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TYING UP THE LOOSE ENDS OF NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION: BRITISH, FRENCH, AND AMERICAN EXPERTS IN PEACE PLANNING, 1917–1919*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2014

VOLKER PROTT
VOLKER PROTT*
Affiliation:
University of Tübingen
*
Seminar für Zeitgeschichte, University of Tübingen, Germany[email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines Allied peace planning during the latter stages of the First World War by comparing and connecting the British, French, and American expert groups. These academic experts were expected to apply the publicly announced programme of national self-determination to the local realities in Europe without losing sight of their governments’ geopolitical directives. Contacts and exchanges between the three groups, largely neglected in the literature, played a crucial role in shaping the experts’ work. At the same time, persisting national suspicion and the fragile institutional position of the experts prevented open debate on the precise meaning of national self-determination and thereby forestalled the development of a coherent Allied peace programme. This shortcoming would become a serious burden for the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference and the early interwar period, in that it led to growing frustration and undermined Allied commitment to the Paris peace treaties.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 727 - 750
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the School of History at the University of St Andrews and at the international conference ‘Between Autonomy and Engagement: Performances of Scientific Expertise, 1860–1960’, held at the University of Leuven. The feedback I received on these two occasions contributed much to improve the structure and argument of this article. The Historical Journal's anonymous referees also made useful comments. I owe special thanks to Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Dirk Moses, who provided important guidance and helped me refine my argument. Margot Wylie read the manuscript closely and made helpful suggestions for improvement in style. The research for this article was funded by a Ph.D. scholarship provided by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

References

1 Minutes of the first plenary session on 18 Jan. 1919 at 3pm, Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States (FRUS): 1919, the Paris Peace Conference, iii (Washington, DC, 1943), pp. 159–69.

2 Formally and significantly, the United States were an ‘associated’ power. For the sake of linguistic simplicity, however, I include them in the term ‘Allies’.

3 On the importance of the Soviet challenge, see Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism (Oxford, 2007), pp. 37–43Google Scholar, and recently Throntveit, Trygve, ‘The fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and self-determination’, Diplomatic History, 35 (2011), pp. 445–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 457–60.

4 For the full text see wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Prime_Minister_Lloyd_George_on_the_British_War_Aims.

5 This conception of experts as ‘honest brokers’ is developed by Pielke, Roger A., The honest broker: making sense of science in policy and politics (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 It has to be kept in mind that the peace negotiations in Paris were initially intended to precede a full peace conference including the Central Powers. This preliminary character of the peace planning process, which continued up to the early phase of the Paris Peace Conference, added to the cautious attitude of the Allied expert groups concerning a full exchange of their views before ‘official’ negotiations would begin.

7 John Maynard Keynes, an economic expert of the British peace delegation in Paris, formulated the most influential contemporary critique of the Paris Peace Conference in his The economic consequences of the peace (London, 1920).

8 For a selection of social science literature on expertise, see Selinger, Evan and Crease, Robert P., eds., The philosophy of expertise (New York, NY, 2006)Google Scholar; Collins, Harry M. and Evans, Robert, Rethinking expertise (Chicago, IL, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fischer, Frank, Democracy and expertise: reorienting policy inquiry (New York, NY, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pielke, The honest broker.

9 See MacLeod, Roy M., ed., Government and expertise: specialists, administrators and professionals, 1860–1919 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

10 See Ash, Eric H., ‘Introduction: expertise and the early modern state’, in idem, , ed., Expertise: practical knowledge and the early modern state (Chicago, IL, 2010), pp. 1–24Google Scholar.

11 See Engstrom, Eric J., Hess, Volker and Thoms, Ulrike, ‘Figurationen des Experten: Ambivalenzen der wissenschaftlichen Expertise im ausgehenden 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert’, in idem, , eds., Figurationen des Experten: Ambivalenzen der wissenschaftlichen Expertise im ausgehenden 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), pp. 7–17Google Scholar, at p. 10, and Kohlrausch, Martin, Steffen, Katrin, and Wiederkehr, Stefan, ‘Expert cultures in Central Eastern Europe: the internationalization of knowledge and the transformation of nation states since World War I: introduction’, in idem, , eds., Expert cultures in Central Eastern Europe: the internationalization of knowledge and the transformation of nation states since World War I (Osnabrück, 2010), pp. 9–30Google Scholar, at p. 9, who call the twentieth century the ‘century of the expert’.

