PARIS 1919 (14 page)

Bullitt and Steffens spent a wonderful week in Moscow: accommodation in a confiscated palace, piles of caviar, nights at the opera in the tsar's old box and during the day discussions with Lenin and Chicherin themselves. The Bolsheviks, Steffens believed, were getting rid of the causes of poverty, corruption, tyranny and war. “They were not trying to establish political democracy, legal liberty, and negotiated peace—not now. They were at present only laying the basis for these good things.” Bullitt agreed that a great work had been started in Russia. Both men were deeply impressed with Lenin. He was “straightforward and direct,” said Bullitt, “but also genial and with a large humor and serenity.” Steffens asked about the terror against the Bolsheviks' opponents and was moved when Lenin expressed regret; he was, thought Steffens, “a liberal by instinct.”
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By the end of the week Bullitt had, he thought, a deal. There would be a cease-fire and then concessions on both sides. The Allies would withdraw their troops, but the Bolsheviks would not insist on an end to the various White governments in Russia. (Since the terms called for an end to Allied assistance to the Whites, the Bolsheviks could afford to be generous.) It is doubtful that the Bolsheviks were negotiating in good faith; Lenin had shown with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk that he was prepared to make concessions only to buy time. Bullitt and Steffens were “useful idiots,” their mission helpful at least for propaganda.

Bullitt proudly bore his agreement, and Steffens his rosy picture of the future, back to Paris. House, as usual, was encouraging, but other members of the American delegation had their doubts. Wilson himself, by now back from the United States, was simply too distracted by the difficult negotiations over the German treaty to pay much attention. He would not make time to see Bullitt. Lloyd George, who had him to breakfast on March 28, was getting very cold feet indeed. Béla Kun's seizure of power in Hungary the weekend before had reawakened fears about Bolshevism spreading westward. News had leaked out about Bullitt's mission; rumors were circulating that Britain and the United States were about to recognize the Soviet government. Lloyd George's Conservative backbenchers were watching him like a hawk; so were Northcliffe's papers. That morning, the
Daily Mail
had carried a savage leading article by Henry Wickham Steed, the new editor of its sister paper
The Times,
who hated Lloyd George as much as Northcliffe did. The Prinkipo “intrigue” was being resurrected, thanks to the machinations of international Jewish financiers and possibly German interests. Lloyd George held the newspaper out toward Bullitt over the breakfast table. “As long as the British press is doing this kind of thing, how can you expect me to be sensible about Russia?”
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In the next weeks, the pressure on Lloyd George grew. On April 10 more than two hundred Conservative members of Parliament signed a telegram urging him not to recognize the Soviet government. Lloyd George, who was also under attack over the German peace terms, knew when to cut his losses. When he faced the House of Commons on April 16, he said firmly that recognition had never been discussed in Paris and was out of the question. When he was asked specifically about Bullitt's mission, he said airily, “There was a suggestion that there was some young American who had come back.” He could not say whether the young man had brought back any useful reports.
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Bullitt was shattered. No one in Paris wanted to hear about his mission, not even the president he admired so much. His disillusionment with Wilson was complete when the terms of the German treaty came out in May. He sent an angry and hurt letter of resignation and headed for the Riviera, “to lie on the sand and watch the world go to hell.” That autumn he returned to the United States and helped to seal the fate of Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles by testifying before the Senate that he, and many others in the American delegation, disapproved of many of its clauses. He also managed to get his report on his mission to Russia into the record. In 1934, he returned to Moscow as the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. This time the experience turned him into a fervent anticommunist.
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Lloyd George and Wilson drew back from contact with the Soviet government after this, although they continued to hope for some miraculous transformation of the Bolsheviks into good democrats. The two even toyed briefly with the idea of using food shipments to calm the Bolsheviks down, a scheme that Hoover, as head of the Allied relief administration, had been pushing. Hoover's own views on the Bolsheviks were close to Wilson's: that they were an understandable response to appalling conditions. They were dangerous, though, their propaganda attractive even in strong societies such as America. The Allies should let the Bolsheviks know, indirectly, that if they stopped trying to spread their revolution, Russia would receive substantial help. With time and food, the Russian people would swing away from radical ideas. To avoid any hint of Allied recognition and to forestall objections from the French, Hoover suggested using a prominent figure from a neutral country to run the whole operation.
⁴⁵

