Part 3

The treaty of Versailles, like the other treaties drawn up at Paris, is by no means a perfect instrument. Those who took part in framing it would be the last to believe it verbally inspired. It is necessarily a peace of compromise and adjustment, and that means that it does not embody completely the desires of any one person or any one country. It was also framed rapidly, not always with sufficient preliminary study, and in some places it bears the marks of haste. But it represents an honest effort to secure a just and durable settlement, and neither the Conference in general nor the United States in particular need be ashamed of it. It is easy to criticise in detail, easy to magnify the defects and forget the substantial results achieved, just as it was easy to criticise the Constitution of the United States when it issued from the Convention of 1787, and to discover therein dangers which history has shown to be imaginary. For one result of the Paris treaties, however, their framers are not responsible, namely the delays in ratification and enforcement. The treaties were drawn for the world of 1919 by men of 1919, on the assumption that what was needed was an early peace as well as a just settlement. The governing commissions and mandates were to begin at once, the plebiscites were to be held as soon as possible, the disarmament of Germany was to be prompt and real, the difficult work of reparation was to be taken up immediately. None of these expectations has been realized, and the responsibility lies less with the Peace Conference than with the failure of America to ratify the treaties and to take part in carrying out their provisions.

In one fundamental respect the treaties drawn up at Paris differ from all such instruments in the past: they do not pretend to be final. The treaty of Vienna lasted, in many respects, for a hundred years, and parts of it are still in force, unchanged by the war or the Conference. For all this the Congress of Vienna deserves its full measure of credit, but it must be remembered that it provided no method of change or adjustment. Only a new war could undo its provisions, and more than one such war proved necessary. At Paris it was recognized from the start that much of the treaty must be temporary and provisional. No one could determine in advance how peoples would vote, or just how much of an indemnity Germany could pay, or whether she would endeavor to execute or to avoid the obligations she there assumed, or what would happen in Austria or in Turkey. Some means of amendment, adjustment, correction, and supplementing was required, and this was found primarily in the League of Nations. In the League the treaties possess the possibility of their own betterment, the starting-point of a new development. Hence, unlike all previous treaties, those of 1919 are dynamic and not static: they are constructive and not merely restorative; they look to the future more than to the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The published records of the Paris Conference are limited to the official reports of the plenary sessions and the official text of the treaties, in French and English, with authoritative maps, subject to correction after the frontiers have been fixed on the spot. The proceedings of the Council of Ten and the Council of Five were kept by a regular secretariat, those of the Council of Four less officially and systematically; these minutes were manifolded but not printed. The minutes of the various commissions, while printed, have not been made public.

The German and Austrian treaties and related documents are printed as supplements to the _American Journal of International Law_ since July 1919. The German treaty is also printed as a Senate Document and as a publication of the American Association for International Conciliation. The entire series of treaties is best available in the British _Parliamentary Papers_, Treaty Series, 1919 and 1920. A bibliographical list of all these treaties by Denys P. Myers is to be published by the World Peace Foundation, _League of Nations Series_, iii, no. 1. _Documents and Statements relating to Peace Proposals and War Aims_, December 1916 to November 1918, have been edited by G. Lowes Dickinson (London and New York, 1919).

There is as yet no memoir literature by members of the Conference. Some confidential papers are printed in the _Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations_ of the United States Senate (Washington, 1919), but these do not concern territorial problems. Some things touching France will be found in the report of the Barthou committee to the Chamber of Deputies, supplemented by the articles of A. Tardieu in _L’Illustration_ since February 1920. The official German criticisms of the Treaty of Versailles were published in various languages and have been freely reproduced by pro-German writers in other countries. A _Kommentar_ in six volumes has been prepared by one of the German delegates, Walter Schücking.

So far the printed accounts of the Conference are the work of journalists, who from the nature of the proceedings cannot be fully informed. The most direct information was perhaps possessed by Ray Stannard Baker, chief of the American service of publicity, but his volume, _What Wilson did at Paris_ (New York, 1919), is _ex parte_ and very brief. E. J. Dillon, _The Inside History of the Peace Conference_ (New York, 1920), is a diffuse composite of hearsay and newspaper clippings; it is anti-French but in general friendly to small nations. H. Wilson Harris, _The Peace in the Making_ (New York, 1920), is an intelligent account by a fair-minded British Liberal. Sisley Huddleston, _Peace-Making at Paris_ (London, 1919), is more impressionistic. J. M. Keynes, _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_ (London and New York, 1919), is the brilliant but untrustworthy work of a British financial expert who finally repented of the treaty. Influenced by German propaganda, it is in general anti-French, anti-Belgian, and anti-Polish, and disparages political self-determination in favor of economic frontiers. Of the various critiques which the book has called out, the most searching is that of David Hunter Miller, in the New York _Evening Post_, February 6 and 10, 1920, and in separate pamphlets.

