PARIS 1919 (17 page)

On January 29, a meeting of the British empire delegation produced, in Borden's words, a “pretty warm scene.” Lloyd George outlined the three types of mandate, which he thought the Americans would accept. Hughes, fighting “like a weasel,” quibbled over every point until Lloyd George lost his temper and told him that he had been arguing his case with the United States for three days but that he did not intend to quarrel with the Americans over the Solomon Islands.
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Unfortunately, the next morning the
Daily Mail,
which published a Paris edition during the Peace Conference, came out with a story clearly inspired by Hughes. The article accused Britain of truckling to the United States, and claimed that the interests of the British empire were being sacrificed to satisfy Wilson's impractical ideals. That morning, the Supreme Council saw “a first-class row.” Lloyd George was angry with Hughes, and Wilson, always sensitive to criticism, was furious. He delivered a rambling and muddled criticism of the proposed compromise and suggested that the whole question of mandates be postponed until the League had been settled. He was noticeably rude to the Australian prime minister. “Mr Hughes,” said Lloyd George, who was despairing of ever getting an agreement, “was the last man I should have chosen to handle in that way.” Wilson brusquely asked Hughes: “Am I to understand that if the whole civilised world asks Australia to agree to a mandate in respect of these islands, Australia is prepared still to defy the appeal of the whole civilised world?” Hughes, who was fiddling with his cumbersome hearing aid, claimed he had not heard the question. Wilson repeated himself. “That's about the size of it, President Wilson.” There was a grunt of agreement from Massey. In fact, Hughes was not as adamant as he sounded. He was shaken by the reaction to the article and was to spend the next few days trying to avoid Lloyd George.
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At this point Botha, who was widely respected, lumbered to his feet. He thought the newspaper article was disgusting. As gentlemen, they must keep their disagreements to themselves. Speaking for himself, he wholeheartedly supported the great ideals expressed by President Wilson. Surely they all did. “He hoped that they would try in a spirit of cooperation, and by giving way on smaller things, to meet the difficulties and make the bigger ideal more possible.” Wilson, who was ashamed of his outburst, was deeply moved. Massey made conciliatory noises, while Hughes said nothing. The proposal, with its three classes of mandate, went through. The awkward question of who got what was put to one side.
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It was the most difficult moment of a grueling week. The Supreme Council was also grappling with other matters: whether to negotiate with the Bolsheviks; Poland and its needs; Czechoslovakia's borders; the German peace terms. It had heard from the Chinese, who wanted German concessions in China back, and from the Japanese, who hoped to keep them; from the Belgians, who also wanted territory in Africa; and from the Rumanians and the Yugoslavs, who were arguing over territory. That Friday evening, Clemenceau complained to his aide Mordacq that he was at the end of his tether. His mind was racing with all the questions that they had been discussing; what he needed was to relax. The two men went off together to the Opéra-Comique.
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In all the discussions, there had been much talk of how glad the colonies were to get away from German rule. Yet although the fifth of Wilson's Fourteen Points had talked about taking the interests of the indigenous populations into account, no one had actually bothered to consult the Africans or the Pacific islanders. True, no Samoans or Melanesians had made their way to Paris, but there were Africans at hand. Indeed, a black French deputy from Senegal, Blaise Diagne, and the great American black leader W.E.B. Du Bois were busy organizing a Pan-African Congress. This duly took place in February with the grudging consent of the peacemakers. None of the leading figures from the Peace Conference attended. A member of the Belgian delegation spoke enthusiastically about the reforms that were taking place in the Congo, and a former minister of foreign affairs from Portugal praised his own country's management of its colonies. The handful of delegates from French Africa demonstrated the success of the
mission civilisatrice
by eulogizing the achievements of the Third Republic. The Congress passed resolutions calling for the Peace Conference to give the League direct control of the former German colonies. House received Du Bois with his customary courtesy but said nothing about the resolutions.
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As the months passed, the powers made quiet deals behind the scenes. Some merely confirmed arrangements made during the war. Japan, for example, got its islands north of the equator. To the south, New Zealand and Australia also got their islands. Partners when it came to defying Wilson, they then squabbled briskly for the next few months over Nauru, which had not been allocated. The island was only 20 square kilometers, but since it was composed mainly of bird droppings, it was an extremely valuable source of phosphates, used to make fertilizer. Without Nauru, both Hughes and Massey argued, their agriculture would collapse. The British settled the matter by taking over the mandate for Nauru themselves and doling out a meager royalty to the few thousand locals. (When Nauru became independent in 1968 and took over the phosphate business, its inhabitants had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world and a homeland that was vanishing under their feet. A trust fund which may be worth around $1 billion has gone into buying property abroad, and into the pockets of highly respectable Australian advisers. The phosphates are about to run out, but Nauru has today found a fresh source of income in money laundering for the Russian mafia.
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)

