How Europe made peace without America

Front matter

EDWARD MINER GALLAUDET MEMORIAL LIBRARY

Gallaudet College Kendall Green Washington, D. C.

BX a

Part III. Nationa, ConsEQUENCES OF THE FAILURE German Will French Resolution. The British Case

. American Withdrawal .

Part IV. Tue ANGLo-FRENcH DUEL Lloyd George The Bolshevik Crisis i The Washington Conference .

Vil

107 120

147 162 178

Vill

CHAPTER

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX, XXI.

XXII.

XXII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

Index .

CONTENTS

Cannes—The French Revolt Poincaré—la Ruhr

Genoa and Chanak .

The Occupation of the RUnE

Part V. To Locarno The Bankruptcy of Nationalism Political Upheaval

The Dawes Plan .

The Protocol .

Locarno é

The League of Nations America and Europe

Part One Democratic Control Of Foreign Policy

Mia TaD ae ay Haha Ss ee het q ° hlapey, y ° X .e . —' : A he . a a1 \ >] ‘eaNte = y Ge” . a% pe. et ae Ga y eee 8 : i] J a. —“ : z : a f ‘ e; ah Vice ei" , ie =. x M a i= 7 1 m . wot + ar . 4 ee ~~" ¥ ¥ = , A | = ; Hee av ~ i ea ha : a my O ’ ‘ a ‘ 4 ; : a : - Fi { e ‘ y ’ : - iy e ‘ 5 \ "? be ~ 7 t ‘ ; = , * +" — ‘ wy § Y $ ‘3 f ia ‘ - bd i ters ase N ' | , TN . ; 3

Chapter One How Europe Made Peace In I8i4

MONG all the political changes which crowded the century separating the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte from the flight of William II none was more far reaching than that which transferred the control of foreign policy to parliamentary and democratic hands. Nor did any change that was in fact a revolution ever come more imperceptibly.

Two generations after the Congress of Vienna, that of Berlin seemed, in all outward circumstances at least, to preserve the traditions of the famous assembly which liquidated the wars of the French Revolution and of the Empire. But four decades later, the Paris Conference which made the Versailles Treaty, differed from the Vienna and Berlin congresses in every essential circumstance.

In the larger sense, the study of the period between Versailles and Locarno is in reality the examination of the consequences of this transfer of control of foreign I policy. It is in these consequences that there is to be found the explanation of all the international anarchy which extends from the moment of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors in the palace of Louis XIV to the welcome of the German delegation in the Hall of the Reformation in the city of John Calvin.

To establish the extent and the character of the change, too, there is, perhaps, no more satisfactory method than to contrast the personalities and compare the circumstances and conditions of the two great settlements, those of 1814 and 1919. |

In examining the problem which was set for the sovereigns and diplomats who met in Paris immediately after the military defeat of the great Emperor, and even in advance of the First Abdication, the fact which claims instant attention is that the situation of Europe itself was not in the main largely different from that which existed immediately after the World War.

In both cases, a long, bloody, and enormously expensive conflict had exhausted the whole Continent. In both instances, a great nation had been beaten by a coalition and with defeat had changed its régime. When the Allied sovereigns made peace with France in 1814, Napoleon was about to set out for Elba. When the Conference to Make Peace assembled in Paris in 1919, William II was in Holland. In the earlier time, the Bourbon Monarchy had been restored in France; in the later, Germany had become a republic.

HOW EUROPE MADE PEACE IN I814 a

Again, if the Allied peoples had loudly proclaimed that they were fighting to make the world safe for democracy, the Allied sovereigns had never mistaken the fact that they were fighting to make the world safe for monarchy. Thus the victors of our own time had precisely the same reasons for desiring the survival of the German Republic as those of the previous century for wishing the Bourbon Monarchy to endure.