A volume on the Conference, with an elaborate atlas, is announced by an American territorial expert, Isaiah Bowman; a fuller work is in preparation by British and American experts under the editorship of Harold W. V. Temperley, of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Of the material collected in France for the Conference, the only systematic publication is the _Travaux du Comité d’Etudes_, in two volumes with an atlas (Paris, 1919). Most of the British material was printed but not published, a useful exception being C. K. Webster, _The Congress of Vienna_ (Oxford, 1918). The Foreign Office series of _Handbooks_ has now been made public (London, 1920). The most important American publication of the sort is the _Atlas of Mineral Resources_ to be issued by the United States Geological Survey (Washington, 1920).

* * * * *

There is no entirely satisfactory discussion of the general problem of frontiers. T. L. Holdich, _Political Frontiers and Boundary Making_ (London, 1916), is concerned chiefly with ‘natural’ frontiers outside of Europe. For the facts of race, see W. Z. Ripley, _The Races of Europe_ (New York, 1899). Leon Dominian, _Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe_ (New York, 1917), is convenient. A more authoritative work on the linguistic side is A. Meillet, _Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle_ (Paris, 1918). Experience with plebiscites is brought together in Miss Sarah Wambaugh’s elaborate _Monograph on Plebiscites_ (New York, 1920). A. Toynbee, _Nationality and the War_ (London, 1915), is an attempt to state the territorial problems in the early months of the war; L. Stoddard and G. Frank, _Stakes of the War_ (New York, 1918), seeks to sum them up at its close. The relation of certain of these problems to a league of nations is discussed in _The League of Nations_, edited by Stephen P. Duggan, with references (Boston, 1919); and by Lord Eustace Percy, _The Responsibilities of Peace_ (London and New York, 1920).

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Webster, _The Congress of Vienna_, p. 93.

[3] _Was von der Entente übrig bliebe wenn sie Ernst machte mit dem “Selbstbestimmungsrecht”_ (Berlin, D. Reimer).

[4] _Atlantic Monthly_, xc, pp. 728, 731 (1902).

[5] Keynes, _Economic Consequences of the Peace_, p. 265.

[6] Dillon, _The Inside History of the Peace Conference_, p. 151.

[7] Keynes, _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_, pp. 30-32. M. Mantoux asserts that Mr. Keynes never attended a regular session of the Council of Four. _London Times_, February 14, 1920.

II

BELGIUM AND DENMARK

Our examination of the specific territorial problems of the Conference may most conveniently begin with the simplest, the frontier between Germany and Denmark. This had been established by force of arms when Schleswig was taken from Denmark in 1864, while a promise made in 1866 to consult the population had never been fulfilled. Only at the close of the World War did an opportunity come to fix the boundary in accordance with the will of the inhabitants. The duty of the Conference was to provide the means of giving effect to their desires.

The territory of the former duchy of Schleswig comprises the portion of the peninsula of Jutland lying between the Danish frontier on the north and the River Eider and the Kiel Canal on the south. Called by the Danes South Jutland (Sönderjylland), it is similar in most respects to Denmark, being chiefly agricultural, with a fishing population on the Frisian islands to the west and a considerable shipping industry in its principal town, Flensburg, a town of 63,000 at the head of the Flensburg fiord. The region has an area of 3385 square miles, and 474,355 inhabitants, not far from twice the extent and population of the state of Delaware. About one-third of the people speak Danish; these are chiefly in the northern portion of the province. The rest, save for an isolated group of Frisians on the west coast, speak German.

The earlier history of Schleswig would take us into the tangled history of the Schleswig-Holstein question, which is for present purposes unnecessary. Suffice it to say that, whatever the previous rights of the king of Denmark may have been, the attempt to unite the duchy of Schleswig fully to the kingdom of Denmark by the constitution of 1863 led in the following year to war with Austria and Prussia and to the defeat of Denmark, whose king, by the treaty of Vienna, renounced all rights over Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg. In 1866, at the conclusion of the war between Austria and Prussia, the treaty of Prague transferred the rights of Austria to the king of Prussia, with the reservation that the “inhabitants of North Schleswig shall be again reunited with Denmark if they should express such a desire in a vote freely given.” Nothing could be clearer, and nothing more ineffective, for the article was contained in a treaty between two powers neither of which had the slightest interest in the performance of the obligation. As a matter of fact, the provision had been suggested by Napoleon III, but the interested parties, Denmark and the inhabitants of the district, were not put in a position to secure its execution. Bismarck, who seems at first to have expected a referendum, maintained in 1867 that the people as Prussian subjects had no right to demand it, the only right to such a demand resting with the emperor of Austria. Prussia made no effort to put the article into effect, and in 1878 it was abrogated by agreement with Austria.

