Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (8 page)

Was the Treaty of Versailles, then, a complete failure? Many intellectuals thought so at the time; most have taken that view since. But then intellectuals were at the origin of the problem – violent ethnic nationalism – which both dictated the nature of the Versailles settlement and ensured it would not work. All the European nationalist movements, of which there were dozens by 1919, had been created and led and goaded on by academics and writers who had stressed the linguistic and cultural differences between peoples at the expense of the traditional ties and continuing economic interests
which urged them to live together. By 1919 virtually all European intellectuals of the younger generation, not to speak of their elders, subscribed to the proposition that the right to national self-determination was a fundamental moral principle. There were a few exceptions, Karl Popper being one.
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These few argued that self-determination was a self-defeating principle since ‘liberating’ peoples and minorities simply created more minorities. But as a rule self-determination was accepted as unarguable for Europe, just as in the 1950s and 1960s it would be accepted for Africa.

Indeed by 1919 there could be no question of saving the old arrangements in Central and Eastern Europe. The nationalists had already torn them apart. From the distance of seventy years it is customary to regard the last years of Austria—Hungary as a tranquil exercise in multi-racialism. In fact it was a nightmare of growing racial animosity. Every reform created more problems than it solved. Hungary got status within the empire as a separate state in 1867. It at once began to oppress its own minorities, chiefly Slovaks and Romanians, with greater ferocity and ingenuity than it itself had been oppressed by Austria. Elections were suspect, and the railways, the banking system and the principles of internal free trade were savagely disrupted in the pursuit of racial advantage immediately any reform made such action possible. Czechs and other Slav groups followed the Hungarians’ example. No ethnic group behaved consistently. What the Germans demanded and the Czechs refused in Bohemia, the Germans refused and the Italians and south Slovenes demanded in the South Tyrol and Styria. All the various Diets and Parliaments, in Budapest, Prague, Graz and Innsbruck, were arenas of merciless racial discord. In Galicia, the minority Ruthenians fought the majority Poles. In Dalmatia the minority Italians fought the majority South Slavs. As a result it was impossible to form an effective parliamentary government. All of the twelve central governments between 1900 and 1918 had to be composed almost entirely of civil servants. Each local government, from which minorities were excluded, protected its home industries where it was legally empowered to do so, and if not, organized boycotts of goods made by other racial groups. There was no normality in the old empire.

But at least there was some respect for the law. In Imperial Russia there were anti-Jewish pogroms occasionally, and other instances of violent racial conflict. But the two Germanic empires were exceptionally law-abiding up to 1914; the complaint even was that their peoples were too docile. The war changed all that with a vengeance. There is truth in the historian Fritz Stern’s remark that the Great War ushered in a period of unprecedented violence, and
began in effect a Thirty Years’ War, with 1919 signifying the continuation of war by different means.
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Of course in a sense the calamities of the epoch were global rather than continental. The 1918–19 influenza virus strain, a pandemic which killed forty million people in Europe, Asia and America, was not confined to the war areas, though it struck them hardest.
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New-style outbreaks of violence were to be found almost everywhere immediately after the formal fighting ended. On 27 July—1 August, in Chicago, the USA got its first really big Northern race-riots, with thirty-six killed and 536 injured. Others followed elsewhere: at Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 30 May 1921, fifty whites and two hundred blacks were murdered.
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In Canada, on 17 June 1919, the leaders of the Winnipeg general strike were accused, and later convicted, of a plot to destroy constitutional authority by force and set up a Soviet.
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In Britain, there was a putative revolution in Glasgow on 31 January 1919; and civil or class war was a periodic possibility between 1919 and the end of 1921, as the hair-raising records of cabinet meetings, taken down verbatim in shorthand by Thomas Jones, survive to testify. Thus, on 4 April 1921, the cabinet discussed bringing back four battalions from Silesia, where they were holding apart frantic Poles and Germans, in order to ‘hold London’, and the Lord Chancellor observed stoically: ‘We should decide without delay around which force loyalists can gather. We ought not to be shot without a fight anyway.’
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Even so it was in Central and Eastern Europe that the violence, and the racial antagonism which provoked it, were most acute, widespread and protracted. A score or more minor wars were fought there in the years 1919–22. They are poorly recorded in western histories but they left terrible scars, which in some cases were still aching in the 1960s and which contributed directly to the chronic instability in Europe between the wars. The Versailles Treaty, in seeking to embody the principles of self-determination, actually created more, not fewer, minorities, and much angrier ones (many were German or Hungarian), armed with far more genuine grievances. The new nationalist regimes thought they could afford to be far less tolerant than the old empires. And, since the changes damaged the economic infrastructure (especially in Silesia, South Poland, Austria, Hungary and North Yugoslavia), everyone tended to be poorer than before.

