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

The Treaty of Versailles was presented to the Plenary Conference on May 6, 1919, and to the German delegation the next day. The conference was supposed to accept it without comment, but General Foch, commander in chief of the French armies and of the Entente forces in the war, made a severe attack on the treaty in regard to its provisions for enforcement. These provisions gave little more than the occupation of the Rhineland and three bridgeheads on the right bank of the Rhine as already existed under the Armistice of November 11, 1918. According to the treaty, these areas were to be occupied for from five to fifteen years to enforce a treaty whose substantive provisions required Germany to pay reparations for at least a generation and to remain disarmed forever. Foch insisted that he needed the left bank of the Rhine and the three bridgeheads on the right bank for at least thirty years. Clemenceau, as soon as the meeting was over, rebuked Foch for disrupting the harmony of the assembly, but Foch had put his finger on the weakest, yet most vital, portion of the treaty.

The presentation of the text of the treaty to the Germans the next day was no happier. Having received the document, the chief of the German delegation, Foreign Minister Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, made a long speech in which he protested bitterly against the failure to negotiate and the violation of the prearmistice commitments. As a deliberate insult to his listeners, he spoke from a seated position.

The German delegation sent the victorious Powers short notes of detailed criticism during May and exhaustive counterproposals on May 29th. Running to 443 pages of German text, these counterproposals, criticized the treaty, clause by clause, accused the victors of bad faith in violating the Fourteen Points, and offered to accept the League of Nations, the disarmament sections, and reparations of 100 thousand million marks if the Allies would withdraw any statement that Germany had, alone, caused the war and would readmit Germany to the world’s markets. Most of the territorial changes were rejected except where they could be shown to be based on self-determination (thus adopting Wilson’s point of view).

These proposals led to one of the most severe crises of the conference as Lloyd George, who had been reelected in December on his promise to the British people to squeeze Germany dry and had done his share in this direction from December to May, now began to fear that Germany would refuse to sign and adopt a passive resistance which would require the Allies to use force. Since the British armies were being disbanded, such a need of force would fall largely on the French and would be highly welcome to people like Foch who favored duress against Germany. Lloyd George was afraid that any occupation of Germany by French armies would lead to complete French hegemony on the continent of Europe and that these occupation forces might never be withdrawn, having achieved, with British connivance, what Britain had fought so vigorously to prevent at the time of Louis XIV and Napoleon. In other words, the reduction in German’s power as a consequence of her defeat was leading Britain back to her old balance-of-power policies under which Britain opposed the strongest Power on the continent by building up the strength of the second strongest. At the same time, Lloyd George was eager to continue the British demobilization in order to satisfy the British people and to reduce the financial burden on Britain so that the country could balance its budget, deflate, and go back on the gold standard. For these reasons, Lloyd George suggested that the treaty be weakened by reducing the Rhineland occupation from fifteen years to two, that a plebiscite be held in Upper Silesia (which had been given to Poland), that Germany be admitted to the League of Nations at once, and that the reparations burden be reduced. He obtained only the plebiscite in Upper Silesia and certain other disputed areas, Wilson rejecting the other suggestions and upbraiding the prime minister for his sudden change of attitude.

Accordingly, the Allied answer to the German counterproposals (written by Philip Kerr, later Lord Lothian) made only minor modifications in the original terms (chiefly the addition of five plebiscites in Upper Silesia, Allenstein, Marienwerder, North Schleswig, and the Saar, of which the last was to be held in 1935, the others immediately). It also accused the Germans of sole guilt in causing the war and of inhuman practices during it, and gave them a five-day ultimatum for signing the treaty as it stood. The German delegation at once returned to Germany and recommended a refusal to sign. The Cabinet resigned rather than sign, but a new Cabinet was formed of Catholics and Socialists. Both of these groups were fearful that an Allied invasion of Germany would lead to chaos and confusion which would encourage Bolshevism in the east and separatism in the west; they voted to sign if the articles on war guilt and war criminals could be struck from the treaty. When the Allies refused these concessions, the Catholic Center Party voted 64-14 not to sign. At this critical moment, when rejection seemed certain, the High Command of the German Army, through Chief of Staff Wilhelm Groener, ordered the Cabinet to sign in order to prevent a military occupation of Germany. On June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the assassination at Sarajevo, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles where the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871, the Treaty of Versailles was signed by all the delegations except the Chinese. The latter refused, in protest against the disposition of the prewar German concessions in Shantung.

The Austrian Treaty was signed by a delegation headed by Karl Renner but only after the victors had rejected a claim that Austria was a succession state rather than a defeated Power and had forced the country to change its name from the newly adopted “German Austria” to the title “Republic of Austria.” The new country was forbidden to make any movement toward union with Germany without the approval of the League of Nations.

