PARIS 1919 (16 page)

On February 11, three days before Wilson was due to sail, the League commission met for most of the day. The French brought up amendments to create a League army. “Unconstitutional and also impossible,” said Wilson. The meeting adjourned without a decision. The next day, David Hunter Miller recorded in his diary, Cecil coldly pointed out their predicament to the French: “In his view they were saying to America, and to a lesser extent to Great Britain, that because more was not offered they would not take the gift that was at hand, and he warned them very frankly that the alternative offer which we have made, if the League of Nations was not successful, was an alliance between Great Britain and the United States.” Bourgeois backed down, but he did make one last, futile attempt a month later, when he suggested that the League should have its own general staff. This, he said mildly, could give the League council information and prepare plans so that it would not be caught flat-footed when wars came. Wilson was enraged. “The French delegates seem absolutely impossible,” he told Grayson, his physician. “They talk and talk and talk and desire constantly to reiterate points that have already been thoroughly thrashed out and completely disposed of.” Bourgeois returned the antipathy. He told Poincaré that Wilson was both authoritarian and deeply untrustworthy: “He conducted everything with the goal of personal exaltation in mind.”
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By February 13, the first draft was ready. Wilson was delighted, both with the auspicious date and with the fact that the articles numbered twenty-six, twice thirteen. The main outlines of the League were in place: a general assembly for all members, a secretariat and an executive council where the Big Five would have a bare majority (the failure of the United States to become a member of the League vitiated that clause). There would be no League army and no compulsory arbitration or disarmament. On the other hand, all League members pledged themselves to respect one another's independence and territorial boundaries. Because the Great Powers worried that the smaller powers might get together and outvote them, there was also a provision that most League decisions had to be unanimous. This was later blamed for the League's ineffectiveness.
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Germany was not allowed to join right away. The French were adamant on this, and their allies were prepared to give way. Indeed, Wilson was all for treating Germany like a convict in need of rehabilitation: “The world had a moral right to disarm Germany and to subject her to a generation of thoughtfulness.” And so Germany was to be in the curious position of agreeing in the Treaty of Versailles to a club that it could not join. Both the British and Americans came to think this rather unfair.
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The covenant also reflected several other causes dear to internationalists and humanitarians. It contained an undertaking that the League would look into setting up a permanent international court of justice, provisions against arms trafficking and slavery and support for the spread of the international Red Cross. It also established the International Labour Organization to work for international standards on working conditions.

This was something middle-class reformers, left-wing parties and unions had long wanted. (The eight-hour day was their great rallying cry.) The most they had been able to achieve before the war, however, had been limits on women working at night and a ban on phosphorus in match-making. The Bolshevik revolution helped to work a miraculous change of attitude among the Western ruling classes. The workers, even in the victorious democracies, were restless. Who knew how far they would go down the path toward revolution? European labor representatives were threatening to hold a conference in Paris at the same time as the Peace Conference, with delegates from the defeated nations as well as the victors. While the Allies managed to deflect this to Berne in Switzerland, Lloyd George and Clemenceau both thought that a clause on labor in the covenant of the League would be very helpful in calming their workers down. In any case, their own political leanings, like Wilson's, made them sympathetic to the labor movement, at least when it steered clear of revolution.
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The day the League of Nations commission was appointed, another was set up on international labor. Under the chairmanship first of the fierce little head of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, and then of the British labor leader George Barnes, it worked away quietly. Barnes complained to Lloyd George that the peacemakers took only a “languid interest” in its work.
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This was probably a good thing: the International Labour Organization came into existence with a minimum of fuss and held its first conference before the end of 1919. Unlike the League of Nations, to which it was attached, it included German representatives from the very beginning. And unlike the League, it has survived to the present day.

