It Happened in 1919 and Still Makes the World a Mess
A seismic event occurred in 1919 whose fractures still cleave the world today. It was the moment that created Iraq with all its fissures, and the violent patchwork of a nation known as Yugoslavia. The disruptions radiating from this critical moment in history are still felt across Asia, throughout Palestine, with remnants still lingering from Central Europe across China to Vietnam. I am not a believer in any single-causation theory of history, but because the Peace that ended the First World War today is such an overlooked yet defining moment, I’ve just published a book about it, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Wiley, 336 pages, $25.95). It’s an effort to draw some lessons from the mistakes of those powerful, single-minded leaders of the empires that had just ended what was called the Great War, so that we may not be condemned to repeat them.
I first realized more than three decades ago that there was something special about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles that was its product. Thirty years ago, almost to the day, I was driving north along the Adriatic Coast of Yugoslavia from the beautiful ancient port cities of Split and Zadar toward the Italian frontier. I had just taken up my post as Eastern Europe bureau chief of The New York Times, based in Belgrade, and I wanted to explore this corner of my new and complex beat.
As we neared the free port of Trieste, my interpreter, Mirjana Komaretsky, and I spotted a small stone cottage perched high on a cliff overlooking the strikingly blue waters of the Adriatic. An old woman was working in the garden in front, and we pulled off the road to chat with her. She smiled and invited us into her cottage for a cup of strong, thick, black Balkan coffee boiled in tiny copper pots.
As we sat down, I asked her to tell us the story of her life. “I was born, oh, more than 90 years ago. I’m not sure exactly how many,” she began, and she smiled showing crooked teeth yellowed from years of smoking. “And I’ve lived in six countries.”
“My,” I observed, “you have traveled a lot in that time.”
“No,” she answered slowly. “I’ve never left this cottage where I was born.”
I began to count quickly what these countries might have been. She was born sometime before 1887 (since we were visiting here in October 1977). For her first 32 years she had lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Then suddenly in 1919 it had all changed, and her life had begun spinning, at times uncontrollably. First there was the invasion of that part of the Adriatic Coast by Italian troops, annexing it to Italy even while negotiators in Paris were carving up the world in what would become the Treaty of Versailles and its associated documents. Before the ink was even dry on that treaty, there was (briefly) the Free State of Trieste. Then there was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a curious, barely stable kaleidoscope of a state cobbled together by the peacemakers in Paris and dominated by Serbs in far-off Belgrade. With the arrival of World War II, there was the Nazi-backed Ustashi-controlled republic of Croatia. Finally, after the war, the Communist rebel leader Josip Broz Tito had reconstituted the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia again, largely as the Allies had envisioned it back in 1919.
Today, if our hostess had lived this long, she would have added a seventh country, the independent nation of Croatia, now on its road to independence and prosperity as a prospective member of the European Union and NATO.
Three years after my visit to that small cottage overlooking the Adriatic, having traveled the length and breadth of the country and of all the other nations of then Communist-controlled Eastern Europe, I offered an article to a major American foreign-policy magazine in which I predicted the violent dismemberment of Yugoslavia not long after the death of Tito. This was a nation of at least three religions, two alphabets, and a host of nationalities. It could not hope to survive absent the powerful rule of a strongman with a history of having rescued his people from the horrors of Nazism. The magazine’s editors hesitated for a considerable time before finally agreeing, reluctantly, to publish what seemed to them an inconceivable fantasy.
I was right, of course. Indeed I knew I had been right years before I ever even arrived in the country to take up my post—since my senior year at Harvard in 1965, when, for my honors thesis, I had first examined the nature of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
Now, more than 40 years later, A Shattered Peace takes this thesis beyond the narrow confines of Yugoslavia and the Balkans. For as it turns out, the peacemakers of Paris replicated their Yugoslavian errors with even more violent and pernicious consequences across Central and Eastern Europe, down through the Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and on across Asia as well.
The peacemakers were bent on redrawing the map of the world, recreating old nations and establishing new ones in their own image–and hang the consequences for the peoples who lived in each of these regions.
