Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (12 page)

Let us not, though, be too hasty in writing off the League’s minority system altogether. In the first place, it did notch up a few successes which offered valuable lessons for the future and showed what was possible with astute and far-sighted government. If these have today been forgotten, it is because they were too peaceful for the history books. The Aland islands dispute, for instance, between Sweden and Finland was resolved quietly in 1921: the islands remained Finnish, but the Swedish islanders were granted a high degree of administrative
autonomy. This compact formed the basis of a solution which removed a major source of tension between the two countries. The Estonian government took the very remarkable step of granting cultural autonomy to its “national minorities”; the Latvians did not go quite this far, but did offer some concessions in education.

Those who condemn the League’s minorities system might also ponder the alternatives. Nation-states were a reality, not merely a creation of wartime Great Power diplomacy. The conversion of the Ottoman Empire into a Turkish national state, for instance, could hardly be attributed to forces outside the country; Mustapha Kemal made the running there, not Lloyd George. And as that example demonstrated, there were several other ways of treating minorities.

“First we kill the Armenians, then the Greeks, then the Kurds,” a Turkish gendarme told a Danish Red Cross nurse in July 1915 as the war accelerated the Turkification of the Ottoman Empire. The attempt to murder the Armenians—chiefly carried out through the so-called Special Organization—was the logical extension of the nationalist programme of the government in Istanbul. Even friendly German observers concluded that beyond the professed concern for military security in border areas the Turks aimed at “the planned extermination of the Armenian people.” The numbers are disputed, but between 800,000 and 1.3 million may have perished in massacres and death marches. Later this would be termed “genocide,” later still “ethnic cleansing.” Mass killing, then, was one way of tackling the problem of minorities in a nation-state. Many in the West were filled with horror; few bore in mind that it was the introduction of the Western conception of the nation-state into the multinational societies of the Near East that had led to massacre in the first place.
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Just a few years later, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire provided a second model for dealing with minorities—population exchange. In the aftermath of the Greek defeat in Asia Minor in 1922—following a decade of fighting between Greeks and Turks—the two governments agreed upon a compulsory version of E. H. Carr’s idea of voluntary “repatriation,” which had actually been tried out on a smaller scale between Greece and Bulgaria in 1919. This time, though, the numbers involved were enormous—nearly 1.2 million Greeks, and half a million Turks. Since religion was used as a marker
of identity, thousands of Turkish-speaking Orthodox villagers from Asia Minor were expelled to Greece, even though they spoke no Greek, while Greek Muslims, many of whose families had converted to Islam, embarked for Turkey. Such was the logic of European nationalism as it tried to rationalize the end of a multi-confessional empire. People were redefined, nationalities created. The suffering was immense: homes and property abandoned, friends left behind. Only through nationalist blinkers could this look like homecoming.

Yet if not homecoming, then at least the building of a fatherland. Horrible as it was, population “transfer” was helpful to governments aiming for national homogeneity, and both the Greek and Turkish authorities welcomed it on these grounds: in Greek Macedonia, for example, the flood of refugees Hellenized both the province and its port of Salonika; other ethnic groups—Sephardic Jews, Albanians, Slavic-speaking Macedonians—suddenly found themselves outnumbered.

