The Second World War and the Holocaust didn’t
just happen because “the evil misguided Germans” voted Hitler into power. World
War II was a product of the outcome of World War l. The peace treaties forced
upon Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey by the US, Britain and
France after World War I laid the foundation to the rise of totalitarianism in
Europe with all its consequences.
On this day
100 years ago, the victorious Entente Powers, led by the US, Britain and
France, signed the infamous Treaty of Versailles with Germany. It was the first
of a series of so-called “peace treaties“ between the Entente and the Central
Powers ending World War l.
In the US,
Britain and France the treaties were sold as historic victories for democracy
and the principle of self-determination. However, in reality they were dictates
with little to no regard to the will of the affected population groups in
regional Europe. They laid the foundation to the rise of authoritarian regimes
across Europe, among them Hitlers Nazi dictatorship in Germany, eventually leading
to the horrors of World War II and subsequently the Cold War and other ongoing conflicts
in Europe and the Middle East.
The First
World War was not a conflict between democracies and authoritarian
dictatorships. The opposing parties were equally imperialist and contained a
mixture of democratic, semi-democratic and virtually absolutist regimes. World
War I started out as a regional conflict in the Balkans and ended up as a full
scale War on territorial and economic supremacy across large parts of the globe.
In 1918,
after four years of full scale war, in which both sides butchered millions of
soldiers and civilians unnecessarily, people were finally ready to mount the
barricades and stop the slaughter. Politicians on both sides continued to spread
rumours of an imminent victory while making grandiose demands for territorial gains
and war reparations. The so called “14
points” announced by US President Woodrow Wilson to Congress in early 1918 called
for a new democratic world order based on equality, democracy and self
determination. Wilson‘s promise was decisive in bringing about a ceasefire.
But the so
called “peace conferences“ with Germany in Versailles, Austria in Saint Germain,
Hungary in Trianon, Bulgaria in Neuilly-sur-Seine and Turkey in Lausanne turned
into a farce. Representatives from the affected countries were not even allowed
to join the conference table. They had to wait at isolated locations where they
were presented with treaties that went beyond their worst expectations and that
showed no regard to the will of the affected regional populations. The
representatives of the “losing powers” had no other choice but to sign,
otherwise the Entente would have continued or extended their food and coal
embargo which had already cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives. Any
modern court would declare these treaties invalid as democratically elected
representatives were blackmailed into signing something while some of the most
basic human rights were ignored.
Germany lost
Alsace-Lorraine to France, Poznania and parts of former West-Prussia and Upper
Silesia to Poland, the region of Eurpen-Malmédy to Belgium, Northern Schleswig
to Denmark, the Memel Territory to Lithuania and the so call Hultschin Region
to Czechoslovakia. While there was certainly majority support in Poznania and
parts of West Prussia to join Poland and Northern Schleswig voted to join
Denmark, it is questionable if there was a majority in favour of joining France
in Alsace-Lorraine. On the other hand, it is certain that the majority of the
population in all other areas ceded from Germany wanted to remain German.
However, besides
these forced and to a large extend undemocratic boundary changes, what hit the
country hardest were the shocking reparations of $ 33 Billion Germany was
supposed to pay to the victors in installments until the 1980s, an amount inconvincible
at the time.
The
Hapsburg Empire, a country with great potential to become a first democratic
Central European Union at the time, was forcibly dismantled. The newly created purely
“German” Austria lost the German speaking parts of Bohemia, Moravia and
Austrian (later Czech) Silesia to newly founded Czechoslovakia. German speaking
South Tyrol became Italian. Especially the forced detachment of South Tyrol was
considered a great injustice as the territory had no connection with Italy
whatsoever. It was merely a trophy Italy received for joining the War on the
side of the Entente. The territory remains a kind of Italian colony to this
day.
Historical
Hungary was dismantled and much of it subdivided between her neighbours. Hungary
did not only loose non-Hungarian speaking territories to Czechoslovakia,
Romania and Yugoslavia, but also areas with Hungarian majorities North of the
Danube, in Crisana, the Vojvodina, the Banat and in Transylvania.
The Ottoman
Empire was also dismantled. Due to an aggressive military campaign shortly
after the War, the successor state, Turkey, kept much of her Kurdish territory
against the will of the local population. Other parts of the Ottoman Empire
were simply subdivided between the British and the French. New countries without
any historic legacy emerged. The mess created by the Entente in 1919/20 sparked
a fire that has irreversibly destabilized the Middle East. The emergence of
Islamism, Islamic terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the civil Wars
in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq as well as the Iranian Islamic Revolution are a
product of the failure of the US, Britain and France to create a democratic
rather than a new imperialist and colonialist world order.
In Europe
alone, more than 10 million people, many of them constituting regional ethnic majorities,
were forced into neighbouring ethnic nation states against their will. This
enormous injustice naturally led to mistrust between Germany, Austria and Hungary
on the one hand and their neighbours on the other hand. In addition, enormous
ethnic conflicts emerged domestically in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, France,
Romania and Yugoslavia between the majority and their forcibly created new large
German and Hungarian minorities. All six countries added fuel to the flames by adopting
Centralist constitutions preventing any form of autonomous self-government in German
and Hungarian speaking regions.
The mess
created by Britain, France and the US at Versailles, St Germain and Trianon
eventually led to the rise of nationalist regimes in almost all European
countries. With the economic crisis that hit the World in the 1930s, democratic
and semi-democratic nationalist regimes eventually turned into outright
dictatorships. Hitler was one of many radicals whose ideas could only flourish
under conditions created by the Western Powers a few years earlier.
The legacy
of the post-World War I peace treaties can be felt to this day. 50 Million War
death, the holocaust, the post-War expulsions, 40 years of Cold War, the Balkan
Wars, ongoing border conflicts as well as civil wars in the Middle East can be
directly linked to the World War I peace dictates. Today some of the political
decision makers in the US and Britain are at it again trying to undermine the much
needed European unification process that has been the basis of peace and
reconciliation for the last 74 years. If the nationalists in Europe win again,
history will repeat itself. And this time it will most likely be the final World
War.
