PARIS 1919 (5 page)

On board the
George Washington,
the Wilsons kept to themselves, eating most of their meals in their stateroom and strolling on the deck arm in arm. The American experts worked away on their maps and their papers, asking each other, with some disquiet, what their country's policies were to be. Wilson had said much about general principles but had mentioned few specifics. A young man called William Bullitt boldly went up to the president and told him that they were all confused by his silence. Wilson was surprised but agreed pleasantly to meet with a dozen of the leading experts. “It is absolutely the first time,” said one afterward, “the president has let anyone know what his ideas are and what his policy is.” There were to be few other such occasions. The experts left the meeting heartened and impressed. Wilson was informal and friendly. He spoke about the heavy task ahead and how he was going to rely on them to provide him with the best information. They must feel free to come to him at any time. “You tell me what's right and I'll fight for it.” He apologized for talking about his own ideas: “they weren't very good but he thought them better than anything else he had heard.”
¹⁵

When it came to making peace, Wilson said, their country would rightly hold the position of arbiter. They must live up to the great American traditions of justice and generosity. They would be, after all, “the only disinterested people at the Peace Conference.” What was more, he warned, “the men whom we were about to deal with did not represent their own people.” This was one of Wilson's deep convictions, curious in a man whose own Congress was now dominated by his political opponents. Throughout the Peace Conference he clung to the belief that he spoke for the masses and that, if only he could reach them—whether French, Italian or even Russian—they would rally to his views.
¹⁶

He touched on another favorite theme: the United States, he assured his audience, had not entered the war for selfish reasons. In this, as in so much else, it was unlike other nations, for it did not want territory, tribute or even revenge. (As a sign that American participation in the war was different from that of the Europeans, Wilson had always insisted on the United States being an Associate and not an Ally.) The United States generally acted unselfishly, in its occupation of Cuba, for example. “We had gone to war with Spain,” he insisted, “not for annexation but to provide the helpless colony with the opportunity of freedom.”
¹⁷

Wilson tended to draw on Latin American examples, since most of his formative experiences in foreign relations had been there. He had recast, at least to his own satisfaction, the Monroe Doctrine, that famous defiance hurled at the Europeans in 1823 to warn them off attempting to colonize the New World again. The doctrine had become a fundamental precept in American foreign policy, a cloak, many said, for U.S. dominance of its neighbors. Wilson saw it rather as the framework within which all the nations of the Americas worked peacefully together, and a model for the warring European nations. Lansing was dubious, as he often was of Wilson's ideas: “the doctrine is exclusively a
national
policy of the United States and relates to its national safety and vital interests.”
¹⁸

Wilson paid little attention to what he regarded as niggling objections from Lansing. He was clear in his own mind that he meant well. When the American troops went to Haiti or Nicaragua or the Dominican Republic, it was to further order and democracy. “I am going to teach,” he had said in his first term as president, “the South American Republics to elect good men!” He rarely mentioned that he was also protecting the Panama Canal and American investments. During Wilson's presidency, the United States intervened repeatedly in Mexico to try to get the sort of government it wanted. “The purpose of the United States,” Wilson said, “is solely and singly to secure peace and order in Central America by seeing to it that the processes of self-government there are not interrupted or set aside.” He was taken aback when the Mexicans failed to see the landing of American troops, and American threats, in the same light.
¹⁹

The Mexican adventure also showed Wilson's propensity, perhaps unconscious, to ignore the truth. When he sent troops to Mexico for the first time, he told Congress that it was in response to repeated provocations and insults to the United States and its citizens from General Victoriano Huerta, the man who started the Mexican Revolution. Huerta in fact had taken great care to avoid provocations. At the Paris Peace Conference Wilson was to claim that he had never seen the secret wartime agreements among the Allies, promising Italy, for example, enemy territory. The British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, had shown them to him in 1917. Lansing said sourly of his president: “Even established facts were ignored if they did not fit in with this intuitive sense, this semi-divine power to select the right.”
²⁰

As the Mexican imbroglio demonstrated, Wilson was not afraid to use his country's considerable power, whether financial or military. And by the end of the Great War the United States was much more powerful than it had been in 1914. Then it had possessed a minuscule army and a middle-sized navy; now it had over a million troops in Europe alone, and a navy that rivaled Britain's. Indeed, Americans tended to assume that they had won the war for their European allies. The American economy had surged ahead as American farmers and American factories poured out wheat, pork, iron and steel for the Allied war effort. As the American share of world production and trade rose inexorably, that of the European powers stagnated or declined. Most significant of all for their future relations, the United States had become the banker to the Europeans. Together the European allies owed over $7 billion to the American government, and about half as much again to American banks. Wilson assumed, overconfidently as it turned out, that the United States would get its way simply by applying financial pressure. As his legal adviser David Hunter Miller said, “Europe is bankrupt financially and its governments are bankrupt morally. The mere hint of withdrawal by America by reason of opposition to her wishes for justice, for fairness, and for peace would see the fall of every government in Europe without exception, and a revolution in every country in Europe with one possible exception.”
²¹

In that meeting on the
George Washington,
Wilson also talked briefly about the difficulties that lay ahead with the nations emerging from the wreckage of central Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and many more. They could have whatever form of government they wanted, but they must include in their new states only those who wanted to be there. “Criterion not who are intellectual or social or economic leaders but who form mass of people,” a member of his audience wrote down. “Must have liberty—that is the kind of government they want.”
²²

