Paris Peace Conference: Challenges and Legacy

[Applause] [Music] [Music] the world's leaders met in Paris at the end of the first world war really to settle the outstanding issues from that war how to deal with those who had defeated how to deal with the world which is in turmoil as a result of the war and it was expected in those days that you would have a big peace conference at the end of the war the winners and losers got together they sat down and they talked about what sort of settlements they could come up with which both sides would like it's the way they'd always done it and so what everyone thought who came to Paris in 1919 was they would drop some terms they would then present them to the Germans and the other defeated nations and then they'd all sit around a table and hammer out something that suited everyone and it didn't work like that I think for two reasons partly because the huge weight of issues in front of them the huge number of issues in front of them was really bigger than I think any other peace conference really had ever dealt with them and this the the world war involved the whole world it really was a world war and what had happened as a result of the first world war was that a number of regimes had collapsed Russia had collapsed it was going into civil war at the rolled russian empire had broken up austria-hungary that huge empire that sat at the center of Europe was in pieces it no longer existed Germany was falling to pieces it appeared the Middle East was in turmoil because the Ottoman Empire based in Turkey which had controlled so much the Middle East was itself on its way out and so they found that they had to deal with an enormous range of issues they also found that drawing up the peace terms particularly with Germany which had been the centerpiece the heart of the defeated coalition was very very difficult and sewn in what happened was that what was meant to be a preliminary peace conference the winners got together in Paris in January 1919 and they said we'll sit here for a month we'll drop all the peace terms will then present them to Germany and so on and then have our negotiation didn't happen because the pressure of events was such and the range of issues was such that it took them till May to really draw up the first set of peace tones which were the ones with Germany and by the time they done that they had had such disagreements and they'd been such fights among the victors that they thought we cannot reopen this and now sit around with the defeated nations and so it turned out to be a very different Peace Conference from all the ones that have come before and this of course enraged the Germans who said but wait a minute we thought we were going to have a proper negotiation and the allies said no here are the terms we will accept reservations in writing well look at them we may not accept them but basically take it or leave it and so the Paris Peace Conference was an extraordinary event it was different from what had come before in the way of peace conferences and they never really was going to be anything like it again at the end of the Second World War there were no major peace conferences there were attempts made to have them but it didn't happen and so what you got instead were a series of peace agreements when you look at the Paris Peace Conference and you look at the records which are very full you think here people sitting around talking about things calmly but of course they weren't I mean they were talking about issues they were having meetings they were drawing up agendas and so on but what you always have to remember is the context and they were making the discussions having their discussions in a world which was shattered I mean the first world war had been a catastrophe in terms of Europe it had been something that no one had really properly expected it had lasted for four years it had destroyed hundreds millions of lives it had destroyed societies it was still reverberating through Europe with the collapse of many of the old regimes such as Austria Hungary you know I had a whole series of new countries or old countries struggling to be born again and so the first world war didn't really end the fighting there were lots of little wars all over Europe in the years immediately after the Armistice in 1918 and so part of the atmosphere which you always have to remember part of the context of the Paris Peace Conference was this feeling of dread that something awful has happened to Europe a catastrophe and it may be going to get even worse Russia was in revolution the Bolsheviks had taken over the people who later on became the Communists nobody knew how far that was going to spread and the Bolsheviks themselves kept on saying we can't have a worldwide revolution and it looked for awhile as though they were right because there were revolutions in Hungary which had a communist government there was an attempted revolution in Austria there were revolutions throughout Germany there were violent demonstrations and insurrections in France and Italy in Britain even in North America I mean we had the Winnipeg general strike in Canada which some people thought was the beginning of revolution in Canada and so I think there was this feeling as they met in Paris of what have we done to our European civilization what have we done to the world is it going to get even worse and and adding to the fear I think was the influenza epidemic which broke out at the end of 1918 and began to spread through the world and suddenly people were dying apparently overnight and so there was that feeling that's a very important part of the context the apprehension the sentence have lost a sense of catastrophe but another side is this sense of hope I mean it's paradoxical in a way but in the midst of this catastrophe people were saying you know surely something good has got to come out of this surely we cannot go back to our old ways surely we've got to now finally sit down and say we've got to run the world in a different way and so you had in Paris both the sense of dread which was part of the context but you also had a sense that the world possibly finally will come to its senses and we'll build a different way of dealing with international disputes we'll build a League of Nations which of course is what the American President Woodrow Wilson and a lot of others wanted and so that was another part of the context and yet a third part I think was the pressure of democratic populist most of the countries who came to Paris to negotiate with democracies and so the politicians that political leaders had to think very carefully about what their own publics wanted and their own publics were not clear what they wanted on the one hand they were a lot of them wanted a better world you know something has got to get get get be done out of this horror and that's why Woodrow Wilson was so enormous ly popular in Europe because people look to him as someone who would begin to lead the world into a much better direction I think what you also had was of longing for revenge someone ought to pay some are not to be made to suffer what has happened to us and so you had all this swirl of emotions around the peace conference which of course made it very difficult