The Treaty of Neuilly was signed by a single Bulgarian delegate, the Peasants’ Party leader Aleksandr Stamboliski. By this agreement Bulgaria lost western Thrace, her outlet to the Aegean, which had been annexed from Turkey in 1912, as well as certain mountain passes in the west which were ceded from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia for strategic reasons.

The Treaty of Trianon signed in 1920 was the most severe of the peace treaties and the most rigidly enforced. For these and other reasons Hungary was the most active political force for revision of treaties during the period 1924-1934 and was encouraged in this attitude by Italy from 1927 to 1934 in the hope that there might be profitable fishing in such troubled waters. Hungary had good reason to be discontented. The fall of the Habsburg dynasty in 1918 and the uprisings of the subject peoples of Hungary, like the Poles, Slovaks, Romanians, and Croatians, brought to power in Budapest a liberal government under Count Michael Károlyi. This government was at once threatened by a Bolshevik uprising under Bela Kun. In order to protect itself, the Károlyi government asked for an Allied occupation force until after the elections scheduled for April 1919. This request was refused by General Franchet d’Esperey, under the influence of a reactionary Hungarian politician, Count Stephen Bethlen. The Károlyi regime fell before the attacks of Bela Kun and the Romanians in consequence of lack of support from the West. After Bela Kun’s reign of Red terrorism, which lasted six months (March-August, 1920), and his flight before a Romanian invasion of Hungary, the reactionaries came to power with Admiral Miklos Horthy as regent and head of the state (1920-1944) and Count Bethlen as prime minister (1921-1931). Count Károlyi, who was pro-Allied, anti-German, pacifist, democratic, and liberal, realized that no progress was possible in Hungary without some solution of the agrarian question and the peasant discontent arising from the monopolization of the land. Because the Allies refused to support this program, Hungary fell into the hands of Horthy and Bethlen, who were anti-Allied, pro-German, undemocratic, militaristic, and unprogressive. This group was persuaded to sign the Treaty of Trianon by a trick and ever afterward repudiated it. Maurice Paléologue, secretary-general of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (but acting on behalf of France’s greatest industrialist, Eugene Schneider), made a deal with the Hungarians that if they would sign the Treaty of Trianon as it stood and give Schneider control of the Hungarian state railways, the port of Budapest, and the Hungarian General Credit Bank (which had a stranglehold on Hungarian industry) France would eventually make Hungary one of the mainstays of its anti-German bloc in eastern Europe, would sign a military convention with Hungary, and would, at the proper time, obtain a drastic revision of the Treaty of Trianon. The Hungarian side of this complex deal was largely carried out, but British and Italian objections to the extension of French economic control into central Europe disrupted the negotiations and prevented Hungary from obtaining its reward. Paléologue, although forced to resign and replaced at the Quai d’Orsay by the anti-Hungarian and pro-Czech Philippe Berthelot, received his reward from Schneider. He was made a director of Schneider’s personal holding company for his central-European interests, the Union européene industrielle et financiére. The Treaty of Sevres with Turkey was the last one made and the only one never ratified. There were three reasons for the delay: (1) the uncertainty about the role of the United States, which was expected to accept control of the Straits and a mandate for Armenia, thus forming a buffer against Soviet Russia; (2) the instability of the Turkish government, which was threatened by a nationalist uprising led by Mustafa Kemal; and (3) the scandal caused by the Bolshevik publication of the secret treaties regarding the Ottoman Empire, since these treaties contrasted so sharply with the expressed war aims of the Allies. The news that the United States refused to participate in the Near East settlement made it possible to draw up a treaty. This was begun by the Supreme Council at its London Conference of February 1920, and continued at San Remo in April. It was signed by the sultan’s government on August 20, 1920, but the Nationalists under Mustafa Kemal refused to accept it and set up an insurgent government at Ankara. The Greeks and Italians, with Allied support, invaded Turkey and attempted to force the treaty on the Nationalists, but they were much weakened by dissension behind the facade of Entente solidarity. The French believed that greater economic concessions could be obtained from the Kemalist government, while the British felt that richer prospects were to be obtained from the sultan. In particular, the French were prepared to support the claims of Standard Oil to such concessions, while the British were prepared to support Royal Dutch Shell. The Nationalist forces made good use of these dissensions. After buying off the Italians and French with economic concessions, they launched a counteroffensive against the Greeks. Although England came to the rescue of the Greeks, it received no support from the other Powers, while the Turks had the support of Soviet Russia. The Turks destroyed the Greeks, burned Smyrna, and came face-to-face with the British at Chanak. At this critical moment, the Dominions, in answer to Curzon’s telegraphed appeal, refused to support a war with Turkey. The Treaty of Sevres, already in tatters, had to be discarded. A new conference at Lausanne in November 1922 produced a moderate and negotiated treaty which was signed by the Kemalist government on July 24, 1923. This act ended, in a formal way, the First World War. It also took a most vital step toward establishing a new Turkey which would serve as a powerful force for peace and stability in the Near East. The decline of Turkey, which had continued for four hundred years, was finally ended.