The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

The Council’s decision must therefore be taken unanimously, which again put a premium on having a compact decision-making body.

True to this conception, the first joint Anglo-American draft restricted membership in the League’s inner council to the five great powers.18. Other League members were to be summoned as and when the great powers needed their advice.

To force their point the delegates of the smaller states, over the objection of both the Americans and the British, insisted that the drafting Commission be expanded to include four additional members – Greece, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia.

The League was ‘the outcome of this war’. Of course, the Big Five were not the only ones to have made a contribution. ‘But the matter is not one to be discussed in the abstract or on the basis of sentiment; but a thing of cold fact; and the fact is that the war was won by Great Britain, France, Japan, Italy and the United States. It is essential that the League be formed around these effective powers . . .’

The same clash of visions recurred on every issue of the Covenant. Who, for instance, should be eligible for membership in the League? In Wilson’s own first drafts of the Covenant, he had included ‘popular self-government’ as a criterion to be met by applicant members, which would have made the League an association of democracies. But this clause was cut out by the legal experts.

What was truly at stake for the French was the political ‘character’ of the League and its members. To impose the stiffest possible test they demanded that any vote for admission should be unanimous.

Crucially, Britain very much wanted to have India included, and though it was making progress towards self-government, the Commission was not willing to grant that India already qualified. This embarrassment was resolved by making India an original signatory of the Covenant to which the qualifications required of new applicants did not apply. After Jan Smuts came up with that procedural fix, Cecil was happy to agree to any formula approved by Wilson.

To impose stiff entrance criteria for the former enemy powers, Cecil suggested that the article be amended to permit the League to ‘impose on any States seeking admission such conditions as it may think fit’. This would allow the League to ‘say to some State, you are too military; to another you are too despotic etc’.

When the French proposed taking up Cecil’s idea of tailoring the requirements to specific applicants, Wilson responded with an even more disconcerting admission. It would be unwise, he interjected, to insist too firmly on very exclusive membership criteria, because that might involve setting up ‘standards that we have not always lived up to ourselves’.

In the end the Commission settled for a compromise that satisfied no one. Any talk of democracy or constitutionalism or responsible government was abandoned in favour of an amendment that simply required candidates for admission to be ‘fully self-governing’. This clearly ruled out colonies but left open the question of members’ internal constitutions.31

The French insisted that if it was to offer a truly effective security guarantee, the League must dispose of an international army. It must have a permanent general staff and a tough regime of supervised disarmament. If implemented, this would have made Marshal Foch’s supreme command over Allied forces, instituted at the final moment of crisis in the spring of 1918 and still operative in the spring of 1919, into the model for a permanent military apparatus.

On the morning of 11 February, Robert Cecil rounded on Léon Bourgeois, ‘speaking very frankly but in private’, he reminded him that ‘Americans had nothing to gain from the League’, that the ‘offer that was made by America for support was practically a present to France, and that to a certain but to a lesser extent this was the position of Great Britain’ as well. ‘If the League of Nations was not successful,’ Cecil warned, Britain would withdraw from the negotiations and make an offer of a separate ‘alliance between Great Britain and the United States’. With the darkest fear of French policy laid bare on the table, ‘the meeting adjourned for lunch’.

Behind the scenes the familiar role assignment at Versailles was reversed. It was Wilson’s realism that turned the French from radical internationalists into defenders of the status quo. If their futuristic internationalist vision was rejected, then France’s minimum negotiating goal was to soften the disarmament provisions of the League Covenant so that they did not operate in such a lopsided fashion as to jeopardize French security.

The security regime provided by the Covenant centred on Article 10, which required the High Contracting Parties to ‘respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all states’. But contrary to the claims later made by Wilson’s Republican opponents, the Covenant provided no automatic enforcement mechanism.

The true substance of the Covenant lay in the procedural mechanism it specified for delaying and mediating conflict. No party was to go to war before submitting the case to arbitration (Article 12). A ruling was to be delivered within six months. The warring parties were to respect a further three months’ waiting period before engaging in conflict. If a ruling was reached the terms were to be published, providing the basis for an emerging body of international law (Article 15). Only a unanimous report by the members of the Council other than the parties to the conflict would have binding force. No member of the League was permitted to declare war on a party to a conflict that was complying with a unanimous Council recommendation. A failure to comply with this arbitration procedure would be considered an act of aggression against all other members of the League and would license sanctions under Article 16. These included a complete and immediate economic blockade and the interdiction of all communications between citizens of the Covenant-breaking state and the rest of the world.

To minimize their commitments yet further and to avoid becoming sucked into the defence of an indefensible status quo, the British had insisted that the League should have the right to adjust boundaries where appropriate. But this risked turning the League Council into the court of appeal for every revisionist and irredentist cause in the world. So, instead, under Article 24 it was the Body of the Delegates that was given the responsibility ‘from time to time’ to ‘advise the reconsideration by States members of the League, of treaties which have become inapplicable, and of international conditions of which the continuance may endanger the peace of the world’.