On February 14, Wilson presented the draft of the League covenant to a plenary session of the Peace Conference. The members of the commission had produced a document, at once practical and inspirational, of which they were all proud. “Many terrible things have come out of this war,” he concluded, “but some very beautiful things have come out of it.” That night he left Paris for the United States, confident that he had accomplished his main purpose in attending the conference.
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The covenant was not quite finished, though. The French still hoped to get in something about military force; the Japanese had warned that they intended to introduce a controversial provision on racial equality; and the mandates over the former German colonies and the Ottoman empire still had to be awarded. There was also the tricky matter of the Monroe Doctrine, underpinning U.S. policy toward the Americas. Would the League have the power, as many of Wilson's conservative opponents feared, to override the doctrine? If so, they would oppose the League, which might well lead to its rejection by Congress. Although Wilson hated to make concessions, especially to men he loathed, he agreed on his return to Paris to negotiate a special reservation saying that nothing in the League covenant invalidated the Monroe Doctrine.
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He found himself embroiled, this time with the British, in the sort of diplomatic game that he had always regarded with contempt. Although Cecil and Smuts sympathized with his predicament and were prepared to support him, Lloyd George had scented an opportunity. He had been trying without success to get an agreement with the United States to prevent a naval race; he now hinted that he might oppose any reservation on the Monroe Doctrine. There was also a difficulty with the Japanese, who, it was feared, might ask for recognition of an equivalent doctrine for Japan warning other nations off the Far East. That in turn would upset the Chinese, already highly nervous about Japanese intentions.
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On April 10, with the naval issue thrashed out and the British back on-side, Wilson introduced a carefully worded amendment to the effect that nothing in the League covenant would affect the validity of international agreements such as the Monroe Doctrine, designed to preserve the peace. The French, resentful over their failure to get a League with teeth, attacked with impeccable logic. There was already a provision in the covenant saying that all members would make sure that their international agreements were in accordance with the League and its principles. Was the Monroe Doctrine not in conformity? Of course it was, said Wilson; indeed, it was the model for the League. Then, said Bourgeois and Larnaude, why did the Monroe Doctrine need to be mentioned at all? Cecil tried to come to Wilson's rescue: the reference to the Monroe Doctrine was really a sort of illustration. Wilson sat by silently, his lower lip quivering. Toward midnight he burst out in a spirited defense of the United States, the guardian of freedom against absolutism in its own hemisphere and here, much more recently, in the Great War. “Is there to be withheld from her the small gift of a few words which only state the fact that her policy for the past century has been devoted to principles of liberty and independence which are to be consecrated in this document as a perpetual charter for all the world?” The Americans who heard him were deeply moved; the French were not.
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On April 28, as a freak snowfall covered Paris, a plenary session of the conference approved the covenant. A delegate from Panama made a very long and learned speech, which started with Aristotle and ended with Woodrow Wilson, about peace. The delegate from Honduras spoke in Spanish about the Monroe Doctrine clause but, since few people understood him, his objections were ignored. Clemenceau, as chairman, moved matters along with his usual dispatch, limiting discussion of hostile amendments, even when they came from his own delegates, with a sharp bang of his gavel and a curt “Adopté.”
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Wilson had every reason to be pleased. He had steered the covenant in the direction he wanted; he had blocked demands for a military force; and he had inserted a reservation on the Monroe Doctrine that should ensure its passage in the United States. The League, he felt confident, would grow and change over the years. In time, it would embrace the enemy nations and help them to stay on the paths of peace and democracy. Where the peace settlements needed fixing, as he told his wife, “one by one the mistakes can be brought to the League for readjustment, and the League will act as a permanent clearinghouse where every nation can come, the small as well as the great.”
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In concentrating on the League, Wilson allowed much else to go by at the Peace Conference. He did not fight decisions that, by his lights, were wrong: the award of the German-speaking Tyrol to Italy, or the placing of millions of Germans under Czechoslovak or Polish rule. Such settlements once made were surprisingly durable, at least until the start of the next war. It would have been difficult in any case for the League to act, because its rules insisted on unanimity in virtually all decisions.

8

Mandates

EVEN BEFORE the League commission got down to work, the issue of mandates had come up at the Supreme Council. None of the victorious powers thought Germany should get back its colonial possessions, which included several strings of Pacific islands and pieces of Africa, and Wilson had made it clear that he expected the League to assume responsibility for their governance. Wilson's attitude came as an unwelcome shock in certain quarters. The French wanted Togoland and Cameroon and an end to German rights in Morocco (leaving France the latter's sole protector). The Italians had their eyes on, among other things, parts of Somalia. In the British empire, South Africa wanted German Southwest Africa, Australia wanted New Guinea and some nearby islands, and New Zealand wanted German Samoa. The British hoped to annex German East Africa to fill in the missing link between their colonies to the north and south. They had also made a secret deal with the French to divide up the Ottoman empire. The Japanese too had their secret deals, with the Chinese to take over German rights and concessions, and with the British to keep the German islands north of the equator.

