Peace in Their Time
Cooper, John Milton Jr.
Books&Arts Peace in Their Time The cost of failure at Versailles BY JOHN MILTON COOPER JR. A Shattered Peace Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today by David A. Andelman Wiley, 336 pp.,...
...This book does have some virtues...
...Nearly all of Andelman’s book concentrates on “the weak, the powerless, the orphaned and friendless”—whom he believes should have received greater and more serious attention from the peacemakers at Paris...
...It also rested on nuclear weapons and what Winston Churchill called the “balance of terror...
...If the peacemakers had handled these people and their aspirations differently, Andelman argues, the world would look different and undoubtedly much better today...
...It is not necessary to admire Wilson, or even to believe that he did much better than Andelman gives him credit for...
...I readily agree with Andelman that most of these areas were not well handled at Paris, but that does not automatically mean that better treatment would have made such a huge difference...
...Perhaps a different posture toward the Zionists might have forestalled the creation of Israel, but Andelman does not confront this question...
...Either this belongs in the book or it doesn’t...
...For example, with regard to the Balkans, he writes, “Wilson kept his head fi rmly buried in the sand...
...Andelman gives little sign that he has delved much into primary materials beyond certain memoirs...
...Perhaps Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and an expanded Poland were artifi cial creations, but was this primarily the doing of the men in Paris, or something they could have prevented...
...For sources, he relies particularly on Harold Nicolson’s diaries and memoir, Peacemaking, 1919 (1933), which makes for lively reading, although a good deal of bias...
...Could any efforts to reach out to the Bolsheviks have come to much...
...It is briskly paced and clearly written...
...The peacemakers of 1919 deserve to be judged at least in part by how they dealt with what they considered most important...
...Certainly the peace imposed at Versailles by the Western powers—Britain, France, Italy and the United States—on the vanquished, not to mention the weak, the powerless, the orphaned and the friendless, determined much of what went wrong for the balance of the century and beyond...
...An equally big shortcoming with Andelman’s interpretation is that he indulges in might-have-beens of his own that are far-fetched...
...Would a hearing for Ho Chi Minh at Paris have insured a non-Communist path to independence in Southeast Asia...
...John Milton Cooper Jr., professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, is the author, most recently, of Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations...
...Anyone who wishes to render this author’s judgment that “it was Wilson who lost the peace” must draw on a lot more research to back up such a claim...
...These are all might-have-beens, but they suggest that the leaders in Paris in 1919 may not have been totally off the mark in picking their priorities...
...The three great peace settlements during the last two centuries have included two successes and one failure...
...That bias is particularly strong against Wilson and aligns this book with Godfrey Hodgson’s recent biography of Colonel Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand (2006), in portraying Wilson as an impractical, misguided idealist who could not be saved from himself by his worldly-wise, constructive adviser...
...The more instructive contrast is not with Vienna in 1815 but with post-1945 Europe...
...He does not mention Arthur Link’s edition of The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, which is an indispensable and easy-to-use source not only on the president but on the conference as a whole...
...Is that really so...
...In the end, the question remains, why was this The Peace That Failed...
...That contention is interesting and deserves more consideration...
...Naturally, a great deal of attention has gone into studying and analyzing peace settlements, with the failures usually getting more attention than the successes...
...Chapter-by-chapter he talks about the young nationalist who did not yet call himself Ho Chi Minh and Indochina, Emir Faisal and the Arab peoples, Chaim Weizmann and a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Thomas Masaryk and Ignace Paderewski and their respective new nations of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Jan Smuts’s mission to Hungary and efforts to establish links with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, various dabblings in the Balkans and the creation of what is anachronistically called Yugoslavia (it did not take that name until 1929), and V.K...
...This was, in the title words of a recent symposium at the Liberty Memorial Museum in Kansas City, “The Peace That Failed,” and it is the subject of this book...
...Anyone seeking such a history should turn to Margaret MacMillan’s Paris, 1919 (2002...
...Andelman’s wish to explain the failure of this peace is commendable, but it highlights the book’s most serious weakness: It does not deliver on its stated aim...
