Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Paris Peace Conference opened on the 18th of January 1919 at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. That date was chosen deliberately. It was the anniversary of the proclamation of William I as German Emperor in 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. The Germans had humiliated France on that day. Now France would help remake the world.

  What followed was one of the most consequential diplomatic gatherings in history. Diplomats from 32 countries converged on Paris. They were assigned to 52 commissions. Those commissions held 1,646 sessions, covering everything from prisoners of war to undersea cables to international aviation. And yet, the four men who truly controlled everything met informally, 145 times, away from the formal sessions.

  Five peace treaties would emerge from those meetings. New nations would be drawn on maps. Old empires would be carved up. Financial penalties would be imposed. And dozens of delegations, representing peoples from Korea to Ireland to the Assyrian diaspora, would arrive in Paris with hopes of being heard. Most would leave disappointed.

  What were the forces shaping those decisions? Why did the defeated have no voice? And how did arrangements made in Paris in 1919 plant the seeds of another world war?

• 2. The Big Four

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  Georges Clemenceau had watched Germany invade France twice in his lifetime. That personal memory drove everything he did at the conference. His chief goal was to weaken Germany militarily, strategically, and economically, and he demanded an American and British guarantee of French security in case Germany attacked again.

  Clemenceau made no secret of his impatience with American idealism. He complained of Woodrow Wilson: "Mr. Wilson bores me with his fourteen points. Why, God Almighty has only ten!" Wilson did sign a mutual defense treaty with France, but he never submitted it for ratification back home, and so it never took effect.

  David Lloyd George of Britain proved to be the most agile operator of the four. The British historian Antony Lentin described him as unrivaled as a negotiator, crediting his charm, insight, resourcefulness, and what Lentin called simple pugnacity. Lloyd George inserted the war-guilt clause, expanded the British Empire, and yet also pushed for better terms for Germany than either France or Italy wanted.

  Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy was in a difficult position. Italy had lost 700,000 soldiers and accumulated a budget deficit of 12,000,000,000 Italian lire. Orlando could not speak English and conducted negotiations jointly with his Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino. Italy gained Istria, Trieste, Trentino, and South Tyrol, but the city of Fiume remained disputed. Nationalists declared the outcome a mutilated victory, and Orlando was ultimately forced to abandon the conference and resign. Francesco Saverio Nitti took his place and signed the treaties.

  Wilson arrived in Europe in December 1918, the first sitting American president ever to visit the continent. His Fourteen Points had shaped the armistice terms and raised enormous expectations across Europe, including in Germany. But in Paris, he found what he called rivalries and conflicting claims previously submerged. France and Britain each refused to adopt specific points, and Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles placed full responsibility for the war on Germany alone, a provision the United States had not supported.

• 3. Germany's Terms

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  Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, signed on the 28th of June 1919, declared that Germany bore responsibility for the war through the aggression of Germany and her allies. That single provision proved humiliating to German leaders, soldiers, and citizens alike.

  The financial reparations that flowed from that clause were intended to be enormous. Germany paid only a small portion before stopping payments altogether after 1931. The British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote that the treaty seemed to Germans wicked, unfair, and a slave treaty, but he also noted it was one they would repudiate at some stage if it did not fall to pieces of its own absurdity.

  The German Weimar Republic had not been invited to the conference at Versailles. The defeated nations, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria, were given no voice in the deliberations. That exclusion gave rise to political resentments that lasted for decades.

  In May 1919, the French diplomat Rene Massigli was sent on secret missions to Berlin. He offered, on behalf of the French government, to revise the territorial and economic clauses of the upcoming treaty. He spoke of the desirability of practical, verbal discussions leading to a Franco-German collaboration, and warned that deepening opposition between the two countries would lead to the ruin of both, to the advantage of the Anglo-Saxon powers. The Germans rejected his offers. The German Foreign Minister, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, believed the United States was more likely to reduce the severity of the penalties than France was. It was, in the end, Lloyd George who pushed for better terms.

• 4. Mandates and Colonies

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  Australia wanted New Guinea. New Zealand wanted Samoa. South Africa wanted South West Africa. The question of what to do with Germany's overseas colonies placed the British dominions in direct conflict with Wilson's desire to have the League of Nations administer all German territories until they were ready for independence.

  Lloyd George proposed a compromise built around three categories of mandates. Former Turkish provinces would be divided between Britain and France. The territories closest to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa would effectively go to those dominions. African colonies required careful oversight as Class B mandates, and those would go to Britain, France, and Belgium, with Italy and Portugal receiving smaller portions. Japan obtained mandates over former German possessions north of the equator.

  The disposition of Arab territories from the former Ottoman Empire was more contested. The Sykes-Picot Agreement had already secretly divided the region between Britain and France. Wilson recommended an international commission to hear the wishes of local inhabitants. That became the King-Crane Commission, which toured Syria and Palestine during the summer of 1919. Its report was presented to Wilson but kept from the public until a newspaper broke the story in December 1922. France was ultimately granted mandates over Syria and Lebanon, while Britain received mandates over Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine, formalized at the San Remo Conference in 1920.

