After five years, the Treaty of Versailles ended World War I on June 28, 1919. Intended as "the war to end all wars," it set the stage for Adolf Hitler and later conflicts in the Balkans and Middle East.
"If you want peace, work for justice," wrote H.L. Mencken. But what is justice?
More below the fold....
Unintended Consequences, Part II - To End All Wars
This week Morning Feature looks at the causes and unintended consequences of World War I. Yesterday we examined why it wasn’t the quick and easy war that leaders promised. Today we’ll explore its lingering effects in the Balkans and the Middle East. Tomorrow we’ll consider lessons on sweeping, systemic change from "the war to end all wars."
One of the most fascinating chapters in Barbara Tuchman's classic narrative history The Guns of August concerns the pursuit of the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau from August 3-10, 1914. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28th, 1914, and by August 3rd Russia, Germany, France, and England had joined the war. But the Ottoman Empire had not ... until England gave her a push.
"The Sick Man"
In 1914 the Ottoman Empire "had many enemies and no allies," Tuchman wrote, "because no one considered her worth an alliance." Long in economic decline, the empire was called "the Sick Man" by other European empires who, for decades, had circled like vultures waiting to devour the corpse. Even the revolution of the Young Turks in 1908, who displaced the aging sultan with a government by committee, did not impress European leaders. Turkey straddled key trade routes, and every empire wanted a slice.
England thought so little of the Young Turks that, although still neutral on July 28th, the English government seized two Turkish battleships under construction in British shipyards. The ships had been financed in Turkey by public subscription, and their seizure was a matter of national honor. On August 3rd Britain replied to an official protest with a dismissive telegram. Turkey signed an alliance with Germany that day, though she did not declare war on Russia as pledged. The Young Turks wanted to see how the early battles played out before committing themselves.
They would not get that luxury. England hoped her primary assistance to France would be naval, and her first priority was clearing the seas for French ships bringing colonial troops from North Africa. That meant sinking the Goeben and Breslau, which had been cruising the Mediterranean since 1912. The British fleet chased the German ships for a week. On August 10th, as the Goeben and Breslau waited at the entrance to the Dardanelles with the British close behind, a Turkish destroyer signaled "Follow me" and led them into safety.
England demanded the ships be disarmed. A Turkish minister replied "Could not the Germans have sold us these ships? Could not their arrival be regarded as a delivery under contract?" It was a spur of the moment announcement that seemed like justice for the two Turkish ships seized by Britain. On August 16th the Goeben and Breslau, still with German crews and commanders, became the Yavus Sultan Selim and Midilli and the Ottoman Empire was at war.
"An awesome moment requiring ... a fitting moral foundation."
For the next three years, a small British army fought the Ottomans in the Middle East. The contingent included the legendary T.E. Lawrence, who stoked dreams of Arab nationalism to incite rebellion against the Turks and aid for the British. Lawrence may have been sincere, but the British Empire remained imperial. By late November 1917, British troops were poised to be the first western army to conquer Jerusalem since the Crusades. In summarizing her earlier book on those events, Tuchman writes:
[T]he taking of the sacred city was felt to be an awesome moment requiring some major gesture to accompany it and provide a fitting moral foundation. An official statement recognizing Palestine as the national homeland of the original inhabitants was conceived to fulfill the need, not in consequence of any philo-Semitism but in consequence rather of two other factors: the influence in British culture of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and a twin influence in that year of what the Manchester Guardian called "the insistent logic of the military situation on the banks of the Suez Canal," in short, Bible and Sword.
Thus became the Balfour Declaration of 1917, stating:
His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
And thus was the modern state of Israel conceived. Her gestation would last three decades and include the Holocaust, seeded in part by the Treaty of Versailles.
Justice, or greed and vengeance?
The Treaty of Versailles ended the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. The former was divided between England and France, and with a few adjustments the lines they drew became the modern Middle East and Persian Gulf states. The latter became Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. In neither case did those drawing the lines pay much heed to local peoples. In the Levant, Britain and France set up easy-to-manage Sunni autocrats; not until the Iranian Revolution in 1979 would Shi'a Muslims have a political voice. Imperial cartographers did little better in eastern Europe. The "Velvet Divorce" in 1989 peacefully separated Czechs from Slovaks, but the dissolution of Yugoslavia into seven states during the 1990s brought the term "ethnic cleansing" into popular parlance. The unclean reality behind that euphemism was widespread rape, mass theft, and over 100,000 dead.
As for Germany, she was assigned principal blame for the war, and the Treaty of Versailles left her impoverished and humiliated. It also left her too weakened to secure her borders or the rule of law within them. Into the void stepped private militias like the Freikorps, whose street violence a young Austrian-born politician both sponsored and promised to end. He also promised to end the poverty and humiliation imposed at Versailles.
That politician was Adolf Hitler, and after he took power in 1933 the brown-shirted Freikorps became the Sturmabteilung or SA. Less than a year later, their usefulness ended when Hitler won the support of the German military by promising to defy the Versailles limitations and rearm. On the night of July 1st-2nd, 1934, thousands of SA were arrested and at least 85 murdered in the Night of the Long Knives. Krystallnacht, World War II, and the Holocaust would soon follow.
H.L. Mencken wrote "If you want peace, work for justice." The Treaty of Versailles, thought at the time to be justice, did not bring peace. But greed and vengeance rarely do.
+++++
Happy Friday!
Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com)