Tony Judt 'Paris 1919': The Fateful Decisions of the Peacemakers nytimes.com
[Review of PARIS 1919 Six Months That Changed the World.
By Margaret MacMillan. A little historical perspective is sometimes useful. Clip: ]
The Paris negotiators did their best, but their efforts were doomed, as some of them already realized. Observing the fate of the stateless Ukrainians, Lloyd George wrote, ''It fills me with despair the way in which I have seen small nations, before they have hardly leapt into the light of freedom, beginning to oppress other races than their own.'' MacMillan is sympathetic to the victors' problems. As to the German question, she shares the current revisionist view that the war guilt and reparations clauses were not especially harsh, given what the Germans had done. Neither Hitler nor World War II should be blamed upon Versailles, she suggests.
That seems right. But even if we agree that Keynes needs revising, MacMillan's overall assessment of the Paris decisions does seem a bit generous. After all, even at the time it was clear to someone like the British general Henry Wilson that terrible mistakes were being made. Of Western support for the unsuccessful Greek project to occupy Smyrna he rightly noted, ''The whole thing is mad and bad.'' Winston Churchill rushed to Paris in an unsuccessful attempt to block the carving up of the Turkish empire: it would bring ''eternal war'' with the Muslim world, he warned, from the Mediterranean to India. And so it has.
After World War II, the Americans accepted their responsibility to remain economically involved in Europe's reconstruction (something Wilson had energetically refused in 1919). Instead of drawing unworkable frontiers and creating new minorities, the victors of 1945 shifted entire peoples. But on the whole they left in place the arrangements invented in Paris a quarter of a century before.
As a result, Paris in the spring of 1919 is still the best starting place for anyone wishing to understand today's world. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are gone. But the Greek-Turkish animosity (like that between Hungary and Romania) can be traced directly to decisions taken in Paris. So can the Balkan wars of the 1990's; the tribulations of Albanians in former Yugoslavia; the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict; the Israel-Palestine hostilities; the claims of the Kurds and the territorial sensitivities of the Turks. Of the modern world's serious trouble spots, only Korea and Kashmir owe little to the actions and omissions of the men of 1919. And Iraq? A British invention, born with French concurrence 83 years ago in a Parisian drawing room. |