So, since 1864, Schleswig has been under Prussian rule, and since 1867 an integral part of the kingdom of Prussia. Once probably wholly Danish, it had been subject for centuries to penetration from the south, and by this time possessed a large German element which henceforth had the active support of the Prussian government. The history of the attempt to Germanize Schleswig is, on a smaller scale, much the same as the history of the Germanization of Prussian Poland. Efforts at replacement of the population by Germans had little success, but the spread of German culture and the suppression of Danish culture were everywhere steadily pushed. German was made compulsory in the schools, the courts, and the churches; Danish was put under the ban in public meetings and theatres; and the Danish press and Danish societies were subjected to various forms of persecution. Intercourse with Denmark was in various ways restricted or made difficult. Constant war was waged against the Danish flag, and even against dresses which displayed the red and white colors of Denmark. It was even said that the owner of a white dog was obliged to repaint his red kennel! The regular agents of Prussian policy were omnipresent: the police, the pastor, and the schoolmaster. The officers’ duty was chiefly negative, the suppression of Danish tendencies; the schoolmaster’s was more positive, to instil Germanism into the rising generation, partly by teaching only in the German language save for a small amount of religious instruction, partly by the well known propagandist methods of German history and patriotic songs. Thus all were compelled to sing, “Ich bin ein Preusse, will ein Preusse sein”; and if a little girl should say, “Ich bin kein Preusse, will kein Preusse sein,” she was whipped and sent home.

Inevitably the zone of German speech crept gradually northward. In some villages of central Schleswig which spoke only Danish half a century ago, it is said that the language has disappeared save among the very old. Still the process of Germanization was slow, and as time went on active resistance was organized in the three great societies of the Language Union, the School Union, and the Voters’ Union. Leaders found in Denmark the Danish education which was forbidden them at home, and kept alive a strong tradition of Danish speech and Danish sympathies. A local political party was maintained, and the Danish vote increased after 1886, although under the German gerrymander of 1867 it was still allowed to return only one member of the Reichstag, and that in the extreme north. Treasonable acts were in general avoided, but the hope of reunion with Denmark was never entirely lost.

The fortunes of the World War gave at first but little hope to the pro-Danish Schleswigers. They served in the German army up to their full capacity; probably, as is stated, their losses were proportionately greater than those among purely German troops. If they were not fighting their own kin and friends, like the soldiers of Alsace-Lorraine, they were at least fighting in another’s cause. Denmark, too, walked warily during the war, with the fate of other small nations ever before her eyes and the profits of German friendship dangled in front of her. It was no time for Schleswig to look for help in this quarter. With the armistice, matters took on a new aspect. Foreseeing that the Schleswig question would be raised at the peace table, Germany proposed a separate arrangement with Denmark, and it was some time before Denmark readjusted her policy to correspond to a world in which the victorious Allies were able to impose terms on a defeated Germany. Even then the readjustment was incomplete. Germany might become powerful again, and Denmark must beware, so many thought, of laying up vengeance for the future by acquiring territory which Germany might demand back. In many quarters there seemed to be genuine terror lest the Allies might impose territory and obligations upon an unwilling Denmark. A natural hesitation over absorbing alien elements was accompanied by a fear lest many new voters might upset the party balance in a small country. In determining the future of Schleswig, it appeared that the timidity of Denmark was to have its weight, as well as the hopes of the population. The Radical party, then in power, wished only limited accessions of population in the region of North Schleswig; while the Conservatives favored a more decided policy extending into southern Schleswig, though few went so far as to demand outright the ancient frontier of the Eider or even the old rampart of the Dannevirke.

No mention had been made of Schleswig in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but a just determination of the question was promised by him in a letter to certain Danish-Americans just after the armistice (November 21). Diplomatic conversations had indeed already begun, and February 21 the Danish government formally placed the matter before the Peace Conference in an exposé made to the Council of Ten by its minister in Paris, Chamberlain Bernhoft. It asked for a plebiscite as soon as possible in the region of unquestioned Danish speech north of a line stretching west from the head of the Flensburg fiord to the north of the island of Sylt in the North Sea, a line which had been demanded, November 17, 1918, by the North Schleswig Voters’ Union at Aabenraa. By February sentiment was ready to ask for a plebiscite also in a zone to the south, which included Flensburg and certain adjacent territory. In order that all possibilities of pressure might be removed, the evacuation of German troops and German higher officials was requested in a considerable strip of territory farther south.