for those actually making the peace to do so in a cool and rational way Paris was and is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and in fact if you go there today you will see a Paris that in most respects looks very much like the Paris that the peacemakers would have seen when they met there in 1919 the city had been damaged a bit by the war the Germans had brought up long-range guns which were capable of sending shells 50 miles or more and some of those had landed on Paris there had been some bombing from the air because this was just the beginning of aerial warfare and a lot of the trees in Paris had had to be cut down during the war for fuel you also could notice the war if you were there because there were so many people wearing black armbands so many Frenchmen had been killed or wounded in the war the French lost more proportionately more men proportionate to their population than any other country I think in the whole of the First World War and that sense of loss and that sense of the French populace having been bled by the war was very much there I think having said that although Paris was a sad place it was beginning to revive gradually the theatres were reopening gradually things were beginning to stir again they were not going to be the same extravagant priorities and spectacles that you'd had at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars but there were parties and there were dances and there were outings and nightclubs so gradually I think people began to get a sense of life reviving again and for young people and there were an awful lot of young people who came to the peace conference because all the countries brought delegates and they all needed assistance and they only did researchers it was fun so it wasn't all gloom and it wasn't all hard work there was another side to it the only real predecessor for the Paris Peace Conference was the Congress of Vienna which took place at the end of the Napoleonic was between 1814 and 1815 but that was very largely a European conference Americans were there but it wasn't really representing the world the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was much more a world conference you had the the Chinese the Japanese ties with a you had various Latin American countries represented the British Empire was represented or so Australia was their New Zealand was the Canada of course was their South Africa was their countries from representatives from the Middle East were there and then of course representatives from virtually all the European countries and from the United States and so it really was I think a truly international conference and because there was so many different countries there and something like over 30 countries came to Paris to discuss the peace terms you also got all sorts of petitioners coming because if you wanted something done in Paris was the place to go because that's where mostly most of the most powerful people in the world were and so it was an extraordinary event which was not just about making peace terms but also trying to settle all sorts of other problems which were day by day brought before it at the core of the peace conference were five countries and at the core of those five countries were in fact three but the five considered major powers in the Paris Peace Conference were Great Britain the United States France Italy and Japan and something people often forget that both Italy and Japan who of course we're going to be enemies of the Western powers in the Second World War were in fact fighting on the Allied side in the First World War but if you looked at who really counted Italy and Japan were not as powerful as Great Britain in the United States and France and so it was really those three countries or rather their leaders who are in Paris who really made a lot of the most important decisions I'll start in in alphabetical order with France the French very much wanted the conference in Paris because they had played a key part in the defeat of Germany they wanted the conference to take part in Paris take place in Paris partly symbolic because Paris had been attacked and occupied by the Germans in the franco-prussian war of 1870 71 so away this was a symbol of Frances survival and victory the leader of France was Georges Clemenceau who was an extraordinary figure he was an old-line radical which in France meant that he was anti-clerical opposed to the church for human rights for the rule of law all these sorts of things in some ways a progressive figure but in some ways a rather old-fashioned figure very very tough he had been a young man when Paris had been shelled and occupied in 1870 71 and it was said that when he was buried he has to be buried standing up facing Germany may not be true but it says something about his character he had become Prime Minister of France in the course of the first world war when things were looking very very dark for France indeed and he really had held France together and he'd helped it to survive until the ultimate victory he was someone who people said I think unfairly was bent on revenge against Germany I think that's too strong I think what he wanted for France above all was security and he didn't want to see what had happened now twice in his lifetime happening again and that is France being attacked and invaded by Germany the British were represented by David Lloyd George who was the British prime minister and like clemenceau radical I'm smaller radical he technically was in his political party was a liberal party he had come really out of a very unusual background for British politics at a time he'd come from a lower middle-class background he came from Wales which was on the fringes of the British Isles and so he was not typical of British political leaders of that time he didn't come from a grand family didn't have a private income he hadn't gone to university he was I think a very skilled man he liked clemenceau had become Prime Minister during the war he led a coalition of liberals and conservatives and he really like clemenceau had held Great Britain together in what looked like a very dark period of the war when it looked like the Allies might lose what he wanted for Britain was security from the German Navy and what he wanted also was Germany's colonies and Britain had got really both of those before the conference started and so Lloyd George more than Clemenceau was able to take a more detached view and say we shouldn't be too hard on Germany he was caught however by his own public opinion just as Clemenceau was because both the British and French public's wanted revenge from Germany they wanted payment from Germany they wanted Germany to be kept down and lloyd-george had run an election campaign shortly before the peace conference opened an election campaign was in nineteen yet just in December 1918 in which he and members of his party had promised that they would make Germany squeeze they would squeeze Germany like a lemon until the pipsqueak and he was caught in a sense by his own promises that Germany would pay and pay a lot and then you had Woodrow Wilson the American president who was an extraordinary figure he's someone that I certainly personally have never been able to make up my