were subjected to vigorous and detailed criticism in the two decades 1919-1939. This criticism was as ardent from the victors as from the vanquished. Although this attack was largely aimed at the terms of the treaties, the real causes of the attack did not lie in these terms, which were neither unfair nor ruthless, were far more lenient than any settlement which might have emerged from a German victory, and which created a new Europe which was, at least politically, more just than the Europe of 1914. The causes of the discontent with the settlements of 1919-1923 rested on the procedures which were used to make these settlements rather than on the terms of the settlements themselves. Above all, there was discontent at the contrast between the procedures which were used and the procedures which pretended to be used, as well as between the high-minded principles which were supposed to be applied and those which really were applied The peoples of the victorious nations had taken to heart their wartime propaganda about the rights of small nations, making the world safe for democracy, and putting an end both to power politics and to secret diplomacy. These ideals had been given concrete form in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Whether the defeated Powers felt the same enthusiasm for these high ideals is subject to dispute, but they had been promised, on November 5, 1918, that the peace settlements would be negotiated and would be based on the Fourteen Points. When it became clear that the settlements were to be imposed rather than negotiated, that the Fourteen Points had been lost in the confusion, and that the terms of the settlements had been reached by a process of secret negotiations from which the small nations had been excluded and in which power politics played a much larger role than the safety of democracy, there was a revulsion of feeling against the treaties.

In Britain and in Germany, propaganda barrages were aimed against these settlements until, by 1929, most of the Western World had feelings of guilt and shame whenever they thought of the Treaty of Versailles. There was a good deal of sincerity in these feelings, especially in England and in the United States, but there was also a great deal of insincerity behind them in all countries. In England the same groups, often the same people, who had made the wartime propaganda and the peace settlements were loudest in their complaint that the latter had fallen far below the ideals of the former, while all the while their real aims were to use power politics to the benefit of Britain. Certainly there were grounds for criticism, and, equally certainly, the terms of the peace settlements were far from perfect; but criticism should have been directed rather at the hypocrisy and lack of realism in the ideals of the wartime propaganda and at the lack of honesty of the chief negotiators in carrying on the pretense that these ideals were still in effect while they violated them daily, and necessarily violated them. The settlements were clearly made by secret negotiations, by the Great Powers exclusively, and by power politics. They had to be. No settlements could ever have been made on any other bases. The failure of the chief negotiators (at least the Anglo-Americans) to admit this is regrettable, but behind their reluctance to admit it is the even more regrettable fact that the lack of political experience and political education of the American and English electorates made it dangerous for the negotiators to admit the facts of life in international political relationships.

It is clear that the peace settlements were made by an organization which was chaotic and by a procedure which was fraudulent. None of this was deliberate. It arose rather from weakness and from ignorance, from a failure to decide, before the peace was made, who would make it, how it was to be made, and on what principles it would be based. The normal way to make peace after a war in which the victors form a coalition would be for the victors to hold a conference, agree on the terms they hope to get from the defeated, then have a congress with these latter to impose these terms, either with or without discussion and compromise. It was tacitly assumed in October and November, 1918, that this method was to be used to end the existing war. But this congress method could not be used in 1919 for several reasons. The members of the victorious coalition were so numerous (thirty-two Allied and Associated Powers) that they could have agreed on terms only slowly and after considerable preliminary organization. This preliminary organization never occurred, largely because President Wilson was too busy to participate in the process, was unwilling to delegate any real authority to others, and, with a relatively few, intensely held ideas (like the League of Nations, democracy, and self-determination), had no taste for the details of organization. Wilson was convinced that if he could only get the League of Nations accepted, any undesirable details in the terms of the treaties could be remedied later through the League. Lloyd George and Clemenceau made use of this conviction to obtain numerous provisions in the terms which were undesirable to Wilson but highly desirable to them.