PARIS 1919 (22 page)

Yugoslavia was already in possession of much of what it wanted in Austria-Hungary by the time the Peace Conference started—Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Slovene heartland in the old Austrian province of Carniola, much of Dalmatia and of course the old kingdom of Croatia— but it wanted still more. The delegation asked for two little scraps in the west known as the Medjumurje and the Prekomurje, where Croatia met Austria and Hungary, and, further east, the Baranya and the Backa, part of the rich southern Hungarian plain. Hungary had few friends in Paris: it was not only a defeated enemy but looked about to fall into revolution. The main question to be determined by the Peace Conference was how much of Hungary Yugoslavia could reasonably have. The Medjumurje and the Prekomurje were largely Croat and Slovene (although the Hungarians tried to claim otherwise) and, after some discussion, were handed over. The fate of Baranya and Backa, however, became tangled up in the dispute between Rumania and Yugoslavia and took much longer to settle.

To all the Balkan nations, the disappearance of Austria-Hungary was as exhilarating an opportunity as the defeats of the Ottoman empire before the war. Each wanted as much as it could get: self-determination for itself but not for its neighbors. Already during that confused period in October 1918 when Austria-Hungary sued for peace and then vanished from history, Balkan governments had started to stake out possession, moving their armies in. New bodies popped up like mushrooms after a storm: workers' councils, soldiers' councils, councils of Croats, Macedonians, Greeks. It was not clear who was behind them, but there seemed no end to them and no limit to their demands.

Greece wanted the rest of European Turkey; so did Bulgaria. Both Greece and Yugoslavia contemplated a division of Albania. Rumania and Bulgaria could not agree on ownership of the Dobrudja, which stretched along the west coast of the Black Sea. Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria all wanted more of Macedonia. There was fine talk of saving civilization and fighting for right and honor; underneath were the calculations of realpolitik. In the heady atmosphere of 1919, it was madness not to grab as much as possible. Balkan statesmen claimed to admire Wilson; they talked the language of self-determination, justice and international cooperation, and they produced petitions, said to represent the voice of the people, to bolster their old-style land grabbing. They showed beautifully drawn maps. “It would take a huge monograph,” wrote an American expert, “to contain an analysis of all the types of map forgeries that the war and peace conference called forth. . . . It was in the Balkans that the use of this process reached its most brilliant climax.”
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The peacemakers had little to guide them in adjudicating all the claims. Wilson had mentioned the Balkans in the Fourteen Points, indirectly when he talked of the “freest opportunity of autonomous self-development” of the peoples of Austria-Hungary, and more directly when he said that Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro should be set on their feet again. He also promised that Serbia should have access to the sea, without specifying how, and that the Balkan states, under the benevolent eye of the powers, should all become friends “along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality.” What that last meant was not clear but it suggested a disregard of both recent history and the national mix in the Balkans.

There was also a feeling that loyal allies should be rewarded. Serbia ought to have something for its sufferings—ports on the Adriatic, perhaps, or, at the very least, access to the Aegean. Greece and Rumania ought to collect on some of the promises handed out so freely during the war. Bulgaria and Ottoman Turkey deserved to pay the penalty for joining the wrong side. What they could pay was another matter. The Ottoman empire did not have much left in the Balkans, and Bulgaria was broke and had already lost a great swath of territory in 1913.

The British were largely indifferent to what happened in the Balkans, as they were to most of Central Europe, so long as British interests, whether commercial or naval, were protected. They preferred strong and stable states because those would act as a barrier to a revived Germany or Russia. While “gallant little Serbia” had its devoted admirers, as did Montenegro and Albania, the British government was not prepared to spend British force or British money to secure its well-being.
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France, by contrast, was guided, as always, by its need for protection against Germany. Ideally, an enlarged Serbia and Rumania and, to the north, Czechoslovakia and Poland would provide such a forceful counterbalance that Germany would never dare to attack France again. And if a strong Serbia kept Italy honest, so much the better.

Geography forced Italy to think seriously about the Balkans. While Italians were generally delighted to see the end of their hereditary enemy Austria-Hungary, and the liberals, at least, sympathized with the small nations struggling to gain their freedom, Italian nationalists did not want any other power to achieve dominance in the Balkans, whether a Bolshevik Russia or a new South Slav state. The nationalists would shape Italian policy in an increasingly belligerent and expansionist direction. Because it feared a strong South Slav state, Italy was prepared to back the demands of its neighbors Rumania, Austria and Bulgaria. In Paris, Sonnino insisted that the competing claims of Italy and Yugoslavia must be discussed only by the Supreme Council. He feared, with reason, that a committee of experts would worry about the fairness of the frontiers, not about what Italy had been promised during the war. That story is part of the wider dispute between Italy and its allies which nearly wrecked the whole Peace Conference.