The problem of peace in 1814 was not largely unlike that of 1919. Nor were the surrounding circumstances different. If the Allied peoples of our own time were still moved by passionate anger at German deeds, the Allied sovereigns of the earlier time were face to face with the people who, by killing their own king, had struck a blow at the very root of the monarchical principle and shattered the system of privilege by the wholesale and savage murder of their aristocrats.

If, between 1914 and 1918, German armies had ranged destructively over Belgium, France, and Poland, and accumulated ruins still bore testimony to their recent presence, the armies of Revolutionary and of Napoleonic France had for twenty years travelled all the roads from Madrid to Moscow, quartered themselves in the palaces of kings, levied enormous tribute upon all the conquered peoples, taken provinces and cities, created new states and destroyed old. On balance, the claims of the victors of 1918 were not impressively greater than those of the conquerors of 1814. !

Again, if the problems of peace in the two centuries were not in any larger aspect different, it is also true that at bottom the problem of peace differs little from war to war and from century to century. By victory nothing is changed except the fact that one nation or coalition of nations, which was seeking to enforce or establish its will by arms, is forced by defeat or by exhaustion to abandon its purpose. It has to submit and it does submit.

By contrast, the victorious nation or coalition, which has sought to establish an opposing will, is now in a position to do it. Power is completely in its hands. It can proceed to translate its purposes into action. Upon the defeated it can impose such conditions as it may choose. It can take provinces, demand indemnities, impose military occupation of the territories of the defeated country.

Yet always there are very definite limitations imposed upon the victor which lie outside of his eventual control and beyond the circumstances of the immediate present. The nation which is beaten will endure and continue. The weakness incident to defeat will not last. Thus the France which was broken in 1870 reappears in 1919 as one of a victorious coalition.

There are, therefore, limits beyond which it is not profitable or even safe to impose terms based upon transitory military decision, since the will and power of every people to exist are permanent. History is full of illustrations of this fact.

When, in the War of the Spanish Succession, still

HOW EUROPE MADE PEACE IN 1814 Ri another coalition had triumphed and the victors were face to face with Louis XIV, beaten to his knees, seemingly without further resource to resist, as France appeared without capacity to make war, when the Grand Monarch, himself, recognizing defeat, proposed to surrender all the provinces which represented a lifetime of successful wars, his conquerors asked one thing more. They demanded that the old king make war upon his grandson, whom he had seated on the throne of Spain.

But this demand went beyond the limit. It struck not the king but the grandfather, and Louis repulsed it. As a consequence, the war was resumed. France rallied to its sovereign, and when peace did come at last, France retained all that would have been surrendered had her foes restricted their demands to territorial cessions.

There is in peoples, too, even when their power to make war nationally has been broken, a capacity for resistance which can hardly be measured. Napoleon found this out in Spain and Germany. The facts and circumstances of modern life have, too, tended rather to fortify than to weaken this last resource of the vanquished.

In the last analysis, the terms of any peace based upon military decision in war are rigidly limited to that maximum, which the man in the street calls “all the traffic will bear.” No matter how complete and far-shining his military success, no matter, also, how great and undeniable his wrongs, if the victor exceed the load limit, the bridge, which is the proposed settlement, will crash.

Immediately or eventually, the unbroken will of the conquered, the will to exist, will reassert itself and the violence of the reaction may compromise everything, the circumstances which were tolerable together with those which were unbearable. Thus the victor will lose what he might have kept because he demanded what was beyond the endurance of the defeated.

The truth of all this was perfectly well known to the kings and diplomats who had to make peace with France after the fall of Napoleon. They knew that if, by the peace which they were going to make, they wounded the spirit of France or put unbearable fetters upon the French people, that settlement would not endure beyond the time during which France recovered her power to act.

And they also knew that, if the Bourbon Monarchy, which they had brought back to Paris in their baggage, were associated with national humiliation or intolerable diminution of the Fatherland, it could not last; that France, the French people, having recovered their freedom, would cast it out and revert to the Napoleonic- Revolutionary régime, which for the victors of 1814 was as terrifying as was the Hohenzollern system for the conquerors of the German Empire.