As it happened, he had someone in mind, “a fine, rugged character, a man of great physical and moral courage”—Fridtjof Nansen, the famous Norwegian Arctic explorer, who happened to be in Paris with the vague idea of doing something for the League of Nations. In the middle of April, the Council of Four approved Hoover's plan. A group of neutral countries, including Nansen's own Norway, were to collect food and medicines for Russia, which they would deliver if the Bolsheviks arranged a cease-fire with their enemies. Nansen tried to dispatch a telegram to Lenin to tell him the good news, but neither the French, who saw the scheme as a ploy by British, American, perhaps even German interests to gain concessions in Russia, nor the British, who were wary of anything that looked like recognition of the Bolsheviks, would send it. The telegram finally went from Berlin.
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The Soviet reply, drafted by Chicherin and Litvinov, came back via radio and cable on May 15. “Be extremely polite to Nansen,
extremely insolent
to Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau,” Lenin had instructed them. As for the scheme itself, “use it
for propaganda
for clearly it can serve
no other
useful purpose.” His colleagues followed his advice, mixing stinging attacks on the Allies with a categorical refusal to consider a cease-fire unless there was a proper peace conference. In Paris, the peacemakers shook their heads sadly and abandoned all further discussion of humanitarian relief. The episode showed yet again the bankruptcy of Allied policy toward Russia.
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There was one last glimmer of hope: that the Russians themselves might solve their dilemma. Just before the spring thaw turned Russia's roads to mud, the White Russians managed to coordinate an attack on the Bolsheviks. From his base in eastern Siberia, the White admiral Kolchak struck along a wide front. One force moved north toward Archangel and managed to link up with a small advance guard from a beleaguered White Russian and British force. Another pushed west toward the Ural Mountains. A third went south to join up with Denikin and his armies. By mid-April Kolchak and his allies had pushed the Bolsheviks back out of 300,000 square kilometers of territory. But this was the high point of their fortunes.

The Bolsheviks possessed two crucial advantages: their unity and their location. They controlled the center of Russia, while their heterogeneous opponents were widely dispersed around the periphery. Often, none of the White Russian commanders, mutually suspicious and separated from one another by miles of often hostile country, had any idea of what the others were doing. The Bolsheviks had three times the manpower and most of Russia's arms factories.
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On May 23, 1919, the Allies decided to extend partial recognition to Kolchak's government. “The moment chosen,” wrote Churchill later, “was almost exactly the moment when that declaration was almost certainly too late.” A dispatch asking for assurances that democratic institutions would be introduced made its tortuous way out to Siberia and in due course a partly garbled answer came back that seemed to provide the necessary guarantees. What also came back from Russia shortly afterward were reports of defeats. By late June, Red armies had broken through Kolchak's center and the Whites were falling back hundreds of kilometers.
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By this time, however, the Peace Conference was drawing to a close and the Germans were about to sign the Treaty of Versailles. There was no time to do anything more about Russia. A brief clause was drawn up for the treaty which simply said that any treaties made in the future between the Allies and Russia, or any parts of it, must be recognized. Another clause left open the possibility of Russia's claiming reparations. Otherwise policy toward Russia remained as confused as it had been all along. The blockade against the Bolsheviks remained in force, but support for the Whites gradually dwindled. Britain and France abandoned Kolchak as a lost cause. (The admiral put himself under the protection of the Czech Legion, still in eastern Siberia; the Czechs handed him over to the Bolsheviks, and he was shot in February 1920.) By October 1919, Denikin was in full retreat in the south. In January 1921, with much prodding from Britain, the European Allies agreed to end military intervention and abandon their blockade. In March 1921, Britain signed a trade agreement with the Soviet government. Even Conservative businessmen, who feared they were losing an opportunity in Russia, supported it. In 1924 Britain and the Soviet Union established full diplomatic relations. France followed reluctantly. America would wait another decade, until FDR.

