Posted on Wed, Feb. 12, 2003 HISTORY: '1919' turns dry story into verdant splendor BY FRITZ LANHAM Houston Chronicle
• Title: "Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World" Mention of the Treaty of Versailles tends to inspire glazed looks and hazy memories of 11th-grade history class. What does one recall? That the treaty ended World War I. That Woodrow Wilson, the idealistic American president, tried to do the Right Thing at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference where it was drafted but saw his efforts thwarted by his French, English and Italian counterparts, a trio of oily Machiavellians. That the confreres so botched the job as to make the rise of Hitler and World War II virtually inevitable. That's about it. All in all, dry and confusing stuff best left to the specialists. Thus it is that Margaret MacMillan's splendid "Paris 1919" comes as something of a surprise. Here is history as it should be done — soundly researched, detailed, enlivened with shrewd, sharply drawn portraits of principal players and walk-ons. Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize when published in England, "Paris 1919" was named one of the seven best books of 2002 by the New York Times Book Review. Make no mistake. The Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles deserve our attention. Between January and June 1919, the leaders of the victorious Allies in World War I made decisions that changed the world. Those decisions haunt us still. Iraq, for example, was one of the countries carved out of the debris of the Ottoman Empire in horse trading between France's Georges Clemenceau and Britain's David Lloyd George. When the Czech Republic and Slovakia divorced in 1993, they undid a country created in 1919. To understand why Turkey and Greece are so hostile to each other and why Syria virtually absorbed Lebanon after the latter collapsed into civil war in the 1970s, look back to decisions made in Paris more than 80 years ago. What is unappreciated, MacMillan argues, is the sheer scale and complexity of the task that confronted the leaders of the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan as they gathered with armies of advisers to make the peace after the bloodiest war ever to afflict Europe to that point. Two old and enormous multiethnic empires — the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman — had allied themselves with Germany and collapsed into rubble after the Central Powers went down in defeat. Virtually the entire map of Eastern Europe and the Middle East would have to be redrawn. Then there was the matter of Germany's African colonies and German concessions in China — what to do about those? — and the boundaries of Germany itself, a country full of people who never accepted the fact that they'd lost the war. What rendered the assignment nearly impossible, MacMillan says, was the flame of ethnic nationalism, a flame Wilson fanned in language both stirring and maddeningly vague. Every nationality deserved to have its own state. That was to be one of the great organizing principles of the new postwar world. But the nationalities were hopelessly intertwined on the ground. That being true, the author, a professor of history and provost at the University of Toronto, is inclined to cut the peacemakers considerable slack. "If they could have done better, they certainly could have done much worse," she writes. MacMillan doesn't accept the caricature of the treaty and peace conference described at the beginning of this review. The motives of all the principals — Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Italy's Vittorio Orlando — were complex and mixed. Nor can the treaty, with its reparations payments imposed on Germany, be held responsible for the rise of Hitler, she argues. MacMillan details how the peacemakers addressed the conflicting demands of each group — the Poles, the Czechs, the Slavs, the Jews, the Arabs. But what makes "Paris 1919" so compelling is her skill at precise, often amusing, character portraits. Dozens of minor characters make brief appearances, but MacMillan devotes most of her attention to the leaders of the Big Four (later reduced to the Big Three when Italy, in a huff, walked out of the conference). Early on, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Orlando decided they could proceed most expeditiously by meeting informally, unencumbered by troops of aides and representatives of the minor allies. So these four men, sitting for days behind closed doors, decided the fate of the world. In evaluating the four, MacMillan is notably evenhanded: "Both Wilson and Clemenceau were liberals with a conservative skepticism of rapid change," she writes. "What divided them was temperament and their own experience. Wilson believed that human nature was fundamentally good. Clemenceau had his doubts. He, and Europe, had been through too much." As it happens, MacMillan is the great-granddaughter of Lloyd George. But she doesn't hesitate to criticize the wily Welshman: "With different leadership in the Western democracies, with stronger democracy in Weimar Germany, without the damage done by the Depression, the story might have turned out differently," she writes. "And without Hitler to mobilize the resentments of ordinary Germans and to play on the guilty consciences of so many in the democracies, Europe might not have had another war so soon after the first. The Treaty of Versailles is not to blame." "Paris 1919" is an exhilarating and eye-opening treatment of decisions that made much of the world as we know it. email this | print this _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