The Americans, in the Balkans as elsewhere, saw their role as that of honest broker, cutting through the thickets of the old diplomacy to apply the brave new standard of self-determination.
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Unfortunately, the truth about populations in the Balkans was not easily discovered. The practice of defining oneself by nationality was so new that many inhabitants of the Balkans still thought of themselves primarily in terms of their region or clan or, as they had done under the Turks, of their religion. Were Serbs and Croats alike because they spoke virtually the same language, or different because the former were mainly Orthodox and used the Cyrillic script and the latter were Catholic and used the Latin? Where did the Macedonians belong—with the Greeks because of their history, or with the Slavs because of their language? How could you draw neat boundaries where there was such a mixture of peoples? How could you leave people together who had come to fear each other? On the population maps of the Balkans the patterns were rather pretty, a pointillist scattering of colors and an occasional bold blob. On the ground it was less pretty, a stew of suspicions and hatreds bubbling away.

The borders drawn through the region left in their wake unhappy minorities and resentful neighbors. And at its heart was the new Yugoslavia. It had formed itself, but the peacemakers recognized it and padded out its borders in a series of separate committees. The result was a country three times bigger than the old Serbia but with even more enemies. The new state took in Montenegro, Slovenia and Bosnia from Austria; Croatia and part of the Banat from Hungary; and pieces of Albania and Bulgaria. What was involved, as so often at the Peace Conference, was not merely the land and the fate of its inhabitants, but the future web of alliances on which the peace of Europe would depend.

Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria, the defeated, mourned their losses, both of territory and of their people. Only Greece in the south was friendly to the new country. Within Yugoslavia, peoples who had little in common except language never agreed on a common interpretation of what the country meant. Yugoslavia paid a heavy penalty for its gains during the Second World War, when its neighbors, with much help from Germany, seized back the land it had won at the Peace Conference and its peoples turned on each other. Although the communist leader Tito managed to put the pieces back together again, seventy years after the Paris Peace Conference had first recognized its existence Yugoslavia started to decompose into its separate components, disappearing for perhaps good as a country in March 2002. Its neighbors watched it uneasily, as they had been doing since 1919.

10

Rumania

A FEW DAYS before the Peace Conference officially opened, a rumor reached Rumania that only Belgium and Serbia among the smaller powers would be invited to participate. Ion Br
tianu, the Rumanian prime minister, in the grip of “violent emotion,” summoned the Allied ambassadors and complained. “Rumania is treated like a poor wretch deserving pity,” he said, “and not like an Ally who has a right to justice.” He instructed them to tell their governments that Rumania had always been a loyal ally (a dubious statement); he obliquely criticized Serbia for entering the war only because it was attacked; he muttered darkly about people who had lost touch with their own countries (his political enemies, some of whom had made their way to Paris); he warned that if the Allies were not careful, they would lose all influence in Rumania; and he threatened to withdraw (from what, it was not clear). The Allied ambassadors passed on this curious statement to their governments with a warning of their own: it would not do to alienate Rumania, because it was a useful buffer against Russia and Russian Bolshevism.
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Since the Great Powers fully intended that Rumania should be represented, both performance and warning were unnecessary.

The Rumanians had a high opinion of their own importance; they also had large expectations of the Peace Conference. Early on January 8, Harold Nicolson, from the British delegation, had a brief meeting with two Rumanian delegates: “They say they are ‘too ashamed to speak of internal questions.' On external questions, however, they show no shame at all, demanding most of Hungary.”
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Rumania also wanted a slice of Russia, Bessarabia, which it was already occupying, and the Bukovina from Austria in the north. Its demands were exorbitant, but it was particularly well placed to achieve them. There was no Russian force capable of stopping it, and Hungary and Austria were humbled. Rumania moved to occupy Hungarian Transylvania and the Bukovina pending a final decision in Paris. That had to wait until the Austrian and Hungarian treaties were drawn up.