On the opening page of my book, I recall an incident described by the dashing British diplomat Harold Nicolson, member of the Bloomsbury group and husband of the brilliant author Vita Sackville-West, who had come to Paris filled with dreams of building a better world from the ruins of the old one while leaving behind the nineteenth century and the ills of the Congress of Vienna. Five months later he was already sadly disillusioned, as I wrote:
“Spring in Paris, a brilliant Tuesday May 13, 1919. At four o’clock the city is still bathed in that crystal light that washes every building clean, even the aging but elegant townhouses in the city’s fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. There, on the Rue Nitot, President Woodrow Wilson has gathered the leaders of the four victorious Allies. World War I is over. And now this small group of statesmen are remaking the world–in their own image. The issue today is Iraq—carving what will become a new nation out of the sands of Mesopotamia. The brilliant young British diplomat, Harold Nicolson, has been cooling his heels in the ante-room, engrossed in The Picture of Dorian Gray, when suddenly a door flies open and he is summoned into the presence of the leaders. He picks up the story in his diary:
“‘A heavily furnished study with my huge map on the carpet. Bending over it (bubble, bubble toil and trouble) are Clemenceau, Lloyd George and PW [President Woodrow Wilson]. They have pulled up armchairs and crouch low over the map. . . . They are cutting the Baghdad railway. Clemenceau says nothing during all of this. He sits at the edge of his chair and leans his two blue-gloved hands down upon the map. More than ever does he look like a gorilla of yellow ivory. . . . It is appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake. . . . Isn’t it terrible, the happiness of millions being discarded in that way? Their decisions are immoral and impracticable. . . . These three ignorant men with a child to lead them. . . . The child, I suppose, is me. Anyhow, it is an anxious child.’
“This self-deprecating Nicolson was perhaps the only truly prescient individual in the room.”
The lines these statesmen drew at the time endure virtually unchanged as those that American soldiers have been defending today in Iraq and Kosovo, and for which in the thousands they have given their lives. President Wilson went to Paris determined to press for self-determination for all people, especially in those countries that the peacemakers would be creating. Yet in the end, these boundaries failed utterly to respect this principle, ignoring the deeply felt religious and ethnic realities of each corner of these remote and, to the peacemakers of the Western powers, all but impenetrable societies. Shiite versus Sunni versus Kurd in Mesopotamia, Catholic versus Orthodox versus Muslim in the Balkans. These are concepts that were alien to Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and the vast bulk of their advisers–almost to a man born and raised in the Western Christian vernacular and society. The principal American expert on the Middle East was a specialist in the Crusades. His deep understanding of the region ended somewhere around the year 1300—six centuries before he arrived in Paris.
Fortunately, as the diplomats and statesmen in Paris, and the army of political aspirants and hangers-on from a hundred nations—from the Emir Feisal, Lawrence of Arabia, and a young Felix Frankfurter representing the Zionist cause and American Jewry, to the Vietnamese visionary who would become Ho Chi Minh—made their rounds in Paris, dining, dancing, and whispering into a hundred pairs of ears, many also left behind records of their daily lives. These diaries, memoirs and typescripts, some published in small editions in the years immediately following the signing of the treaty, others still languishing in archives across the United States and Europe, became the most powerful testaments to the work of these delegations in Paris—and the material from which I drew the bulk of the research for A Shattered Peace.
Over the past three years, as the book went from an inchoate set of ideas, conversations, and impressions to a finished manuscript, my sense of the magnitude of the problems began to coalesce as well. The failures, for instance, were legion—an emasculated League of Nations that failed even as a forum for the world’s troubles and that the central power emerging from the war, the United States, declined even to join; violent bickering among the newly created states of Central Europe; the unrelenting march to power of the Bolsheviks in Russia, and their exclusion from the community of nations; in Asia the resurgent power of an expansionist Japanese Empire and the turbulent demands of ignored peoples from China to Vietnam.
Here’s how I conclude A Shattered Peace:
“To the end there remained some considerable question as to whether Wilson ever really understood what the grand principles he so eloquently enunciated really stood for. The world that Europe’s leaders wanted to bring forth from this Peace Conference was one they could understand and continue to manipulate in the same way they or their forebears had been pulling the levers for centuries. For the first time, however, they had embraced a larger task—remaking the entire world in their image. For this they were hopelessly ill equipped.
“Wilson came to Paris with the world at his feet. American forces and its military-industrial complex had effectively won the war for the Allies. But it was Wilson who lost the peace. . . .
“If there is a single lesson to be learned, it is that we cannot remake the world in our own image or the image we would like to have of it–politically, economically, socially, or in any other fashion. The best of intentions simply don’t work with a bad plan. And if there is any question about that, we have only to look to the past to prove this point—provided we look far enough back to see where our troubles began.”