The Conference of Paris was likewise a laborious body. The gaiety of the Congress of Vienna has become proverbial. “The Congress does not march,” said the Prince de Ligne, “it dances.” “Everybody dances save Talleyrand, who has a club foot. He plays whist.” It is probable, as recent historians of the Vienna assemblage have pointed out, that “the unending series of balls, dinners, reviews, and fêtes did not greatly hinder the work of those whose industry was important.”[2] Nevertheless the presence of a crowd of kings and princes and great ladies—the Prince de Ligne wore out his hat taking it off at every turn—gave the Congress of Vienna an air of splendor and gaiety which was conspicuously lacking at Paris. There were no kings at the Paris Conference, indeed there were few kings left anywhere in Europe by January 1919. There were no balls, no great festivities. If the Conference did not always advance, at least it did not dance. The Marne was too near for that, in space as well as in time. Armageddon was just past. The Germans had barely missed marching up the Champs-Elysées and under the Arc de Triomphe. The American delegates were within an hour’s ride of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, where their countrymen had, only a few months before, done “the things that can’t be done.” Two hours would take them to the heart of the devastated region, refugees from which still filled Paris. The regiments of poilus that marched by with steady stride had looked into the mouth of hell, and their eyes showed it. The Paris which Castlereagh had found “a bad place for business” in 1814 was a better place for business in 1919. The world wanted peace, and it wanted it soon.
It was also a hungry world. Pliny tells of a fabled people of the East so narrow-mouthed that they lived by the smell of roast meat. Even that gladsome and satisfying odor had long since disappeared from the nostrils of a great part of Europe, and the mouths had not shrunk. “If they have no bread, let them eat cake,” a great lady had said at the time of the French Revolution. The cake had gone with the bread. “The wolf,” said Mr. Hoover, “is at the door of the world.” More than once the Peace Conference had to turn from other matters to feed the peoples whose frontiers it was drawing, to deal earnestly and under pressure with problems of blockade and rationing, of transportation by land and sea.
Back of hunger lay anarchy. Great states were on the verge of dissolution, and it was doubtful who, if anyone, could sign the treaty on their behalf. There were times when the Conference had also to interrupt its labors to consider the chaos into which the world seemed to be drifting. The day after the Bolshevist revolution in Hungary one of the sanest of American journalists remarked, “In the race between peace and anarchy, anarchy seems today to be ahead.”
No peace congress had ever confronted so colossal a task. The assembly at Paris met to end a world war, then in its fifth year, which had destroyed 9,000,000 lives and untold billions of property, and left the world staggering under a crushing burden of debt and destruction. It had in the first instance to liquidate the affairs of three bankrupt empires, the German, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Turkish. The peoples which they had held in unwilling subjection were to be set free, and either attached to the neighboring peoples from which they had once been torn, or established firmly as independent and self-governing states. “As Lord Bryce had predicted, the most knotty disputes which faced the Conference were ‘nearly all problems that involve the claims of peoples dissatisfied with their present rulers and seeking either independence or union with some kindred race.’” Several thousand miles of new boundaries had to be drawn, marking new frontiers, and if possible these frontiers must be just and lasting. Provision must be made for restoring the lands laid waste by war and reëstablishing the normal commercial and industrial life of the warring countries. Those responsible for the war must pay, and they must be punished. Finally, if possible, effective measures must be taken to prevent the recurrence of a similar war, whether brought about by Germany’s lust of conquest or by any other state. If war could not be prevented, it must at least be rendered more difficult and more abhorrent to the common moral sense of mankind.