Every country was landed with either an anguished grievance or an insuperable internal problem. Germany, with divided Prussia and lost Silesia, cried to heaven for vengeance. Austria was left fairly homogeneous – it even got the German Burgenland from Hungary – but was stripped bare of all its former possessions and left with a
third of its population in starving Vienna. Moreover, under the Treaty it was forbidden to seek union with Germany, which made the Anschluss seem more attractive than it actually was. Hungary’s population was reduced from 20 to 8 million, its carefully integrated industrial economy was wrecked and 3 million Hungarians handed over to the Czechs and Romanians.
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Of the beneficiaries of Versailles, Poland was the greediest and the most bellicose, emerging in 1921, after three years of fighting, twice as big as had been expected at the Peace Conference. She attacked the Ukrainians, getting from them eastern Galicia and its capital Lwow. She fought the Czechs for Teschen (Cieszyn), and failed to get it, one reason why Poland had no sympathy with the Czechs in 1938 and actually helped Russia to invade them in 1968, though in both cases it was in her long-term interests to side with Czech independence. She made good her ‘rights’ against the Germans by force, in both the Baltic and Silesia. She invaded newly free Lithuania, occupying Vilno and incorporating it after a ‘plebiscite’. She waged a full-scale war of acquisition against Russia, and persuaded the Western powers to ratify her new frontiers in 1923. In expanding by force Poland had skilfully played on Britain’s fears of Bolshevism and France’s desire to have a powerful ally in the east, now that its old Tsarist alliance was dead. But of course when it came to the point Britain and France were powerless to come to Poland’s assistance, and in the process she had implacably offended all her neighbours, who would certainly fall on her the second they got the opportunity.

Meanwhile, Poland had acquired the largest minorities problem in Europe, outside Russia herself. Of her 27 million population, a third were minorities: West Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Belorussians, Germans, Lithuanians, all of them in concentrated areas, plus 3 million Jews. The Jews tended to side with the Germans and Ukrainians, had a block of thirty-odd deputies in the parliament, and formed a majority in some eastern towns with a virtual monopoly of trade. At Versailles Poland was obliged to sign a special treaty guaranteeing rights to her minorities. But she did not keep it even in the Twenties, still less in the Thirties when her minorities policy deteriorated under military dictatorship. With a third of her population treated as virtual aliens, she maintained an enormous police force, plus a numerous but ill-equipped standing army to defend her vast frontiers. There was foresight in the remark of the Polish nobleman to the German ambassador in 1918, ‘If Poland could be free, I’d give half my worldly goods. But with the other half I’d emigrate.’
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Czechoslovakia was even more of an artefact, since it was in fact a collection of minorities, with the Czechs in control. The 1921 census revealed 8,760,000 Czechoslovaks, 3,123,448 Germans, 747,000
Magyars and 461,000 Ruthenians. But the Germans claimed it was deliberately inaccurate and that there were, in fact, far fewer in the ruling group. In any case, even the Slovaks felt they were persecuted by the Czechs, and it was characteristic of this ‘country’ that the new Slovak capital, Bratislava, was mainly inhabited not by Slovaks but by Germans and Magyars.
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In the Twenties the Czechs, unlike the Poles, made serious efforts to operate a fair minorities policy. But the Great Depression hit the Germans much harder than the Czechs – whether by accident or design – and after that the relationship became hopelessly envenomed.

