The aftermath of the First World War: peace treaties and the revolutionary wave

Armistices and the break-up of empires

The First World War ended piecemeal over a few weeks in the autumn of 1918. Bulgaria was the first to sign an armistice; the Ottoman Empire stopped fighting under the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October and Austria-Hungary under the Armistice of Villa Giusti on 3 November. Germany, the last opponent left, signed the armistice largely written by the Allied Supreme Commander Ferdinand Foch in a railway carriage in the Compiègne Forest on 11 November; it came into force at 11 a.m. Paris time, and 2,738 men died on that last day alone. The terms required the withdrawal of German forces from west of the Rhine and Allied occupation of the Rhineland, but did not relax the naval blockade of Germany. 1 2 3)

The Habsburg empire was coming apart from within even before the armistice. On 16 October Emperor Karl issued the People’s Manifesto, proposing to turn the empire into a federation of five kingdoms, but on the 18th US Secretary of State Robert Lansing replied that the Allies were now committed to the causes of the Czechs, Slovaks and South Slavs and that autonomy was no longer enough. Czech politicians took over in Prague on 28 October; on the 29th the South Slavs proclaimed the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; and on the 31st Mihály Károlyi’s government in Hungary repudiated the union with Austria. On 11 November Karl renounced any participation in Austrian affairs of state, though he did not abdicate. The Republic of German-Austria was proclaimed the next day, and the Hungarian People’s Republic on the 16th. 4

New states were built on the ruins. In Poland the Regency Council announced its intention to restore independence on 7 October, and on 10 November Józef Piłsudski, freed from a German prison in Magdeburg, returned to Warsaw. He was made commander-in-chief the next day and on the 14th received all authority as Chief of State; on 28 November a decree of his gave Polish women the vote. On 1 December in Belgrade Prince Regent Alexander of Serbia proclaimed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Ottoman dynasty came to an end when, after the Turkish War of Independence, the Grand National Assembly abolished the monarchy. 5 6 2

The revolutionary wave, 1918–1919

Where empires collapsed, revolution flooded in. Uprisings, strikes and mutinies inspired by the success of the Russian Revolution and by the disorder the war left behind were mostly socialist or anti-colonial in nature, but most of the socialist revolts failed to create lasting states. Believing that world proletarian revolution was imminent, the Bolsheviks founded the Communist International at a congress in Moscow on 2–6 March 1919 to coordinate the wave. Its story is told in The founding of the Comintern. 7 8

In Germany the revolution began at the end of October 1918, when sailors at Kiel refused orders to sail out against the British fleet. In early November workers’ and soldiers’ councils took power across the country with little resistance, and on the 9th a republic was proclaimed in Berlin. Yet the councils were made up almost entirely of SPD and USPD members; they deprived only the military commands of their power, and there were hardly any confiscations of property or occupations of factories. The moderates controlled most of the councils and blocked the left’s goals of nationalising key industries and setting up a council republic, and in the suppression of the January 1919 uprising Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by the Freikorps; in the spring the soviet republics of Bavaria and Bremen were crushed as well. The full story is in The German Revolution of 1918–1919. 9

The same fork appeared along the Danube. In German-Austria a coalition led by the Social Democrats made Karl Renner chancellor and Victor Adler foreign minister, co-opted the newly created soldiers’ and workers’ councils and used its control of the trade unions to carry out social policies that blunted the appeal of socialist revolution. In Hungary the Communists and Social Democrats merged and set up the Soviet Republic on 21 March 1919. Led by Béla Kun, it never got the Entente to lift its blockade, the Red Army help Kun had promised never came, and after 133 days it fell on 1 August, defeated by Romania. It is covered in The Hungarian Soviet Republic. 10 11 7

