The Exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations. Article IV of the Covenant provides for a council of nine members, five of whom are permanent “representatives of the principal Allied and Associated Powers.” The four minority members “shall be selected by the Assembly from time to time in its discretion.” It is true that the Council “may name additional members of the League whose representatives shall always be members of the Council,” and that new members of the League may be admitted on a two thirds vote of the Assembly. But the jokers that exclude Germany from membership in the League as well as in the Council are the qualifying clauses providing that a new member “shall give effective guarantees of its sincere intention to observe its international obligations” and that each member of the Council possesses an absolute veto. It is easily seen that these jokers put the admission of Germany entirely in the hands of France, who can be sole judge of Germany’s worthiness. This same handicap holds in regard to Russia. And no student of world affairs believes that the League of Nations can become anything else than the subservient tool of the Entente powers, unable to move in anything against their interests or wishes, unless Germany and Russia are permanent members of the Council.
The Failure to Establish or Promise Reciprocity in Any of Its Provisions That Would Otherwise Have Been for the Common Good of the World. The Treaty of Versailles contains many good points, such as its penalties; the restoration of plunder taken from other countries during previous wars as well as during the recent war; the military, naval, and air clauses; the resurrection of Poland; the erection of mixed arbitral tribunals; aërial navigation clauses; ports, waterways and railways clauses; labor clauses; and other minor points. But all these features, good in themselves, are not written in the treaties for the purpose of establishing improved international relations but as additional means of crippling and punishing Germany. None of them are contractual, in the ordinary sense; that is, they bind only one party. Reciprocity is not provided for, even in the future. The result is not only to put Germans in a position of inferiority to citizens of neighboring nations for the time being but to give them no hope that this condition will ever be remedied. For the numerous jokers take away the effectiveness of the time-limits provided in some instances for withholding reciprocity.
It is inconceivable that officers and men of Allied armies had not been guilty of violations of international law during more than four years of fighting. But only Germans were to be tried, and the German Government bound itself to hand over for trial before Allied tribunals all whose names should be handed in. This impossible provision in itself put Germany in hopeless default from the moment her representatives signed the treaty. Only if the Germans had been an uncivilized tribe of savages could such provisions have been executed. Similarly, the trial of Kaiser Wilhelm, too, before an impartial tribunal would have been a splendid measure. But the treaty bound the Germans to an unheard-of thing in international relations. They were obliged to confess their rulers’ guilt and their own, as a people, before the trial! And the treaty gave no promise, as it should have done, that the question of the responsibility for the war would be fairly gone into by a court of justice, with all the evidence before it. If the purpose of the men who made the Treaty of Versailles was not vindictiveness but a desire to get at the truth, they would have coupled their demand for the trial of the Kaiser with a guarantee that all the documentary evidence on both sides should be brought into court. Only in this way could a fair trial have been had. The penalties clauses of the treaty, therefore, violate the accepted principles of law as well as the dictates of fair play and common sense.
If the treaty had limited itself to the restoration of the loot of the recent war, no exception could have been taken. But Germany was summoned to give up art treasures and other plunder of the long ago. Was this done because the restitution was a matter of justice or to remove ancient grievances that stood in the way of the reconciliation of peoples? If so, the victors should have promised to give back to one another and to neutral nations—and in many instances to the vanquished—the more notorious examples of loot in their own national galleries and museums. This was a trifling matter, but it showed the spirit of the treaty.
Permanent peace could never come from a one-sided application of the principle of disarmament, especially when it was coupled with the guarantees clauses. History does not record an instance where a great people, deprived of its means of defense, with portions of its territory under military occupation and neighboring enemy countries still armed to the teeth, did not find some means, internally or through alliances, to break the grip of its enemies. In 1870, by annexing Alsace-Lorraine, Bismarck made an armed camp of Europe. In 1919, by occupying the Rhine and disarming Germany without promising themselves to disarm, the Allies, in the Treaty of Versailles, laid the foundation for a greater and more dangerous unrest than Europe has known in modern times. Lack of reciprocity in the military, naval, and aërial clauses was practicable only (a) if the enemies of Germany were ready to form a permanent alliance and keep several million men under arms, or (b) if they were willing to kill indefinitely all male children born in Germany—and also the existing male population under twenty-five.
The resurrection of Poland could have been a glorious and blessed result of the Paris settlement had it been conceived and carried out in the interests of the Poles. But the resurrection of Poland, as provided for in the Treaty of Versailles and the supplementary treaty, was an attempt to create an artificial state for old-fashioned “balance of power” purposes. The real interests of the Poles were not considered at all. Their only hope of succeeding in rebuilding their national life lay in having boundaries that would not in the future create against them fatal antagonism on the part of their two powerful neighbors, Germany and Russia. Had Polish and not French interests been considered in writing the Treaty of Versailles, the new Poland would not have been saddled with the Danzig corridor, and Upper Silesia would have remained German territory. A combination of fear and greed, without statesmanlike vision, made a Poland that can never last. The frontiers of Poland, as drawn in the Treaty of Versailles, heralded war and not peace. They were a perpetuation of the worst evil from which Europe had been suffering. The corridor and the “free port of Danzig” were declared to be necessary in order to give Poland an outlet to the sea, despite the fact that Danzig is an indisputably German city. But the same men at the same time took away Trieste and Fiume from Austria and Hungary, despite the dependence of their hinterland upon them, invoking the argument of the population of the ports, the validity of which was hotly denied by them when Germany invoked it!
The erection of mixed arbitral tribunals for adjustment of war claims of private citizens put a premium upon the appeal to force. What it meant was that, if your country was successful in fighting, you had a valid claim against a citizen of a defeated country, and that your claim would be adjusted by arbiters appointed by your own country. The important thing, then, according to the Treaty of Versailles, was not the sanctity of private contracts entered into between individuals of different nations, but citizenship in a winning nation.
In aërial navigation and in ports, waterways, and railways, the right of the victors to transit across and privileges on German soil were affirmed without reciprocity. Not only were the Germans denied the right of transport by air and water and rail, on equal terms with other nations, outside their own country, but they were required to open up Germany to Allied control and to concede special privileges in waterways and ports, to facilitate the passage over their territory of international trains—all this without reciprocity. The time-limits set gave no reasonable hope of a change; for the removal of disabilities depended upon the integral observance of all the other treaty obligations.
The Violation of the Principle of Self-Determination Where It Was to the Interest of the Victors to Ignore It. On the ground that Alsace-Lorraine had been forcibly taken from France against the will of the inhabitants in a previous war, it was altogether just that France should receive back her “lost provinces” without a plebiscite. Even had one been taken, the result would not have been in doubt. France would have won by an overwhelming vote. It was just also to stipulate the return to Denmark of indisputably Danish territory, with a plebiscite for doubtful border districts. The other territorial provisions were open to question.
The most flagrant violation of the principle of self-determination was in the matter of the detachment for fifteen years (with a plebiscite at the end of that time) of the Saar Valley