...but it is necessary to take him seriously and pay attention to what he really thought and said...
...Except for how to win wars, there is no more important question in international relations than this one...
...The failure came at the end of World War I, with the work of the Paris peace conference...
...Beyond that, it rested on the hard lesson that peacemaking does not end with a conference or a treaty...
...Besides being much more sophisticated in its analysis of what Andelman’s book makes its main subject, Manela’s work rests on extensive archival research in many countries and languages, including Arabic and Chinese...
...Part of the problem lies in the approach that Andelman takes...
...Andelman would probably respond that the problems of dealing with Germany were not as important as the future of Asia and the Arab world or the shape of central and eastern Europe...
...In his bibliography (there are no notes), he mentions the volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States that cover the peace conference, but his text does not refl ect much acquaintance with material there...
...Wellington Koo and efforts to defend China against Japanese expansion...
...If Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau had done a better job of dealing with Germany and preserving European order, the neglected areas would have risen to importance in different ways...
...If anything, Andelman goes even further than Hodgson in this direction...
...But the reason for this was that the president did not want to be dragged into intrigues there by Italy and other nations...
...Yet whatever else the Cold War did, it unquestionably nerved both sides to maintain the order that emerged from the ashes of Nazi Germany...
...Andelman likes to spice up the historical account with anecdotes from his experiences as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and CBS, particularly in Asia and the Balkans...
...These are interesting, but also sometimes a bit distracting...
...My own answer is a proposition that both MacMillan and I have advanced— namely, that the breakdown of this settlement depended less on the specifi c terms or even general direction of the Treaty of Versailles and more on the quickly demonstrated lack of will among the victors to make it stick...
...But this focus comes at the expense of what the peacemakers considered most important— namely “the vanquished,” the treatment of the defeated foes, particularly Germany...
...Would setting Faisal up with an Arab state that included most of the nonTurkish parts of the Ottoman Empire really have prevented the bloody confl icts that are now plaguing the Middle East...
...The successes came at the end of the Napoleonic wars, with the work of the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, and at the end of World War II, with the division of Europe that lasted for the next four decades...
...A Shattered Peace Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today by David A. Andelman Wiley, 336 pp., $25.95 Why do some peace settlements succeed and others fail...
...This is not a comprehensive history of the peace conference...
...If Germany had been reintegrated successfully into the international community, and Britain and France had enjoyed more decades to recover from the devastation of World War I, then Europe would almost certainly not have become divided as it was after World War II, decolonization might have proceeded in a more responsible way, and more than one power (ourselves) would have been capable of dealing with an expansionist Japan...
...Andelman almost completely neglects this aspect of peacemaking—almost, but not quite...
...In sum, A Shattered Peace provides a diverting stroll through some aspects of peacemaking after World War I, together with quick accounts of what the author believes to be some of the consequences of that effort...
...Andelman admits that Lenin really did not want constructive engagement with capitalist powers but sought only to manipulate them to gain advantage for revolutionary activity...
...If the League of Nations had been established as a stronger body with the United States fully participating, then collective security might have been not so wild a dream...
...To this day, there is no comprehensive treaty to end World War II and no treaty with Germany...
...Anyone who wants a comprehensive and readable account of the conference should consult MacMillan’s book, and anyone who wants to learn more about the impact of Woodrow Wilson’s ideas on the non-Western world should read Erez Manela’s just published The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism...
...The author has an ambitious purpose, as the subtitle implies: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today...
...Here are the book’s last words: “For one fi nal view of another set of issues dealt with at the peace conference and the efforts of British economist John Maynard Keynes to shape the future course of the economy of the western world, see ‘Chapter 9 1/2: Setting Up a Global Economy’ at hor or the publisher decided to relegate that material to a website, but shame on whoever did...
...Would a more vigorous defense of China at the peace conference have accomplished anything more than to push Japan faster down the path of aggression...
...If there was a single moment when all might have been different, this was the moment: Paris, 1919,” David Andelman contends...
...That is what makes the experience of 1919 particularly worth pondering, and I regret to say that A Shattered Peace is not one of the better places to begin such pondering...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 14