Italy’s Biennio Rosso, the “two red years” of 1919–1920, broke out amid unemployment and soaring prices. The Italian Socialist Party grew to 250,000 members and the socialist General Confederation of Labour to two million. In Turin and Milan factory councils appeared, which Antonio Gramsci regarded as the Italian equivalent of Russia’s soviets, and the movement peaked in August and September 1920, when armed metalworkers occupied their factories. It was followed by the violent reaction of the fascist Blackshirts and, in 1922, by Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome. 12

The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles

The starting point of the peace was the Fourteen Points announced by US President Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918. Based on the research of the Inquiry, a team of about 150 advisers, they called for free trade, open agreements, disarmament, a Polish state, the redrawing of borders along ethnic lines and an association of nations to guarantee the political independence and territorial integrity of all states. The German government asked for an armistice on the basis of these principles. The conference opened on 18 January 1919 at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. Diplomats from 32 countries and nationalities attended, but the defeated powers were given no voice, and Russia was represented only by the Whites, not by the Soviet government. 13 14)

The major decisions were made by the “Big Four” — French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Wilson and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando — in 145 closed sessions. Clemenceau sought French security by weakening Germany economically, militarily and territorially, and in the end accepted Anglo-American pledges of alliance in return for a fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland. Lloyd George wanted to prevent French domination and keep a revived Germany as a counterweight and a deterrent to Bolshevik Russia. Orlando pressed for the territory Italy had been promised for entering the war, failed, and at one point left the conference; Italian nationalists called the result a “mutilated victory”. 13 14)

The treaty with Germany stripped it of 65,000 km² of territory and 7 million people. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France; Germany had to recognise Polish independence, and several border areas were to be decided by plebiscite. Danzig became a Free City under the League of Nations. All the overseas colonies became League mandates, and the German concessions in Shandong went to Japan rather than to China. The German army was limited to 100,000 men, conscription and an air force were prohibited, and the Rhineland was to be occupied by Allied troops for fifteen years. Union with Austria was forbidden without the consent of the League. 13

The most contested clause was Article 231, the opening article of the reparations section. Its statement that Germany accepted responsibility for all the loss and damage suffered by the Allies as a consequence of the aggression of Germany and her allies was drafted by American diplomats as a compromise between the Anglo-French and American positions; it did not use the word guilt and was meant to lay a legal basis for reparations, and the other defeated powers’ treaties contained the same article. Germans nonetheless read it as a “war guilt clause”. In the London Schedule of Payments of 5 May 1921 the Reparation Commission set the total at 132 billion gold marks, of which Germany was actually required to pay 50 billion. By the time payments ended in 1931 Germany had paid about 20.6 billion gold marks by the reckoning of the Reparation Commission, and no more than 19 billion by Niall Ferguson’s estimate. 15 13

The German delegation was handed terms without being allowed to negotiate. Philipp Scheidemann, Germany’s first democratically elected head of government, resigned rather than sign, and the new government of Gustav Bauer asked for certain articles to be withdrawn before giving way to an Allied ultimatum threatening renewed war. The treaty was signed on 28 June 1919, the fifth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — the room in which the German Empire had been proclaimed in 1871, chosen deliberately by Clemenceau. Germans of all political shades called it “the Diktat”. 13

The other treaties: Saint-Germain, Neuilly, Trianon, Sèvres and Lausanne

Austria’s Chancellor Karl Renner arrived at Saint-Germain in May 1919 only to find his delegation excluded from the negotiations, and signed the treaty under an Allied ultimatum on 10 September. It confirmed the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, and over 60 per cent of the prewar Austrian Empire’s territory was lost. Article 88 forbade union with Germany without the consent of the League Council, so the name “German-Austria” had to be changed to “Austria”. Bulgaria, under the Treaty of Neuilly of 27 November, lost Western Thrace and with it its outlet to the Aegean, and had to cut its army to 20,000 men and pay reparations of £100 million; in Bulgaria the treaty is known as the Second National Catastrophe. 3) 16