Therefore, in the first Treaty of Paris, made in April, 1814, the victorious allies left to France every foot of territory which had been hers at the beginning of the great cycle of the wars of the Revolution and the Em-

HOW EUROPE MADE PEACE IN I814 a pire. What France had taken by the sword, they took back, although, even in defeat, they left her Savoy, which had not been hers in 1792. In addition, they levied no tribute and they peers no occupation of French soil.

Were they enlightened and generous, after all, these servants and masters of the ancient régime? If anyone thinks that, let him study what they did to the Polish, the Belgian, the Italian, the Saxon peoples, to all helpless peoples, at Vienna a few months later. They were harsh, cynical, greedy men, and the Fourteen Points in the halls of Vienna in the winter of 1814-15 would have been greeted as an echo escaping from Bedlam. They made peace with the strong, but only to do violence to the weak.

They were also, however, men who had learned their trade. They had been at school steadily in all the years from Valmy to Fontainebleau. They knew their Europe, their France, and they also knew their job, which was to restore peace without delay and on the terms which would be most profitable to themselves within the limit of possible profit. They remembered that, even after Leipzig, they had offered Napoleon the left bank of the Rhine from Switzerland to the sea, and he had refused. Now, in less than two years, he was on his way to Elba and they were in Paris.

The work of the treaty-makers of 1814 was presently subjected to two rigid tests. Within the year, Napoleon came back from Elba and all their settlement was put in jeopardy. Had the Treaty done violence to the spirit of France, had it reduced France beyond the limits of French endurance, 1815 was bound to be 1792, and the French people would have gone to the frontiers again. As it was, the veterans of the Grande Armée rallied to their great commander, and he took them to Waterloo. But France stood still.

The second test was that of time. Peace between France and Great Britain has endured to the present hour. It lasted between France and Prussia to 1870 and between France and Austria to 1859. By contrast, the settlement made at Versailles in 1919 had to be revised within less than five years and, so far from producing peace, was the immediate prelude to a new period of anarchy and chaos. ;

What explains this different outcome? Why did the Allied sovereigns and diplomats of the early Nineteenth Century successfully solve their problem while the prime ministers and President of the Twentieth failed completely in the face of conditions which were not essentially different?

The answer must be found in the change which had come with the passage of a little more than a century. The settlement of 1814 was made by men who were the fine and finished product of a system which had long endured and, with the passing of centuries, had acquired a competence and technique in dealing with precisely the questions which constituted the task of Paris after the Napoleonic debacle. ©

HOW EUROPE MADE PEACE IN I8I4 9

In all the centuries following the period when kings on horseback led their subjects to war, foreign affairs had remained the chief and exclusive business of sovereigns. They no longer fought wars, but they made and directed them. They retained in their hands the management of the machinery by which wars were conducted and terminated. And with the passing of time they had learned to associate with themselves those of their subjects whose brains, knowledge, and character permitted them to become great foreign ministers or successful military captains. The favours of royalty were thus bestowed upon the ministers who did the will and the soldiers who directed the armies of the monarchs.

The business of the people was to pay taxes and to furnish conscripts for their kings. There was nothing approaching contemporary public opinion in any of the Continental countries which had fought France. Nor was there anything even remotely suggesting representative parliaments through which public opinion could

make itself felt. _ The situation was materially different in England, but the difference was more apparent than real. The Crown had surrendered much to Parliament. There were a press and a public opinion. But Parliament was not representative in the contemporary sense, the press was still in its infancy and public opinion was left consistently in the dark.

Castlereagh, who represented Britain at Paris and Vienna, had acquired an enormous prestige at home as

IO HOW EUROPE MADE PEACE WITHOUT AMERICA well as abroad. When he was backed by the Duke of Wellington, as was almost invariably the case, his will was supreme, and for public opinion in our modern sense both had a contempt which was equal and without limit. As a consequence, Castlereagh did not even deign to keep Parliament informed of his negotiations.