Yugoslavia resembled Czechoslovakia in that it was a miniature empire run by Serbs, and with considerably more brutality than the Czechs ran theirs. In parts of it there had been continuous fighting since 1912, and the frontiers were not settled (if that is the word) until 1926. The Orthodox Serbs ran the army and the administration, but the Catholic Croats and Slovenes, who had much higher cultural and economic standards, talked of their duty to ‘Europeanize the Balkans’ (i.e., the Serbs) and their fears that they themselves would be ‘Balkanized’. R.W.Seton-Watson, who had been instrumental in creating the new country, was soon disillusioned by the way the Serbs ran it: ‘The situation in Jugoslavia’, he wrote in 1921, ‘reduces me to despair …. I have no confidence in the new constitution, with its absurd centralism.’ The Serb officials were worse than the Habsburgs, he complained, and Serb oppression more savage than German. ‘My own inclination’, he wrote in 1928, ‘… is to leave the Serbs and Croats to stew in their own juice! I think they are both mad and cannot see beyond the end of their noses.’
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Indeed, MPs had just been blazing away at each other with pistols in the parliament, the Croat Peasant Party leader, Stepan Radić, being killed in the process. The country was held together, if at all, not so much by the Serb political police as by the smouldering hatred of its Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian neighbours, all of whom had grievances to settle.
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Central and Eastern Europe was now gathering in the grisly harvest of irreconcilable nationalisms which had been sown throughout the nineteenth century. Or, to vary the metaphor, Versailles lifted the lid on the seething, noisome pot and the stench of the brew therein filled Europe until first Hitler, then Stalin, slammed it down again by force. No doubt, when that happened, elderly men and women regretted the easy-going dynastic empires they had lost. Of course by 1919 the notion of a monarch ruling over a collection of disparate European peoples by divine right and ancient custom already appeared absurd. But if imperialism within Europe was anachronistic, how much longer would it seem defensible outside it?
Self-determination was not a continental principle; it was, or soon would be, global. Eyre Crowe’s rebuke to Harold Nicolson at the Paris Conference echoed a point Maurice Hankey had made to Lord Robert Cecil when the latter was working on the embryo League of Nations scheme. Hankey begged him not to insist on a general statement of self-determination. ‘I pointed out to him’, he noted in his diary, ‘that it would logically lead to the self-determination of Gibraltar to Spain, Malta to the Maltese, Cyprus to the Greeks, Egypt to the Egyptians, Aden to the Arabs or Somalis, India to chaos, Hong Kong to the Chinese, South Africa to the Kaffirs, West Indies to the blacks, etc. And where would the British Empire be?’
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As a matter of fact the principle was already being conceded even at the time Hankey wrote. During the desperate days of the war, the Allies signed post-dated cheques not only to Arabs and Jews and Romanians and Italians and Japanese and Slavs but to their own subject-peoples. As the casualties mounted, colonial manpower increasingly filled the gaps. It was the French Moroccan battalions which saved Rheims Cathedral. The French called it gleefully
la force noire
, and so it was but in more senses than one. The British raised during the war 1,440,437 soldiers in India; 877,068 were combatants; and 621,224 officers and men served overseas.
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It was felt that in some way India should be rewarded; and the cheapest way to do it was in the coinage of political reform.

The capstone on British rule in India had been placed there when Disraeli made Victoria Empress in 1876. The chain of command was autocratic: it went from the district officer to provincial commissioner to governor to governor-general to viceroy. This principle had been maintained in the pre-war Morley—Minto reforms, since Lord Morley, though a liberal progressive, did not believe democracy would work in India. But his Under-Secretary, Edwin Montagu, thought differently. Montagu was another Jew with oriental longings, though rather different ones: the longing to be loved. He suffered from that corrosive vice of the civilized during the twentieth century, which we shall meet in many forms: guilt. His grandfather had been a goldsmith, his father made millions as a foreign exchange banker, and so earned himself the luxury of philanthropy. Montagu inherited all this and the feeling that he owed something to society. He was a highly emotional man; people used the term ‘girlish’ about his approach to public affairs. Turning down the Ireland secretaryship in 1916, he wrote, ‘I shrink with horror at being responsible for punishment.’ When he died a friend wrote to
The Times:
‘He never tired of being sorry for people.’
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