mind about whether or not I would have liked him he was an idealist in some ways he represented I think and perhaps the most idealistic of the big leaders at the Paris Peace Conference he had brought the United States into the war not he said very firmly for any particular gain for the United States but to make the world a better place and what he wanted I think above all else was a League of Nations an association of Nations which would settle disputes among nations which would help to make the world a fairer and more prosperous and more equitable place so that you would not get the sorts of conflicts in the future that you had had in such there's so much in the immediate past Wilson however was also a realist I mean he wasn't just a wild-eyed idealist who knew the United States was powerful it was not yet as powerful as it was going to become but it was clearly a rising power and he knew that he had a certain amount of leverage over the Europeans because the United States had learned a lot of money in particular to Great Britain for its war effort and so Wilson was quite prepared to use that power he was someone who I think called himself a Democrat both small D and large D but he was someone who I think had undemocratic tendencies he tended to think if you disagreed with him that you were wrong he tended to think that he was the only one who understood the people and he tended to believe that his other democratically elected leaders with whom he was dealing and with whom he was dealing did not understand the people and like he did and so they were an interesting combination Clemens so the stiff neck rather traditional French gentleman in some ways Lord George the the new man who'd come out of a much lower class background much more lower-class background than Clemens owes but who was a very good negotiator and then Wilson who came from the u.s. bringing very different sorts of ideas from either Clemenceau Lloyd George and one of the interesting things about the Peace Conference is the interaction among those three men because that interaction was going to be very important in some of the decisions that were later made the Germans had a lot of expectations of the Peace Conference some in my view highly unrealistic I think they felt that it would be the old style of negotiation where they sat down with the winners and they tried to get as good a deal as they could and they were very disappointed when that didn't happen and it later on became something the Germans themselves used as a bludgeon against the Treaty of Versailles the Germans also came to think that they would get a piece that would not really make them suffer very much they believed that Woodrow Wilson when he had said we are he wanted a peace without revenge and without retribution was what he was speaking to them and I think they thought that this meant that they really wouldn't have to pay anything they really wouldn't lose any territory they also I think believed that they were different Germany because the Germany that had made the First World War was the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany had become a republic at the end of the war as a well in that Wilhelm had slunk off into exile in the Netherlands and so what a lot of German said it were a different Germany when not those people went out the Germany that made the war we're different Germany so why should we be punished for the sins of our predecessors and the final thing I think which encouraged the Germans to look and perhaps to optimistically at what might happen to them in terms of peace treaties and peace terms was that increasing of the Germans were beginning to convince themselves they hadn't really lost the war that the Armistice of November the 11th 1918 had been a draw that they had only really asked for it because they didn't want the suffering to go on and they were doing it really an in a sort of way that was good for everyone and that's simply not true I mean Germany lost the war the German armies collapsed the German High Command begged the civilian government to try and make a speedy armistice and if you look at the terms of that armistice it's a surrender I mean Germany surrendered its fleet both its surface fleet and it's submarine fleet it surrendered all its heavy equipment it surrounded its tanks its field artillery its machine guns I mean that's a surrender but so what you got it happening in Germany I think was for various reasons an unrealistic mood or an unrealistic expectation growing of what they were likely to get in the way of peace terms and they also I think assume that they would have what they thought of as a negotiation and so that is really I think those are the reasons why when the Germans were finally summoned to Paris when their peace treaty was finally ready there was summoned to Paris and these terms were handed over rather abruptly by Clemens so basically said here they are take them or leave them you know we're not going to negotiate seriously with you there was a tremendous feeling of betrayal and bitterness in Germany they hadn't expected this I would argue they should have because I think they were being unrealistic in assessing their own situation but what people think is is as important as what the truth is and what the Germans felt and what they came increasingly to think was that the whole process in Paris was deeply unfair in the peace terms were deeply unfair and there was a tremendous debate in Germany as to whether or not they'd sign and the Allies in Paris actually prepared to reopen the war because they felt they were going to probably have to invade Germany in force Germany to sign the peace terms and at the very last minute in June 1919 in the German parliament approved the peace terms and two German delegates were sent to parents to sign them but in Germany the Treaty of Versailles the treaty that Germany signed at Versailles signifying his loss in the first world war was known increasingly as the dictate the dictated peace the trouble in a way with the Paris Peace Conference is that no one had a very clear plan of what was meant to happen different countries drop agendas I'm the French drop an agenda for example which dealt almost entirely with French interest in the first list of things and then had had other things down the road the Americans had a different view of what they wanted to discuss first they wanted to discuss the league and the British had their own agenda the British Foreign Office drew up the most complicated diagram I have ever seen all with beautiful colors and things swirling around a little boxes here and little round things here nobody really knew what was going to happen and the conference started as a preliminary Peace Conference that was its official title and this was when the Allies were going to get together and hammer out their combined demands that common demands and then they were going to have real peace conference which to which they would invite Germany and the other defeated nations such as Austria and Hungary and an ottoman Turkey and that didn't happen and as one French diplomat said rather crossly he said this whole conference is an improvisation they don't know where they're going they keep on making up their minds they