Framework of Events: May/June at the Paris Peace Conference

OK, so I have bitten off more than I can chew! But that doesn't mean that we can't continue exploring important aspects of the "peace" year and even beyond. To those who are still reading, many thanks for your patience in waiting for the recent posts. In the coming days, we will be dealing with the German territorial issues, especially North Schleswig, and Upper Silesia, as they were embodied in the Draft Treaty of May 1919 and the Final Draft of June. And I want to come to grips in the next couple of posts with the issue of the "dictated peace."

For now, I want to get another framework of events up front, so that the various issues to come make more sense. First, a simple chronology.

April 25—First German Delegates arrive in Paris.

April 28—The Covenant of the League of Nations (worked out by Jan Smuts) was presented in final form, to be integral to the coming treaties and agreements.

April 29—The German Foreign Minister, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau arrives in Paris.

May 5—The Italian delegation returns to Paris, after having left abruptly eleven days previously.

(as the Draft Treaty for the Germans was hammered together during April, the French were increasingly adamant that the German treaty must include Germany's cession of all territories west of the Rhine, to make the Rhine the Franco-German border, for security reasons. )

May 7—The Draft Treaty was submitted to the German Delegation in the Seventh Plenary Session of the Peace Conference, held at the Trianon Palace at Versailles. The Germans were given fifteen days to "reply" to the terms of the Treaty in writing (in the French language). (Nine additional days were added a few weeks later.)

May 8—The Germans protested a number of specific terms, while the Foreign Office and ot

her German government branches began compiling materials for the Reply.

May 12—The Allied Economic Council decided to continue wartime Blockade against Germany if the Germans refused to sign the Treaty. (Although the Blockade on foodstuffs was still in effect, the Allies had allowed some limited deliveries since March 25.)

May 13—Brockdorff-Rantzau sends Note to Clemenceau refusing the Treaty clause in which Germany is to accept sole responsibility for the war.

June 2—Austrian Draft Treaty handed to Austrian Delegation.

June 3—Germany protests French support for an independent Rhine Republic.

June 12—Turkish delegation arrives at Paris.

June 16—Final Allied reply to a list of German objections to the Treaty. The Allies give the Germans five days to sign.

June 20—Centrist German cabinet (SPD, DDP, Center), led by Philipp Scheidemann, resigns after emotional meetings about the Treaty, Scheidemann saying "The hand which signs this Treaty will wither." All political elements in Germany oppose the Treaty, and the Foreign Minister, Brockdorff-Rantzau, is opposed to signing.

Same day, the Allied Supreme Council orders Marshal Foch to prepare to advance from occupied to unoccupied Germany if the Germans have not signed the Treaty by seven o'clock PM on June 23.

June 21—The German fleet, commanded by Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter and interned by the Allies in Gutter Sound at Scapa Flow, is scuttled by its crews, an open act of defiance: sunk were dozens of vessels, including fifteen capital ships. In trying to prevent the scuttling, British ships opened fire, killing nine Germans and wounding six.

June 22—In a Sunday session, and after much discussion, votes 237-138 to sign the Treaty, with reservations on the "war guilt" clause. The same day, the Supreme Council refused to recognize any signing with reservations.

June 23—The Germans seek a delay, which is refused. At 6:35 in the evening, twenty-five minutes before the deadline, German officials announce that Germany will sign the treaty without reservations, but under protest. The German National Assembly sends a telegram acceding, but calling the whole process "injustice without example."

June 28—At the Ninth Plenary Session of the Peace Conference, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the official signing of the Treaty took place. Signing for the Germans was Foreign Minister Hermann Müller (SPD) and Colonial Minister Johannes Bell (Center Party).

Self-Determination: A Deeper Look

Self-determination, as we have seen, became a primary theme of the Paris Peace Conference. I would like to examine this conception here in a bit more depth.

Even before American entry into the war, Woodrow Wilson had introduced into the public discourse on the territorial aspects of the war the expression "self-determination," not a new phrase in itself, but an old expression with a new meaning. Where "self-determination" seemed to be related to the individual will and freedom of action, Wilson and his Progressive friends applied the term to groups or peoples, meaning that each people should decide for itself how it should be governed. This expression, indeed, seemed tailor-made for peacemaking, since the staggering number of territorial changes to be overseen and codified by the Conference called for some overriding rhyme and reason. Indeed, Wilson proposed precisely this: that the changes made in European areas in particular - and to a lesser extent in non-European areas - be in accordance both with a "new diplomacy" of "open covenants openly arrived at" and confirmed by Self-determination.