With hindsight, Churchill and Foch were right about the Bolsheviks and Lloyd George and Wilson were wrong. The governing party in Russia did not become like Swedish Social Democrats. Lenin had established a system of terrible and unfettered power which gave Stalin free rein for his paranoid fantasies. The Russian people, and many more beyond, paid a dreadful price for the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, while in Paris the peacemakers were brought up against the limits of their own power.

7

The League of Nations

ON JANUARY 25, the peace conference formally approved the setting up of a commission on the League of Nations. A couple of the younger members of the American delegation thought it would make a wonderful inspirational film. They would show, they thought, the old diplomacy doing its evil work. Animated maps would illustrate how the seeds of war had been sown in the past: the secret alliances, the unjust wars, the conferences at which the old, selfish European powers drew arbitrary lines on the maps. The Paris Peace Conference and the League would shine out in “bold contrast.” The film would also, they were sure, make lots of money.
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It is hard today to imagine that such a project could have been taken seriously. Only a handful of eccentric historians still bother to study the League of Nations. Its archives, with their wealth of materials, are largely unvisited. Its very name evokes images of earnest bureaucrats, fuzzy liberal supporters, futile resolutions, unproductive fact-finding missions and, above all, failure: Manchuria in 1931, Ethiopia in 1935 and, most catastrophic of all, the outbreak of the Second World War a mere twenty years after the first one had ended. The dynamic leaders of the interwar years— Mussolini, Hitler, the Japanese militarists—sneered at the League and ultimately turned their backs on it. Its chief supporters—Britain, France and the smaller democracies—were lukewarm and flaccid. The Soviet Union joined only because Stalin could not, at the time, think of a better alternative. The United States never managed to join at all. So great was the taint of failure that when the powers contemplated a permanent association of nations during the Second World War, they decided to set up a completely new United Nations. The League was officially pronounced dead in 1946. It had ceased to count at all in 1939.

At its last assembly, Lord Robert Cecil, who had been there at its creation, asked, “Is it true that all our efforts for those twenty years have been thrown away?” He answered his own question bravely: “For the first time an organisation was constructed, in essence universal, not to protect the national interest of this or that country . . . but to abolish war.” The League had been, he concluded, “a great experiment.” It had put into concrete form the dreams and hopes of all those who had worked for peace through the centuries. It had left its legacy in the widespread acceptance of the idea that the nations of the world could and must work together for the collective security of them all. “The League is dead: Long live the United Nations!”
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Cecil was right. The League did represent something very important: both a recognition of the changes that had already taken place in international relations and a bet placed on the future. Just as steam engines had changed the way people moved about the surface of the earth, just as nationalism and democracy had given them a different relationship to one another and to their governments, so the way states behaved toward one another had undergone a transformation in the century before the Peace Conference met. Of course power still counted, and of course governments looked out for their countries, but what that meant had changed. If the eighteenth century had made and unmade alliances, and fought and ended wars, for dynastic advantage, even matters of honor, if it was perfectly all right to take pieces of land without any regard for their inhabitants, the nineteenth century had moved toward a different view. War increasingly was seen as an aberration, and an expensive one at that. In the eighteenth century someone's gain was always someone's loss; the overall ledger remained balanced. Now war was a cost to all players, as the Great War proved. National interests were furthered better by peace, which allowed trade and industry to flourish. And the nation itself was something different, no longer embodied by the monarch or a small élite but increasingly constituted by the people themselves.

In diplomacy, the forms remained the same: ambassadors presented credentials, treaties were signed and sealed. The rules, however, had changed. In the game of nations it was no longer fashionable, or even acceptable, for one nation to seize territory that was full of people of a different nationality. (Colonies did not count, because those peoples were assumed to be at a lower stage of political development.) When Bismarck created Germany, he did so in the name of German unity, not conquest for his master's Prussia. When his creation took Alsace-Lorraine from France in 1871, the German government did its best to persuade itself and the world that this was not for the sake of old-fashioned spoils of war but because the peoples of those provinces were really German at heart.