Given the growing propensity for certain ethnic groups, notably the Germans and the Hungarians, to act as magnets for irredentism, transfer might have seemed an attractive idea to many other states. Still, there were several reasons why the Greco-Turkish population exchange was not more widely followed in inter-war Europe. One was cost: Greece’s population increased by a quarter—putting into perspective the recent British refusal to admit three million Hong Kong Chinese—and the strain of resettling so many refugees imposed an awesome social and economic burden on the country. In addition, the two governments wrangled for years over compensation and property valuation; it was doubtful whether bilateral relations were much improved by the exchange. Third, it was obvious that such an arrangement was only feasible where a minority had a “home” to go to. It was hardly applicable to the Jews, the Macedonians or even the Ukrainians, for example. Finally, of course, the compulsory uprooting of populations offended liberal ideas of individual rights. The forced transfer of 1923 would not find imitators until the collapse of the League and the rise of a Nazi New Order.
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The Greco-Turkish exchange of peoples had been reached in part
after
the event, for hundreds of thousands of Greeks had fled Asia Minor to escape the Turkish advance well before the diplomats
started talking. They were, in fact, part of the enormous wave of refugees produced by the war, including more than a million Russians fleeing the revolution, Poles, Balts and Germans hounded out of eastern Europe, 350,000 Armenians and many others. Before 1914 they might have found refuge across the Atlantic; after 1921 the doors were closed. Thus Europe’s traditional strategy for its displaced populations—transoceanic export—no longer functioned. Meanwhile nation-states drafted citizenship laws which excluded hundreds of thousands of incomers. The result was a vast increase in “stateless” persons, unable or unwilling to return home, resented in their place of refuge and straining those earlier traditions of asylum which had been so pronounced a feature of pre-war liberalism. The 1924 Romanian citizenship law made 100,000 Jews inside Romania stateless; others remained in limbo in Poland. Weimar Germany and France of the Third Republic both locked up thousands in detention camps. Liberals were shocked. “It is impossible that in the twentieth century, there could be 800,000 men in Europe unprotected by any legal organisation recognised by international law,” wrote the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross. As a result of international action, the so-called “Nansen passport” was created and efforts were made to define a refugee in international law and to provide protection.
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The problem did not go away, however; in fact, the economic depression made it worse. Twenty years after the Russian civil war no less than half of all Russian émigrés still counted as refugees. The Spanish civil war saw 400,000 republicans flee northwards into France just as that country was expelling hundreds of thousands of foreign workers, chiefly Algerians and Poles. After Hitler’s rise to power, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and searched for shelter elsewhere. This last wave of refugees in particular illustrated both the value and the limitation of the prevailing minority-rights regime. It brought home in the starkest possible terms the need for minorities to enjoy international protection against the nation-state if Europe was to escape a permanent refugee crisis. To that extent, the minority guarantees system introduced in 1919 was a courageous and imaginative step in the right direction. But that system had never been extended to Germany. What was more,
even if it had been, it would have been inoperative, since Germany had pulled out of the League in 1933 and refused to recognize its authority. The minority treaties were part and parcel of the international order established under the League; they stood, and fell, with the authority of the League itself.

IDEALISTS AND REALISTS

What, then, was the League of Nations? A system of alliances, a guarantor of peace, an instrument of arbitration or a proto-federation? For General Smuts in 1918 the answer was simple and radical: “Europe is being liquidated and the League of Nations must be the heir to this great estate”: according to this view (which reflected much older attitudes towards territorial distribution), it was to be a combination of international property manager and nanny, nursing immature societies both inside and outside Europe towards independent statehood. By implication, the great civilized powers were duty-bound to offer guidance.

This quasi-imperial vision of liberal paternalism shaded at one end of the political spectrum into the secret desire of some in Whitehall to see the League as an updated Concert of Great Powers, of the kind which had managed to keep the peace (more or less) for nearly a century after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. At the other, it touched on the Wilsonian dream of a new international order based on equality of nations (or more precisely states) under a strengthened international law. This lofty vision was put to the test early on, when Japanese delegates to the Paris Peace Conference proposed a clause for the League’s Covenant enshrining the principle of racial equality. This was too much for the white men—Wilson’s adviser Colonel House minuted worriedly: “It will surely raise the race issue throughout the world”—and the suggestion was unceremoniously rebuffed.
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If for idealists the League offered the chance of a new juridical order, for the hard-headed French, on the other hand, the League’s chief value lay not in its defence of a new international morality but, far more concretely, in its capacity to defend the Versailles settlement against revision. French interests demanded a League with teeth. They made several attempts to create a supranational military force at
the League’s disposal, but failed to persuade the British. When Wilson failed to push American membership of the League through Congress, much of the League’s deterrent value slipped away.

