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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
‘The characteristic feature of the crisis of the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 was the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a Utopia which took little account of reality to a reality from which every element of Utopia was rigorously excluded… The Utopia of 1919 was hollow and without substance,’ So wrote E. H. Carr in the conclusion to his Twenty Years Crisis, which he sent to the press in the middle of July 1939. Fifty years later one cannot but agree with him that the peace settlement of 1919 ‘failed’: Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin wiped it off the map of Europe. But though the Second World War created a very different ‘realistic’ world, some of the ‘Utopian’ ideals of 1919, so brusquely dismissed by Carr, re-surfaced irrepressibly after 1945, and some of their practical applications returned to the agenda of international politics.
1. Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years Crisis (London, 1939), p. 224.Google Scholar
2. In this case, as in so many others, the peacemakers had been faced with a choice of evils: which was the lesser, to deprive Poland of access to the sea or, as was decided, t o separate East Prussia from the rest of Germany while providing extra-territorial facilities for German trains crossing the corridor. Though the second alternative was a sensible compromise, it found few defenders outside Poland. The international administration of Danzig worked well for fifteen years, and a similar arrangement for Fiume, which Wilson proposed, might also have worked well had not the Italians rejected it. In recent times international administration has been proposed for Jerusalem. The post-1945 example of the land corridor from West Germany to West Berlin invalidates the view commonly held between the wars that the Polish Corridor was by its nature ‘artificial’ and ‘unworkable’.
3. Langer, William L., ‘The Well-Springs of our Discontents’, Journal of Contemporary History, iii (1968), p. 11.Google Scholar
4. ’The peace of Versailles lacked moral validity from the start’, wrote Taylor, A. J. P. in The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961), p. 28.Google Scholar
5. Keynes, John Maynafd, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919), p. 215.Google Scholar
6. Italy and Yugoslavia only reached agreement, by direct negotiation, in the Treaty of Rapallo of 12 November 1920.
7. Mayer, Arno J., Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (London, 1968).Google Scholar
8. To describe Poland as a ‘new’ state was of course a gross historical misnomer, for it had an ancient history before its partition in 1772–95; but in the documentation of 1919 Poland was so described.
9. In his introduction to the 1943 edition of his Peacemaking 1919, Harold Nicolson wrote (p. xix): ‘We succeeded in balkanizing Europe, although we europeanized the Balkans.’
10. I have not included ‘extermination’ as a method of dealing with minorities because such a ‘solution’ would have been beyond the capacity of the peacemakers of 1919 even to imagine.
11. The first example of a mass exchange of populations occurred in 1922 between Greece and Turkey, after the Greeks had suffered defeat by the Turks and had been obliged to abandon their aim of creating a Greater Greece in Anatolia.
12. The Treaties of Versailles (with Germany), St Germain (with Austria), Neuilly (with Bulgaria) and Trianon (with Hungary) had been signed on 28 June, 10 September, 7 November 1919 and 10 June 1920 respectively.
13. The Jews were the most widely dispersed minority in East-Central Europe, and in 1919 suffered from the additional disadvantage of having no ‘mother country’ which could defend their interests or to which they could emigrate.
14. Another reason for the indignation of the new states was that the great powers, notably Italy, undertook no similar obligations with regard to their minorities.
15. Langer, op. cit., p. 17.
16. Langer, op. cit., p. 16.
17. At the beginning of 1919 Britain had troops, in addition to its far-flung imperial garrisons, in France, Belgium, the Rhineland and Northern Italy; at Fiume and Salonica; in Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia; at Archangel, Batum and Vladivostok; and in Germany's former colonies in Africa; and the white ensign of the Royal Navy flew in the Baltic, Black and Caspian Seas.
18. See Kennedy's, Paul perceptive treatment of this theme in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988), chapter 6.Google Scholar