keep on changing their minds and I think you have to remember that that's very much the character of the conference and initially what was meant to be the centerpiece of the conference was the Council of 10 or the supreme council was given both names where you had the five powers of Britain France United States Italy in Japan the heads of those delegations plus a second there plus all their aides and that lasted for about two months but it was cumbersome and they found it took too long to decide anything and so then would on Woodrow Wilson the American presidents urging they set up a smaller group called the Council of four where you had just Italy France the United States and Great Britain represented and only represented by one person in other words the person who was the head of the delegation so you got that sort of sense that they will really grow groping their way and issues would come up and the leaders of the Peace Conference said well we better set up another committee we better set up another Commission and so you got a proliferation of all sorts of bodies meeting in rooms all over Paris deciding all sorts of questions and that in fact was one of the problems because when they put the German peace terms together they hadn't really seen them before because it had one commission over here working on Germany's borders in the West one working on Germany's borders in the East one working on how much money Germany should pay in reparations and so on one working on disarmament causes for the treaty and so the whole thing was really I'm very decentralized and then they suddenly threw it together and the treaty turned out to be rather harsher than people had expected and so the conference itself was was a curious thing I think it wasn't planned out and perhaps you couldn't have done because so many issues kept coming up and there was so many different things they had to grapple with and there were real crises of course in the conference I mean you had different nations suddenly getting crossed and saying I'm not getting or we're not getting anything we wanted the Italians walked out the Italians foolishly in my view had fixated on a small port at the top of the Adriatic when they already had ports in the Adriatic but they wanted this little one called fiume which today is called Rica and it's right up at the top and it's part of Croatia and the Italian and Italians and their public opinion had sort of fixed on this and said we must have few made it's makes up for all the sacrifices officially and Woodrow Wilson said look I'm not giving you fiume because it's inhabited by a majority of slavic people they're not italians and i don't believe in giving people of one ethnicity a way to be ruled by people of another ethnicity and say italians marched out and a half the Japanese threatened to march out because they didn't get a clause they wanted in the Covenant of the League of Nations the Chinese threatened to work out and in fact in the end didn't sign the treaty because what had been German possessions in China were handed over not to the giant Chinese who felt they were entitled to get their own property back and they'd been on the winning side but handle it hand it over and said to the Japanese the Belgians threatened to walk out because they weren't getting what they saw as adequate compensation for all they had suffered during the First World War and so there were real moments of crisis there were also tremendous disputes between for example the American president and Georges Clemenceau the Prime Minister of France the French wanted security they wanted ideally to take land away from Germany to have a buffer between themselves in Germany and Woodrow Wilson was not prepared to give that and so you've got a real sort of head-to-head on that you've got a terrific fight between the British and the French over carving up the Arab territories which had belonged to the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and it is said that in the course of this fight clemenceau challenged Lloyd George to a duel which would have been disaster for Lloyd George whose Clemenceau had actually fought a number of duels and Lloyd George would absolutely hopeless but things were gradually smoothed over and so you had tensions running very very high because every nation had its own interests every nation wanted to get what it could you also had real really serious disagreements over the best way to treat Germany the best way to build a League of Nations the best way to do a whole lot of things and so it was not an easy negotiation and there were times when people really dispensed that the whole thing is gonna collapse it's a disaster there were many important moments at the Paris Peace Conference but some of them I think are important for their symbolism and for what actually that more for that than for what actually happened and of course I think the most important symbolic moment of the Paris Peace Conference is when Germany signs its treaty the Treaty of Versailles it is signed at the Great Palace of else.i that was built by louis xiv the son king who had dominated Europe in his time and it was the period the room in which the treaty was signed the whole of Mirrors at Versailles if you ever go there and see it it's extraordinary it's this huge room which runs the full length of the Great Palace with these giant mirrors and this wonderful view outside of the grounds and it was in that room in 1871 that the new Germany had been proclaimed after Frances defeat so this room and this Palace has tremendous symbolism the Palace of louis xiv who had once dominated Europe the palace where Germany had been proclaimed after Frances defeat and now in 1919 the place where the treaty with Germany is signed which now proclaims Germany's defeat and so I think that is really one of the moments of the peace conference and of course it was a huge crowd there and a huge crowd outside and when the treaty had been signed the cannon went off and the fountains what came on and I suppose for France for a moment there was a sense that maybe finally this time we're safe and they want to know that 20 years later another German army becoming into France and this time there'd be another German defeat there are great many stories at the Paris Peace Conference because you had such an extraordinary range of characters and of course I mean one of them is my one of my favorites is is that piece of work Queen Marie of Romania who was very very pretty and I think rather promiscuous had married a very dumb husband but he happened to be king of Romania so so she was quite happy to be queen of Romania and she came to Paris bringing two rather sort of I think unattractive daughters who she hoped to get married off and also to buy some clothes you know she hadn't been able to get to Paris during this in the war and she was rather suffering from not being able to buy French clothes but she said I'm only doing this for Romania she said to think that I wouldn't get what we need if I didn't have the right hat so she came partly for herself but partly also for Romania and she came and she asked for basically half of Hungary for Romania in the most breathtaking way and she made quite an impression on what George