Wilson's new world order called for some arrangement other than annexation or colonization for those parts of the world not yet ready to govern themselves. Mandates, a form of trusteeship either directly under the League of Nations or under powers to be mandated by the League, were proposed as a possible solution. The length of the mandate would depend on the progress made by their wards. Wilson was maddeningly imprecise. Clearly, Africa would need outside control, but what about the pieces of territory which were flaking off from the defeated empires: the Arab Middle East, or Armenia, Georgia and the other Caucasian republics? In the confusion that was central Europe, there were also peoples who did not seem ready to look after themselves. Here Wilson would only say that he did not approve of mandates for European peoples.
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The idea itself, of the strong protecting the weak, was not a new one. Imperialists, frequently quite sincerely, had made much of their mission before the Great War. Germany, said the leading American expert on Africa, was exceptional in never having properly understood its duty: “The native was almost universally looked upon as a means to an end, never as an end in himself, and his welfare and that of the colony were completely subordinated to the interests of the German on the spot and of Germany at a distance.”
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The British, realizing that there was no point in antagonizing the Americans by talking of adding Germany's territory, or anyone else's, to their empire, supported the idea of mandates. Smuts applied his usual eloquence. Great empires were being liquidated, he wrote in the memorandum on the League of Nations which so impressed Wilson, and the League must step in. “The peoples left behind by the decomposition of Russia, Austria and Turkey are mostly untrained politically; many of them are either incapable or deficient in the power of self-government; they are mostly destitute, and will require much nursing towards economic and political independence.” Where Europeans—Finns, for example, or Poles—could stand on their own feet almost at once, it would take longer in the Middle East. The former German colonies in the Pacific and Africa would probably never be able to look after themselves. Their inhabitants were barbarians “to whom it would be impracticable to apply any ideas of political self-determination in the European sense.” It would be much the best thing if the British empire took them over directly. If the Americans objected, he told his British colleagues, then Britain could graciously concede and ask in return for control under general, and minimal, League supervision. That in turn would oblige other nations, in particular France, Smuts's bugbear, to accept similar conditions for their colonies. Cecil saw a practical advantage: British traders and investors might finally be able to get into French and Portuguese colonies in Africa.
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The very word “mandate” had a benevolent and pleasing sound. Initially it also caused considerable confusion when it was produced at the Peace Conference. Was it merely a bit of window dressing, as cynics thought, to describe old-fashioned land grabbing, or was it a new departure in international relations? Would the League leave the mandatory powers alone to administer their assigned territories or would there be constant interference? When a bewildered Chinese delegate was told that the former German territories in his country would receive a new ruler, he was heard to ask, “Who is Mandatory?”
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The French reacted to the whole idea with hostility and apprehension. Clemenceau exclaimed to Poincaré: “The League of Nations guaranteeing the peace, so be it, but the League of Nations proprietor of colonies, no!” Colonies were a mark of power; they also held what France badly needed: manpower. There were always going to be more Germans than French, but with colonies in Asia and Africa the French had some hope of restoring the balance with what they liked to call “our distant brothers.”
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If France received mandates under the League, would there be niggling restrictions on the recruitment of native soldiers for duty overseas? Unfortunately both the Americans and the British appeared to be thinking along these lines. Their proposed terms for mandates had the responsible powers doing humanitarian work, putting down slave trafficking, for example, but they also prohibited the military training of inhabitants for anything except police and “defence of territory.”

When the mandates issue came up in the Supreme Council, Clemenceau and Pichon launched an attack. Why should France spend time and money on looking after its mandates if it could not ask for volunteers to defend it when the time came? It was all very well for the United States and Britain to take a detached view, protected as they were from Germany by geography, but France would not have survived the German attack without its colonial soldiers. Lloyd George tried to find a compromise. The clause that so upset the French was really directed against the sort of thing the Germans used to do, raising big native armies to attack other colonies. The French would be perfectly free to defend themselves and whatever territories were under their wing. Clemenceau was mollified: “If this clause meant that he had a right of raising troops in case of general war, he was satisfied.” Lloyd George cheerfully agreed: “So long as M. Clemenceau did not train big nigger armies for the purposes of aggression, that was all the clause was intended to guard against.” Wilson said he agreed with Lloyd George's interpretation. The trouble was that no one was quite clear what the clause meant. Could the French use soldiers from their mandates in a European war, or not? Several months later, in May, the French tried quietly to introduce their own clarification when they slipped in a phrase about defense “of the mother country” to the mandates clause in the final version of the covenant of the League as it was being prepared for printing. The British secretary to the Peace Conference, Hankey, who spotted the change late one night, did not believe French assurances that the other powers had approved it. He rushed round, catching Wilson already in bed and Lloyd George as he was getting undressed. “As I suspected, it was a ‘try-on.'” An agitated Wilson made Clemenceau remove the phrase.
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The British watched the French maneuverings with smug disapproval, but they had their own difficulties with the Americans. Or rather, they were forced into a confrontation by South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, who because of their own territorial ambitions wanted nothing to do with mandates. Lloyd George found himself putting a case that he knew would be opposed by the United States. On January 24, he argued, somewhat halfheartedly, in the Supreme Council that annexation made administrative sense. He left it to the dominion leaders to supply the other arguments.