12 Kohlrausch, Steffen, and Wiederkehr, ‘Introduction’.

13 Engstrom, Hess, and Thoms, ‘Figurationen’.

14 See ibid., p. 10.

15 Patel, Kiran Klaus and Lipphardt, Veronika, ‘Neuverzauberung im Gestus der Wissenschaftlichkeit: Wissenspraktiken im 20. Jahrhundert am Beispiel menschlicher Diversität’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 34 (2008), pp. 425–54Google Scholar.

16 These are Lowczyk, Olivier, La fabrique de la paix: du comité d’études à la conférence de la paix, l’élaboration par la France des traités de la Première Guerre Mondiale (Paris, 2010)Google Scholar for Goldstein, France; Erik, Winning the peace: British diplomatic strategy, peace planning, and the Paris Peace Conference, 1916–1920 (Oxford, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for Britain;, Great and Gelfand, Lawrence E., The Inquiry: American preparations for peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven, CT, London, 1963)Google Scholar, for the United States. One striking example of the notable lack of interest for making comparisons is Lowczyk's list of references, which does not even mention Goldstein's or Gelfand's work. The only attempt at a more comprehensive survey of the role experts played at the Paris Peace Conference is Kitsikis, Dimitri, Le rôle des experts à la conférence de la paix de 1919: gestation d'une technocratie en politique internationale (Ottawa, 1972)Google Scholar. This study, however, does not include the planning phase and is based on a relatively narrow range of archival material.

17 For the French case, see Bariéty, Jacques, ‘Le “Comité d’études” du Quai d'Orsay et la frontière rhénane, 1917–1919’, in Baechler, Christian and Fink, Carole, eds., The establishment of European frontiers after the two world wars (Bern, 1996), pp. 251–62Google Scholar; Minassian, Taline Ter, ‘Les géographes français et la délimitation des frontières balkaniques à la Conférence de la Paix en 1919’, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 44 (1997), pp. 252–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boulineau, Emmanuelle, ‘Un géographe traceur de frontières: Emmanuel de Martonne et la Roumanie’, L'Espace géographique, 30 (2001), pp. 358–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heffernan, Michael, ‘History, geography and the French national space: the question of Alsace-Lorraine, 1914–1918’, Space and Polity, 5 (2001), pp. 27–48Google Scholar; and Palsky, Gilles, ‘Emmanuel de Martonne and the ethnographical cartography of Central Europe (1917–1920)’, Imago Mundi, 54 (2002), pp. 111–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the British PID, there are only the articles by Goldstein, Erik, ‘Great Britain and greater Greece, 1917–1920’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989), pp. 339–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Dockrill, Michael, ‘The Foreign Office Political Intelligence Department and Germany in 1918’, in idem, and French, David, eds., Strategy and intelligence: British policy during the First World War (London, 1996), pp. 160–83Google Scholar. On the American Inquiry, see Smith, Neil, American empire: Roosevelt's geographer and the prelude to globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2004), pp. 113–38Google Scholar; Ment, David M., ‘Education, nation-building and modernization after World War I: American ideas for the peace conference’, Paedagogica Historica, 41 (2005), pp. 159–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Crampton, Jeremy W., ‘The cartographic calculation of space: race mapping and the Balkans at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919’, Social and Cultural Geography, 7 (2006), pp. 731–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Memorandum prepared in the Foreign Office and circulated to the War Cabinet by Robert Cecil, 14 Mar. 1918, London, The National Archives (TNA), records of the Foreign Office (FO), 366/787, file no. 45225, pp. 62−5, at pp. 62 and 65. Unless otherwise stated, page numbers refer to the consecutive pagination in the archival record cited.

19 On the enchanting power of science see Patel and Lipphardt, ‘Neuverzauberung’, and, for the context of the Inquiry, see Gelfand, The Inquiry, pp. 158, 330.

20 House, Edward Mandell, The intimate papers of Colonel House, iii: Into the world war (Boston, MA, and New York, NY, 1928), p. 319Google Scholar.

21 Especially the American and French governments were concerned with secrecy, while the complex structure of British peace planning probably did not make for a good story. In the American and French case, secrecy is generally depicted as having been a hindrance to the efforts of the experts. See Gelfand, The Inquiry, pp. 39–41, 71, and Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, pp. 34, 106–7, 472.

22 For its second volume, the comité d’études increasingly recruited geographers and not historians, as Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, p. 65, notes. The Inquiry moved its headquarters to the American Geographical Society and with Isaiah Bowman saw a geographer assigned as its chief expert. In the case of the PID, in contrast, the direct influence of geographers was less marked. See Heffernan, Michael, ‘Geography, cartography and military intelligence: the Royal Geographical Society and the First World War’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 21 (1996), pp. 504–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at p. 521. Of course, the maps prepared by the Geographical Section provided an important basis of the work of the British experts.