and Clemenceau who loved pretty women did not make such a good impression on Woodrow Wilson she went for lunch with him she turned up late she brought along extra people and then she sat there and talk to him about whether a woman should take levers or not which was not what you talked to Woodrow Wilson about he was very puritanical so she was a wonderful character there was that very enigmatic and curious figure of TE Lawrence who came with Prince Faisal trying to get a kingdom for Prince Faisal who'd fought in the war in the desert and the two of them got absolutely fed up with the whole peace conference they felt they weren't getting what they wanted and they don't ask me why they did it they took a little plane and flew over Paris throwing rolls of toilet paper down on everyone the standard view of the Treaty of si for many as among historians and others was that it led pretty directly to the outbreak of war in 1939 that you can trace the origins of the Second World War in Europe right back to what happened in 1919 in Paris and I always thought that's an oversimplification to begin with that 20 is and lots is going on in those twenties and people are making decisions and not making decisions and so what were they doing what was everyone doing in all those 20 years and there were moments in those 20 that 20 appeared where things could have gone in very different directions increasingly today historians are looking at the 1920s and I think what they are finding and I certainly am persuaded by it is that the 1920s were a period of rebuilding of regeneration of rebalancing in Europe and that there was a very good chance that countries such as Germany which had lost the will be brought into some sort of international order would become participants in it would would have a stake in it and would contribute to it and Germany after all joined the League of Nations eventually so you you do get I think in the nineteen twenties a sense that there is optimism there there's a chance that Europe is not going to go down a road towards war again now there are always those in Germany who attacked the treaty and certainly radical right-wing nationalists like Hitler made very great play with it I mean Hitler in mind comes talks about the chains of their side he talks about how he's going to break it and in fact in the end that's what he does one by one he breaks the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles but Hitler was a right-wing nut in the 1920s he represented a fringe group he did not represent mainstream German political opinion and the center parties they said that the Democratic parties in fact were quite strong and so I would argue that if it hadn't been for what happened at the end of the 1920s people like Hitler wouldn't have made the showing that they later made and of course what happened at the end of the 1920s was the Great Depression and the Great Depression the great catastrophe which hit the world economically of course was translated into political catastrophe because what you got when the Depression started as unemployment began to rise as trade fell off you got countries following policies which were in their own individual terms probably made sense with disastrous they put up tariff barriers they made it difficult for goods to come in it became too expensive to buy goods from abroad this was to protect their own industries and what it did was lead to even more diminutive world trade the world trade fell off even more and countries became increasingly selfish increasingly concerned about looking after themselves and what it led to in domestic politics was people looking for more extreme solutions and so you've got a rise of parties on both the left and the right you've got the radical fascists people like the night season in Germany the fascists in Italy growing in strength and you also got communists on the other extreme growing because it seemed as though capitalism had really failed it come to a dead end and so I think that had as much the Great Depression and what its consequences had as much to do with the outbreak of the Second World War as the Treaty of Versailles and the war in the Treaty of Versailles in the League of Nations which was set up as a result of the Paris Peace Conference provisions for changing international agreements and so that could have been changes and indeed some changes had been made peacefully and so I think if you look at the 1920s and 1930s the picture is a lot more complex and I think to say what happened in 1919 we can see a very neat straight line right to 1939 it's too simple and it really leaves out the decisions and the events that happen in those very important ears what historians always do is change their minds about things and I think we've been changing our minds about the Paris Peace Conference for some years now I mean it used to be seen really in terms of its failure the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 did not prevent another war in 1939 and I think we've tended to look back and see the Paris Peace Conference in those terms I would say that it's legacies is more complex than that it did help to sort out borders in Europe some of which many of which have survived to today countries came out of the Paris Peace Conference not all of which have survived Yugoslavia has broken up Czechoslovakia has broken up but again many of the borders in Europe have survived what also I think came out of the Paris Peace Conference that was very good was a sense that the world ought to work together the League of Nations again is tired with with its own failure to prevent war in 1939 but we moved away along a path which I think is very valuable and important path where you get nations submerging their individual interests and trying to work together and a number of the institutions that was set up with the League of Nations in fact have survived the International Labour Organization for example is still with us today and so the league I think did get us used as people living in this world to the idea that nations can work together and we can have international institutions and international organizations which work together for the collective good what happened at the Paris Peace Conference was the German colonies were handed over to the League of Nations to administer and the League of Nations then handed them over to individual countries as mandates now you could argue that that's just the old-style colonialism but in fact it introduced a very important idea and that was at such possessions the former German colonies now being run as mandates by South Africa for example or Britain or France or Belgium should be administered for the benefit of their populations and it did introduce a very interesting new idea that people living in the empires actually had to be considered they're good and their wishes and their needs had to be considered where the Paris Peace Conference has also had a very interesting legacy I think of course is in the Middle East because with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the mid least something had to be done or so the powers thought and so countries were created in the Middle East pretty much with the borders that we see today Iraq is a creation