The Treaty of Trianon with Hungary was signed in the Grand Trianon at Versailles on 4 June 1920. Hungary became a landlocked state of 93,073 km² and 7.6 million people — 28 per cent of the land and 36 per cent of the population of the prewar kingdom — and 3.3 million Hungarians were left as minorities in the territories allotted to its neighbours. Its army was limited to 35,000 men. The Allies held no plebiscites; the Millerand letter accompanying the treaty explained that a popular consultation would not have produced significantly different results. The Hungarian delegation signed under protest, and agitation for revision began at once. Hungary’s later politics are followed in The Horthy regime: from the White Terror to the turn to the right. 17

The Treaty of Sèvres with the Ottoman Empire was signed on 10 August 1920 in an exhibition room of the porcelain factory at Sèvres. It required the renunciation of most territory not inhabited by Turks, created large occupation zones in Anatolia and, in the Arab lands, introduced the British Mandate for Palestine and the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon. It was never ratified. The Greek landing at Smyrna on 15 May 1919 had set off a national movement led by Mustafa Kemal, and the Grand National Assembly in Ankara stripped the treaty’s signatories of their citizenship. Soviet support was vital: according to Soviet documents, in 1920–1922 it included 39,000 rifles and 10.7 million Turkish lira, a twentieth of the Turkish wartime budget. 18 2

Turkish forces checked the Greek advance at the Sakarya and drove the Greeks out of Anatolia in the Great Offensive. After the Armistice of Mudanya of 11 October 1922 a conference opened at Lausanne on 20 November, and after eight months of negotiation between İsmet İnönü and the British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon the 143-article Treaty of Lausanne was signed on 24 July 1923. It recognised Turkish independence on terms far more favourable than Sèvres. Under a convention signed on 30 January 1923, about 1.22 million Greek Orthodox Christians from Asia Minor and elsewhere and 355,000–400,000 Muslims from Greece had already been forcibly exchanged. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October. 2 19 20

Border wars and new states in the East

The peace made in Paris did not settle Eastern Europe’s borders. When Germany capitulated, Soviet Russia annulled the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (see Brest-Litovsk and Germany’s eastern occupation) and moved forces westward into the lands the Germans had abandoned. Lenin saw newly independent Poland as a critical route for spreading revolution into Europe, while Piłsudski aimed to restore Poland’s pre-1772 borders. On 1 November 1918 war broke out between Poles and Ukrainians in Lwów. Ukraine, where revolution, civil war and foreign occupation were entangled, is covered in Ukraine’s revolution and wars. 21 5

The Polish–Soviet War lasted from 14 February 1919 to 18 March 1921. In April 1920 Piłsudski, allied with Symon Petliura of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, launched the Kiev offensive and took Kiev on 7 May, but the Red Army counter-offensive from June drove the Poles back to Warsaw by August. The Polish victory at the Battle of Warsaw on 12–25 August turned the tide, and the Peace of Riga followed on 18 March 1921. The new border ran about 200 km east of the Curzon Line, giving Poland parts of present-day Ukraine and Belarus. The full story is in The Soviet-Polish War. 21

On the Baltic coast, too, the new states won their borders in war. Estonia, supported above all by Britain and Finland, defeated the Soviet Russian westward offensive and the pro-German Baltische Landeswehr and signed the Treaty of Tartu on 2 February 1920. Lithuania fought the Bolsheviks, the Bermontians and Poland in turn, and in October 1920 lost Vilnius to General Żeligowski’s staged “mutiny”, arranged by Piłsudski. These wars are covered in Baltic wars of independence and border settlements. 22 23

Inside Russia the Allies did not withdraw their troops after the armistice. Begun to keep munitions from falling into German hands, the intervention changed its aim after November 1918 to helping the Whites: Allied troops landed at Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok and also intervened in the Baltic, the Caucasus and southern Russia. The western Allies ended their North Russian and Siberian interventions in 1920, but the Japanese intervention in Siberia continued until 1922, and Japan occupied northern Sakhalin until 1925. That war is covered in The Civil War and Foreign Intervention. 24

