Seeking peace in a world falling to pieces

When Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany in April 1917, he made no secret of his ambitions. This would not be a war to gain territory or treasure but a fight for the “ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples.” He famously declared his chief war aim: “The world must be made safe for democracy.”

Once engaged in the Great War, Wilson expanded on these principles in his Fourteen Points. The United States now repudiated the making of secret alliances, which had led to war in 1914. It also pledged to ensure freedom of the seas, promote free trade, reduce armaments and give the peoples of Europe and the Middle East, languishing under the rule of tyrannical empires, the opportunity for national self-determination. Not least, Wilson asked that the states of the world join together in a League of Nations to help preserve peace.

Surely no nobler set of war aims was ever articulated, and when Wilson arrived in Europe in January 1919 to preside over the postwar peace conference, the public hailed him as an almost divine figure, a man possessed of the power to right the wrongs and ease the sufferings of war-racked Europe. The crowds that lined the streets as he made his way into Paris erupted with shouts of “Vive l’Amerique!” Wilson, they believed, had come to Paris not merely to make peace but to make the world anew.

Of course, he failed, and the story of Wilson’s heroic failure lies at the heart of Margaret MacMillan’s excellent survey of the Paris Peace Conference. This is a sprawling work of narrative political history, filled with both diplomatic detail and vivid portraits of statesmen from across the world who converged on Paris in those dreary early months of 1919. This is by no means the first book to have covered this ground, but by combining impeccable research with lively prose and an eye for telling detail, MacMillan brings the diplomatic wranglings to life.

The three chief leaders occupy center stage. Woodrow Wilson faced off against the wily British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a Welsh dynamo with a keen political sense and few scruples. He also locked horns with the stalwart French premier, Georges Clemenceau, who hated Germany with all his heart and demanded a tough peace settlement that would forever hobble the once fear-inspiring nation. These men brought with them dozens of ministers, hundreds of advisors and thousands of journalists, who packed the best Paris hotels and restaurants, filling the city with an air of drama and intrigue. MacMillan, Lloyd George’s great-granddaughter, has an especially keen eye for set-piece descriptions and character portraits, and she persuades us that “for six months, Paris was the capital of the world.”

Indeed, the leaders in Paris took on an agenda of staggering proportions, addressing issues that affected almost every continent. With the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires swept away by the war, the leaders had to rearrange the political map of Europe. They also sought to revive the European economy, disarm the defeated powers, contain the Bolshevik challenge coming from Russia, dismantle the German colonial empire and design successor states in the Middle East to take the place of the defunct Ottoman Empire. On top of this, they outlined an unprecedented experiment in international cooperation and collective security: the League of Nations.

If these leaders had shared a common vision and close unity of purpose, they might have managed to achieve great things in Paris. But they were divided on almost all the great questions of the conference. Wilson expended enormous energy on the League, believing this new world body would assure a lasting peace. Clemenceau disdained it and demanded a military occupation of the Rhineland, the long-term disarmament of Germany and a heavy reparations bill. Lloyd George, under political pressure at home to “squeeze Germany until the pips squeaked,” lent support to France’s demands for reparations from Germany but tried to ingratiate himself with Wilson by supporting the League. All the while, he had his eyes set on snapping up large chunks of the Middle East, now that the Ottomans had been pushed aside. Not surprisingly, the Germans, who were not allowed to participate, declared the whole thing a sham.

At times, MacMillan’s narrative flies past like an express train, and we catch only glimpses of various characters in each compartment. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin appears briefly, casting scorn on Wilson’s high-minded pieties. Then a noisy band of Yugoslavs looms into view, calling for recognition of their newly proclaimed kingdom; then delegations of Romanians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Czechs and Slovaks speed by before ceding place to the Japanese representatives, asking for a sphere of influence in China.

Throughout, however, the story returns to the central questions of the conference: Must Germany be treated harshly or leniently? Should Germany pay for the war damage it caused? Should all the peoples of Europe and the Middle East really be granted self-determination or should multi-ethnic states be established? And, most important, what powers should be given to the new League of Nations to keep the peace?

As MacMillan shows, the peace conference failed because these issues were never resolved. The treaty that was finally signed with Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles was shot through with contradictions that opened the way for Germany’s angry defiance. For example, the victors demanded payment of reparations but gave no indication of how Germany would find the means to pay. Self-determination had been loudly championed by Wilson, but the Allies remained in occupation of German territory in the West, while in the East, millions of Germans wound up living inside the new states of Czechoslovakia and Poland. Meanwhile, Romania and Yugoslavia were allowed to swallow vast tracts of Hungary. And, to Wilson’s profound distress, the League of Nations, on which he had labored so valiantly, was scorned by the United States Senate, which refused to ratify American membership.

The most egregious betrayal of Wilson’s idealism occurred in the Middle East, where Britain and France pounced on the Ottoman Empire like hungry wolves. Turkish nationalist forces under Kemal Ataturk preserved a sovereign Turkish state (and crushed hopes for an independent Kurdistan), but the vast lands stretching south and east -- Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula -- these were to be divided up as spoils of war. The British and French politely claimed to be acting on behalf of the League of Nations, which would oversee the elevation of these undeveloped regions into modern states. In fact, this was a land grab, and it laid the ground for the anti-Western animosity that permeates the Arab world today.

Despite the many shortcomings of the peace settlement devised in 1919, MacMillan offers some sympathy for the peacemakers. They did not, after all, willingly sow the seeds of World War II. They simply disagreed on the basic mechanism to ensure a lasting peace. Indeed, despite the subtitle of the book, these were six months that signally failed to change the world: They did not make the world safe for democracy or restrain the destructive power of nationalism or curtail the building of vast navies and armies. In the same month that the peace conference ended, Adolf Hitler began a career as an education officer in the German army, instructing cadets about the Jewish and Bolshevik conspiracy against Germany.

MacMillan’s fine work reminds us just how hard it is, even for great powers, to hammer swords into plowshares. Today, at a time of unprecedented American power and global reach, our record of manufacturing peace has not been especially strong either. Those recent settlements that have worked, such as in Bosnia and Kosovo, have held together only because of the presence of large numbers of U.S. and NATO soldiers to enforce an uneasy truce. In Afghanistan, our efforts at nation building are incomplete at best. In Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, half a century of determined peacemaking efforts have gone unredeemed. Meanwhile, there are some 60 armed conflicts going on in the world today, and the United States is either powerless or unwilling to stop them. MacMillan’s book reminds us of the main lesson learned at such a high cost in Paris in 1919: Peace is not something that can be imposed at the conference table. It can grow only from the hearts of people.