Another factor also now entered into the equation: public opinion. The spread of democracy, the growth of nationalism, the web of railway lines and telegraphs, the busy journalists and the rotary presses churning out the mass circulation newspapers, all this had summoned up a creature that governments did not much like but which they dared not ignore. At Paris, it was assumed that negotiations would be conducted under public scrutiny.

For idealists this was a good thing. The people would bring a much needed common sense to international relations. They did not want war or expensive arms races. (This faith had not been shaken by the fact that many Europeans seemed enthusiastic about war in the decades before 1914, and positively passionate in 1914 itself.) The prosperity and progress of the nineteenth century encouraged the belief that the world was becoming more civilized. A growing middle class provided a natural constituency for a peace movement preaching the virtues of compulsory arbitration of disputes, international courts, disarmament, perhaps even pledges to abstain from violence as ways to prevent wars. The opponents of war took as models their own societies, especially those in Western Europe, where governments had become more responsive to the will of their citizens, where public police forces had replaced private guards and where the rule of law was widely accepted. Surely it was possible to imagine a similar society of nations providing collective security for its members?
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In Paris, Wilson insisted on chairing the League commission, because for him the League of Nations was the centerpiece of the peace settlements. If it could be brought into being, then everything else would sooner or later fall into place. If the peace terms were imperfect, there would be plenty of time later for the League to correct them. Many new borders had to be drawn; if they were not quite right, the League would sort them out. Germany's colonies were going to be taken away; the League would make sure that they were run properly. The Ottoman empire was defunct; the League would act as liquidator and trustee for the peoples who were not yet ready to rule themselves. And for future generations the League would oversee general prosperity and peace, encouraging the weak, chiding the wicked and, where necessary, punishing the recalcitrant. It was a pledge that humanity was making to itself, a covenant.

The picture sometimes painted of Wilson sailing across the Atlantic bearing the gift of the League of Nations from the new world to the old is compelling but, alas, false. Many Europeans had long wanted a better way of managing international relations. The war they had just survived made sense only if it produced a better world and an end to war. That was what their own governments had promised in the dark days, and that was what had kept them going. In 1919, as Europeans contemplated those catastrophic years, with the scarcely imaginable outpouring of blood, as they realized that European society had been horribly damaged, perhaps fatally, the League struck many, and not only liberals and left-wingers, as their last chance. Harold Nicolson spoke for many of his generation when he said: “We were journeying to Paris, not merely to liquidate the war, but to found a new order in Europe. We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission. We must be alert, stern, righteous and ascetic. For we were bent on doing great, permanent and noble things.”
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Lloyd George went along with Wilson's insistence that the League should be the first task of the Peace Conference, not merely out of a cynical desire to keep the Americans happy. He was, after all, a Liberal, the leader of a party with a strong history of opposition to war. A consummate politician, he also knew the British public. “They regard with absolute horror,” he told his colleagues on Christmas Eve 1918, “the continuance of a state of affairs which might again degenerate into such a tragedy.” It would be political disaster to come back from the Peace Conference without a League of Nations. But the League never caught his imagination, perhaps because he doubted whether it could ever truly be effective. He rarely referred to it in speeches and never visited its headquarters while he was prime minister.
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In France, where memories of past German aggression and apprehension about the future were painfully alive, there was deep pessimism about international cooperation to end war. Yet there was a willingness, especially among liberals and the left, to give the League a try. Clemenceau would have preferred to deal with the German peace first, but he was determined that it would not be said that France had blocked the League. He himself remained ambivalent, not, as is sometimes said, hostile. As he famously remarked, “I like the League, but I do not believe in it.”
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Public opinion provided general support for the League but no clear guidance as to its shape. Should it be policeman or clergyman? Should it use force or moral suasion? The French, for obvious reasons, leaned toward a League with the power to stop aggressors by force. Lawyers, especially in the English-speaking world, put their faith in international law and tribunals. For pacifists, there was still another remedy for international violence: general disarmament and a promise from all members of the League to abstain from war. And what was the League going to be like? Some sort of superstate? A club for heads of state? A conference summoned whenever there was an emergency? Whatever shape it took, it would need qualifications for membership, rules, procedures and some sort of secretariat.