Now in most minds, insofar as self-determination takes on a collective or group meaning, it goes back to the earlier content of mid-nineteenth-century nationalism. The great "nationalisms" of the nineteenth century eventually resolved themselves into a simple program: to make one's ethnic "nation" coterminus with one's country. Indeed, triumphant nineteenth-century liberalism gave rise to the national idea as a peaceful way to end the dynastic rivalries of Europe: if kings were always after territory, a state that ended at its natural ethnic or linguistic boundary had no right or indeed no reason to invade its neighbor. Nationalists before the 1860s or so were frequently influenced by universalist liberalism. Within the liberal national states, the nation was, as Ernest Renan called it in the 1880s, a "daily plebiscite," the result of individual choice and shared memories. The central proposition of Renan's famous essay is that individual choice is at the heart of the nation, and that the aggregation of individual choices "creates an ethical conscience, which is called a nation."

Clearly, the warm tones of this earlier sense of the word self-determination echoed in the rhetoric of the 1919 peacemakers. The problem was that the peacemakers most devoted to this proposition, above all the crusading Americans under Wilson, proposed to confer from Paris this self-determination on the peoples in question. Where the origin of the term was indeed associated with self-directed movements for true local control of governments, the peacemakers came to the board as social engineers who not only "imposed" self-determination from above, but also decided which groups were worthy of self-determination.

In this sense, self-determination as wielded in the rather Aesopian jargon of 1919 represented the opposite of secession. Where secession means the departure of a region from one state form in order to exist outside that state form, self-determination in 1919 meant that ethnic groups, at least certain ethnic groups chosen by the victorious powers, should possess a state which corresponded territorially to the land occupied by the ethnic group, meaning land where members of the language group lived. Further, the planners at Paris generally held that all members of an ethnic group would by definition choose to live in a state encompassing their group and only their group.

Here we see self-determination not in the sense of the "plebiscite every day," but in the sense of positivist "social science" and technocracy. "Tell me what is right," Wilson told his experts en route to the Peace Conference, "And I will fight for it."

Wilson recognized that not every individual decision was dictated by one's physiological heritage, but on the whole, the Paris peacemakers seemed to take a reductionist view of ethnicity, often practically equating ethnic or linguistic connections with political aspirations. The Council of Four was, for Wilson certainly and to a lesser extent for the other Allied leaders, a sort of Saint Simonian meeting of Presbyterian technocrats disposing over the peoples of Europe.

The upshot of this was that the various "deals" made by the Allies during the war, the various aims for territory involving power and empire, and other secret plans for territorial disposition nurtured by the victorious Allies at the Conference were often covered over with the sanctimonious phrase of "self-determination." We will see this phrase "in action" over the newt few days.

Here We Go Again

Apologies to any who might be following my attempt to keep up with the Paris Peace Conference. I am losing ground! But I had to undertake a very specific research trip at this very specific time, and what with the end of the semester, my travel, etc., I have been remiss in keeping up. Well, no use crying over blog entries unwritten. Indeed, my research pertained to several topics of interest here, so perhaps the future entries, especially those on the formation of the modern Middle East, will be richer.

Finals, Flu, and Some Developments on Schleswig

OK, so I have missed some of my anniversaries. Unfortunately, working with about two dozen term papers and then being overwhelmed with finals, an especially sick group of test-takers (no swine flu that I know of, but several hospitalized with lung infections, etc.), and some severe cases of senioritis has taken its toll.

By the way, my college, Austin College, is in Texas, though nowhere close to the border, but the authorities were on swine flu alert. As readers of this blog will have perceived, there were loads of references to the 1918/1919 flu in the discussion of this swine flu (and, because of this one, the discussion of the 1976 "failed" epidemic). In both cases, scientists were thinking about the second round of the flu pandemic. It was the beginning of this one which killed several peacemakers in Paris in the early months of 1919.

Well, finals are done: the strong have overcome, the graduators have graduated. So I continue!

Let turn back to the issue of Schleswig-Holstein.

You may remember from my February 22 post that there was a long history to the northern border of the German world. It was a border that was, like most European borders, not especially clear. That is, there was a continuum from one hundred percent Danish speaking, southward, to some point at which Danish-speakers and German-speakers were about fifty-fifty, to some point farther south at which everyone spoke German. This zone (say from one hundred to one hundred percent) started in the middle of the Jutland Peninsula and ended just south of its base—perhaps a hundred and twenty miles north and south. And the Peninsula here averages maybe forty miles wide. (Quote me if you like, but the glib summary I have just made constitutes pretty rough justice. The demographics of the region were hotly disputed by, basically, German scholars on the one hand, and Danish scholars on the other, for fifty years.)

