The Abyss by Niall Ferguson

Author:Niall Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2012-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

REDRAWING THE MAP

Was the port at the mouth of the River Vistula called Danzig, its German name? Or was it to be Gdańsk, as the Poles called it? Once a free, self-governing Hanseatic city under the protection of the Teutonic Knights, Danzig had recognized the sovereignty of the Polish crown from the mid-fifteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century. But in 1793 it was annexed by Prussia, then, after a brief period of independence during the Napoleonic era, in 1871 it became part of the German Reich. More than 90 per cent of the town’s population were German. Most of the peasants in the surrounding countryside, however, were Polish or Slavonic Kashubes.

Danzig was one of countless questions to confront the Western leaders and their entourages when they gathered at Versailles in 1919. The great optimist and moralist among them, the Virginian-born and Presbyterian-raised US President Woodrow Wilson, believed he had the answers.4 Some of these were familiar liberal nostrums, like free trade and freedom of the seas. Others built on pre-war and wartime proposals for collective security, arms control and an end to ‘secret diplomacy’; from these Wilson fashioned his League of Nations, with its biblical ‘Covenant’. The most radical of Wilson’s schemes, however, envisaged a reordering of the European map on the basis of national ‘self-determination’. From December 1914 onwards Wilson had argued that any peace settlement ‘should be for the advantage of the European nations regarded as Peoples and not for any nation imposing its governmental will upon alien people’. In May 1915 he went further, asserting unequivocally that ‘every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live’. He repeated the point in January 1917 and elaborated on its implications in points five to thirteen of his Fourteen Points. According to Wilson’s original draft of the Covenant, the League would not merely guarantee the territorial integrity of its member states but would be empowered to accommodate future territorial adjustments ‘pursuant to the principle of self-determination’. This was not entirely novel, needless to say. British liberal thinkers since John Stuart Mill had been arguing that the homogeneous nation state was the only proper setting for a liberal polity, and British poets and politicians had spasmodically stuck up for the right to independence of the Greeks and the Italians, whom they tended to romanticize. When trying to imagine an ideal map of Europe in 1857, Giuseppe Mazzini had imagined just eleven nation states ordered on the basis of nationality. But never before had a statesman proposed to make national self-determination the basis for a new European order. In combination with the League, self-determination was to take precedence over the integrity of the sovereign state, the foundation of international relations since the Treaty of Westphalia two and a half centuries before.

Applying the principle of self-determination proved far from easy, however, for two reasons. First, as we have seen, there were more than thirteen million Germans already living east of the borders of the pre-war Reich – perhaps as much as a fifth of the total German-speaking population of Europe.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.