The British scholar Alfred Zimmern was probably right to see the League in the 1920s as an “instrument of cooperation.” Even if it disappointed both the idealists and the realists, it was certainly not unimportant: it provided an international forum for discussion, it was a source of influence, and helped tackle the kinds of problems—like the refugee crisis, and other social, economic and legal matters—where a coordinated international response was desirable. Even though it had very limited powers to intervene in the internal affairs of member states, it could help publicize abuses of minority groups, and to that extent expose governments to the pressure of world opinion.

Nevertheless, its influence depended on its members’ willingness to work through it. They were not bound to it, and could conduct diplomacy through other channels. And this meant that the rule of international law it embodied ultimately depended upon the political will of its members. The strength of pacifism in Britain and France made public sentiment—which Woodrow Wilson and others had seen as the basis of a strong League—studiously passive in international affairs. As the balance of power in Europe shifted, the League became increasingly marginalized, diplomacy flowed around Geneva rather than through it, and a rival ideological vision of a European order emerged in Berlin.

The defining feature of the European balance of power in 1919 had been the simultaneous exhaustion of Russia and Germany. This was perfectly obvious to observers at the time, though they did not all draw the same lessons from the fact. For the British it was important to recognize that Germany must recover her status as a Great Power, if only to prevent a political understanding between Berlin and Moscow, which would jeopardize the whole settlement. The minorities treaties would help by ensuring the fair treatment of the German minorities outside Germany, as well as by providing a model of tolerant government to the new states more generally.
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From France’s point of view, on the other hand, Germany had to be kept in her place. The new states of eastern and central Europe would act both as a buffer against Bolshevik revolution and as a check against
Germany. The slogan of national self-determination was thus a means to an end, and could be overridden when it clashed with French interests. This explains the French lack of enthusiasm for the minorities treaties—which seemed merely to weaken her new east European allies—and the French refusal in 1918–19 (and again, implicitly, in 1931) to allow Austria and Germany to be united, against the evident wishes of the bulk of the Austrian population.

Despite the creation of the League, then, Great Power politics was far from dead in Europe after 1918. Other, more traditional, diplomatic forums remained influential: the Conference of Ambassadors, for example, a gathering of the Great Powers in the old style, was chosen in preference to the League to settle two major crises in 1923: over Corfu, between the Greeks and Mussolini’s Italy; and Vilna, between the Poles and the Lithuanians. As the French in particular lost faith in the idea of collective security through Geneva, they pursued alternative and more traditional means of guaranteeing their interests.

In 1921, at French prompting, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania formed the Little Entente, a bloc directed at Hungary, and indirectly at Germany too. In the next few years, France signed treaties with all these states, as well as with Yugoslavia. France’s hold over Germany was manifested much more concretely in her occupation of the Rhineland. When French and Belgian troops invaded the Ruhr in 1923 to force the payment of reparations, it looked like a further expression of French might: the ensuing fiasco, however, and eventual reparations deal was more than a temporary rebuff to Paris. It lost Paris goodwill in London, and demonstrated that the Europeans could not solve their problems without American help.
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In the mid-1920s, as French policy became more conciliatory, Germany re-emerged as a major power. At Locarno, in 1925, peace was reaffirmed in western Europe, but the issue of Germany’s eastern borders was pointedly left open: the “spirit of Locarno” pointed more to the revival of Great Power diplomacy than to Geneva. The years 1928–30 saw the last French efforts to achieve stability through Geneva. First there was the meaningless declaration, “outlawing war,” known as the Briand-Kellogg Pact; although many other countries signed up, it was in fact far less than the solid American support
France had hoped for. Then came Briand’s ill-fated proposal for European unity. Finally, there was the 1932 Disarmament Conference, the largest international gathering since 1919. This met in unpropitious conditions: the Manchurian crisis had exposed the weakness of the League in its first major international challenge; Franco-German relations were at a low, following France’s veto of the proposed Austro-German customs union; the economic crisis had plunged the international economy into depression. Again, the French proposed a League of Nations force; again it was rejected. Hitler’s election doomed the conference; the German delegation walked out, and Germany left the League in October 1933.