In any case, with the wars of German Unification, the region ended up not as a proud, independent German state of the new federal Germany, but as a somewhat unwilling province of Prussia, the largest German state, the one to rule them all, so to speak.

If we scroll forward to the Peace Conference, we have Woodrow Wilson insisting on "self-determination" and meaning ethnic togetherness. We have the whole French diplomatic establishment insisting on the old truism (outworn even in 1919) that cutting down the size and population of a state would cut down on its power, and of course on the application of that rule in cutting as much territory away from Germany as possible.

Clearly, Alsace-Lorraine would go back to France. Clearly, Wilson's concern with Poland would place many parts of Germany in Polish hands. And some German territory could be handed over in one way or another to Belgium and Lithuania.

But Denmark? Denmark had been neutral in the War. Yet the Entente diplomats found a way. German states, especially Prussia, had "unjustly" taken too much territory in the Danish War of 1864. This incorporation of territory had trapped many ethnic Danes south of the border. Hence, both on grounds of general "justice" (remember Wilson's unctuous commandment to his researchers: "Tell me what is right, and I will fight for it") and on grounds of ethnic self-determination, the Entente began to work (as early as March 1919) on a plan to give Schleswig, or some part of it, to Denmark.

OK. Now we are caught up, at least on this issue, and I promise to add the next installment in a reasonable day or two.

Yeats, Violence, and "The Second Coming"

Yeats was not at Paris, but maybe this would be a good time not only for me to get back on the line, but also to introduce the theme of a broader cultural critique of the age of the "The Peace."

As we have seen in the last post (pun accidental, but there it is, at least for all who are familiar with the famous British bugle call), the violence of the war had lessened in its horrifying intensity with the Armistice, but much, much more violence was in store. The very period of the Peace that we are looking at was a time in which our modern "left" and "right" were being more highly defined, and in which the murderous aspects of modern national identity began to take on more definition as well. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset was already writing the material that in the late twenties became The Revolt of the Masses, in which the liberal philosopher decried the rise of barbarism associated with "mass man." His idea was not that social inferiors were taking over the system, but rather that the modern high-tech, crude demagogue represented a great danger for civilization. Ortega y Gasset was thinking of what the nineteenth-century art historian Jacob Burckhardt called the "simplificateurs terribles" (terrible simplifiers), men who would use the technology of modern life to power over the masses, whose faith was their driving force.

If we consider that the period between 1917 and 1919 saw the foundation of the Bolshevik regime, the formation of the Fascist party in Italy, and Hitler's conversion of a tiny crackpot political grouping Munich to the NSDAP, the National Socialist Party--well, we have the true generation of the whole "totalitarian" triumvirate so to speak, and precisely during the later phases of the war and the time of the peace conference.

To make a long story short, much that was happening seemed to thinking contemporaries a kind of retrograde motion in terms of civilization. British war poet Wilfred Owen sensed this in his grim vision "Strange Meeting," in which he describes a "trek from progress." A trek not toward progress, but from it. Other poets, philosophers such as Ortega y Gasset, and cultural observers of all kinds could see aspects of the same trend.

Among them was the great Irish mystic, the poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). Already in January 1919--as the Paris Peace Conference was opening, a telling conjunction indeed--Yeats was writing one of the great poems of the twentieth century and a powerful critique of times out of joint in "The Second Coming." (For a very fine short analysis of the poem, see this essay.)

In the poem, printed just below, the poet becomes the prophet. It is well worth reading. It certainly discerns a design for a violent century.

The Second Coming

by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Peace.... Isn't It Wonderful!: Violent Europe, Spring 1919

Let me just list a few events outside Paris in these busy peacemaking days.

March 3—Freikorps units continue their pacification of "leftists" and resume "force and awe"-type tactics in Berlin. Twenty-four "radicals" are killed in Berlin in early March with more to come.

In Latvia, other "volunteer" fighters under German General von der Goltz began an advance on Riga, which had been captured by Bolsheviks.

March 4—In Siberia, Admiral Kolchak's White army begins an offensive against the Reds on a 700-mile front.

March 10—Bitter fighting between White forces (Cossacks in this instance) and Bolshevik Red Army forces on the Dnieper.

