Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times:
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 nation-
alist 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. 115 These few argued that self-
determination was a self-defeating principle since ‘liberating’ peo-
ples 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 rail-
ways, the banking system and the principles of internal free trade
were savagely disrupted in the pursuit of racial advantage imm-
ediately 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 imposs-
ible 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. 116 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. 117 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. 118
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. 119 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.’ 120
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. 121
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, Ger-
mans, 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 fron-
tiers. 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.’ 122
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. 123 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 administra-
tion, but the Catholic Croats and Slovenes, who had much higher
cultural and economic standards, talked of their duty to ‘European-
ize 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.’ 124 Indeed, MPs had just been blazing away at each other with pistols in the parliament, the Croat Peasant Party leader, Stepan Radic, 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. 125
Central and Eastern Europe was now gathering in the grisly
harvest of irreconcilable nationalisms which had been sown through-
out 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?’ 126
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.