Only occasionally does she let in comments like those of John Maynard Keynes (the father of, among other things, Keynesian Economics) that poverty, hunger, destitution, and deprivation are stalking through the world the negotiators are slowly and more or less casually chopping up to suit (essentially) their own interests. She assures us that Keynes’ book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, is often wrong-headed. Indeed, she is refreshingly forthright in judgements, pointing out that certain people – but only certain people – are talking or writing nonsense. That is where she falls into the failure of the negotiators themselves. She is a quiet cheer-leader and promulgator of conventional wisdom. As we will see….
To her credit, she deals piece by piece, country by country, region by region with the story of post-war conditions and aspirations – and the disappointments evoked by the non-working of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s fuzzy Fourteen Point basis for constructing the League of Nations and the decisions about post-war boundaries.
But the flaws of the book, alas, place it in what one might suggest is the National Post Mainstream, in a mindset – that is - which accepts U.S. claims about reality, about itself, and about the world – and sees all facts in that light. She tells us that Woodrow Wilson had a “liberal and Christian vision” (p. 13) and that the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was an imperialist (p. 43). Both of those statements are not fundamentally false and both are acceptable to the National Post mindset.
But she lets us know (pp. 9-10) that Woodrow Wilson set on foot U.S. military intervention in Central America – Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic – and the U.S. invasion of Mexico. That might lead a writer to note that the U.S. was engaging in imperialist military action under Woodrow Wilson who could shape his “liberal and Christian vision” to what he saw as U.S. needs. But she does not soil the name of Wilson with the word imperialist. To make that very obvious fact clear from the beginning would explain much that is unexplained in the tangles of diplomacy in Paris, 1919.
Though – as I say – she is willing to characterize some people’s comments as nonsense, those people are carefully selected. Here again U.S. president Woodrow Wilson figures importantly. When the document constituting the League of Nations (its “covenant”) was almost ready, some countries, quite naturally, wanted to add items or modify ones to be included. Woodrow Wilson wanted the Monroe Doctrine given a special untouchable place.
That “Doctrine” was (and is) a unilateral statement of U.S. imperial policy and intentions first articulated in 1823 and reaffirmed and elaborated unilaterally ever since. It is not international law. It is not a product of treaty-making. It has not been accepted as part of "the law of nations". In fact, before the First World War, Stephen Leacock wrote about its unilateral imposition supported by force and power alone. Woodrow Wilson, an historian, political economist, and legal scholar among other things, knew what Stephen Leacock and most governments knew. He wanted to protect the Monroe Doctrine and have it at least semi-legitimized by recognition in the covenant of the League of Nations, and he spent much time and effort to bring that about. (pp. 95-97)
Margaret Macmillan goes blithely along with Woodrow Wilson. She writes that “Wilson introduced a carefully worded amendment to the effect that nothing in the League covenant would affect the validity of such international agreements as the Monroe Doctrine….” But the Monroe Doctrine was not (and is not) an international agreement! Here is certainly a place MacMillan should have pointed out that Wilson was writing and talking nonsense (in this case, imperialistic nonsense). She doesn’t. And so we have to realize that though all participants in her book are equal, some are more equal than others.
The question of race and colonialism, a more diffuse problem, is another matter in the book that MacMillan de-fangs. Almost inadvertently, she lets a reader find out that a racist basis operated in the whole 1919 process. Some leading protagonists were racist – with all the implications that would have for policy making. Her focus on the question settles on the Japanese attempt to get a racial equality clause into the covenant of the League, the failure, and the future ramifications of that failure. But the whole League of nations process, from start to finish, was – among other things – racist based, and the book needs several concentrated paragraphs if not a chapter to set out that fact and to point to its overall implications. Parallel racisms and racisms extending out of the ones in 1919 are active in policy making now.
Finally, her attitude to Russia and the Russian Revolution is disappointing. The revolution was in 1917, the events she covers (mostly) 1919. The response of the Western countries to the Revolution was remarkable. Left analysts would probably say the capitalist forces were determined to crush any kind of attempt to liberate the oppressed and to distribute national and global wealth more fairly. Left analysts might be wrong.
Russia (it is largely forgotten) did much to win the First World War for the Allies. When it made a separate peace before the war’s end, Western powers decided (grossly unfairly) it deserved nothing. Margaret MacMillan needed to address the problem fully and fairly. She needed to show how in her terms the Left is wrong in its analysis and what it was that really motivated the Western powers to be so unified in their rejection of Russia. Even so great an enemy of the Soviet Union as Winston Churchill, saw deep contradiction in the events. Referring to the undeclared war by the West against the Soviet Union, he asks: “Were they at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians at sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sank its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall.” (p. 70)
MacMillan describes Lenin as “a realist and a fanatic” (p. 64) And when the Soviets made propaganda of the fact that the whole capitalist West lined up against them, she gently scoffs that Western policy and action did nothing to prevent Soviet success (p. 73). The comment is inadequate. Engaging Russia in the foundation of the League of Nations could have had huge effect upon the future. The failure to do so was an enormous matter requiring a stretch of scholarly talent to discuss seriously. Lenin treated the weak, late overtures to Russia with contempt in the light of the conditions Churchill describes. But if conditions had been different, so might Lenin’s responses have been different. Calling Lenin a fanatic is hardly sufficient. Brushing aside the Western undeclared war against Russia is not sufficient either. Surely, a scholarly book published in 2003 should go beyond the knee-jerk responses of National Post editors.
MacMillan suggests that the violence of the Bolshevists motivated the actions Churchill describes. But Western nations didn’t stir themselves at all to stem the thug violence of Mussolini’s fascists or of the Nazis or of the violent, murderous reactionary coalition around Franco that destroyed the legitimate government of Spain and set up a dictatorship. Concern about violence is rarely a primary reason for the kind of action the Western nations took against Soviet Russia from the outset. What, then, were the reasons? There is no serious discussion of the matter in PARIS 1919.
Finally, MacMillan ends the book with a few terrible questions. “How can the irrational passions of nationalism and religion be contained before they do more damage? How can we outlaw war?” Fair questions, but hardly the only – or even perhaps the most important – ones. She makes clear how powers with imperial ambitions distorted good intentions, used force instead of law, and bred racisms. But she has no questions about how to contain imperialism, doesn’t even include it at the close. Out of the capitalist grabs and the imperial confrontations that she reveals, we are now left with one imperial power and its “globalization”- the ruthless transferring of wealth from public to brutal, oppressive, and irresponsible private hands. Out of that will come the next century of bloodshed, which has already begun. It is, moreover, at least significantly a consequence of 1919 and of the treatment of Soviet Russia. Ms. MacMillan discloses not the slightest awareness of the fact, failing to break through to the most disturbing, most important, and most relevant questions that are generated by her research.
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Robin Mathews publishes on culture, politics, the arts, and Canadian Intellectual history. He lives in Vancouver with his wife, a potter. His column appears regularly on Vive le Canada.
Comments: rmathews@sfu.ca
Note: rmathews@sfu.ca
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See:
http://www.unclenicks.net/bilderberg/ww ... g/2001.htm