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Guide to How Not to Alter the World November 27, 2002 By RICHARD BERNSTEIN The subtitle of Margaret MacMillan's rich new history of the negotiations that followed World War I - "Six Months That Changed the World," referring to the Versailles Peace Conference - may represent one of the more overused phrases in historical writing, but in the case of her illuminating and engrossing "Paris 1919," it is unarguably justifiable. The six-month session in Paris that took place between January and June 1919 and involved representatives of 29 countries drew many of the boundaries of Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans that exist to this day, recreated Poland, set the terms by which the major powers would attempt to live with one another and forged the model for the future United Nations, among many other things. But while the conference changed the world, events were to prove in spectacularly disastrous fashion 20 years later that it did not achieve its main objective, which was to design an international structure that would keep the peace. This by no means reduces the value of Ms. MacMillan's re-creation of the debates and decisions made at Versailles. As the former diplomat Richard Holbrooke puts it in a brief forward to Ms. MacMillan's volume, historical failures are often more instructive than successes because "they illuminate paths and pitfalls to be avoided." In Ms. MacMillan's view of things, the pitfalls included carving up non-European territories in ways that would prove unstable years later, cutting large German populations out of Germany and in the case of President Woodrow Wilson, in particular, believing that a better world would come about through moral order rather than, say, a re-established balance of power. And still Ms. MacMillan's vision of the actors in the complex Versailles drama is more charitable than censorious. Her assessment does not include the common notion that the greatest failure of the conference was that it imposed an unjust and Carthaginian peace on Germany and thereby inevitably gave rise to World War II. "Hitler did not wage war because of the Treaty of Versailles," Ms. MacMillan writes in her concluding chapter. Even if Germany had retained everything that was taken from it at Versailles, he would have wanted more: "the destruction of Poland, control of Czechoslovakia, above all the conquest of the Soviet Union" as well of course as the annihilation of the Jews. Ms. MacMillan's approach to history is to get under the skin of the figures, to see them not so much as good or evil but as all-too-human actors struggling with a task of monumental difficulty even as they represented varying and conflicting national interests. France, for example, whose wishes at Versailles, had they all been granted, would have imposed a much harsher peace on Germany than either the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, or Wilson were willing to accept, was operating out of two devastating wars with Germany, the one just concluded and the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 (when, as Ms. MacMillan points out, French reparations paid to Germany were greater than those Germany actually paid to France after World War I). "They had not suffered what France had," Ms. MacMillan explains of Wilson and Lloyd George. Nor, it might be added, did Wilson or Lloyd George have to worry, as the French did, of being a second-rate power next to a Germany that would always be bigger and more populous. That was why, for example, the French at first opposed creating mandates over the former colonial territories of Germany and Turkey, the two biggest defeated powers. They preferred to have colonial control to give them assured access to native men available for recruitment into French armies. A similar worry led France to demand that the German border be placed at the Rhine, thus making the Rhineland either a separate country, or, preferably, a part of France, and that led the men at Versailles into their worst deadlock. The British foreign secretary, Alfred Balfour, understood the French situation perfectly but felt they were blind to the proper solution: not paring the Rhineland away from Germany but creating a strong international system embodied in a working League of Nations capable of standing up to a resurgent Germany. Otherwise, he told Lloyd George, "no manipulation of the Rhine frontier is going to make France anything more than a second-rate Power, trembling at the nod of its great neighbors on the East, and depending from day to day on the changes and chances of a shifting diplomacy and uncertain alliances." Given the weakness of the League of Nations and the failure of Britain and France to stop German rearmament in the 1930's, that turned out to be a remarkably accurate prediction. In the end the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, accepted that the Rhineland would remain part of Germany in exchange for a temporary occupation of the German territory east of the Rhine and a promise from Britain and the United States to come to French aid if Germany ever attacked again. Clemenceau was bitterly reviled for that concession. President Raymond Poincar� of France, after one argument with his prime minister, confided to his diary that Clemenceau was "scatterbrained, violent, conceited, bullying, sneering, dreadfully superficial, deaf physically and intellectually, incapable of reasoning, reflecting, of following a discussion." In Ms. MacMillan's view, however, Clemenceau actually got more at Versailles than the Allies had been prepared to give him. In a prophetic statement of his own, he told the French Parliament in 1919, "The treaty, with all its complex clauses, will only be worth what you are worth; it will be what you make it." Among the many strengths of this work is its completeness. Ms. MacMillan, a historian at the University of Toronto and herself the great-granddaughter of Lloyd George, provides a lucid primer on many of the less widely understood (at least in the United States) parts of the picture. She recounts the formation of Yugoslavia and shows how decisions made at Versailles planted the seeds of later conflict. She covers the carving up of Africa, the concessions made to Japanese imperialism in China, the disposition of the former Ottoman Empire and the formation of the Arab states, including that ramshackle assembly of incompatible parts that is the current Iraq. In other words, in Paris in 1919 the world did change. Ms. MacMillan's honest, dispassionate and thoroughly engaging book explains why, and how much we continue to live with the changes brought about then. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/27/books/review/27BERN.html?ex=1039395109&ei=1&en=6fccd82e0b0c3168 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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