7.8: Envisioning a Post-War World

Envisioning a Post-War World 

On December 4, 1918, President Wilson became the first American president to travel overseas while in office (figure 7.8.1). Wilson went to Europe to end “the war to end wars”, and he intended to shape the peace. The war brought an abrupt end to four European imperial powers. The German, Russian, Austrian-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires each evaporated and the map of Europe was redrawn to accommodate new independent nations. As part of the armistice, Allied forces occupied territories in the Rhineland separating Germany and France, to prevent conflicts there from reigniting war. A new German government disarmed while Wilson and other Allied leaders gathered in France at Versailles to dictate the terms of a settlement to the war. After months of deliberation, the Treaty of Versailles officially ended the war.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): "Woodrow Wilson returning from the Paris Peace Conference, 1919," in the Public Domain.

In January 1918, before American troops had even arrived in Europe, President Wilson had offered an ambitious statement of war aims and peace terms known as the Fourteen Points to a joint session of Congress. The plan not only addressed territorial issues but offered principles on which Wilson believed a long-term peace could be built. The president called for reductions in armaments, freedom of the seas, adjustment of colonial claims, and the abolition of the types of secret treaties that had led to the war. Some members of the international community welcomed Wilson’s idealism, but in January 1918, Germany still anticipated a favorable verdict on the battlefield and did not seriously consider accepting the terms of the Fourteen Points. Even the Allies were dismissive. French prime minister Georges Clemenceau remarked, “The good Lord only had ten [commandments].”

President Wilson continued to promote his vision of the postwar world. The United States entered the fray, Wilson proclaimed, “to make the world safe for democracy.” At the center of the plan was a new international organization, the League of Nations. It would be charged with keeping a worldwide peace, “affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” This promise of collective security, that an attack on one sovereign member would be viewed as an attack on all, was a key component of the Fourteen Points. Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech was translated into many languages and was even sent to Germany to encourage negotiation. 

 But while President Wilson was celebrated in Europe as a “God of Peace,” many of his fellow statesmen were less enthusiastic about his plans for postwar Europe. Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt called the Fourteen Points “high-sounding and meaningless” and said they could be interpreted to mean “anything or nothing.” Whether intentionally or not, the very ambiguity of many of Wilson’s points helped make him for a time the most popular politician in the world. It turned out that when the ideas were unclear people tended to choose the meaning they wanted in the “high-sounding” text. Indeed, when Wilson traveled through Italy and France before the opening of the Peace Conference he was greeted by rapturous and adoring crowds wherever he went. As popular as he was among Europeans, he was just as loved by those living under colonial rule. Across the world, colonized people assumed that Wilson’s embrace of “self-determination” meant that they would finally have a sympathetic figure to turn to at the height of the global power structure. Such hopes would end in disappointment for many. Traveling to Versailles in 1919, and renting a suit for the occasion, the future Vietnamese anti-colonial leader Ho Chi Minh was frustrated to find that he was never even able to get close to Wilson, much less present him with his petition for Vietnamese independence. 

In an even more disappointing example, a group of Korean nationalists drafted their own declaration of independence from Japanese rule which they hoped they could get Wilson to support. Japanese authorities in Korea, however,  refused to give them exit visas to leave the country. Still desperate to get their declaration to Wilson at Versailles, they gave the job to one of their members who had been living in China. He set off on foot, following the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, but by the time he arrived, the peace talks had already concluded and Wilson was gone. Such disappointments were not all the fault of Wilson. It turned out that, like the Japanese in Korea, the French and the British also worked to prohibit the travel of the most influential colonial leaders. Additionally, the British were careful that any petitions sent from the colonies would be safely filed away before reaching the American delegation.  In the end, though, the inability of colonial people to meet with him or get their petitions read was not what undermined this Wilsonian moment. Instead, it was the formidable barriers of white supremacy and the unwillingness of the victors to place abstract principles above what they saw as their national interests. 

High-minded rhetoric could not overcome the fact that many of those responsible for crafting what would become the Treaty of Versailles, including Wilson himself, held deeply racist assumptions about the natural order of the world. One of Wilson’s fears of bringing the U.S. into the war was that it would weaken the country’s ability, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow – Japan for instance.… White civilization and its domination of the planet rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.” Self-determination was fine for – to use the language of the time – “self-governing races” but inappropriate for non-Europeans. “After all,” Wilson is quoted as saying about America’s colonial subjects in the Philippines “they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice.” 