Thus there existed at the close of the Napoleonic Period and at the moment when Europe made peace with France, a number of highly trained statesmen and diplomats, responsible to royal masters who themselves knew Europe, or were, at least, beyond the control of any popular or democratic force. By reason of their relation to the events of the past two decades, too, these men not only knew Europe intimately, but they knew equally well the statesmen of the several countries with whom they had to deal. In fact, the sovereigns had themselves made the last campaign together.

It is not only possible but obviously tempting to exaggerate the extent to which this combination of knowledge and experience did function smoothly. In point of fact, it never functioned at all smoothly and was always on the point of an open break. Yet the break never came, and in the end, decisions were always reached by unanimity.

Thus, it is exact to say that the men who made the settlement of Paris in 1814, as they also made the decisions of the Congress of Vienna and the later peace after Waterloo, were men for whom the business in hand had been a life work, and that their knowledge, experi-

HOW EUROPE MADE PEACE IN ISI4 Il ence, and ability, subject to royal pleasure, which did often hamper and harass them, had full scope. And never under any circumstance had they to consider the question of public opinion as we know it, or submit to the immediate restrictions of parliamentary supervision.

Chapter Two The Situation In Iqi9q

HEN one turns to the consideration of the situ- Y-Y ation which existed a century after the Paris Peace of 1814, on the eve of still another Paris conference, the contrast with the circumstances of the earlier day is impressive.

The kings had gone. Parliaments, beginning with the British, had become representative. The men who were to act for the great European states, and in reality they were Clemenceau and Lloyd George, were not diplomats. Neither had any claim to expert knowledge of foreign affairs. Neither had ever manifested any particular interest in this field. And this was also true of Woodrow Wilson, who acted with them to make the decisions of the “Big Three”? and thus to make the settlement of Versailles.

Both the European premiers were lifelong parliamentarians. Both had come to power in the dark days of the war because of their unique power to give impulsion to legislative bodies.and stimulus to democratic peoples facing the tremendous strain incident to the great struggle.

Clemenceau had once been president of the Council and thus measurably conversant with foreign affairs for 12

THE SITUATION IN I919 13 a brief moment before the war, but both he and Lloyd George had been distinguished throughout their long careers almost exclusively because of their mastery of that peculiar technique which permits contemporary politicians to control majorities, sway public opinion, make or break ministries.

They were, themselves, moreover, in the last analysis, entirely at the command of their respective parliaments which could dismiss them within the hour. For them, as for all premiers, the conditions of continued power were found always in the necessity to maintain control of parliament by that highly difficult device of retaining popular approval, for parliaments are jealous bodies and are ever ready to lay hold upon public opinion as a stick with which to assail the Minister of the moment.

In the field of domestic affairs, moreover, the people have with the passing decades acquired undeniable capacity. Although they may be frequently misled, sometimes deceived, often frankly mistaken, within the limits of their own national existence and experience the people have acquired a grasp of the fundamentals. They know here what they want and why. They are acquiring and they continue to acquire the discipline and selfrestraint which are necessary. They have learned to compromise, and rarely, except in transitory bursts of passion, demand the absolute.

But in the nature of things they can, as yet, bring nothing like the same knowledge or the same experience to foreign affairs. The complex problems of interna-

I4 HOW EUROPE MADE PEACE WITHOUT AMERICA tional relations and the baffling mysteries of other national existences lived under different conditions of geography, dominated by other traditions and illuminated by other histories are to them unintelligible. They must measure the policies and purposes of every other people by the yardstick of their own experience.

Thus, they will bring to foreign questions the same standards, express the same will, insist upon the same tests which they employ in domestic affairs. They will never question their own knowledge or competence. And, in the last analysis, the choice of any Prime Min- — ister must often be between openly flouting national will, and throwing this national will into violent collision with the similar will of another people.