The man who had put the League at the heart of the Allied peace program kept an enigmatic silence on such details during the war. Wilson spoke only in generalities, albeit inspiring ones. His League would be powerful because it would represent the organized opinion of humanity. Its members would guarantee, he said in his Fourteen Points, each other's independence and borders. It might use force to protect these, but would probably not need to. The war had shown that ordinary people longed for such an organization; it was what they had fought for. “The counsels of plain men,” he told a huge audience in the Metropolitan Opera House in New York just before the war ended, “have become on all hands more simple and straightforward and more unified than the counsels of sophisticated men of affairs, who still retain the impression that they are playing a game of power and playing for high stakes.”
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Wilson thought it was a mistake to get down to specifics while the war was still on. That would only cause dissension among the Allies and it might give the enemy countries the impression that the League was somehow directed against them. To him it was so eminently a rational idea, the need for it so widely accepted, that it would grow on its own into a healthy organism. Even in Paris, while the League's covenant was being drafted, he resisted what he saw as excessive detail. “Gentlemen,” he told his colleagues on the League commission, “I have no doubt that the next generation will be made up of men as intelligent as you or I, and I think we can trust the League to manage its own affairs.”
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Wilson's casual attitude alarmed even his supporters. Fortunately, perhaps, there were several detailed plans floating about. As the war had dragged on, it had inevitably provoked much discussion about ways to forestall conflict. In the United States, the League to Enforce Peace brought Democrats and Republicans together. In Britain, a League of Nations Society drew a respectable middle-class, liberal membership. To their left, the Fabians sponsored a full-scale study of the matter by Leonard Woolf. At the beginning of 1918, the French and British governments decided that they had better get in on the act since, thanks to Wilson, a League of Nations was now an explicit Allied war aim. In France a commission under the prominent liberal statesman Léon Bourgeois drew up an elaborate scheme for an international organization with its own army. In Britain a special committee under a distinguished lawyer, Sir Walter Phillimore, produced a detailed set of recommendations that incorporated many of the prewar ideas on, for example, compulsory arbitration of disputes. Its approach was cautious, rejecting both utopian ideas of a world federation and the pragmatic suggestion that a league should be merely a continuation of the wartime alliance. When the British government sent him a copy of the Phillimore report, Wilson said unhelpfully that he found it disappointing and that he was working on his own scheme, which he would unveil in due course. His main principles, he allowed the British to learn, were two: “There must be a League of Nations and this must be virile, a reality, not a paper League.” The war ended with no more definite word than that from Washington.
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It was at this point that one of the luminaries of the British empire decided to try his hand at drafting a scheme. Thin, with hard blue eyes, General Jan Smuts, the South African foreign minister, was not particularly imposing at first glance. (In London, Borden's secretary thought he had come to fix the electric light and curtly told him to wait outside.) He had, however, precisely the sort of personal qualities to appeal to Wilson, because they were so much like his own: a fondness for dealing with the great questions, deep religious and ethical convictions, and a desire to make the world a better place. Both men had grown up in stable, happy families in small communities, Wilson in the American South, Smuts in the settled Boer farming community of the Cape. Both had fond memories of happy black servants (although both doubted that blacks would ever be the equals of whites) and unhappy memories of war, civil in Wilson's case and Boers against the British in Smuts's. Both were sober and restrained on the surface, passionate and sensitive underneath. Both combined vast self-righteousness with huge ambition. Both were quick to see the inconsistencies in others while remaining blind to their own.
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