  The World Zionist Organization submitted its draft resolutions in February 1919, seeking recognition of Jewish title over the land and League of Nations sovereignty under British mandate. A pro-Zionist joint resolution on Palestine was passed by the United States Congress in September 1922.

• 5. The Unheard Nations

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  Nguyen Ai Quoc, later known as Ho Chi Minh, petitioned the conference for self-determination and independence for the Vietnamese people. Vietnam was a French colony. His petition was largely ignored.

  The Korean National Association attempted to send a three-man delegation to Paris and failed. A separate delegation from China and Hawaii did reach the conference, including a representative of the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai, Kim Kyu-sik. China's Sun Yat-sen urged American diplomats to take up Korean independence. Other than China, no nation took the Koreans seriously, and the failure ended their hopes for foreign support.

  The Chinese delegation itself suffered a significant defeat. Wellington Koo demanded the return of Germany's concessions in Shandong to China. Despite American support and the language of self-determination, Article 156 of the Treaty of Versailles transferred German concessions in Jiaozhou Bay to Japan instead. The delegation's leader, Lu Zhengxiang, demanded a reservation be inserted before he would sign. After it was denied, the treaty was signed by all delegations except China's. Outrage over that provision triggered demonstrations in China on the 4th of May, an event later known as the May Fourth Movement.

  The Assyrian delegation arrived representing a people who had lost as many as 300,000 in the years leading up to the conference during the Sayfo genocide. A multi-denominational group came from the United States, Constantinople, Caucasia, and Persia. Despite six formal claims for an Assyrian autonomous state encompassing Mosul, Al-Jazira Province, Bashkala, and Urmia, the delegation's internal disagreements over which power to seek for protection and over the name Assyro-Chaldean weakened its overall advocacy. Abraham K. Yoosuf wrote afterward: "Assyrians have not yet learned the meaning of national sanctity... It is evident that we cannot accomplish these things without American and English sympathizers." The Treaty of Sevres promised Assyrians minority rights and local autonomy in an independent Kurdistan, but the Treaty of Lausanne superseded those terms and they were never put into effect.

  Iran, officially Persia at the time, declared neutrality during the war but had its territory repeatedly violated and occupied by British, Russian, and Ottoman forces. The delegation, led by Foreign Minister Prince Firouz Mirza Nosrat-ed-Dowleh, sought evacuation of foreign troops, reparations, and revisions to the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention that had divided Iran into spheres of influence without its consent. Britain blocked their admission to the main sessions, and Iran's voice remained absent from the final decisions.

• 6. Japan's Racial Equality Proposal

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  On the 13th of February 1919, the leader of the Japanese delegation, Saionji Kinmochi, proposed adding a racial equality clause to the Covenant of the League of Nations. The text called for equal and just treatment for all alien nationals of member states, making no distinction in law or in fact on account of race or nationality.

  Australia and South Africa were strongly opposed. Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes said he had no objection to the proposal only if it was stated in unambiguous terms that it did not confer any right to enter Australia. He was also alarmed by Japan's growing regional power. Within months of war's outbreak in 1914, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand had collectively seized all of Germany's possessions in the Far East and the Pacific. Britain had endorsed Japan's occupation of those possessions, and Hughes had been alarmed by that policy ever since.

  Britain ultimately abstained from voting, succumbing to pressure from its dominions. Wilson, serving as conference chairman, ruled that a unanimous vote was required for the proposal to pass. On the day of the vote, 11 of the 17 delegates voted in favor. The proposal failed.

  Japan's territorial demands fared better. Shantung, including Kiaochow, which Japan had seized from Germany in 1914, passed to Japanese control under Article 156 rather than returning to China. The Pacific Islands north of the equator became a Class C mandate administered by Japan. The defeat of the racial equality proposal, however, influenced Japan's turn away from cooperation with Western powers toward more nationalist and militarist policies.

• 7. Historical Reckoning

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  The British historian Eric Hobsbawm framed the conference's ambition starkly: no equally systematic attempt had been made before or since, in Europe or anywhere else, to redraw the political map on national lines. He argued that the logical implication of creating ethnically homogeneous states was the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities, a consequence not fully demonstrated until the 1940s.

  Left-wing historians including Hobsbawm argued that Wilson's principle of self-determination was primarily aimed at undermining the Bolsheviks, using nationalism to contain revolutionary sentiment sweeping Europe after the October Revolution. Right-wing historian John Lewis Gaddis agreed on that point, writing that when Wilson made self-determination one of his Fourteen Points, his intent had been to undercut the appeal of Bolshevism. The journalist Ray Stannard Baker captured the dynamic in a single line: "Paris cannot be understood without Moscow."

  Professor Michael Neiberg noted that although senior statesmen stopped working personally on the conference in June 1919, the formal peace process did not really end until July 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed. That treaty also erased the protections promised to Assyrians and Kurds under the Treaty of Sevres, protections that were never put into effect.

  The United States Senate never ratified any of the peace treaties, so the United States never joined the League of Nations. The 1921-1923 Harding administration concluded separate new treaties with Germany, Austria, and Hungary. The League itself proved unworkable without American participation, and the resentments built into the Versailles settlement fed directly into the political conditions that would produce World War II.