Thus a glance at the map of Europe shows that certain frontiers apparently have been drawn by nature, while others are clearly the work of man. The Spanish peninsula, Italy, the British Isles, and the Scandinavian lands are set apart from the mass of the Continent by broad boundaries of sea or mountain which have come to form permanent political frontiers. On the other hand no such obvious natural obstacles separate France from Germany, Germany from Russia, Belgium from Holland, Austria from its neighbors, Serbia from Bulgaria. So far as the boundaries have been drawn by geographic forces, the forces are less obvious; if they have been drawn by the course of history, this requires explanation and elucidation. It so happened that the Paris congress had to do, not with the outlying regions where the physical and the political maps generally coincide, but with those lands of central and eastern Europe where the adjustment is most complicated. We shall understand its work more clearly if we pause to analyze briefly this problem of frontiers.
Of the geographical elements which go to form frontiers, the most obvious, after the sea, is constituted by mountains. The Pyrenees are a perfect example of a natural frontier which is also an actual frontier, and so in a lesser degree are the Alps and the Carpathians. Mountains inevitably divide, turning peoples different ways, in spite of modern means of communication, and they have always been valued as military barriers. Rivers, on the contrary, although they have military value, unite rather than divide, so that we need not be surprised if we find no important instances of a river frontier in present-day Europe, save along the Danube and where the Rhine separates Alsace and Baden. Most frontiers are neither mountain ranges nor rivers, yet they are often adjusted to lesser features of topography, with reference either to defence or to means of communication. Communication notably, with the growth of modern systems of transportation, bears an intimate relation to boundary problems. Access to the sea, either directly or by neutralized or internationalized rivers, has become a prime necessity for most states, and occupied the Conference especially in the cases of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia. Even railroad lines, especially where they monopolize natural routes, have their place in frontier adjustments, as in Carinthia or between East and West Prussia.
Another geographical element, essentially modern in its significance, is found in natural resources. This has never been wholly absent from boundary problems, at least in its early form of fertile or less fertile land, but it has taken on a preponderant importance with the growth of modern industrialism. Each state has been anxious to bring within its limits supplies of mineral resources, and especially of that foundation of modern industry, coal. Now it so happens that some of the most important deposits of coal and mineral wealth lie on or near disputed frontiers. The coal of Upper Silesia, Teschen, Limburg, and the Saar, the iron of Briey and annexed Lorraine, the potash of Upper Alsace, the mercury mines of Carniola, are all cases in point. Prussia was affected by such considerations in drawing the frontiers of 1815 and 1871; other countries had learned the lesson by 1919.
The human elements in frontier-making are still more complex than the geographical. Obviously we have to do not with individuals but with groups, and with those larger groups which have acquired a full measure of what the sociologists call ‘consciousness of kind,’ to the point of constituting some kind of national unity or national organization. We speak of the self-determination of peoples, but what is a people? Is it created by race or language or political allegiance, or only by that more subtle compound which we call nationality? How large must a people be to have a right to stand alone? Can it stand alone without certain economic and even military prerequisites? How far can we go in breaking up states in order to give effect to self-determination?
Such general principles might have a very wide application. Formulated with special reference to the Central Powers, self-determination was seized upon by men who had a case to urge in any part of the world—in Ireland, in Egypt, in the Philippines. A German map of last spring even represented Hawaii, St. Thomas, Florida, and Texas as trying to escape from their unwilling subjection to the United States[3]—a curious evidence that German mentality had not changed since the notorious Zimmermann note of 1917. More than once it was necessary to point out that the function of the Paris Conference was not to do abstract justice in every corner of the earth, but to make peace with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Many causes perhaps excellent in themselves were not the business of the Conference.
Even within the self-imposed limits of the Conference, there were difficulties. “Self-determination,” President Wilson had said, “is not a mere phrase, it is an imperative principle of action.” But President Wilson had also said that self-government cannot be given but must be earned; that “liberty is the privilege of maturity, of self-control,” that “some peoples may have it, therefore, and others may not.”[4] However just and admirable self-determination might be, it could be fully applied only to peoples who had some experience in self-government and thus some means of political self-expression. For this reason it was not applicable to the downtrodden natives of the German colonies. And even among self-governing peoples there are practical limitations. Self-determination may be only another name for secession, and we fought the Civil War to prevent that; we have been none too successful in securing the subsequent self-determination of the negroes in the southern states. Sometimes a people may be too small to stand alone, and sometimes, as in parts of the Balkans and Asia Minor, the mixture of peoples may defy separation. In western Asia, notably, national aspirations have outrun the social organization.
Wherever you apply it, self-determination runs against minorities. Ireland has its Ulster, Bohemia its Germans, Poland its Germans and Lithuanians. There are minorities along every frontier. Some one remarked that there was need of a fifteenth point, the rights of minorities. The Conference found this out, and upon the newly established states of eastern Europe were imposed special treaties safeguarding the rights of minority peoples—Jews, Germans, Russians, etc.—whom past experience had shown to need such guarantees.
Of these human elements in frontier-making we may begin by eliminating race, for in Europe race is a matter of no importance in drawing national lines. This point is emphasized, here and later, because there has been a great deal of loose talk about race, notably on the part of German writers. So far as it is an exact term at all, race is a physical fact, dependent upon certain elements of stature, color, and shape of the skull which occur and are transmitted in certain fixed combinations or racial types. There are three such types in Europe, the Teutonic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean, most prevalent respectively in northern, central, and southern Europe. But in no country do they appear in pure or unmixed form. Migration and conquest have intermingled them to such an extent as to leave no sharp racial frontiers and to make the people of every country a mixture of two or three races. Thus the central or Alpine type is widely prevalent in the south and west of Germany, and the Teutonic type in the north and east of France. Furthermore these physical types are quite without political significance—no one cares whether his neighbors are tall or short, blonde or brunette, round-headed or long-headed. So far as Europe is concerned, all talk of race has to be eliminated from serious international discussion.
Language, on the other hand, is a matter of prime importance. Speech is a fundamental element in creating consciousness of kind: the man in the street knows whether he can understand the speech of his neighbor, and has always had opprobrious epithets for those who speak an alien tongue, from the ‘barbarians’ of the Greeks and the ‘Welsh’ of the Teutonic Middle Ages to the ‘dagoes’ and ‘gringoes’ and ‘wops’ of current parlance. Even differences of dialect engender similar terms, as when the people of the Right Bank are called Schwob in Alsace and the Alsatians are stigmatized as Wacke by those beyond the Rhine.
Still, language has its pitfalls as a guide to national lines of cleavage. To begin with, while in the country districts it is singularly persistent, it can also be learned and unlearned by a new generation, especially when the resources of universal education are wielded by the compulsive power of the modern state. The German schoolmaster has labored to reduce the area of Danish in Schleswig and of French in Alsace-Lorraine. The Russians have checked German in the Baltic provinces. In the British Isles Celtic speech is far less widespread than Celtic blood. Moreover, if the government cannot always drive out minority languages, it can at least make its own language statistics. It is easy for the census-taker to impose on the weak or ignorant, to interpret all doubtful cases in one direction, to adopt definitions which fall on one side. The statistics of Polish-speaking districts in Prussia and of Italian-speaking elements in Austria-Hungary are well known examples.