of the peace process at the end of the First World War Syria is a creation of that process Lebanon's a creation of that process the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine which then of course resulted in the birth of the State of Israel Israel initiated was initiated at the Paris Peace Conference I think the Peace Conference of 1919 was really important for Canada it was part of our growing up as a nation Canada of course was still very much part of the British Empire it was relatively in fact a very new country and had only gradually begun to acquire some sort of control over its own foreign affairs I mean the fact that we called our department External Affairs that meant dealing with anything outside the British Empire but as far as being in the British Empire meant it meant that really the British had sort of a majority say I would not a majority say the British it was British foreign policy that really was Canadian foreign policy and we were gradually as a country beginning to assert ourselves we had already begun to take responsibility for our relations with the United States because we felt quite rightly that Britain would not really be always seeing things in the Canadian way and it wasn't safe well sensible to allow Britain to run Canada's relations with the United States and so I think we were already beginning to move down that road what the First World War did I think is give Canada more sense of itself as a nation and of course it's the time when Canadian troops fought together as a unit with their own general General Sir Arthur Currie and I think this was important for us that we were beginning to distinguish ourselves from Britain we still I think most Canadians felt themselves to be part of the British Empire but increasingly we saw themselves we saw ourselves as a separate component of that Empire with often separate needs and separate views and separate interests we also I think and again I'm speaking as a Canadian here we're losing perhaps the all with which we had treated British leadership increasingly becoming critical our Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden who in 1914 tended to speak very deferentially to the British by 1917 was hammering his fist on the table and saying I don't like the way you're running the war and we demand the greatest say and the running of the war we demand the greatest say in the policymaking of the British Empire and so you see a Canada which is growing up which is becoming more assertive which is getting more sense of itself the Peace Conference is the first major international gathering at which Canada is represented as Canada initially the British wanted to simply have a British Empire which should be staffed by people from Britain and they would take along a couple of Colonials and the Canadians and the Australians made a real fuss about this and said no we we have contributed to your war effort our men have died money has gone into the war effort our resources have gone into the war fit we're not going to be told now that we don't count and so the British took a British Empire delegation to Paris on which the leaders of New Zealand Australia South Africa and Canada were represented and there was a huge and some issue at the peace conference of whether Canada would sign all the various international agreements that came out of it separately or as part of the British Empire in the end the compromise on the treaties was that the British sign for the British Empire and then so indented slightly who has separate signatures for each of the dominions in the British Empire and for India Canada joined the League of Nations as Canada Canada joined the International Labour Organization as Canada and this would have been unthinkable in 1914 so I think what you see as a result of both the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 is Canada moving a good way down to full control over itself in international affairs the question of what leaders learn from history is a very interesting one and when leaders of today look back at something like the Paris Peace Conference what did they learn I'm not sure that history ever offers very clear lessons what it does do I think is give examples of where you can really make a mistake about things I mean if I were looking at the Paris Peace Conference I say they were probably trying to do too much although a lot was simply thrust upon them and they didn't have much choice I would say that they probably didn't take into consider enough because consideration enough of the wishes of people on the ground they would probably be dialed by their own power and that happens all the time I mean they sent round tables in Paris they said oh we can put these people here mean but those people there and we'll create this country called Iraq and it's you know a piece of cake and I think if there's a lesson in that I think it's a lesson of humility that your powers as a nation is never as great as you think it is that you should not expect you can sort everything out to suit yourselves that you should worry about what people whom you don't think are very important are likely to do because sometimes they're going to do things that surprise you and cause you real problems as the Americans discovered in Vietnam I mean then it never thought the Vietnamese would defeat them or cause them such problems so I think those are the sorts of lessons not very specific lessons but more general lessons that can be learned try and have your goals clearly defined try and be very clear about what it is you want to accomplish try not to do too much try not to be unreasonable in what you hope to accomplish and I guess at the end remember that with all the best will in the world you're bound to make mistakes at some point I think somewhere in the 1970s I got fascinated by the Paris Peace Conference I was teaching and I was teaching largely modern history and every time not every time but so often when I was teaching about a particular subjects that Euless la vía I would find that it went back to the Paris Peace Conference or the League of Nations went back to the Paris Peace Conference or when I started to teach a little bit about the Middle East again I had to go back to the Paris Peace Conference really to understand how the modern Middle East was was brought into being and so I thought this is really interesting I'm so many issues were discussed there and these are not just dead issues these are issues were still still dealing with today I mean how do you run the world how do you have international peace how do we all work together when we all have different interests and so I thought really this is a fascinating subject then I thought look who's there I mean it was it was a good story too because you had all these world leaders I mean we'll never again I think get so many world leaders sitting in one place with six months and it's absolutely unthinkable and you had all sorts of other people you've had John Maynard Keynes the great economist you had John Foster Dulles who later on became a US Secretary of State you had a Japanese prince who was later on going to be tried for war crimes you had Lawrence of Arabia Ho Chi Minh was there as a sort of minor figure on the