March 17—Red forces in Archangel fought Germans, French (!), and British (!) in heaving fighting near Bolshe Ozerki. The offensive of von der Goltz's mostly Latvian and German volunteer forces retake Milau from the Bolsheviks on March 18, finding massacred hostages in the citadel of the town.

March 19—The Supreme War Council in Paris orders a stop to fighting and massacres between Poles and Ruthenians along the Poland/Ukraine border.

March 21—Count Karolyi's government in Hungary falls, its place taken by a Communist/Socialist government which includes Bela Kun as foreign minister. A Hungarian Soviet is declared shortly thereafter, and Hungary declares war on Czechoslovakia (!), with Hungarian "Reds" invading Slovakia in early April.

March 23—Mussolini founds the Fascist movement in Milan, amid street fighting and strikes in Italy.

March 24—100,000 miners Britain strike against new rationing and other grievances.

March 25—Beginning of the end of the "Hunger Blockade" against Germany as the first "food ship" docks at Hamburg to begin offloading 400,000 tons of food.

A Word On Upper Silesia

I  want to say something now about German perceptions of what was going on in Paris, especially in connection with the coal-producing territory of Upper Silesia.  Remember that no Germans were allowed visas to be in any part of France during the conference, except at the few occasions when the German delegation was invited to come.  At the same time, the Germans were not just sitting on their hands.  Indeed, they were having extensive discussions about what to say to the Allies once they got a chance to talk. 

If the Germans were not allowed to go to France, by the way, at least France could come to Germany.  Considerable German territories were occupied immediately after the war by American, French, and British troops.  But even so, contact in the sense of high diplomacy was extremely limited.   So much of the German discussion was based on guesswork.

But they could easily guess that the Allies were interested in the coal-rich eastern region of Upper Silesia.  This borderland was peopled about equally by ethnic Germans and ethnic Poles.  Yet the value of the coal for the newly set-up state of Poland (darling of the Allies—especially of Wilson) was self-evident. 

There was much talk on parts of the political spectrum of the Allies "spiriting away Upper Silesia from us" to give to Poland, as one leftist politician put it at a political gathering in the early stages of the November Revolution (1918).  Some even suggested that the Allies would hold a border referendum, a plebiscite, in Upper Silesia and other ethnically mixed border regions, and since all Germans "knew" that everyone on the border would vote German, they hoped merely to have Allied troops present to prevent "Polish skullduggery." 

On December 27,  1918, however, the eastern German city and province of Posen (just to the north of Silesia) experienced an uprising that would alter conditions substantially.  German Posen became Polish Poznań.  An uprising in several local places ended in an influx of paramilitary forces from the newly revived Polish state.  Indeed, as the local Polish soldiery and those who had come to their aid made their way into the region, they set up an organization called the  "Central Organization for Cleansing Poznań (city) of Jews and Germans" (Centralna Organizacja dla Oczyszczenia Poznania od Żydów i Niemców). This was one of the earliest known uses of the term "cleansing" in the context of unwanted ethnic groups.

And indeed, the first postwar migrations of any sort in the German-Polish border region resulted from the Poznań uprising of December 1918, supported by the new government of Poland, which led to an exodus of Germans and Jews. The "Posen Pattern"—meaning a violent overthrow of the local authorities sanctioned by the victorious Allies—echoes through much of the German official record about the border in after the war.

Still, German statesman swayed between optimism and pessimism.  Many agreed with General von Seeckt that holding onto the eastern territories would be "child's play."  On the other hand, many Berlin planners continued to wonder how to interpret the strange information they were receiving second-hand from Paris.  As for the borderlanders in Upper Silesia, a startling development occurred:  local people from both the Polish-speaking population and from among the Germans banded together to form the League of Upper Silesians, under the slogan "Upper Silesia to the Upper Silesians!"  These people were hoping for a neutral, independent state, a kind of Luxembourg of the east. One thing that very sizeable group proved was that many of the "Polish" inhabitants of Upper Silesia did not really want to opt for what must have seemed the shaky new Polish state. 

Actually, I will deal with this period of time later in a more general context of the autonomist crisis, since autonomist movements emerged in many regions of the Germany during 1919 and later. 

But the point here is that while the Upper Silesians were attempting to control their future, the Allies were making other plans.  In April, ninety years ago, the Allies began working out the details for border plebiscites to be held in several different German regions. 

This is a story we have to keep tabs on, and indeed a very important one.