23 Lavisse had previous experience in advising politicians and was well connected in the French political scene. Benoist had taught history at the École libre des sciences politiques and was deputy for the Département de la Seine between 1902 and 1919. See Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, pp. 45–8.

24 Lippmann was a politically influential publicist and Mezes was a philosopher who had good connections to Colonel House through his marriage to the latter's sister-in-law.

25 On Tyrrell see Goldstein, Winning the peace, pp. 65–7.

26 The PID, which Hardinge wanted to establish as a permanent body of the Foreign Office, existed until 1920, when it was closed due to budgetary shortages. It was, however, recreated in 1939. See Goldstein, Winning the peace, p. 88.

27 See Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, pp. 79–81, 106–11.

28 Smith, American empire, pp. 132–4, has emphasized the geopolitical background of the attention that the Inquiry dedicated to Latin American issues.

29 Walter Lippmann, Report on the Inquiry, 10 May 1918 (Inquiry doc. 882), FRUS: 1919, the Paris Peace Conference, i (Washington, DC, 1942), pp. 82–97, at p. 97.

30 See Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, pp. 79–126. The minutes of the comité consultatif can be found in Paris, Archives du ministère des affaires étrangères (MAE), Papiers d'agents – Archives privées (PA−AP), 166, André Tardieu, vols. 347 (pp. 245–51, Belgium), 360 (pp. 96–100, Poland), 368 (pp. 3–12, Czechoslovakia), 371 (pp. 48–56, Romania), 382 (pp. 64–9, Yugoslavia), and 390 (pp. 55–63, Italy/Yugoslavia).

31 On the friendly relationship between House and Wiseman see Gelfand, The Inquiry, pp. 116–20, and Goldstein, Winning the peace, pp. 43–44, 101.

32 On House's mission to London, see Inquiry doc. 981, College Park, MA, National Archives and Records Administration II (NARA), Record Group (RG) 256, entry 4.

33 See the memorandum by George W. Prothero on the ‘Communication of Peace Handbooks to the U. S. Peace Delegation’, 23 Mar. 1920, TNA, FO 370/98, pp. 383−8, at p. 383, also for the following quotations.

34 Prothero mentioned ‘Greenland, St. Pierre and Miquelon, the Falkland Island, Central and South America, various islands (Galapagos &c) in the Eastern Pacific; also those on questions of International Law, Zionism etc’, ibid., p. 384.

35 These can be found in the Inquiry archives, NARA, RG 256, entry 4, Inquiry doc. 980.

36 Memorandum by Prothero, 23 Mar. 1920, TNA, FO 370/98, p. 385.

37 See Johnson's report on the ‘Arrangements made by the British Government for Collecting Data for the Peace Conference’, dated 1 May 1918, NARA, RG 256, entry 4, Inquiry doc. 987.

38 See Prothero's memorandum, 23 Mar. 1920, TNA, FO 370/98, pp. 386–7.

39 House to Mezes, 3 June 1918, NARA, RG 256, entry 1, box 7, folder ‘Colonel House’.

40 Mezes to House, 14 June 1918, ibid.

41 Lippmann to House, 7 June 1918, ibid.

42 Ibid., also for the following quotations.

43 This problem is highlighted by Gelfand, The Inquiry, pp. 32–78, who speaks of ‘experts’ in inverted commas.

44 See Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, p. 109.

45 See ibid., p. 96.

46 For a list of participants to the congress see Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MA, Isaiah Bowman papers (IBP), Series 13.10 (Paris Peace Conference, Scrapbook), p. 169. For the correspondence between de Martonne and Bowman see IBP, Series 2.30 (personal correspondence, Mar-McCulloh), folder ‘de Martonne’, and NARA, RG 256, entry 1, box 10, folder ‘de Martonne’.

47 See the report sent by Emmanuel de Martonne to the French foreign ministry dated 24 Oct. 1918, MAE, A Paix, vol. 220, pp. 27–34.

48 See Demande de visa de passeport, dated 25 Nov. 1918, IBP, Series 13.10 (Paris Peace Conference, Scrapbook), p. 149.

49 Apart from his reports on the PID and the comité d’études, see his various interviews with political and economic leaders in Great Britain and France during his European mission in NARA, RG 256, entry 4, Inquiry doc. 992.

50 Inquiry doc. 993, dated 13 Mar. 1918, NARA, RG 256, entry 4.

51 See Inquiry doc. 988, ‘Detailed information on French Official preparations for studying conditions of Peace’, no author, no date (Johnson sometime in late Mar. to early Apr. 1918, or before 5 Apr., at any rate, which is the date on which Vidal de la Blache died), NARA, RG 256, entry 4.