Far beyond the more immediate and necessary tasks of the Conference rose the dreams of those who looked for the dawning of a new age of peace and justice, a new social and economic era. The downtrodden and the oppressed looked toward Paris. Visions of peace were confused with visions of the millennium. “We were told,” said a Scotch mill-worker, later in the winter, “that the peace would bring in the New Jerusalem. We want some of that New Jerusalem.” The day President Wilson sailed for Brest, a worker at the Twenty-third Street Ferry, speaking for the early crowd hurrying to their long hours in New York sweatshops, pointed to Hoboken and said, “There goes the man who is going to change all this for us.” Beautiful, extravagant, heart-breaking hopes were centred on the Conference at Paris, most of all on the leader of the American delegation and his programme. And such hopes were in large measure inevitably doomed to disappointment. The congress could not create a new heaven and a new earth; it could at best only make some short advance on the road thither and show the way along which further advance lay. Renan tells of a devout soul, who, seeing so much evil about him, was periodically afflicted with doubts concerning the goodness of an all-powerful God. “Perhaps,” his parish priest would answer, “you have too high an idea of God and what he can do.” “It was an old world,” writes Mommsen of the age which just preceded the Christian era, “and even Caesar could not make it young again.”
A just peace, a durable peace, if possible a quick peace, could these ends be secured? The task was one which called for compromise and adjustment, it called also for organization. There is said to have been a plan for quick preliminaries which should end the state of war, followed by the leisurely and expert working out of details. If such a course had been possible, it would probably have been the best. Germany would have accepted terms in January at which she howled in June, while the Allied peoples might thus have avoided the long agony of doubt and postponement which delayed the resumption of normal activities and the rehabilitation of the devastated regions. The world that was malleable after the armistice soon grew cold and hard. It is, however, a matter for serious question whether an agreement upon such preliminaries was possible. The problems were too varied and intricate, the conflict of interests too acute, the new ideas too new, to admit of even provisional adjustment in a few weeks. The Conference seemed long, too long, to the outside world which waited. If it did not dance, like the Congress of Vienna, neither did it always seem to march, like the Congress of Berlin, which had a cut-and-dried programme. At times it was undoubtedly too slow; at times certain special problems, like Fiume, consumed energy altogether out of proportion to their importance; yet the Conference made steady and on the whole rapid progress. It was a hard-working body, and its scanty time was well spent.
It will be many years before the history of the Peace Conference can be written. Its work was too vast and too varied; its records are too scattered and too inaccessible, many of them still unwritten. We are still too near for a true perspective. For some time we must be content with fragmentary, partial, provisional, journalistic accounts, and we do well to keep to the main lines of unmistakable fact. The most obvious results of the work of the Conference, though not necessarily the most permanent results, are its territorial decisions, the readjustment of boundaries and sovereignties, the calling of new states into being. These, so far as they go, are clear and definite. They can be expressed on a map, their origin and occasion can be traced, their nature explained. It is these, the territorial results of the Conference, with their consequences and implications, which form the subject of this volume. The treatment is further limited to Europe, omitting the problems of Asia, Africa, and the isles of the Pacific.
There are those who maintain that the territorial results are unstable and hence relatively unimportant, liable to speedy readjustment in a fluid state of international relations, subordinated in ever increasing degree to economic and social influences which transcend national boundaries. All this the future must determine. For the present the decisive fact for many millions of Europeans is that they are on one side or another of a political frontier, members or not of the state to which their natural allegiance gravitates; and this is a matter of specific boundary. One may deplore the rivalries over small bits of territory, which acquire a factitious significance in the course of the dispute, but they cannot be ignored. The possession of land is still a passion of peoples, and even of what our census calls ‘minor civil divisions,’ and the history of individual ownership shows that such passions do not grow less with the growth of other interests. So long as states continue to exercise authority within definitely recognized frontiers, the establishing of their territorial limits must remain a fundamental problem of international relations. If an illustration of the meaning of frontiers is desired nearer home, one has only to look at the two sides of the Rio Grande.
Reduced to their lowest terms, the elements which enter into a national boundary are two, the land and the people; and an ideally perfect frontier would be at the same time geographic and ethnographic. Such coincidences are, however, relatively rare, and the problem varies from age to age as different geographical considerations change in relative importance and as the human elements of race, language, and nationality develop, shift, and grow more complex.