Margaret MacMillan - Paris 1919, Six Months That Changed the World.pdf - historia i geografia - kuszaba

PARIS

SIX MONTHS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

1919

Margaret MacMillan

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Foreword

Richard Holbrooke

In diplomacy, as in life itself, one often learns more from failures

than from successes. Triumphs will seem, in retrospect, to be

foreordained, a series of brilliant actions and decisions that may in

fact have been lucky or inadvertent, whereas failures illuminate

paths and pitfalls to be avoided—in the parlance of modern

bureaucrats, lessons learned. With this in mind, it is time to look

again at what happened in Paris in 1919. Margaret MacMillan’s

engrossing account of that seminal event contains some success

stories, to be sure, but measured against the judgment of history

and consequences, it is a study of flawed decisions with terrible

consequences, many of which haunt us to this day.

In the headline version of history, the road from the Hall of

Mirrors to the German invasion of Poland only twenty years later is

usually presented as a straight line. But as MacMillan forcefully

demonstrates, this widely accepted view of history distorts the

nature of the decisions made in Paris and minimizes the importance

of actions taken in the intervening years.

The manner in which the war ended—with an “armistice” and

no fighting on German soil—played a significant role in subsequent

events. “Things might have been different,” MacMillan writes, “if

Germany had been more thoroughly defeated.” Most Germans

outside the High Command did not realize that Germany was

finished militarily, and therefore did not regard November 11, 1918,

as a day of surrender. Hitler would capitalize on this; his promise to

undo the Treaty of Versailles was a potent and popular theme

during his rise to power. But MacMillan corrects the widely held

view that the reparations payments imposed by the victors were so

onerous as to have caused the wreck of the German economy that

paved the way for Hitler.

By any standard, the cast of characters that assembled in

Paris in 1919 was remarkable, from Lawrence of Arabia to a small

Vietnamese kitchen hand later known as Ho Chi Minh. And for the

first time in history, an American stood at the center of a great

world drama. Woodrow Wilson inspired tens of millions who never

met him, and frustrated those who worked with him. He was

idealistic and remote, naive and rigid, noble and conflicted. His

strengths and weaknesses, his health, even the influence of his

overbearing and ignorant wife, were all critical factors in events of

historic importance.

In the eighty years since he left office, Wilson’s reputation has

risen and fallen regularly—but he remains as fascinating and

central to an understanding of modern American foreign policy as

ever. His many supporters, from Herbert Hoover to Robert

McNamara, have argued that his enemies in both Paris and the

United States Senate were responsible for the undoing of one of

history’s noblest dreams. Others, including Senator Jesse Helms,

have viewed Wilson’s determined adversary, Senator Henry Cabot

Lodge, as a principled protector of American sovereignty and

charged Wilson with seeking to undermine the American

Constitution. Another school of thought, especially prevalent in the

latter years of the Cold War, criticized Wilson for unrealistic, overly

moralistic goals; among its best-known practitioners are George F.

Kennan and Henry Kissinger, who accused Wilson of “extraordinary

conceit,” even while conceding that he “originated what would

become the dominant intellectual school of American foreign

policy.” (To Kissinger’s horror, his president, Richard Nixon, placed

Wilson’s portrait in the place of honor in the Cabinet Room.)

Through the fog of this never-ending debate, one thing is clear:

as Wilson arrived in France in December 1918, he ignited great

hopes throughout the world with his stirring Fourteen Points—

especially the groundbreaking concept of “self-determination.” Yet

Wilson, often ill-informed or badly prepared for detailed

negotiations, seemed vague as to what his own phrase actually

meant. “When I gave utterance to those words,” he admitted later, “I

said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which

are coming to us day after day.”

Even at the time it was recognized that the concept of self-

determination was, as MacMillan puts it, “controversial and

opaque.”

“When the President talks of ‘self-determination,’” Secretary of

State Robert Lansing asked, “what unit has he in mind? Does he

mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?… It will raise

hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of

lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream

of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late.”

Lansing was one of the first to recognize a dilemma that lies at

the core of many of today’s bitterest disputes. Still, it was not

Wilson’s dreams but his decision to compromise them (by letting

Japan take the Shantung peninsula in China, for example) that cost

the world so dearly. Ironically, when Wilson returned home, he

made the opposite mistake: by refusing to make relatively minor

compromises with Senate moderates, he lost his chance to get the

treaty (and American membership in the League of Nations) ratified.

Some of the most intractable problems of the modern world

have roots in decisions made right after the end of the Great War.

Among them one could list the four Balkan wars between 1991 and

1999; the crisis over Iraq (whose present borders resulted from

Franco-British rivalries and casual mapmaking); the continuing

quest of the Kurds for self-determination; disputes between Greece

and Turkey; and the endless struggle between Arabs and Jews over

land that each thought had been promised them.

As the peacemakers met in Paris, new nations emerged and

great empires died. Excessively ambitious, the Big Four set out to

do nothing less than fix the world, from Europe to the far Pacific.

But facing domestic pressures, events they could not control, and

conflicting claims they could not reconcile, the negotiators were, in

the end, simply overwhelmed— and made deals and compromises

that would echo down through history.

Even then, they sensed that they were laying the seeds for

future problems. “I cannot say for how many years, perhaps I

should say for how many centuries, the crisis which has begun will

continue,” predicted Georges Clemenceau, whose own behavior

contributed to the failure. “Yes, this treaty will bring us burdens,

troubles, miseries, difficulties, and that will continue for long

years.”

MacMillan brings back to life some great dramas: the Italian

walkout after the failure of their effort to gain control of much of the

Yugoslav coast; the Japanese grab of the Shantung peninsula,

which launched the May Fourth Movement in China and started the

path to war and revolution in Asia; the dismemberment of Hungary,

which left millions of Hungarians permanently outside their own

country’s borders; the inability of the Big Four to deal with the new

Soviet government, other than by sending a feckless expeditionary

force into the Russian civil war; the dissolution of the Ottoman

empire and the rise of one of the twentieth century’s most

remarkable leaders, Kemal Atatürk; and last but not least, the

creation of Yugoslavia (originally, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats,

and Slovenes) out of the disparate peoples of the south Balkans.

This state would survive under Marshal Tito’s communist

dictatorship for decades, but when the patchwork put together in

1919 fell apart in the early 1990s, four wars followed—first

Slovenia, then Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzegovina, and finally

Kosovo. (A fifth, in Macedonia, was barely averted.)

As our American negotiating team shuttled around the

Balkans in the fall of 1995 trying to end the war in Bosnia, the

Versailles treaty was not far from my mind. Reading excerpts from

Harold Nicolson’s Peacemaking 1919 , we joked that our goal was to

undo Woodrow Wilson’s legacy. When we forced the leaders of

Bosnia, Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to come

together in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 and negotiate the end

of the war, we were, in effect, burying another part of Versailles. In

the spring of 2002, the last two parts of the Versailles creation still

linked as “Yugoslavia” took another step, moving to the brink of a

full and final divorce by agreeing to rename their country “Serbia

Margaret MacMillan - Paris 1919, Six Months That Changed the World.pdf

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