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

The treaties of peace set the boundaries of the defeated states but not those of the new states. These latter were fixed by a number of treaties made in the years following 1918. The process led to disputes and even to violent clashes of arms, and some issues are still subjects of discord to the present time.

The most violent controversies arose in regard to the boundaries of Poland. Of these, only that with Germany was set by the Treaty of Versailles. The Poles refused to accept their other frontiers as suggested by the Allies at Paris, and by 1920 were at war with Lithuania over Vilna, with Russia over the eastern border, with the Ukrainians over Galicia, and with Czechoslovakia over Teschen. The struggle over Vilna began in 1919 when the Poles took the district from the Russians but soon lost it again. The Russians yielded it to the Lithuanians in 1920, and this was accepted by Poland, but within three months it was seized by Polish freebooters. A plebiscite, ordered by the League of Nations, was held in January 1922 under Polish control and gave a Polish majority. The Lithuanians refused to accept the validity of this vote or a decision of the Conference of Ambassadors of March 1923, giving the area to Poland. Instead, Lithuania continued to consider itself at war with Poland until December 1927.

Poland did not fare so well at the other end of its frontier. There fighting broke out between Czech and Polish forces over Teschen in January 1919. The Conference of Ambassadors divided the area between the two claimants, but gave the valuable coal mines to Czechoslovakia (July 1920).

Poland’s eastern frontier was settled only after a bloody war with the Soviet Union. The Supreme Council in December 1919 had laid down the so-called “Curzon Line” as the eastern boundary of Polish administration, but within six months the Polish armies had crossed this and advanced beyond Kiev. A Russian counterattack soon drove the Poles back, and Polish territory was invaded in its turn. The Poles appealed in panic to the Supreme Council, which was reluctant to intervene. The French, however, did not hesitate, and sent General Weygand with supplies to defend Warsaw. The Russian offensive was broken on the Vistula, and peace negotiations began. The final settlement, signed at Riga in March 1921, gave Poland a frontier 150 miles farther east than the Curzon Line and brought into Poland many non-Polish peoples, including one million White Russians and four million Ukrainians.

Romania also had a dispute with Russia arising from the Romanian occupation of Bessarabia in 1918. In October 1920, the Conference of Ambassadors recognized Bessarabia as part of Romania. Russia protested, and the United States refused to accept the transfer. In view of these disturbances Poland and Romania signed a defensive alliance against Russia in March 1921.

The most important dispute of this kind arose over the disposition of Fiume. This problem was acute because one of the Great Powers was involved. The Italians had yielded Fiume to Yugoslavia in the Treaty of London of 1915 and had promised, in November 1918, to draw the Italian-Yugoslav boundary on lines of nationality. Thus they had little claim to Fiume. Nevertheless, at Paris they insisted on it, for political and economic reasons. Having just excluded the Habsburg Empire from the Adriatic Sea, and not wishing to see any new Power rise in its place, they did all they could to hamper Yugoslavia and to curtail its access to the Adriatic. Moreover, the Italian acquisition of Trieste gave them a great seaport with no future, since it was separated by a political boundary from the hinterland whence it could draw its trade. To protect Trieste, Italy wanted to control all the possible competing ports in the area. The city of Fiume itself was largely Italian, but the suburbs and surrounding countryside were overwhelmingly Slav. The experts at Paris wished to give Italy neither Fiume nor Dalmatia, but Colonel House tried to overrule the experts in order to obtain Italian support for the League of Nations in return. Wilson overruled House and issued his famous appeal to the Italian people which resulted in the temporary withdrawal of the Italian delegation from Paris. After their return, the issue was left unsettled. In September 1919 an erratic Italian poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, with a band of freebooters, seized Fiume and set up an independent government on a comic-opera basis. The dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia continued with decreasing bitterness until November 1920, when they signed a treaty at Rapallo dividing the area but leaving Fiume itself a free city. This settlement was not satisfactory. A group of Fascists from Italy (where this party was not yet in office) seized the city in March 1922 and were removed by the Italian Army three weeks later. The problem was finally settled by the Treaty of Rome of January 1924, by which Fiume was granted to Italy, but the suburb of Port Baros and a fifty-year lease on one of the three harbor basins went to Yugoslavia.

These territorial disputes are of importance because they continued to lacerate relationships between neighboring states until well into the period of World War II and even later. The names of Fiume, Thrace, Bessarabia, Epirus, Transylvania, Memel, Vilna, Teschen, the Saar, Danzig, and Macedonia were still echoing as battle cries of overheated nationalists twenty years after the Peace Conference assembled at Paris. The work of that conference had undoubtedly reduced the numbers of minority peoples, but this had only served to increase the intensity of feeling of the minorities remaining. The numbers of these remained large. There were over 1,000,000 Germans in Poland, 550,000 in Hungary, 3,100,000 in Czechoslovakia, about 700,000 in Romania, 500,000 in Yugoslavia, and 250,000 in Italy. There were 450,000 Magyars in Yugoslavia, 750,000 in Czechoslovakia, and about 1,500,000 in Romania. There were about 5,000,000 White Russians and Ukrainians in Poland and about 1,100,000 of these in Romania. To protect these minorities the Allied and Associated Powers forced the new states of central and eastern Europe to sign minority treaties, by which these minorities were granted a certain minimum of cultural and political rights. These treaties were guaranteed by the League of Nations, but there was no power to enforce observation of their terms. The most that could be done was to issue a public reprimand against the offending government, as was done, more than once, for example, against Poland.

The disarmament provisions of the peace treaties were much easier to draw up than to enforce. It was clearly understood that the disarmament of the defeated Powers was but the first step toward the general disarmament of the victor nations as well. In the case of the Germans this connection was explicitly made in the treaty so that it was necessary, in order to keep Germany legally disarmed, for the other signers of the treaty to work constantly toward general disarmament after 1919 lest the Germans claim that they were no longer bound to remain disarmed.

In all of the treaties, certain weapons like tanks, poisonous gas, airplanes, heavy artillery, and warships over a certain size, as well as all international trade in arms, were forbidden. Germany was allowed a small navy fixed in number and size of vessels, while Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria were allowed no navy worthy of the name. Each army was restricted in size, Germany to 100,000 men, Austria to 30,000, Hungary to 35,000, and Bulgaria to 20,000. Moreover, these men had to be volunteers on twelve-year enlistments, and all compulsory military training, general staffs, or mobilization plans were forbidden. These training provisions were a mistake, forced through by the Anglo-Americans over the vigorous protests of the French. The Anglo-Americans regarded compulsory military training as “militaristic”; the French considered it the natural concomitant of universal manhood suffrage and had no objections to its use in Germany, since it would provide only a large number of poorly trained men; they did, however, object to the twelve-year enlistment favored by the British, since this would provide Germany with a large number of highly trained men who could be used as officers in any revived German Army. On this, as in so many issues where the French were overruled by the Anglo-Americans, time was to prove that the French position was correct.