Paris Peace Conference (1919)

"In the summer of 1919, the Allied armies stood along the Rhine, and their bridgeheads bulged deeply into defeated, disarmed, and hungry Germany. The chiefs of the victor Powers debated and disputed the future in Paris. Before them lay the map of Europe to be redrawn almost as they might resolve. After fifty-two months of agony and hazards the Teutonic Coalition lay at their mercy, and not one of its four members could offer the slightest resistance to their will. Germany, the head and forefront of the offence, regarded by all as the prime cause of the catastrophe which had fallen upon the world, was at the mercy or discretion of conquerors, themselves reeling from the torment they had endured. Moreover, this had been a war, not of governments, but of peoples. The whole life-energy of the greatest nations had been poured out in wrath and slaughter. The war leaders assembled in Paris had been borne thither upon the strongest and most furious tides that have ever flowed in human history. Gone were the days of the Treaties of Utrecht and Vienna, when aristocratic statesmen and diplomats, victor and vanquished alike, met in polite and courtly disputation, and, free from the clatter and babel of democracy, could reshape systems upon the fundamentals of which they were all agreed. The peoples, transported by their sufferings and by the mass teachings with which they had been inspired, stood around in scores of millions to demand that retribution should be exacted to the full. Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred blood-soaked battlefields."

"But in November 1918, the fighting momentarily ended, humankind could still for a fleeting season dream the dreams of hope. Much of that hope was invested in the person of the American president, Woodrow Wilson. ‘‘What a place the President held in the hearts and hopes of the world!’’ when he boarded the George Washington for the Paris Peace Conference on December 4, 1918, exclaimed the British economist John Maynard Keynes. Buoyant and eager, Roosevelt followed his chief to Paris aboard the same ship a month later. But there, hovering on the periphery of the peace negotiations, he witnessed the remorseless demolition of the liberal settlement that Wilson had championed. It was the young Keynes who most famously chronicled the hope-smothering defects of the treaty that was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Wilson had envisioned a liberal peace, a peace without victory, a peace that would magnanimously restore Germany to its rightful place in an open world of free trade and democracy. In that world commerce would be unshackled from political constraint, politics would be based on the principle of self-determination, and order would be maintained by a new international body, the League of Nations. But what emerged from the ordeal of the Paris peace negotiations was a document that mocked those ideals."

"When American thinking on foreign policy and European diplomatic traditions encountered each other at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the differences in historical experience became dramatically evident. The European leaders sought to refurbish the existing system according to familiar methods; the American peacemakers believed that the Great War had resulted not from intractable geopolitical conflicts but from flawed European practices. In his famous Fourteen Points, Woodrow Wilson told the Europeans that, henceforth, the international system should be based not on the balance of power but on ethnic self-determination, that their security should depend not on military alliances but on collective security, and that their diplomacy should no longer be conducted secretly by experts but on the basis of “open agreements, openly arrived at.” Clearly, Wilson had come not so much to discuss the terms for ending a war or for restoring the existing international order, as he had to recast a whole system of international relations as it had been practiced for nearly three centuries."

"To provide for the conditions of peace and the reorganization of Europe [at the end of the First World War] the Paris Conference met on January 18th (same day as the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles in C.E.1871), in which all the victorious states were represented (thirty-two), but whose direction was assumed by the heads of government of the four largest states (i Big Four, as the Anglo-Saxons used to say), Wilson, LLoyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando. As was inevitable, a welter of contradictory tendencies and appetites was unleashed: nationalisms exasperated against each other and messianic hopes of universal transformation fought and mixed together. (Luigi Salvatorelli)"

"Treaty of Versailles (1919)"

"League of Nations"