Rumania faced a more difficult task with its claim to the Banat—also on Yugoslavia's list. Sloping westward down from the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps to the southern end of the Hungarian plain, this bucolic backwater caused much controversy in 1919. It was a rich prize: its 11,000 square miles, with their industrious farmers, rich black soil and abundant rivers and streams poured out corn and wheat. Herds of longhaired cows grazed on its pastures, and fat chickens and pigs scratched in its farmyards. The Banat had almost no industry to speak of, no towns of over 100,000, and few great monuments. It was picturesque rather than grand.

On January 31, 1919, Rumanian and Yugoslav representatives came before the Supreme Council. The Chinese, Czechs and Poles had appeared earlier in the week to present their respective cases, a precedent that worried Lloyd George—and he was by no means alone. The day before, he had asked whether there should be a firmer agenda. “He thought the discussion on Czecho-Slovakia and Poland the other day was absolutely wrong. He would not use the term ‘a waste of time' because that was a very provocative one, and he could already see the glare in the President's eye! At the same time he thought it was not quite the best method of dealing with the business.” If they were starting to deal with territorial issues, Lloyd George argued, they should get on with it and actually make some decisions. After an inconclusive discussion, the council accepted Balfour's suggestion that they might as well hear the Rumanians and Serbs out because it would make them happier.
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Like many of Balfour's solutions, it was more elegant than practical.

As the light faded on that cold afternoon, Br
tianu presented Rumania's case. Rich and polished to the point of absurdity, Br
tianu had a profound sense of his own importance. He had been educated in the Hautes Ecoles in Paris, and never let anyone forget it; he loved to be discovered lying on a sofa with a book of French verse in a languid hand. Nicolson, who met him at a lunch early on in the conference, was not impressed: “Bratianu is a bearded woman, a forceful humbug, a Bucharest intellectual, a most unpleasing man. Handsome and exuberant, he flings his fine head sideways, catching his own profile in the glass. He makes elaborate verbal jokes, imagining them to be Parisian.” Women rather liked him. “The eyes of a gazelle and the jaw of a tiger,” said one. Queen Marie of Rumania, who knew all about seductions, demurely recalled an evening when the full moon had made him “sentimental.” In a less charitable mood, she told Wilson that he was “a tiresome, sticky and tedious individual.”
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Throwing open his briefcase with what Nicolson described as “histrionic detachment,” he claimed the whole of the Banat. “He is evidently convinced that he is a greater statesman than any present. A smile of irony and self-consciousness recurs from time to time. He flings his fine head in profile. He makes a dreadful impression.”
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His arguments ran from the strictly legalistic (Rumania had been promised the Banat in the secret clauses of the Treaty of Bucharest of 1916 with which the Allies had enticed Rumania into the war) to the Wilsonian (Rumanians ought to be in one nation). In the course of his peroration he called in ethnology, history, geography and Rumania's wartime sacrifices. He also hinted that the Serbians had tilted toward Austria-Hungary in the past. (The Serbians were to make the same accusation about the Rumanians.)

Vesni
and Ante Trumbi
replied. They pointed out that Serbia was asking for only the western part of the Banat. While they could not call on secret treaties, they could otherwise use the same sorts of arguments as the Rumanians. “Since the Middle Ages,” said Vesni
, “the portion of the Banat claimed by Serbia had always been closely connected with the Serbian people.” Historically, he went on, “as the Isle of France was to France, and Tuscany to Italy, so was the Banat to Serbia.” It had given birth to the Serb Renaissance and later Serbian nationalism. And when the Serbian royal family had been exiled, it had naturally taken refuge there. (To this Br
tianu replied, reasonably enough, that the vagaries of Serbian politics had occasionally driven its rulers into Rumania proper, but this was scarcely reason for Serbia to claim that as well.
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)

In the discussion Wilson noted, with some surprise, that the delegates from the Balkan nations did not “represent their facts in the same way, and there would always be something that was not quite clear.” The United States was always ready, he said, to approve a settlement based on facts. Balfour, who had been half asleep, intervened to ask an apparently simple question: Were there any figures as to the ethnic mix of the Banat? Yes, said the Yugoslavs; the western part, which they were claiming, was predominantly Serb and, moreover, so were monasteries and convents all over the Banat. There were, of course, large numbers of Germans and Hungarians, but they would much rather be part of Serbia than Rumania. No, said Br
tianu, Rumanians were in the majority if you took the Banat as a unit (for political and historical reasons the only thing to do); monasteries were neither here nor there because everyone knew the Serbs, like all Slavs, tended to be religious; and, as for the Germans and Hungarians, the Serbs would have trouble managing such large minorities.
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