52 Report on the Committee of Research of the Sorbonne, no author, no date (Johnson in late Mar. or early Apr. 1918), Inquiry doc. 982, NARA, RG 256, entry 4.

53 See ‘Report on Origin, Personnel, and Organization of the French “Comité d’Études”, appointed to assemble data for the peace conference’ by Douglas Johnson, 13 Aug. 1918, Inquiry doc. 270, NARA, RG 256, entry 4, also for the following quotations.

54 On this point see Freund, Wolfgang, ‘Disputierte Bevölkerung: Der gelehrte Streit um die Menschen an der deutsch-französischen Grenze’, in Krassnitzer, Patrick and Overath, Petra, eds., Bevölkerungsfragen: Prozesse des Wissenstransfers in Deutschland und Frankreich (1870–1939) (Cologne, 2007), pp. 207–32Google Scholar, at p. 216.

55 See Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, p. 100.

56 See ibid., p. 101.

57 The five reports are the Inquiry documents 69, 173, 331, 462, and 1006, NARA, RG 256, entry 4.

58 See e.g. the memorandum on ‘The Peace Conference Settlement, Points which may be raised by France’, dated 10 Dec. 1918, TNA, FO 371/4353, PC 8, pp. 416–21, and Goldstein, Winning the peace, pp. 147, 231–3.

59 See Goldstein, Winning the peace, pp. 99, 107.

60 Douglas Johnson to the Inquiry, 25 July 1918, on ‘Suggestions for a plan for the closer cooperation of the several commissions engaged in assembling data for use at the peace conference’, NARA, RG 256, entry 1, box 7, folder ‘Colonel House’, p. 1 (in the report).

61 Hugues Le Roux was a writer, journalist, and senator from 1920 to 1925, see www.senat.fr/senateur-3eme-republique/le_roux_hugues1668r3.html#1889-1940. However, since there is no further archival trace of him regarding the contact between the French and British expert groups, it is impossible to determine whether he actually visited the PID or what his role was in this context.

62 Johnson's report to the Inquiry, 25 July 1918, NARA, RG 256, entry 1, box 7, folder ‘Colonel House’, pp. 4, 6, 7−8.

63 See Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, p. 34. Unfortunately, Lowczyk does not give further details.

64 Ibid., p. 103.

65 See London, Royal Historical Society, George W. Prothero papers, personal correspondence, letters by Émile Bourgeois to Prothero (in French), dated 3 Aug. 1916 and 24 July 1918.

66 For the Franco-British networks of geographers in this period, see Clout, Hugh and Stevenson, Iain, ‘Jules Sion, Alan Grant Ogilvie and the Collège des Ecossais in Montpellier: a network of geographers’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 120 (2004), pp. 181–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at pp. 185–6.

67 See IBP, Series 13.2 (Paris Peace Conference, C–D), diary entry from 16 Mar. 1919.

68 See Headlam-Morley, James, A memoir of the Paris Peace Conference 1919, ed. Headlam-Morley, Agnes et al. (London, 1972), pp. 18–19Google Scholar, 33; Nicolson, Harold, Peacemaking 1919 (London, 1964), pp. 104Google Scholar, 107, 223; and IBP, Series 13.2 (Paris Peace Conference, C–D), folder ‘Diary’. According to these three sources, meetings of the British and American experts took place on 6, 7, 9, 11, 14, and 30 Jan., as well as on 1, 3, 21, and 28 Feb. and 1 Mar. 1919.

69 See Benoist, Charles, Souvenirs, III: 1902–1933: vie parlamentaire, vie diplomatique (Paris, 1934), pp. 326–32Google Scholar.

70 See IBP, Series 13.2 (Paris Peace Conference, C–D), diary entries of 5, 13, 16, 18 Jan. and 16 Mar. 1919.

71 For example, Benoist, Souvenirs, p. 329, remarked that the comité's deliberations needed to be kept ‘secret’, since they touched on ‘delicate subjects, even between allies’ (all translations by the author, VP, unless otherwise stated).

72 For a refined if somewhat artificial distinction between Wilson's original ideas of self-government and their later transformation into national self-determination see Throntveit, ‘Fourteen Points’.

73 A typical critique of the Paris Peace Conference stated that it ‘fell between the two stools of realism and idealism’. Harold Nicolson, ‘Marginal Comment’, Spectator, 20 Mar. 1942, p. 278, cited after IBP, Series 13.1 (Paris Peace Conference, A–C), folder ‘Abstracts’.

