Wilson and His Peacemakers; J. Chamberlain

Walworth sums things up pithily by saying that "the withdrawal of the United States" in 1919 from active peacemaking decisions "left many of the expectations raised by its president unfulfilled. German Social Democrats, striving to operate a new government, were disap pointed in their overoptimistic hopes. Contrary to the doctrine of self-determination, they found their population and that of Austria di minished by hundreds of thousands of people of their blood. Instead of sharing in the political reconstruction of the world's society that Wilson had advocated under economic arrange ments that would make it possible to engage in productive industry and profitable trade, Ger many could look forward only to inflation and bankruptcy. " Wilson went to Paris with high hopes that he Woodrow Wilson could put some meaning into his rhetoric about making the world safe for democracy. He had enlisted scholars to redraw the map of Europe and to indicate possible mandates for both the Middle East and the colonial preserves of Africa. Ethnic lines and language groupings would be respected. The word, stressed over and over again, was' 'self-determination. " But there were brute facts of geography to be reck 0ned with, and the disposition of raw materials was not always convenient. Then there were the secret understandings among the European nations that antedated America's entry into the war.

Unable to cope with the wiliness of Britain's Lloyd George and the intense nationalism and Germanophobia of Clemenceau, the "Tiger of France," Wilson put his remaining trust in the League of Nations. The League would do·what the Treaty of Versailles had left undone. But Wilson sadly underestimated the fact that Europe remained a prey to disruptive forces that were deeply rooted in history. The Czechs were quarreling with the Poles over coal mines at Teschen. The Sudeten Germans, Iiving on a strip of territory that had been awarded to Czechoslovakia for reasons of military safety, were hard to conciliate. In the South Tyrol hundreds of thousands of Germans and Aus trians were consumed with acute distaste for the Italian government that had insisted on an nexing them. Poland had to deal with Ukrai nians in territory that was supposed to protect East Galicia. The Croats and the Slovenes, shoved together in the New Yugoslavia, were in a perpetual state of friction. Bulgaria and Hungary had lost large portions of their native popUlations. Instead of democracy, dictatorship was to be the lot of many of the small East Eu ropean countries.