The League of Nations, the mandates and the limits of self-determination

The Covenant of the League of Nations was drafted principally by Britain’s Lord Robert Cecil and South Africa’s Jan Smuts. Smuts also proposed a mandate system for the captured colonies of the Central Powers. The conference approved the creation of the League on 25 January 1919, and the Covenant, as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles, came into force with the treaty on 10 January 1920. But on 19 March 1920 the US Senate’s 49–35 vote fell short of the two-thirds majority needed for ratification, and the United States never joined the League Wilson had championed. 25

The mandate system of Article 22 rested on non-annexation and on administering territories as a “sacred trust of civilisation” for the benefit of their peoples. Britain and France took the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire; Britain, France and Belgium the remaining German colonies in Africa; South Africa, Australia and New Zealand took South West Africa and the Pacific islands south of the Equator, and Japan those north of it. The historian Susan Pedersen finds that colonial administration in the mandates did not differ substantially from that elsewhere. Japan’s Racial Equality Proposal for the Covenant ran into Australian opposition over immigration, and the British delegation, putting the unity of the Empire first, sacrificed it; it was not adopted. 26 14)

The historian Erez Manela calls 1918–1919 the “Wilsonian moment”, when the colonised world placed its hopes in Wilson’s language of self-determination. Those hopes were dashed when the Treaty of Versailles left the colonial system intact, and the disillusionment broke out in protest movements. In Egypt the British arrest of the Wafd leader Saad Zaghloul on 8 March 1919 and his exile to Malta set off a nationwide revolution in which at least 800 people were killed between 15 and 31 March alone. In Korea the March First Movement, begun with public readings of the Declaration of Independence on 1 March 1919, spread to some 1,500–1,800 protests with an estimated 0.8 to 2 million participants; one Korean estimate of 1920 counted 7,509 deaths and 46,948 arrests, and the movement led to the creation of the Korean Provisional Government. 27 28 29

At Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919, troops under Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer blocked the exit and fired on the crowd, killing between 379 and more than 1,500 people. In China the decision to hand the German concessions in Shandong to Japan set off the May Fourth Movement; what followed is told in May Fourth and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. In Paris a group of Vietnamese patriots, citing the principle of self-determination, sent a petition for the rights of the people of Indochina to Clemenceau and Wilson and was ignored. Nguyễn Ái Quốc, the public face of the petition and the future Ho Chi Minh, voted for the Third International at the Congress of Tours in December 1920 and became a founding member of the French Communist Party. 30 13 31

The crisis of 1923

Reparations soon led to armed confrontation. Germany made the first cash payment of 1 billion gold marks under the London Schedule in June 1921 but only small cash payments thereafter; after a default on timber deliveries in December 1922, the Reparation Commission declared Germany in default on coal on 9 January 1923. On 11 January French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr. Chancellor Wilhelm Cuno’s government called for “passive resistance”, which the Reichstag approved by 283 votes to 12, and production stopped as miners and railway workers refused to obey the occupiers. An estimated 137 civilians were killed during the occupation, and the French authorities imposed between 120,000 and 150,000 sentences, the overwhelming majority of them expulsions from the occupied area. 13 32

To support idled workers and businesses the government printed money, and the inflation already under way ran out of control. The mark, at 320 to the dollar in mid-1922, stood at 4.2105 trillion to the dollar by November 1923. Gustav Stresemann’s new government ended passive resistance on 26 September and two months later replaced the paper mark with the Rentenmark, stabilising the currency. The Dawes Plan of 1924 restructured and lowered the reparations payments, and France and Belgium withdrew from the Ruhr by August 1925. 33 32