Thus the absolute break between the conditions of 1814 and 1919 is established. The men who made the older settlement knew the material with which they had to work. They knew it because it was their trade to know it, and their presence at Paris and Vienna was the ultimate proof of their mastery of that trade. Finally, together with knowledge, they had power.

On the contrary, the men who held power in 1919 had come to office by reason of their capacity to deal with an utterly dissimilar set of problems from those presented at the Paris Conference. They had learned a totally different art from that of negotiating abroad, they were masters of the art of dealing with a modern parliamentary democracy. They knew all about this business

THE SITUATION IN I9I9 15 that a lifelong training could teach them, and they were at Paris precisely because, in the terrible hours of the World War, they had displayed the supreme mastery of this art of leading the peoples.

There is a further circumstance to be noted in presenting the contrast between 1814 and 1919.[In its long struggle with monarchy and autocracy, democracy had not only wrested control of domestic affairs from the enemy and thus automatically succeeded to the direction of foreign affairs, it had in the progress of the battle also acquired an instinctive and dominating distrust for methods of the older order, for what it described as “old-fashioned diplomacy” and the men who plied that trade.

As a consequence, although diplomacy had on suffer-. ance continued to play a part, its influence in foreign affairs had steadily diminished in all the years from the Congress of Berlin to the World War. Moreover, after 1914, democracy tended to arrive at the conclusion that this world-wide catastrophe was itself in some mysterious fashion to be charged to diplomacy.

Accordingly, when Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson undertook to make peace at Paris, none of them even thought of employing importantly the machinery of the Foreign Office, the Quai d’Orsay, or the State Department. Diplomatic opinion was rarely asked, diplomatic experience and knowledge were seldom appealed to. On the contrary, all three manifested the same impatience and contempt for the representatives of the profession to which Talleyrand and Metternich had belonged a century before.

Between the situation of Lloyd George and Clemenceau on the one hand, and that of Woodrow Wilson on the other, in their relation to their respective legislatures, there were points of close resemblance and of tremendous contrast.

From the beginning of its history the United States had adopted a system which in reality forbade all foreign relations save the most rudimentary. The Atlantic Ocean and, later, the Monroe Doctrine were the bases of American foreign policy, which was comprehended in the double purpose to keep out of Europe and to keep Europe out of the Americas.

All power, save that of mere formal negotiation, was from the outset vested with Congress and in practice with the Senate. The President had power, subject to the consent of the Senate, to appoint ambassadors, who represented the country abroad. But, in practice, ambassadors had seldom been more than messenger boys in evening dress and diplomatic posts either inexpensive rewards for party service or a form of inverted Purgatory between the lost Paradise of public office and the impending Hades of enforced private life.

The President had also the power to negotiate treaties, but all treaties, when negotiated, were without validity until they had been ratified by the Senate. For four years the President was beyond the reach of political accident, save in the remote contingency of impeach-

THE SITUATION IN I9I9 17 ment, but in all this time, while he had absolute freedom of action, he was without power to bind or to loose.

Under the American system, there was always the possibility of a collision between the Executive and the Legislature, but in practice, at least since the War of 1812, no President had ever seriously attempted to act in foreign affairs save in close relation with Congress, drawing negotiators either from that body or from the ranks of the two parties therein represented.

The fundamental difference between the American and the European system lay in the fact that, in Europe, the executive was a member of the legislative branch. He was daily and hourly subject to its will and pleasure. He could disappear overnight. But, while he remained, as the agent of the Parliament he had all power. In negotiating with other countries, he was compelled always to retain the majority of his own Parliament and, therefore, to keep it informed and consenting.

On the other hand, when the Prime Minister had made a treaty under these conditions, ratification of the document by the Parliament was generally automatic. By contrast, when President Wilson had made a treaty, he had then to begin at the beginning. He had first to inform and then to persuade Congress.