74 For the informative example of the territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and in Anatolia, see most recently Doumanis, Nicholas, Before the nation: Muslim–Christian coexistence and its destruction in late-Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford, 2013)Google Scholar. The introduction of national distinctions to multi-confessional and linguistically mixed areas like Upper Silesia could trigger the outbreak of ethnic violence, as has been shown by Wilson, Timothy, Frontiers of violence: conflict and identity in Ulster and Upper Silesia, 1918–1922 (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the more general phenomenon of paramilitary violence in Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, see Gerwarth, Robert and Horne, John, ‘Vectors of violence: paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923’, Journal of Modern History, 83 (2011), pp. 489–512CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 The literature has largely disregarded this issue of which ‘version’ of national self-determination the peace-makers and their experts applied. Instead, many authors over-generalize and claim that the Paris peace treaties were generally ‘flawed’. See e.g. Winter, Jay M., Dreams of peace and freedom: utopian moments in the twentieth century (New Haven, CT, 2006), p. 51Google Scholar. The more recent literature takes a more nuanced stance towards the peace negotiations but has thus far missed the opportunity to reassess the role that the Wilsonian ideas played in this rediscovered complexity. See e.g. Trachtenberg, Marc, ‘Versailles after sixty years’, Journal of Contemporary History, 17 (1982), pp. 487–506CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Macmillan, Margaret, Paris 1919: six months that changed the world (New York, NY, 2003)Google Scholar.

76 See notably the reports by Emmanuel de Martonne, dated 24 Oct. 1918, and Louis Aubert, dated 11 Dec. 1918, MAE, A Paix, vol. 220, pp. 27–34 (de Martonne) and 4–14 (Aubert). On this aspect see also Ter Minassian, ‘Les géographes français’, pp. 256, 277–83.

77 See Smith, American empire, pp. 115, 117, 135, 140–3.

78 Minutes of the General Conference on 2 Aug. 1918, IBP, Series 13.12 (Paris Peace Conference, Red Book 1 & 2, memo, Divisional Chiefs Conference), pp. 5−6 (in the file).

79 Crampton, ‘Cartographic calculation’, p. 739.

80 See Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, pp. 473–5.

81 Possibly the only exception is Benoist, Souvenirs, who has given a pessimistic account of the comité d’études.

82 See Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix, p. 12. One of the pioneering studies on the comité is Bariéty, ‘Comité d’études’.

83 On the professionalization of US foreign policy and state administration in the twentieth century see Turner, Stephen, ‘What is the problem with experts?’, in Selinger, and Crease, , eds., Philosophy of expertise, pp. 159–86Google Scholar, at pp. 172–4.

84 See Bowman's correspondence with Charles Seymour, IBP, Series 2.40 (personal correspondence, Schaeffer-Shuf), and the undated report by Bowman (probably 1920) on ‘The geographic program of the American peace delegation’, IBP, Series 13.3 (Paris Peace Conference, G–I), folder ‘Inquiry 9’.

85 See e.g. the volume by House, Edward Mandell and Seymour, Charles, eds., What really happened at Paris: the story of the peace conference, 1918–1919: by American delegates (London, 1921)Google Scholar.

86 Smith, American empire, p. 168.

87 On the role of the experts at the peace conference see Day, Clive, ‘The atmosphere and organization of the peace conference’, in House, and Seymour, , eds., What really happened at Paris, pp. 15–36Google Scholar; Kitsikis, Le rôle des experts; Goldstein, Winning the peace, pp. 229–78; and, for the French perspective, Lowczyk, Fabrique de la paix.

88 Quoted from the minutes of the meeting on 13 Feb. 1919 in Conférence de la paix 1919–1920, Recueil des actes de la Conférence: Partie IV, C, 4: Commission des affaires roumaines et yougo-slaves (Paris, 1923), p. 25 (my translation).

89 See Keynes, Economic consequences; Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919; and Headlam-Morley, Memoir.

90 See the correspondence between Lord and Bowman in Aug. and Sept. 1918, NARA, RG 256, entry 2, box 21, folder ‘Relations with State Department’.

91 Diary of William C. Bullitt, entry of 9 Dec. 1918, The papers of Woodrow Wilson, liii:November 9, 1918 – January 11, 1919 (Princeton, NJ, 1986), p. 350.

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid., p. 352.

94 Several diaries of Inquiry experts mention the meeting with Wilson; see ibid., pp. 350–7 (diaries of Bullitt, Bowman, and Charles Seymour).

95 On 20 Dec. 1918, Lansing, Robert, The peace negotiations: a personal narrative (Boston, MA, and New York, NY, 1921), p. 97Google Scholar, noted: ‘When the President talks of “self-determination” what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community? Without a definite unit which is practical, application of this principle is dangerous to peace and stability.’