Smuts and Botha presented South Africa's case for the annexation of German Southwest Africa. Both men had fought in the brief victorious campaign of 1915, planned by Botha. They were asking to keep a huge stretch of territory, the size of England and France combined, widely regarded as without much value. (Its rich deposits of minerals had yet to be discovered.) The Atlantic coast was desert, the bulk of the interior scrub land, suitable mainly for grazing. A few thousand Germans, many of them rumored to be fleeing scandal in Germany, had built themselves imitation castles, cozy German villages and a neat little capital at Windhoek. The first German imperial commissioner, Ernst Goering (father of Hermann), had set the tone for German rule over the much larger African population with his authoritarian and brutal administration.
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Smuts and Botha made much of German cruelty toward the natives. White South Africans by contrast, said Smuts, understood the natives; indeed, they had done their best to give them a form of self-government. “They had established a white civilization in a savage continent and had become a great cultural agency all over South Africa.” Now there was a chance for the peoples of Southwest Africa to share in these benefits. The territory was already tied to South Africa by geography; on all grounds, it made sense simply to make one country out of two. Wilson listened sympathetically. He liked both men, Smuts in particular, and, while he was not prepared to back down, he made it clear that he felt a South African mandate would be so successful that the inhabitants of Southwest Africa would one day freely choose to unite with South Africa.
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Clemenceau, the chair, then invited the “cannibals”—a little running joke he had with Hughes—to present the case for Australia and New Zealand. Waving a grossly distorted map which showed the lands he wanted—New Guinea and nearby islands such as the Bismarck Archipelago—practically touching Australia, Hughes demanded outright annexation. He cited defense (the islands were “as necessary to Australia as water to a city”) and Australia's contribution in the war, the 90,000 casualties, the 60,000 killed and the war debt of £300 million. “Australia did not wish to be left to stagger under this load and not to feel safe.” Although he could not say so openly, the future enemy Hughes had in mind was Japan. The Australians had also considered using the argument that the locals welcomed them with open arms, but when the Australian government carried out some inquiries in New Guinea it found that the inhabitants much preferred German officials, who had let them go their happy head-hunting way. There would be unlimited access for missionaries, Hughes said in reply to an earnest question from the president: “There are many days when the poor devils do not get half enough missionaries to eat.”
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Massey, brandishing his own map, made a long and rambling speech on behalf of New Zealand's claim to Samoa. New Zealand troops, at “great risk,” had occupied the islands at the start of the war. (In fact, the greatest risk came from boredom as the occupiers sat for the next few years downing huge quantities of beer.) The Samoans were not savages but very sensible people, and they wanted New Zealand rule. (Meanwhile, the Samoans were presenting the local New Zealand administrator with a petition demanding American rule, rule from London, rule by any power except New Zealand.
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Wilson, who could not bear Hughes in particular, listened with an obvious lack of sympathy. The French watched with amusement. They did not like mandates and they did not mind seeing disarray in the British empire. “Poor little Hughes is swelling up with pseudo importance,” wrote a member of the Australian delegation. “Of course he is being used as a Catspaw by the French who want the Cameroons, Togo Land & Syria.”
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A few days later, the French minister of colonies, Henri Simon, was moderation itself when he spoke to the Supreme Council. France only wanted two little pieces of territory in Africa: Togoland, which ran inland along France's West African colony of Dahomey (Benin), and the Cameroons, also in West Africa, which Germany had managed to pry out of France in 1911. (In addition, France wanted an exclusive protectorate over Morocco, but there was no need to mention that.) He preferred annexation, said Simon, as being more efficient and better for the natives. All France wished was to be able to continue its work of spreading civilization in tropical Africa. Clemenceau, who did not care at all about colonial possessions, undercut the effect of all this by saying that he was quite ready to compromise.
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Wilson dug in his heels. “If the process of annexation went on,” he told the Supreme Council, “the League of Nations would be discredited from the beginning.” The world expected more of them. They must not go back to the old games, parceling out helpless peoples. If they were not careful, public opinion would turn against them. They would see further upheavals in a Europe already troubled by revolution. He would not stand, he said privately, for “dividing the swag.” If necessary, and this was a favorite threat, he would take the whole issue to the public. On the other hand, he was eager to move on from mandates. The fate of Europe—of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia—was the important question.
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Behind the scenes, a number of people were working to ease the confrontations. The Canadians, who always feared the consequences of tension between Britain and the United States, urged Hughes and Massey to be reasonable. House, now recovered from his illness, told the British that they must back down. Smuts and Cecil worked out a proposal which House thought the basis of a deal. There would be three types of mandates: “A” for nations, such as those in the Middle East, which were nearly ready to run their own affairs; “B” where the mandatory power would run them; and “C” for territories that were contiguous or close to the mandatory power, which would administer the territory as part of its own, subject only to certain restrictions, such as on the sale of alcohol and firearms. “C” mandates, in other words, conveniently covered Southwest Africa and the islands Australia and New Zealand wanted. A 999-year lease, said Hughes, instead of outright freehold. He was not prepared, however, to give way gracefully.
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