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Sunday, December 29, 2002

By Bob Hoover, Post-Gazette Book Editor

Treaty of Versailles showed vision, but the world didn't

Sitting on our 21st-century perch looking backward at the dismal ruins of the 20th, we are frequently serenaded by the usual cautionary tales from conventional historians.

The biggest one is the story of the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 agreement between the winners and losers of World War I.

	Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World By Margaret MacMillan Random House ($35)

This document was the root cause of World War II, we have been told over and over. We are still paying the price for what those foolish old men --Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau -- devised in Paris.

The argument always insists that their greatest sin was imposing a punitive peace on Germany, thus planting the seed of resentment from which sprouted Adolf Hitler.

The other great faults were the creation of a world organization without the power to police its members and a retreat back into isolationism by the United States.

As the United States fought the second great war, both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman carried with them the frightening image of their Democratic predecessor, who arrived in Paris to the adulation of Europe and left the White House a drooling cripple.

There would be no repeat of the six-month international circus where kings and kitchen help -- Ho Chi Minh, who worked for the chefs of the Ritz Hotel -- lined up to plead their cases for nationalism.

Instead, the vanquished must surrender "unconditionally," their nations under the occupation of the victors.

There would also be a United Nations with enforcement powers led by an America freely shouldering worldwide responsibilities.

The work of the previous peacekeepers would be remembered only for its failings.

Margaret MacMillan, the great-granddaughter of Lloyd George and history professor at the University of Toronto, has re-examined the events with the benefit of our 21st century view and found a different picture.

Her lively account, spiked with anecdotes, gossip and hindsight, sweeps away some of the dust that's accumulated over the years and lends a new appreciation for the generally well-meaning intentions behind the decisions.

Not only were the Allies -- essentially the United States, Great Britain and France (Italy would abandon the negotiations) -- confronting a world in chaos, but also their citizens were simply too brutalized to mount new military adventures that might have prevented later problems.

On the continent, the Old World Order, which held fractious Eastern Europe together, was no more.

In the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire had collapsed while Imperial Russia had disappeared behind a huge question mark of revolutionary infighting.

Victorious Great Britain and France were devastated, their treasuries empty, the majority of their young men dead or maimed, and, in France's case, most of their farms, factories and mines ruined.

For a defeated country, Germany was in remarkably good shape. It had not experienced invading armies, its cities were untouched by destruction, and its army, while reeling from the slaughter of 1914-18, was largely intact.

German troops marched home in formation and were greeted by cheering crowds in Berlin. "No enemy has conquered you," Friedrich Ebert, the country's president, told them.

Onto this scene stepped President Wilson with his Fourteen Points. His concept of what he called "self-determination" had raised the hopes of the world's many minorities, even though, as MacMillan notes, neither Wilson nor anyone else had a clear idea what that concept really meant.

It was the struggle over that concept, with its redrawn maps, plebiscites, hasty promises and cynical compromises, that dominated the peace conference. The most pressing concern, Germany's peace terms, was among the last issues dealt with by the Allies.

One of the first was approval of the League of Nations, usually credited to Wilson, although MacMillan says it was a European idea as well. Yet, the American president's idealism was like a life preserver to a broken world in 1919.

"It was easy to mock Wilson, and many did," says MacMillan. "It is also easy to forget how important his principles were in the spring of 1919 and how many people, and not just in the United States, wanted to believe in his great dream of a better world."

When the president left Paris in June 1919, he felt he had achieved much, and he was right. For the first time in modern history, the grievances and injustices of the world found a forum in which to be heard.

The German peace terms, while flawed, were the product of compromise. He had done what he could.

Wilson, however, could not, would not, compromise with the U.S. Senate, and his stubbornness cost him dearly.

In 1940, in the same rail car in France where the 1918 armistice was signed, Hitler voided the Treaty of Versailles. As MacMillan shows in her engaging book, that document did not create the Nazi leader or the events or decisions that followed its signing.

Instead, the treaty held the promise that there could be standards that all peoples could accept, from a world court to recognition of the rights of minorities.

In MacMillan's view, it was the world, not the treaty, that was flawed.