Britain and France had agreed in secret on a preliminary division of the German colonies in Africa during the war. At the Peace Conference, Lord Milner, the British colonial secretary, met with his French counterpart, Henri Simon, to work out the details of their control of some thirteen million people. France duly got most of Togoland and the Cameroons, Britain a small strip of each next to its colonies of the Gold Coast and Nigeria, and almost the whole of German East Africa. The Portuguese complained; they hoped to add a piece of German East Africa to their colony of Mozambique. Portugal, one of its delegates told Clemenceau, was owed something for “its unforgettable services to Humanity and Civilization above all in Africa, which it has watered with its blood since the 14th century.” The Portuguese also suspected, correctly, that their allies were planning to transfer a bit of Angola to Belgium in order to give the Belgian Congo a proper Atlantic coast. In the end Portugal kept its colonies intact and gained a minuscule piece of land for Mozambique .
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The Belgians were less easily ignored. On May 2, they complained to the Council of Four that they were being left out and put in a demand for part of German East Africa. “A most impudent claim,” said Lloyd George. “At a time when the British Empire had millions of soldiers fighting for Belgium, a few black troops had been sent into German East Africa.” Lloyd George was being unfair. Congolese troops under Belgian command had played an important part in pushing the Germans back in East Africa. At the end of the war, Belgian forces occupied about a third of the country. The Belgian government had no interest in keeping this; it intended to use East Africa to bargain for Portuguese territory along the Atlantic. The British, who were unable to persuade the Portuguese to play along, found themselves in an awkward position. Belgium would not give up its gains without something in return. Unfortunately, that occupied territory included what looked like the best possible route for the north–south railway linking the Cape to Cairo that British imperialists had so long dreamed of building.
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On May 7, just after the Germans had received their terms, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Wilson and Orlando met in a room at Versailles and agreed on the final distribution of mandates over the former German colonies. (They still were haggling over the wreckage of the Ottoman empire in the Middle East.) When word leaked out into the press that Belgium was to get nothing, the Belgians, who were already feeling shortchanged, were enraged.
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In the end, Britain decided it could spare a bit of territory (and that there were other routes for the railway) and so two provinces next to the Congo's borders were detached from East Africa. Belgium took the mandates for Rwanda and Burundi.

When the League finally came into existence in 1920, it confirmed what had long since been decided. In the interwar years, the mandates in Africa and the Pacific did look, as Hughes had predicted, very much like direct annexation. The mandatory powers sent in annual reports to the League but otherwise went their own way. At the end of the Second World War, the United Nations took over the mandates and, as the great colonial empires melted away, gave independence to the territories it had inherited— with one exception. South Africa refused to give up Southwest Africa. Only in 1990 did it welcome its new neighbor, the independent state of Namibia. In 1994, the last mandate ended when Palau, which had been placed under Japan in 1919 and then under the United States after 1945, became independent. The 999-year leases had run out ahead of their time.

PART THREE

THE BALKANS AGAIN

9

Yugoslavia

WHILE THE GREAT POWERS had been preoccupied with the League, the smaller powers had been busy polishing up their demands. On the evening of February 17, 1919, a telephone call came to the Hôtel de Beau-Site, near the Etoile. Would the delegation of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes please be ready to attend the Supreme Council the following afternoon? This sudden and typically capricious attention from the powers came as something of a relief. The delegation had been in Paris since the beginning of January, but its leaders had only appeared once before the council, on January 31, to counter Rumanian claims to the whole of the rich Banat, which lay between their two countries.

The Hôtel de Beau-Site had not been a happy place during those long weeks. The delegation, almost a hundred strong, comprised Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians and Montenegrins, university professors, soldiers, former deputies from the parliament in Vienna, diplomats from Belgrade, lawyers from Dalmatia, radicals, monarchists, Orthodox, Catholics and Muslims. Many of its members did not know each other; indeed, as subjects of Serbia or of Austria-Hungary, they had fought on opposite sides during the war. The delegation faithfully reflected the great dividing lines that ran through the Balkans: between Roman Catholicism in the west, and Eastern Orthodoxy; between Christianity in the north, and Islam to the south. The delegates from the Adriatic side, mainly Slovene and Croat, cared passionately about security from Italy and control over ports and railways that had once belonged to Austria-Hungary, but were indifferent to border changes in the east. The Serbs from Serbia, meanwhile, were prepared to trade away Dalmatia or Istria to get more territory to the north and east.

