Peaceless Europe

by Francesco Saverio Nitti

But before trying to see how and why the treaties cannot be carried out, it may be well to consider how the actual system of treaties has been reached, in complete opposition to all that was said by the Entente during the War and to President Wilson's fourteen points. At the same time ought to be examined the causes which led in six months from the declarations of the Entente and of President Wilson to the Treaty of Versailles.

The most important cause for what has happened was the choice of Paris as the meeting-place of the Conference. After the War Paris was the least fitted of any place for the holding of a Peace Conference, and in the two French leaders, the President of the Republic, Poincaré, and the President of the Council of Ministers, Clemenceau, even if the latter was more adaptable in mind and more open to consideration of arguments on the other side, were two temperaments driving inevitably to extremes. Victory had come in a way that surpassed all expectation; a people that, living through every day the War had lasted, had passed through every sorrow, privation, agony, had now but one thought, to destroy the enemy. The atmosphere of Paris was fiery. The decision of the peace terms to be imposed on the enemy was to be taken in a city which a few months before, one might really say a few weeks before, had been under the fire of the long-range guns invented by the Germans, in hourly dread of enemy aeroplanes. Even now it is inexplicable that President Wilson did not realize the situation which must inevitably come about. It is possible that the delirium of enthusiasm with which he was received at Paris may have given him the idea that it was in him alone that the people trusted, may have made him take the welcome given to the representative of the deciding factor of the War as the welcome to the principles which he had proclaimed to the world. Months later, when he left France amid general indifference if not distrust, President Wilson must have realized that he had lost, not popularity, but prestige, the one sure element of success for the head of a Government, much more so for the head of a State. It was inevitable that a Peace Conference held in Paris, only a few months after the War, with the direction and preparation of the work almost entirely in French hands and with Clemenceau at the head of everything, should conclude as it did conclude; all the more so when Italy held apart right from the beginning, and England, though convinced of the mistakes being made, could not act freely and effectively.

The first duty of the Peace Conference was to restore a state of equilibrium and re-establish conditions of life. Taking Europe as an economic unity, broken by the War, it was necessary first of all and in the interests of all to re-establish conditions of life which would make it possible for the crisis to be overcome with the least possible damage.

I do not propose to tell the story of the Conference, and it is as well to say at once that I do not intend to make use of any document placed in my hands for official purposes. But the story of the Paris Conference can now be told with practical completeness after what has been published by J.M. Keynes in his noble book on the Economic Consequences of the War and by the American Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, and after the statements made in the British and French Parliaments by Lloyd George and Clemenceau. But from the political point of view the most interesting document is still André Tardieu's book La Paix, to which Clemenceau wrote a preface and which expresses, from the point of view of the French Delegation at the Conference, the programme which France laid before itself and what it obtained. This book explains how the principal decisions were taken, and indeed can be fairly considered to show in a more reliable way than any other publication extant how the work of the Conference proceeded. For not only was M. Tardieu one of the French Delegates to the Conference, one of those who signed the Versailles Treaty, but also he prepared the plan of work as well as the solutions of the most important questions in his capacity of trusted agent of the Prime Minister.

The determination in the mind of President Wilson when he came to Paris was to carry through his programme of the League of Nations. He was fickle in his infallibility, but he had the firmest faith that he was working for the peace of the world and above all for the glory of the United States. Of European things he was supremely ignorant. We are bound to recognize his good faith, but we are not in the least bound on that account to admit his capacity to tackle the problems which with his academic simplicity he set himself to solve. When he arrived in Europe he had not even prepared in outline a scheme of what the League of Nations was to be; the principal problems found him unprepared, and the duty of the crowd of experts (sometimes not too expert) who followed him seemed rather to be to demonstrate the truth of his idea than to prepare material for seriously thought out decisions.

He could have made no greater mistake than he did in coming to Europe to take part in the meetings of the Conference. His figure lost relief at once, in a way it seemed to lose dignity. The head of a State was taking part in meetings of heads of Governments, one of the latter presiding. It was a giant compelled to live in a cellar and thereby sacrificing his height. He was surrounded by formal respect and in some decisions he exercised almost despotic authority, but his work was none the less disordered; there was a semblance of giving in to him while he was giving away his entire programme without being aware of it.

In his ignorance of European things he was brought, without recognizing it, to accept a series of decisions not superficially in opposition to his fourteen points but which did actually nullify them.

Great Britain is part of Europe but is not on the Continent of Europe. While Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, etc., live the same life, are one in thought, Great Britain lives in her superb insularity. If she had any moment of supreme anxiety during the War, it was in the spring and summer of 1917 during the terrible threat of the destruction of her shipping by submarines and the inability of construction to keep pace with it. But after the defeat of Germany Great Britain found herself with a fleet far superior to those of all the rest of Europe put together; once more she broke away from Continental Europe.

Lloyd George, with swiftly acting brain and clear insight, undoubtedly the most remarkable man at the Paris Conference, found himself in a difficult situation between President Wilson's pronouncements, some of them, like that regarding the freedom of the seas, undefined and dangerous, and the claims of France tending, after the brutal attack it had had to meet, not towards a true peace and the reconstruction of Europe, but towards the vivisection of Germany. In one of the first moments, just before the General Elections, Lloyd George, too, promised measures of the greatest severity, the trial of the Kaiser, the punishment of all guilty of atrocities, compensation for all who had suffered from the War, the widest and most complete indemnity. But such pronouncements gave way before his clear realization of facts, and later on he tried in vain to put the Conference on the plane of such realization.

Italy, as M. Tardieu says very plainly, carried no weight in the Conference. In the meetings of the Prime Ministers and President Wilson le ton était celui de la conversation; nul apparat, nulle pose. M. Orlando parlait peu; l'activité de l'Italie à la conference a été, jusqu'à l'excès, absorbée par la question de Fiume, et sa part dans les débats a été de ce fait trop réduite. Restait un dialogue à trois: Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George. The Italian Government came into the War in May, 1915, on the basis of the London Agreement of the preceding April, and it had never thought of claiming Fiume either before the War when it was free to lay down conditions or during the progress of the War.