AFTER World War One

...In Germany, the Allies and the United States sought to use economic and political influence to check revolutionary social ist tendencies, regardless of the fact that this led to a Center-Right alliance that effectively inhibited the more radical potential of the German Revolution of 1918...

...Moreover, Wilson also joined the Allies both in supporting anti-German territorial terms in the East (Mayer tends to underestimate the extent to which a punitive attitude toward Germany lived on in Wilson's thinking from the war days) and in placing American-Allied unity and the containment of revolutionary socialism throughout Europe ahead of any vision of a liberal-Left alliance to remake world politics...

...Mayer argues that the results of the Paris Peace Conference represented a failure on the part of liberal elements inspired by Woodrow Wilson to ally themselves with the forces of democratic socialism throughout postwar Europe in order to create a new rational and humane world order...

...The work provides a worthy sequel to Mayer's earlier study, Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 19171918, which analyzed European politics and diplomacy in the last two years of World War I. Both books exhibit Mayer's methodological effort to abandon what he has termed "the constricting framework of orthodox diplomatic history" in favor of an emphasis "on the making of foreign policy prior to its being fed into the diplomatic and military machinery, particular care being taken to probe those points at which domestic affairs intersect with foreign policy, military preparedness, and diplomacy...

...Moreover, the Allies hoped to bind America's political and military power to the defense of the final peace settlement against a potential German effort at revenge, and Allied leaders were willing consequently to make some concessions to Wilson...

...Moreover, Wilson hoped that a unified liberal Russia would enter the League of Nations and help to support an American-inspired system of liberal capitalist stability in Europe and in Asia...

...Ironically, in this last connection, Allied and especially French acceptance of Wilson's League of Nations program in 1919 resulted, in large part, because the League served to tie American power to the maintenance of the anti-German peace settlement...

...In Hungary, the Alliedand American-induced fall of Bela Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic was followed by a brutal White Terror...

...Finally, a special problem was the existence of strongly anti-German and social-patriotic elements within the French and British Left, elements which tended to undercut whatever unified opposition the Allied Left might have been able to offer to anti-German extremism at Paris...

...When Wilson did finally appeal to one of the Allied peoples over the heads of their own government (in his statement to the Italian people on the Fiume question), Mayer shows that the Allied-Left was too weak to rally effectively to Wilson in Italy or elsewhere, and that they tended to view Wilson's effort as a case of too little and too late...

...Moreover, other factors served to further inhibit the achievement of Wilson's peace program: Wilson's principles and aims, like all such pronunciamentos, were destined to be honored in the breach...

...Commenting at one point on Woodrow Wilson's role in the Russian question, Mayer writes that "Wilson lacked the courage, the political support, and the diplomatic leverage to force a credible effort for accommodation with Lenin...

...The Allies needed American economic strength for their own recovery and to help buttress orderly governments BOOKS in the defeated states of Germany, Austria, and Hungary, each of which faced a revolutionary socialist upheaval...

...Above all, there moves through Mayer's pages the prophetic figure of Woodrow Wilson...

...Tins MASSIVE yet gracefully written book is a definitive political history of Europe during the period of the Paris Peace Conference from November• 1918 to June 1919...

...Mayer is, I think, much closer to the truth at other moments in the book when he stresses Wilson's anti-Bolshevism and commitment to the eventual reinstatement of the liberal-nationalist values of the March Revolution in Russia...

...Above all, the Alliel cabinets were much less prone to bend tothe ideological and diplomatic wishes of theWilson Administration once victory had dras tically reduced their dependence on Americanmilitary and economic power...

...IN MAYER'S VIEW, the greatest evil of the postWorld War I period was its obsessive antiBolshevism...

...Most basic, according to Mayer, was the decline in the political strength of Left-liberal and democratic socialist elements in all the countries victorious in the War...

...In our own time, however, it is clear that we are involved around the world with the ambiguous legacy of the final triumph of the Wilsonian vision in America during World War II and the Cold War which followed...

...or, failing this, to make the operation essentially defensive...

...and] of the social origins, status, and world views of the principal political and foreign policy actors...

...the seeds of appeasement, World War II, and the Cold War...

...This statement implies that Wilson wished to reach an agreement with Lenin but was prevented by other political factors...

...American aid was also sought to make viable the pro-Allied successor states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania...

...Wilson's opposition to armed Allied intervention BOOKS in Russia at crucial moments at Paris never meant that the President was prepared to accept Bolshevik rule in all or part of Russia...

...and after the Armistice the AlliedGovernments could dispense with the support oftheir own forces of movement...

...the beginnings of the ostracism of a hostile Soviet Union...

...These hopes explain Wilson's efforts to negotiate the Bolsheviks out of power, his willingness to maintain America's forces in Siberia throughout 1919, and his attempt to reach an agreement with Admiral Kolchak for a liberal-nationalist solution in Russia in the spring of 1919...

...Yet it should be noted that paradoxically the very threat of Bolshevism in Germany had given Wilson some leverage at Paris in moderating the peace settlement...

...For a time, Wilson's own nation would reject his liberal globalist vision of an American destiny to stabilize the world against threats to international order from either the atavistic Right or the revolutionary Left...

...It led to the Allies' support of reactionary and expansionist tendencies in their client states of Poland and Rumania...

...Mayer exhaus tively traces rising conservative power through the Republican victory in the American elections of 1918, the success of the Right in Britain's Khaki election, and the solidification of the conservative power of Clemenceau and Sonnino in France and Italy on the eve of the Paris Conference...

...As regards the Russian question, Mayer argues that the political weakness of the Allied Left, combined with its own ambivalence on the Bolshevik issue, led to a situation in which the Allied governments, the Allied client successor states of Poland and Rumania—and for a time even the Germans in the Baltic and the Ukraine—were able to support the Russian Whites through a limited program of counterrevolutionary intervention...

...Opposition to Bolshevism helped to split an already weakened world socialist movement...

...with the success of the revolution from above in Berlin the rebellion against the Kaiserand Erich Ludendorff no longer required encouragement...

...Many factors explain why history did not move in this direction in 1918 and 1919...

...Wilson, of course, was not completely without diplomatic leverage...

...The conditions that had promptedtheir formulation and acceptance in early 1918had passed into history: there was no longer anyneed to restrain the Soviet government fromsigning a separate peace with the Central Powers...

...In the last analysis, the value of Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking lies in the fact that Mayer has shown us how the events of the early months of 1919 contain in microcosm all the basic political questions of the next 50 years...

...Rather, Wilson worked for a more moderate peace from a restrained position within the inner councils of the victorious Allied powers...

...All the elements are already present in 1919: the roots of fascism...

...Then, having helped to contain the German Left, the Allies and the Americans proceeded to impose a harsh peace which further discredited the German CenterLeft forces and accelerated a drift toward the Right in German politics...

...The point is, then, that Wilson had considerable influence at the Paris Peace Conference, but it was not an influence based upon a broad solidarity with the European non-Bolshevik Left...

...Moving beyond the traditional official sources for diplomatic history, Mayer is particularly concerned with "an investigation of party, pressure, and interest politics...

...evidence of the growing weakness of a schismatic European Left...

...Moreover, Mayer describes in great detail the manner in which the Russian Whites and their conservative Allied supporters were able successfully to block all Allied-American efforts to reach a modus vivendi with the Soviet regime...