They were together in Paris because of an idea, one of those so popular in nineteenth-century Europe, that a common language meant a common nationality. They all spoke a South Slav (Yugoslav) language. While Slovenian had become a distinct language over the centuries, Serbian and Croatian were virtually the same except for one striking difference. Serbian, like Russian and Bulgarian, was and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, borrowed from the Greek of the Byzantine empire, while Croatian reflected the Catholic and Western orientation of its people and used the Latin alphabet. While separate nationalisms had been growing in the Balkans before the war—Serbian, for example, or Croatian—so too had the dream that all South Slavs, whether still under Ottoman rule, inside Austria-Hungary, or already independent in Serbia and Bulgaria, belonged together in one great nation. What started with a few mainly Croat intellectuals and priests along the Dalmatian coast grew by the 1860s into
jugoslovjentsvo—
Yugoslavism—with a Yugoslav academy, schools, journals, all to promote unity among South Slavs. But was that going to be stronger than all the other forces, from history to religion, that marked them out, one from the other? The Yugoslav idea was always strongest among the South Slavs, especially the Croats, inside Austria-Hungary who feared that they were being made into Germans or Hungarians.
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Those outside, in Serbia, for example, had an alternative and equally compelling vision, of a large nation-state built around themselves.

The state of the South Slavs—cobbled together from Serbia and the southern parts of the vanished Austria-Hungary—that emerged in 1919 was the result of both accident and hasty, often desperate choices. It was not even clear what the delegation or the new country it claimed to represent should be called. Made up of Serbia and the southern parts of the vanished Austria-Hungary, it eventually took the name Yugoslavia. The Peace Conference, contrary to what many people have believed since, did not create Yugoslavia—it had already created itself by the time the first diplomats arrived in Paris. Seventy years later, the powers were equally unable to prevent its disintegration. But the peacemakers in Paris had the ability to withhold territory from the new state, perhaps even destroy it. They were wary, with good reason, of ambitious nations in the Balkans. It would be a mistake to give the South Slav state a navy, Wilson thought: “It will be a turbulent nation as they are a turbulent people, and they ought not to have a navy to run amuck with.”
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In February 1919 the peacemakers had not yet decided whether to be good or bad fairy godmothers. Except for one. The Italian government would have preferred to strangle the infant state in its cradle. Italian nationalists were quick to cast Yugoslavia as their main enemy, the role having been left empty by the disappearance of Austria-Hungary. “To our hurt and embarrassment,” complained Prime Minister Orlando, “Yugoslavia will have taken the place of Austria, and everything will be as unsatisfactory as before.” Britain and France at first reluctantly went along with Italy and refused to recognize the new state. The United States, which had no love for Italy and Italian ambitions in the Balkans, recognized Yugoslavia in February; Britain and France did so only in June, partly in reaction to Italy's intransigence, which at that point was threatening to break up the Peace Conference.
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Nicola Pa
i
, for many years prime minister of Serbia, headed the delegation. In his mid-seventies, with clear blue eyes and a long white beard that fell to his waist, he looked like a benevolent old monk. His private life was exemplary: he was deeply religious, and, although he had married a rich woman, he lived simply. He loved to sit in the evenings singing old Serbian folk songs with his wife and daughters. When he spoke in public, which he did rarely, he was slow and deliberate. (His Serbian was said to be full of mistakes.) He spoke only rudimentary French and German and no English at all. Perhaps because of this, he had a reputation for great wisdom. Lloyd George thought him “one of the craftiest and most tenacious statesmen in South Eastern Europe.” Like another Serb leader, in the 1990s, Nicola Pa
i
was a devious, dangerous old man who loved two things: power and Serbia. Few of his colleagues trusted him; he was, however, adored in the countryside, where most Serbs lived.
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Many people in Paris found the Balkans confusing. At his first meeting with Nicola Pa
i
, Lloyd George inquired whether Serbs and Croats spoke the same language.
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Only a handful of specialists, or cranks, had made it their business to study the area. What most people knew was that the Balkans were dangerous for Europe; they had caused trouble for decades as the Ottoman empire disintegrated and Austria-Hungary and Russia vied for control; and they had sparked off the Great War when Serb nationalists assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo.

Nicola Pa
i
had been born when Serbia was already free, with its own prince, but he had grown up in a world marked by those long years of Ottoman rule. From Rumania south to Greece, the Ottomans had left their cooking, their customs, their bureaucracy, their corruption and, to a certain extent, their Islam. “Balkan” had become shorthand for a geographic area but also for a state of mind, and for a history marked by frequent war and intrigue. Their past had taught the peoples of the Balkans, as the proverb had it, that “the hand that cannot be cut off, must be kissed.” The cult of the warrior coexisted with admiration for another sort of man, like Nicola Pa
i
, who never trusted anyone, never revealed his true intentions and never took advice.
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