periphery so I just thought this is you know a fascinating story with fascinating characters and so I started to read about it and I started to collect books and I thought someone's bound to have written a big book on it and I found this book in that big book but there wasn't anything like what I wanted to do I mean there would be a book on Romania at the peace conference so a sulli at the peace conference so japan at the peace conference and i thought i want to do the whole lot which was crazy now i think of it and i sometimes so why did I ever think I'd do it but I kept collecting books and then I'd go off and do research and so I'd you know if there was an academic conference somewhere that had an archive I wanted I'd make you know get a grant to go there and so I went to Edinburgh I went to Washington I went to where else would I go I went to Ottawa a lot because they're very good papers there I went to Paris which is not a hardship I mean it was absolutely lovely I spent a summer in Paris doing research I went to London I did research in London I went to Yale I went here and there and you know I did it over the years and I gradually began to write it and then I tried to find a publisher and I couldn't find one and people said this was probably the 1980s they said who wants to read about about a bunch of dead white men sitting around a table talking about peace treaties it isn't relevant for today and I said well I think it is but nobody so listen to me and then finally I got a publisher and by this point it was the 1990s and my timing was very good because suddenly after the end of the Cold War it actually method that Serbs and Croats couldn't stand each other apparently couldn't stand each other and suddenly history matters and so my thought that a lot of stuff goes back to the Paris Peace Conference was now one that other people began to see something in and so that's how I did it I took a very long time to do it and I had really wonderful time doing it what people have said to me and I'm very flattered and touched when they say it is it helps them to understand the world of day that they didn't really know why there was such trouble between say Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East and they said the Paris 1919 book has helped them to understand the background to issues and that I feel I'm very pleased about because that's what I hoped it happened and I think if you live in this world and you have a curiosity about it you want to know how we got there and I think it's also important for the general public to know something about the past which has affected its lives affected the lives of the general public because politicians and political leaders often use history and they say history teaches us this we must do this we must do that and I think we all need to know a bit about history so we can say wait a minute I'm not sure that lesson is there or I'm not sure I agree because history is misused in my view in a great many ways and I think we need to know enough about it so we can say I don't know we need to be able to ask questions so it's partly for understanding but it's partly also to help us ask good questions of those who are leading us you

[Applause] [Music] [Music] the world&#39;s leaders met in Paris at the end of the first world war really to settle the outstanding issues from that war how to deal with those who had defeated how to deal with the world which is in turmoil as a result of the war and it was expected in those days that you would have a big peace conference at the end of the war the winners and losers got together they sat down and they talked about what sort of settlements they could come up with which both sides would like it&#39;s the way they&#39;d always done it and so what everyone thought who came to Paris in 1919 was they would drop some terms they would then present them to the Germans and the other defeated nations and then they&#39;d all sit around a table and hammer out something that suited everyone and it didn&#39;t work like that I think for two reasons partly because the huge weight of issues in front of them the huge number of issues in front of them was really bigger than I think any other peace conference really had ever dealt with them and this the the world war involved the whole world it really was a world war and what had happened as a result of the first world war was that a number of regimes had collapsed Russia had collapsed it was going into civil war at the rolled russian empire had broken up austria-hungary that huge empire that sat at the center of Europe was in pieces it no longer existed Germany was falling to pieces it appeared the Middle East was in turmoil because the Ottoman Empire based in Turkey which had controlled so much the Middle East was itself on its way out and so they found that they had to deal with an enormous range of issues they also found that drawing up the peace terms particularly with Germany which had been the centerpiece the heart of the defeated coalition was very very difficult and sewn in what happened was that what was meant to be a preliminary peace conference the winners got together in Paris in January 1919 and they said we&#39;ll sit here for a month we&#39;ll drop all the peace terms will then present them to Germany and so on and then have our negotiation didn&#39;t happen because the pressure of events was such and the range of issues was such that it took them till May to really draw up the first set of peace tones which were the ones with Germany and by the time they done that they had had such disagreements and they&#39;d been such fights among the victors that they thought we cannot reopen this and now sit around with the defeated nations and so it turned out to be a very different Peace Conference from all the ones that have come before and this of course enraged the Germans who said but wait a minute we thought we were going to have a proper negotiation and the allies said no here are the terms we will accept reservations in writing well look at them we may not accept them but basically take it or leave it and so the Paris Peace Conference was an extraordinary event it was different from what had come before in the way of peace conferences and they never really was going to be anything like it again at the end of the Second World War there were no major peace conferences there were attempts made to have them but it didn&#39;t happen and so what you got instead were a series of peace agreements when you look at the Paris Peace Conference and you look at the records which are very full you think here people sitting around talking about things calmly but of course they weren&#39;t I mean they were talking about issues they were having meetings they were drawing up agendas and so on but what you always have to remember is the context and they were making the discussions having their discussions in a world which was shattered I mean the first world war had been a catastrophe in terms of Europe it had been something that no one had really properly expected it had lasted for four years it had destroyed hundreds millions of lives it had destroyed societies it was still reverberating through Europe with the collapse of many of the old regimes