But as far as Wilson was concerned, the mistrust and insecurity that animated these discussions was the wrong place to start. ‘It must not be supposed,’ Wilson insisted, ‘that any of the members of the League will remain isolated if it is attacked . . . We are ready to fly to the assistance of those who are attacked, but we cannot offer more than the condition of the world enables us to give . . . When danger comes, we too will come, and we will help you, but you must trust us. We must all depend on our mutual good faith.’

Clemenceau was no simple-minded realist when it came to international affairs. On the contrary, in early April 1919 he would make an impassioned appeal for the Versailles Treaty to set a dramatic precedent by bringing the Kaiser to trial as an international criminal.38 But the frustration that Larnaude and Bourgeois experienced in the Commission confirmed Clemenceau in his suspicion that the League was a lost cause as far as France was concerned.

Provided that a democratic alliance was in place, France could live with an empty League. The real risk from the point of view of Paris was that the League might have become an exclusive Anglo-American duopoly. Both at the time and since, critics would argue that the League served as a convenient vehicle for the upholding of an Anglo-American imperium.

There was some talk over the winter of 1918–19 from the Entente side of making the League into the vehicle for an international financial settlement. But as we shall see, those plans were rapidly quashed.

To further increase the pressure, in late October he asked Congress to appropriate funds for a second three-year naval spending programme. And in unguarded moments on the passage to Europe in early December he made clear what this meant. If Britain would not come to terms, America would ‘build the biggest Navy in the world, matching theirs and exceeding it . . . and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map’.43 When Wilson arrived in Europe there seemed little prospect of Britain gaining either of its main objectives: a cordial power-sharing agreement with the United States, or recognition by the US of the exceptional naval needs of a worldwide empire. Caught between these conflicting impulses, by the end of March 1919 relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other.

But would the British and American navies be able to cooperate? Was Wilson determined to push ahead to build the largest navy in the world? If the US acted unilaterally and aggressively, could Britain afford not to respond? It would make a mockery of the League of Nations if it began not with disarmament but with the greatest arms race the world had ever seen.

Since 1916 Wilson had argued that America needed to threaten to build a huge navy to force the British to accept the terms of the new order. As the peace conference entered its fortnight of deepest crisis, in late March 1919 Lloyd George turned the tables on him. Wilson had returned from Washington in an embarrassing situation. His conversations with congressional leaders had made clear that the Covenant would not pass without an explicit inclusion of the Monroe Doctrine.

In the first week of April as the conference reached deadlock, Lloyd George made clear that there would be no British signature on an amended Covenant including the Monroe Doctrine unless Wilson agreed to refrain from an all-out naval arms race.

But his indignation did little to dent Downing Street’s logic: ‘The first condition of success for the League of Nations is . . . a firm understanding between the British Empire and the United States of America and France and Italy that there will be no competitive building up of fleets or armies between them. Unless this is arrived at before the Covenant is signed, the League of Nations will be a sham and a mockery.’47 Rather than Wilson using American naval armaments to force Britain to fall into line with his vision of a new international order, it was Britain that held Wilson’s Covenant hostage to curb American naval armaments.

But in seeking to explain Versailles’s Janus face, Bainville looked beyond the emotional cycle of crime and punishment to a deeper historical and structural feature of the peace. Whether it was cruel or kind, what struck Bainville most about the Versailles settlement was that it extended the principle of national sovereignty across all of Europe, including to Germany. Despite the disaster unleashed by Bismarck’s creation of 1871, an integral and sovereign German nation state was taken for granted as a basic element in the new order. For Bainville this assumption was the hallmark of sentimental nineteenth-century liberalism.5 The bizarre mixture of cruelty and kindness that characterized the peace was the direct result of Clemenceau’s effort to reconcile the security needs of France with his romantic attachment to the principle of nationality.

Across the sweep of modern history since the emergence of the modern nation state system in Europe in the seventeenth century, the assumption of German national sovereignty marks the treaty of 1919 as unique. Most, if not all, of the problems peculiar to the Versailles Treaty system arose from it.

Self-determination as a universal aspiration was not an idea imported to an uncomprehending Europe by an American President. Since the first French Republic had embarked on the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, the question of how to accommodate French security with the rights of other people to self-determination had been an abiding preoccupation.

The tragic torsion imparted to European history by the degeneration of the French revolution was fundamental to Clemenceau’s distinctively republican view of history.6 The Congress of Vienna of 1815 had imposed peace on Europe, but it had denied the national aspirations of Germany. The disastrous denouement came in the 1860s when the vainglorious ambition of Bonaparte’s nephew opened the door to Bismarck. If the France of Napoleon III had no friends in 1870, it was for good reason. Clemenceau did not bemoan the defeat of a regime that had imprisoned both him and his father. The disaster was that Germany’s wounded pride was now slaked by Prussia’s aggression. Clemenceau had many brutal and prejudiced things to say about Germans. But he did not deny that the Huns of 1914 were in no small part the product of France’s own twisted history.