Of all the ideas Wilson brought to Europe, this concept of self-determination was, and has remained, one of the most controversial and opaque. During the Peace Conference, the head of the American mission in Vienna sent repeated requests to Paris and Washington for an explanation of the term. No answer ever came. It has never been easy to determine what Wilson meant. “Autonomous development,” “the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments,” “the rights and liberties of small nations,” a world made safe “for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions”: the phrases had poured out from the White House, an inspiration to peoples around the world. But what did they add up to? Did Wilson merely mean, as sometimes appeared, an extension of democratic self-government? Did he really intend that any people who called themselves a nation should have their own state? In a statement he drafted, but never used, to persuade the American people to support the peace settlements, he stated, “We say now that all these people have the right to live their own lives under governments which they themselves choose to set up. That is the American principle.” Yet he had no sympathy for Irish nationalists and their struggle to free themselves from British rule. During the Peace Conference he insisted that the Irish question was a domestic matter for the British. When a delegation of nationalist Irish asked him for support, he felt, he told his legal adviser, like telling them to go to hell. His view was that the Irish lived in a democratic country and they could sort it out through democratic means.
²³

The more Wilson's concept of self-determination is examined, the more difficulties appear. Lansing asked himself: “When the President talks of ‘self-determination' what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community?” It was a calamity, Lansing thought, that Wilson had ever hit on the phrase. “It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force.” What, as Lansing asked, made a nation? Was it a shared citizenship, as in the United States, or a shared ethnicity, as in Ireland? If a nation was not self-governing, ought it to be? And in that case, how much self-government was enough? Could a nation, however defined, exist happily within a larger multinational state? Sometimes Wilson seemed to think so. He came, after all, from a country that sheltered many different nationalities and which had fought a bitter war, which he remembered well, to stay in one piece.

Initially, he did not want to break up the big multinational empires such as Austria-Hungary and Russia. In February 1918, he had told Congress that “well-defined” national aspirations should be satisfied without, however, “introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the peace of Europe, and consequently of the world.”
²⁴

That led to another series of questions. What was a “well-defined” nationalism? Polish? That was an obvious one. But what about Ukrainian? Or Slovak? And what about subdivisions? Ukrainian Catholics, for example, or Protestant Poles? The possibilities for dividing up peoples were unending, especially in central Europe, where history had left a rich mix of religions, languages and cultures. About half the people living there could be counted as members of one national minority or another. How were peoples to be allocated to one country or another when the dividing lines between one nation and another were so unclear?

One solution was to leave it to the experts. Let them study the history, collect the statistics and consult the locals. Another, more apparently democratic solution, which had been floating around in international relations since the French Revolution, was to give the locals a choice through a plebiscite, with a secret vote, administered by some international body. Wilson himself does not seem to have assumed that self-determination implied plebiscites, but by 1918 many people did. Who was to vote? Only men, or women as well? Only residents, or anyone who had been born in the disputed locality? (The French firmly rejected the idea of a plebiscite on their lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine on the grounds that the vote would be unfair because Germany had forced French speakers out and brought in Germans.) And what if the locals did not know which nation they belonged to? In 1920, when an outside investigator asked a peasant in Belarus, on the frontier where Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians all mingled, who he was, the only answer that came back was “I am a Catholic of these parts.” What do you do, asked American experts in Carinthia in the Austrian Alps, when you have people “who do not want to join the nation of their blood-brothers, or else are absolutely indifferent to all national questions”?
²⁵

At the end of 1919, a chastened Wilson told Congress, “When I gave utterance to those words [that ‘all nations had a right to selfdetermination'], I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.” He was not responsible for the spread of national movements looking for their own states—that had been going on since the end of the eighteenth century—but, as Sidney Sonnino, the Italian foreign minister, put it, “the War undoubtedly had had the effect of over-exciting the feeling of nationality. . . . Perhaps America fostered it by putting the principles so clearly.”
²⁶

Wilson spent most of his time in the meeting with his experts on the matter closest to his heart: the need to find a new way of managing international relations. This did not come as a surprise to his audience. In his famous Fourteen Points of January 1918, and in subsequent speeches, he had sketched out his ideas. The balance of power, he told the U.S. Congress in his “Four Principles” speech of February 1918, was forever discredited as a way to keep peace. There would be no more secret diplomacy of the sort that had led Europe into calculating deals, rash promises and entangling alliances, and so on down the slope to war. The peace settlements must not leave the way open to future wars. There must be no retribution, no unjust claims and no huge fines—indemnities—paid by the losers to the winners. That was what had been wrong after Prussia defeated France in 1870. The French had never forgiven Germany for the monies paid over and for the loss of their provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. War itself must become more difficult. There must be controls on armaments— general disarmament, even. Ships must sail freely across the world's seas. (That meant, as the British well knew, the end of their traditional weapon of strangling enemy economies by blockading their ports and seizing their shipping; it had brought Napoleon down, and, so they thought, hastened the Allied victory over Germany.) Trade barriers must be lowered so the nations of the world would become more interdependent.

At the heart of Wilson's vision was a League of Nations to provide the collective security that, in a well-run civil society, was provided by the government, its laws, its courts and its police. “Old system of powers, balance of powers, had failed too often,” one expert jotted down, as the president spoke. The League was to have a council that could “butt in” in case of disputes. “If unsuccessful the offending nation to be outlawed—‘And outlaws are not popular now.'”
²⁷