100 Years ago at Versailles: When the US, Britain & France laid the foundation to the rise of Hitler

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.

Diverse tongues-Ethnic minorities and languages preserve Europe's rich fabric

Diverse tongues-Ethnic minorities and languages preserve Europe's rich fabric

22.08.2007

By Peter Josika

Opponents of the European Union argue that a multi-ethnic European state destroys diversity and endangers smaller ethnic groups. In fact, the opposite is true, if you look at history and the current state of ethnic minorities in Europe.

Take the Czech Republic as an example. Since the formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the historically multilingual Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia have turned into one of Europe’s most mono-ethnic nation states. The Polish population has dropped 50 percent; the number of Sudeten Germans, once the largest ethnic minority in Europe, has dropped more than 99 percent.

Mono-ethnic states destroy diversity.

By contrast, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium are Europe’s only remaining officially multi-ethnic states. They have preserved their linguistic plurality better than any other nation in Europe. Even smaller ethnic communities such as the Reto-Romans and German-Belgians are flourishing today. Nowhere else in Europe have so many dialects survived as they have in Switzerland.

To go back to the Czech example, the national revival itself was a product of the conditions of former multi-ethnic Austria.

If Bohemia and Moravia had become a part of “mono-ethnic” Germany in 1871, most Czechs would be proud Germans now. Multi-ethnic states are, in fact, the guarantors of ethnic diversity.

Minorities in Europe’s mono-ethnic nation-states struggle to survive. Stateless languages such as Sorbian, Kashubian, Breton, Alsatian or Scots Gaelic are in danger of extinction, while the number of Hungarians (in Slovakia, Romania and Serbia), Germans (in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary), Slovenes (in Italy, Austria) and Poles (in the Czech Republic, Belarus, Ukraine) has decreased markedly in recent decades.

So if we remain a divided Europe of mono-ethnic nation-states we will not only destroy Europe’s position in the world and our economic prospects, but we will also maintain prejudice and ethnic tension. This eventually leads to more conflict of the kind we have experienced in the past.

A Europe of mono-ethnic nation states is also the best recipe to endanger the very existence of Czech identity and nationhood. A united Europe, on the other hand, is the only way to overcome national and ethnic conflict in Central Europe and safeguard the position of all ethnicities, including those of the Czechs.

President Václav Klaus is one of a group of influential politicians who continuously try to torpedo the European unification process. This group openly fights for a return to the Dark Ages of the interwar period.

In addition to Klaus, other politicians from Poland and the Czech Republic have sadly become the driving force of this new Euroskepticism. It is interesting to see how two countries that currently benefit the most from the EU have also become her greatest potential adversaries.

Klaus loves to preach “democracy” if it suits his political strategy. However, when it comes to the EU, as a “true democrat” he should have sided recently with those who are against the Polish government’s push to maintain the status quo (where a Polish vote has twice as much weight as a German vote). Klaus sided with the Poles.

In spite of vocal politicians like Klaus, most Czechs and Poles are not anti-European.

Public opinion polls tell us so. In both countries there is underlying support for greater European political integration and a joint foreign policy, more so than in many West European countries.

However, certain populist politicians continue to scaremonger the public by spreading divisive nationalist slogans and wrong and unsubstantiated fears about the loss of property and identity. They like to call the EU “undemocratic” and “supra-national” to discredit the difficult process of getting the identities and interests of two dozen EU countries all under one umbrella.

As we all know, Europe has gone through an unbelievable transformation over the past few decades. A continent once brainwashed and destroyed by nationalism and communism has started to turn into a united force that stands for democracy, human rights, prosperity, diversity and, most importantly, reconciliation among nations, ethnicities and religious groups.

Since the end of the Cold War, Central and East European countries have been given the opportunity to benefit from and enrich the EU project.

As many of those countries join the EU, they become the fastest-growing economies in the world. Billions of euros in investments and subsidies from countries like Germany, France, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have created this Central and East European economic miracle.

The true key to this success was having the political will to overcome nationalist sentiments after two world wars. Modern Europe was born out of the understanding that nationalism creates division and destruction.

No country has been forced into the EU. All have joined by their free will.

Modern-day Czechs have only to look at history to see their mono-ethnic behavior. Founders in 1918 included Czechs (over-represented), Slovaks and Ruthenians, or Rusyns (under-represented). Germans and Hungarians, who constituted almost 40 percent of the population at the time, were barred completely.

Those same Czechs continue to vigorously defend the equally undemocratic ethnic cleansing of the German-speaking population after World War II.

It is ludicrous of Klaus to lash out at the EU for supposedly being supra-national and undemocratic if these terms fit much better his own views of his own country.

 

— The author, a resident of Biel, Switzerland, is coordinator of the Network of European Bilingual Cities project and a correspondent for Eurolang, the news agency of European minorities (www.eurolang.net).

 

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