These details in the American system, which had decisive importance later and were never understood or appreciated in Europe, have a value at this point, only as they serve to make clear the fact that in the United States, as in France, Britain, and all Allied states represented in the Peace Conference, democratic control of foreign policy through parliaments or Congress had become absolute—and, of course, in the case of the United States there never had been any other tradition.

Such, then, was the revolution which had taken place in the control of foreign policy in tLe European world. But the Conference of Paris in 1919 was precisely the first occasion when and where the consequences of the revolution were to be disclosed. If the Congress of Vienna had been the culminating point of the old order, Paris was just as clearly the first authentic revelation of the arrival of a new system and another age.

But if the Paris Conference was the first disclosure of this great transformation, what occurred there was steadily repeated in all the succeeding years. All prime ministers and foreign ministers in Europe, from Versailles to Locarno, were equally helpless in the face of their own public opinions. Each was compelled to adopt policies and resort to measures in which he did not believe, either to avoid disaster at home or save a foreign associate, equally handicapped by a similar national state of mind.

Peace after the first fall of Napoleon, and again after Waterloo, was restored in a few weeks because those who had power were aware of the realities of the international situation. Peace after 1918 was postponed for seven years, because the peoples which had all power at home were uninformed as to the limits of their own

THE SITUATION IN I9I9 19 power abroad and unaware of the necessity for compromises without which settlement was impossible. What the monarchs and diplomats had learned before the settlement of 1814, the sovereign peoples learned only after the making of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

Chapter Three

[' THE elements of the problems of 1814 and 1919 were in the main similar, if not identical, there was, however, one factor in the later situation without parallel in the earlier, and that was the American. |

After the Armistice, two million American soldiers still remained upon European soil. They had supplied the added weight which had made the military decision possible. Their presence testified eloquently to the meaning of the American intervention and to the fact that the forthcoming Peace Conference had not merely to make peace with the German enemy, but to establish the bases of any future relation between the American people and those Allied nations with whom they had been associated in the common victory.

The importance of the American factor could not be overlooked then, it cannot be neglected now. From the very outset of the Peace Conference, it was apparent that the character of the settlement to be made with Germany would not alone be enormously shaped by the views of the American representative as to proper terms, but by the extent to which the American representative could and would bind the American people to share in the task of compelling execution of the Treaty when made.

AMERICA AND THE PEACE CONFERENCE 21

In reality, it lay within the power of the United States, if not in its purpose or thought, to play the part at Paris in 1919 that Britain had played in 1814, and the role of Castlereagh was open to President Wilson. The European hope and need to obtain the continuing aid of the United States gave to the American President incalculable power, which was not lessened by the fact that his country was asking for no share in the war booty itself.

In estimating the importance of the American factor, it is also necessary to go beyond the material circumstances and appreciate the moral effect upon Europe of the sudden and decisive intervention in a Continental struggle of a people, which, throughout all its previous history, had followed a policy of complete and defiant isolation and had existed rather as a dream than a reality for the European masses, the dream of an El Dorado where everyone was rich and happy and the streets were literally paved with gold.

This effect was, in truth, little short of revolutionary. Accustomed through long centuries not merely to conduct their own struggles within European limits, but to intervene powerfully and profitably in the affairs of other continents, the European peoples beheld with wonder and amazement the arrival upon their shores of a power superior to all in every material circumstance.

Physically exhausted, they were struck by the still unwearied strength of American youth; financially stricken, they were made aware of the seemingly inexhaustible American wealth which the American soldier and civilian spread about with lavish disdain. Mortally sick with the agony and horror of the long war, they ‘listened captivated to the words in which the American President proclaimed the arrival of a new age of pan prosperity, and safety.

For the moment, the American phenomenon filled all eyes, captured all imagination, defied all rational appraisal. Knowing nothing about America, the Allied peoples believed everything which their own misfortune and the patently incalculable good luck of the American people could suggest.