Moscow saw Germany in 1923 as comparable to Russia in the summer of 1917. On 15 August the Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev instructed the KPD to prepare for an approaching revolutionary crisis, Trotsky expressly agreed, and Karl Radek pleaded for an early strike. The party chairman Heinrich Brandler assured Moscow that 253,000 Communists were ready to fight. The KPD entered the Saxon government on 10 October, but when a workers’ conference at Chemnitz on the 21st failed to back a call for a general strike, the rising was called off. Local branches of the party in Hamburg and Bremen nonetheless launched their own insurrections, which the police suppressed. The Reichswehr then forcibly deposed the SPD–KPD government of Saxony. 34

The threat came from the right as well. Inspired by Mussolini’s March on Rome, the Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, together with Erich Ludendorff, led some 600 SA men into the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich on the evening of 8 November and proclaimed the “national revolution”. The next day about 2,000 Nazis marching on the Feldherrnhalle were stopped by a police cordon; fifteen Nazis, four police officers and one bystander were killed. Hitler was sentenced to five years for treason but served only nine months, during which he dictated Mein Kampf. The putsch brought Hitler to national attention for the first time. 35

1923 was also the year the postwar order provisionally settled. The Treaty of Lausanne in July completed the series of peace treaties, and the currency stabilisation that autumn and the Dawes Plan the following year ended the German crisis. The revolutions the Comintern had tried to kindle had all failed. The Bolsheviks turned from world revolution to “socialism in one country”, and in the meantime, in 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had been created. 14) 32 7

Interpretations: the “Carthaginian peace” debate and the Versailles system

The judgement of Versailles began with John Maynard Keynes. Keynes, who had been the principal representative of the British Treasury at the conference, called the treaty a “Carthaginian peace” — a peace meant to crush the defeated — in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published at the end of 1919, and warned that reparations far beyond Germany’s capacity to pay would destabilise the whole European economy. In six months the book sold 100,000 copies worldwide and was translated into 12 languages, and his reading quickly became the academic orthodoxy. The British perception that Germany had been treated unfairly later underpinned public support for the appeasement of Hitler. From the other side, Marshal Foch criticised the treaty for treating Germany too leniently. 36 13

Rebuttals came early too. In The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes, written in the 1940s, the French economist Étienne Mantoux disputed Keynes’s predictions — German steel output in 1927 was 30 per cent above 1913 — and argued that German rearmament spending in each year from 1933 to 1939 was seven times the reparations figure. Sally Marks wrote in 2013 that for nearly forty years diplomatic historians had argued that the treaty was more reasonable than its reputation suggests; she had argued as early as 1978 that Article 231 made no mention of war guilt and merely laid a legal basis for reparations, and Ruth Henig summarised in 1995 that most historians of the conference took the view that, in economic terms, the treaty was not unduly harsh on Germany. 36 13 15

Did Versailles, then, produce Hitler? The Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan argued in Peacemakers (2001; published in the United States as Paris 1919) that the conditions imposed on Germany did not lead to the rise of Hitler. The German historian Detlev Peukert held that what mattered was not the “reality” of the treaty but the German “perception” that it was an impossible peace, and that the millenarian hopes raised during the war, when Germany seemed about to conquer Europe, meant that any peace would have provoked a nationalist backlash. The scholarly consensus on Article 231 likewise holds that neither the article nor the treaty caused the rise of Nazism; an unconnected rise in extremism and the Great Depression brought the Nazi Party to power. 37) 13 15

The weakness of the postwar order known as the “Versailles system” lay in its being a compromise that left no one satisfied: Germany was neither pacified nor conciliated, nor permanently weakened. The United States never ratified the treaty and made a separate peace, and defeated Germany entered the League only in 1926, the Soviet Union only in 1934. The problems the treaty left led on to the Dawes and Young Plans, which reorganised reparations, and to the Locarno Treaties, which improved relations between Germany and the West. At the same time the order was continually challenged by two currents that began in these years: the defeated powers’ demands for revision, and the anti-imperialist movements of the colonial world. 13 25