Wilson arrived in Europe a world hero. He toured England, France, and Italy briefly and was greeted ecstatically almost everywhere. The reception tended
Europe before the Great War In 1914, five countries dominated Europe: the German Empire, France, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.
To increase his sense of mission and to convince him, in the fashion of a typical progressive, that whatever the European politicians might say about it, “the people” were behind his program.
When the conference settled down to its work, control quickly fell into the hands of the so-called Big Four: Wilson, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, and Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando of Italy. Wilson stood out in this group but did not dominate it. His principal advantage in the negotiations was his untiring industry. He alone of the leaders tried to master all the complex details of the task.
The seventy-eight-year-old Clemenceau cared only for one thing: French security. He viewed Wilson cynically, saying that since mankind had been unable to keep God’s Ten Commandments, it was unlikely to do better with Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Lloyd George’s approach was pragmatic and almost cavalier. He sympathized with much that Wilson was trying to accomplish but found the president’s frequent sermonettes about “right being more important than might, and justice being more eternal than force” incomprehensible. “If you want to succeed in politics,” Lloyd George advised a British statesman, “you must keep your conscience well under control.” Orlando, clever, cultured, a believer in international cooperation but inflexible where Italian national interests were concerned, was not the equal of his three colleagues in influence. He left the conference in a huff when they failed to meet all his demands.
The conference labored from January to May 1919 and finally brought forth the Versailles Treaty. American liberals whose hopes had soared at the thought of a peace based on the Fourteen Points found the document abysmally disappointing.
The peace settlements failed to carry out the principle of self-determination completely. They gave Italy a large section of the Austrian Tyrol, though the area contained 200,000 people who considered themselves Austrians. Other Germanspeaking groups were incorporated into the new states of Poland and Czechoslovakia.
The victors forced Germany to accept responsibility for having caused the war—an act of senseless vindictiveness as well as a gross oversimplification— and to sign a “blank check,” agreeing to pay for all damage to civilian properties and even future pensions and other indirect war costs. This reparations bill, as finally determined, amounted to $33 billion. Instead of attacking imperialism, the treaty attacked German imperialism; instead of seeking a new international social order based on liberty and democracy, it created a great-power entente designed to crush Germany and to exclude Bolshevik Russia from the family of nations.
Mediterranean Sea
Europe after the Great War The Versailles Treaty and other postwar settlements punished the losers, especially Germany and Austria-Hungary, transferring their lands to newly-created nations in eastern Europe, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.
Ottoman Empire and the Arab World, 1914 In 1914, the Ottoman Empire, also known as Turkey, controlled much of the Arab world, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea.
Wilson himself backtracked on his pledge to honor the right of self-determination. The fate of Arab peoples eventually proved to be of particular significance to Americans, especially after the events of September 11, 2001. For centuries, most Arabs had lived under the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman Empire joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, Arab nationalists looked to the Allies and eventually worked out a deal with Britain. In return for Arab military support against the Ottoman Empire and the Germans, Britain would endorse Arab independence after the war. Wilson seemingly concurred, for Point Twelve of his Fourteen Points called for the “autonomous development” of Arab peoples. But in 1917 the British issued the Balfour Declaration in support of “a national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine, land mostly occupied by Palestinian Arabs. How could Palestinian Arabs be granted independence if Palestine was to become the home of Jewish settlers?
In the postwar negotiations, Britain retreated from its earlier promise to the Arabs. Wilson, too, had second thoughts about granting the Arab peoples self-determination. Secretary of State Lansing worried about the “danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races,” particularly the “Mohammedans [Muslims] of Syria and Palestine.”
Wilson reluctantly deleted explicit references to selfdetermination from the postwar settlements. Rather than grant the Arab peoples independence, Britain and France themselves seized Arab lands that had been ruled by the Turks. This land grab was “legalized” through the device of a mandate to rule the region issued by the League of Nations.
Similarly, Ho Chi Minh, a young Vietnamese nationalist, was embittered by the failure at Versailles to deliver his people from French colonial rule. He decided to become a communist revolutionary. The repercussions of Arab and Vietnamese discontent, though far removed from American interests at the time, would be felt in full force much later.
To those who had taken Wilson’s “peace without victory” speech and the Fourteen Points literally, the Versailles Treaty seemed an abomination. The complaints of the critics were individually reasonable, yet their conclusions were not entirely fair. The new map of Europe left fewer people on “foreign” soil than in any earlier period of history. Although the Allies seized the German colonies, they were required, under the mandate system, to render the League of Nations annual accounts of their stewardship and to prepare the inhabitants for eventual independence. Above all, Wilson had persuaded the powers to incorporate the League of Nations in the treaty.
Wilson expected the League of Nations to make up for all the inadequacies of the Versailles Treaty. Once the League had begun to function, problems like freedom of the seas and disarmament would solve themselves, he argued, and the relaxation of trade barriers would surely follow. The League would arbitrate international disputes, act as a central body for registering treaties, and employ military and economic sanctions against aggressor nations. Each member promised (Article 10) to protect the “territorial integrity” and “political independence” of all other members. No nation could be made to go to war against its will, but Wilson emphasized that all were morally obligated to carry out League decisions. By any standard, Wilson had achieved a remarkably moderate peace, one full of hope for the future. Except for the war guilt clause and the heavy reparations imposed on Germany, he could be justly proud of his work.
Within the French mandate Within the British mandate
Dismantling the Ottoman Empire, 1919-1920 The Ottoman Empire was the biggest loser at Versailles: It lost everything apart from Turkey itself; but the Arab nationalists lost as well, because Britain and France, through League-appointed mandates, took control of Syria, Transjordan, Palestine, and Mesopotamia (Iraq).
World History