The degree of racism among the representatives at Versailles can be seen in the experience of the Japanese delegation. The Japanese arrived in France convinced that as an imperial nation themselves they had graduated to the rank of Great Power and deserved a seat at the table. They were indeed at the table, but it was at the far end of the conference table away from where the important conversations were happening. Aside from being mostly left out of the key discussions, they also had to deal with the racist remarks and insults of their fellow delegates. The senior Japanese diplomat, Mokino Nobuaki (seated on the left in figure 7.8.2), nevertheless attempted to push forward Japan’s most important item – adding a racial equality clause into the charter of the proposed League of Nations: 

The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord as soon as possible to all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): "Japan's delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference," in the Public Domain.

The clause was mostly meant to push back on generations of anti-Asian legislation in the U.S. and Australia. In making his case for the clause, Mokino quoted extensively from the constitutions of the Western Powers and called on these nations to live up to their liberal promises. This was met with fierce resistance. When Mokino referenced Thomas Jefferson’s words that “all men are created equal,” Lord Balfour of the British delegation angrily responded with his disbelief that, “a man of Central Africa was created equal to a European.” Despite this attitude, when Mokino put the racial equality clause to a vote it won. Refusing to accept the outcome, the American and Australian delegations vetoed the clause with Wilson claiming that the strong objections to the clause were enough to annul the vote. If industrialized Japan with its constitutional system, emerging economic might, and overseas empire could barely get its voice heard in international affairs then what chance did Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans, or other colonized people have?

National interests also got in the way of Wilsonian idealism. Even the closest allies of the United States had little passion for Wilson’s pet project of the League of Nations. The British and French were instead focused on guaranteeing the future security of their own nations. Unlike the United States, safe across the Atlantic, the Allies had endured the horrors of the war firsthand. They believed that the sacrifices they made in pursuit of victory meant they should not have to sacrifice when it came to the peace. Negotiations made it clear that British prime minister David Lloyd-George was more interested in preserving and expanding Britain’s imperial domains, while French prime minister Clemenceau wanted severe financial reparations and limits on Germany’s future ability to wage war. Wilson would stand and fight for a League of Nations, but in other matters was all too ready to bow to British and French desires. In 1919, writing in a journal that he edited, a young Mao Zedong lamented the helplessness of Woodrow Wilson among “the thieves” at Versailles: “Wilson in Paris was like an ant on a hot skillet. He didn’t know what to do… He heard nothing except accounts of receiving certain amounts of territory and of reparations worth so much in gold. He did nothing except to attend various kinds of meetings where he could not speak his mind…I felt sorry for him for a long time. Poor Wilson!” (quoted in Mishra, 199)

Wilson would not have been happy to be pitied by this obscure young Chinese intellectual and neither he nor the American delegation were deserving of that pity. Despite the Allies’ lack of agreement with the Fourteen Points, the key role of U.S. troops and U.S. dollars in the outcome gave the Americans an influential seat at the negotiating table at Versailles. Woodrow Wilson was seen as an international hero, and his appointee Thomas Lamont became a central figure in the negotiations that ended the war and set guidelines for German reparations. Britain and France were eventually successful at getting the punitive items they wanted into the final treaty and Lamont went along with them because shifting the financial burden to Germany guaranteed that the Allied nations that owed J.P. Morgan and Company so much money would be able to pay it back. ​

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919 and would mark the formal end of the fighting between Germany and its adversaries (additional treaties dealt more specifically with the other combatants). Since the moment of its signing contemporary observers and later historians and political scientists have argued over its significance. Was it too harsh on Germany? Too lenient? Did its terms make future war inevitable or was it mistakes by the following generation that led to the next crisis? Beyond such questions, the terms of the Treaty did, at least, radically reshape the borders of Europe by dismantling the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, creating new nations based on ideas of ethnic kinship in their place, and also enlarging the borders of existing nations (figure 7.8.3).

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): "Central Europe before and after WWI," BBC, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.

The treaty was a compromise that included demands for German reparations, provisions for the League of Nations, and the promise of collective security. Wilson did not get everything he wanted, but Lamont did. According to historian Ferdinand Lundberg, the “total wartime expenditure of the United States government from April 6, 1917, to October 31, 1919, when the last contingent of troops returned from Europe, was $35,413,000,000. Net corporate profits for the period January 1, 1916, to July 1921, when wartime industrial activity was finally liquidated, were $38,000,000,000.”​ In the years after the war, J.P. Morgan and Company would earn additional millions by loaning Germany the money the treaty required it to pay to the allies so they could pay the bankers.

Review Questions

• How did racism impact the negotiations over the Treaty of Versailles?
• The main players at Versailles brought their own interests and biases into their construction of the post-war world. If you were at Versailles in 1919 what would have been your vision for the new order?