The commission to which the Conference referred the Schleswig problem heard delegates from the different parts of the territory, as well as reports of the various points of view in Denmark. The commission saw no reason why the right of voting should be refused to any part of the region to be evacuated, though it was plain that some judgment would need to be used in drawing a frontier upon the basis of the voting, so as to avoid enclaves and inconvenient meanderings. Definite evidence was before it of a desire to vote on the part of many persons in south Schleswig. Accordingly its report, incorporated in the draft treaty submitted to the Germans in May, provided for a plebiscite by three zones, so that the frontier between Germany and Denmark might be fixed in conformity with the wishes of the population. In the first or northernmost zone, where the voting was supposed to be largely a matter of form, the plebiscite was to take place for the whole district within three weeks of the German evacuation. In the second zone of mixed speech in middle Schleswig, where opinion was likely to vary in different districts and to be affected somewhat by the result in the first zone, the voting was to occur not more than five weeks later and to be taken commune by commune. The same method was to be applied two weeks thereafter in the third zone, which comprised the remainder of the evacuated territory extending to the Eider and the Schlei, a region of predominantly German speech, where the Danish tradition had been greatly weakened in course of time and where the people would likewise want to know the result in the neighboring zone to the northward. Within ten days of the coming into force of the treaty German troops and higher officials were to evacuate the whole territory north of the Eider and the Schlei, and the administration was to be carried on by an International Commission of five, one appointed by Norway, one by Sweden, and three by the Allied and Associated Powers. This commission was to hold the plebiscites in accordance with provisions which had been suggested by the Danish government; and upon the result of the voting, with due regard to geographic and economic conditions, recommend a permanent boundary to the Allied and Associated Powers. The whole plan was carefully drawn to secure as full and free an expression as possible of the desires of the population.

Opposition came from two sources. The German criticisms, as handed in to the Conference in May, had little weight. They proposed to limit the voting, and hence any possible loss of German territory, to a portion of the first zone, on the ground that only there did more than half of the population speak Danish. Apart from the fact that this affirmation was based on the official language statistics of the Prussian census, which was notoriously unfavorable to non-German elements, the proposal started from two inadmissible assumptions: one that language is the sole test of political sympathy; the other that no region where Germans were in a majority should be allowed self-determination, for, it was implicitly believed, no German could possibly want to leave the Fatherland. Germany thus sought to prevent free expression of opinion where it might turn to Germany’s disadvantage, at the very moment she clamored for it in Upper Silesia, where it might possibly turn out in her favor. How Germany hoped to control the plebiscite appeared from another proposal, namely that, all German officials still remaining in the country, the administration and the voting should be in charge of a commission of Germans and Danes, with a Swedish chairman!

The Danish objection, as voiced by the majority Radicals, was against the inclusion of the third zone in the voting. The reason most generally given was that districts in this zone might vote for Denmark from purely economic motives, especially the desire to escape German war taxes and war indemnities, and thus form an irredentist minority in a country with which they were not really in sympathy. Probably also there was still the lurking fear of the powerful neighbor of the past and the future, as well as some measure of friendliness for the new regime in Germany.

To such arguments the Conference yielded, cutting out of the final treaty the plebiscite in the third zone and its evacuation as well. The change was made at the last moment, without readjustment of the other provisions, so that this section of the treaty shows certain signs of haste. The effect was to take away all opportunity for self-determination in the third zone and to leave the German troops and administration here in a position to exert pressure on the region to the northward.[8]

The vote in the first zone, held February 10, 1920, resulted in a decisive Danish majority of three to one, and led to occupation by Denmark, as the treaty had provided. Feeling ran high in the second zone, where the German government sought to influence the decision by threats in the Reichstag; the struggle centred around Flensburg, certain in either event to be a frontier town now that the third zone had been eliminated. The plebiscite, held March 14, resulted decisively for Germany, the vote in Flensburg being overwhelming and only a few scattered villages on the islands voting for Denmark. The result failed to satisfy either party entirely, a large Danish group still wanting Flensburg, while in the first zone the Germans wished to recover Tönder, where the voting had favored Germany. Indeed it remains to be seen whether German hopes of recovery will be limited to Tönder.