such as Austria Hungary you know I had a whole series of new countries or old countries struggling to be born again and so the first world war didn&#39;t really end the fighting there were lots of little wars all over Europe in the years immediately after the Armistice in 1918 and so part of the atmosphere which you always have to remember part of the context of the Paris Peace Conference was this feeling of dread that something awful has happened to Europe a catastrophe and it may be going to get even worse Russia was in revolution the Bolsheviks had taken over the people who later on became the Communists nobody knew how far that was going to spread and the Bolsheviks themselves kept on saying we can&#39;t have a worldwide revolution and it looked for awhile as though they were right because there were revolutions in Hungary which had a communist government there was an attempted revolution in Austria there were revolutions throughout Germany there were violent demonstrations and insurrections in France and Italy in Britain even in North America I mean we had the Winnipeg general strike in Canada which some people thought was the beginning of revolution in Canada and so I think there was this feeling as they met in Paris of what have we done to our European civilization what have we done to the world is it going to get even worse and and adding to the fear I think was the influenza epidemic which broke out at the end of 1918 and began to spread through the world and suddenly people were dying apparently overnight and so there was that feeling that&#39;s a very important part of the context the apprehension the sentence have lost a sense of catastrophe but another side is this sense of hope I mean it&#39;s paradoxical in a way but in the midst of this catastrophe people were saying you know surely something good has got to come out of this surely we cannot go back to our old ways surely we&#39;ve got to now finally sit down and say we&#39;ve got to run the world in a different way and so you had in Paris both the sense of dread which was part of the context but you also had a sense that the world possibly finally will come to its senses and we&#39;ll build a different way of dealing with international disputes we&#39;ll build a League of Nations which of course is what the American President Woodrow Wilson and a lot of others wanted and so that was another part of the context and yet a third part I think was the pressure of democratic populist most of the countries who came to Paris to negotiate with democracies and so the politicians that political leaders had to think very carefully about what their own publics wanted and their own publics were not clear what they wanted on the one hand they were a lot of them wanted a better world you know something has got to get get get be done out of this horror and that&#39;s why Woodrow Wilson was so enormous ly popular in Europe because people look to him as someone who would begin to lead the world into a much better direction I think what you also had was of longing for revenge someone ought to pay some are not to be made to suffer what has happened to us and so you had all this swirl of emotions around the peace conference which of course made it very difficult for those actually making the peace to do so in a cool and rational way Paris was and is one of the most beautiful cities in the world and in fact if you go there today you will see a Paris that in most respects looks very much like the Paris that the peacemakers would have seen when they met there in 1919 the city had been damaged a bit by the war the Germans had brought up long-range guns which were capable of sending shells 50 miles or more and some of those had landed on Paris there had been some bombing from the air because this was just the beginning of aerial warfare and a lot of the trees in Paris had had to be cut down during the war for fuel you also could notice the war if you were there because there were so many people wearing black armbands so many Frenchmen had been killed or wounded in the war the French lost more proportionately more men proportionate to their population than any other country I think in the whole of the First World War and that sense of loss and that sense of the French populace having been bled by the war was very much there I think having said that although Paris was a sad place it was beginning to revive gradually the theatres were reopening gradually things were beginning to stir again they were not going to be the same extravagant priorities and spectacles that you&#39;d had at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars but there were parties and there were dances and there were outings and nightclubs so gradually I think people began to get a sense of life reviving again and for young people and there were an awful lot of young people who came to the peace conference because all the countries brought delegates and they all needed assistance and they only did researchers it was fun so it wasn&#39;t all gloom and it wasn&#39;t all hard work there was another side to it the only real predecessor for the Paris Peace Conference was the Congress of Vienna which took place at the end of the Napoleonic was between 1814 and 1815 but that was very largely a European conference Americans were there but it wasn&#39;t really representing the world the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was much more a world conference you had the the Chinese the Japanese ties with a you had various Latin American countries represented the British Empire was represented or so Australia was their New Zealand was the Canada of course was their South Africa was their countries from representatives from the Middle East were there and then of course representatives from virtually all the European countries and from the United States and so it really was I think a truly international conference and because there was so many different countries there and something like over 30 countries came to Paris to discuss the peace terms you also got all sorts of petitioners coming because if you wanted something done in Paris was the place to go because that&#39;s where mostly most of the most powerful people in the world were and so it was an extraordinary event which was not just about making peace terms but also trying to settle all sorts of other problems which were day by day brought before it at the core of the peace conference were five countries and at the core of those five countries were in fact three but the five considered major powers in the Paris Peace Conference were Great Britain the United States France Italy and Japan and something people often forget that both Italy and Japan who of course we&#39;re going to be enemies of the Western powers in the Second World War were in fact fighting on the Allied side in the First World War but if you looked at who really counted Italy and Japan were not as powerful as Great Britain in the United States and France and so it was really those three countries or rather their leaders who are in Paris who really made a lot of the most important decisions I&#39;ll start in in alphabetical order with France the French very much wanted the conference in Paris because they had played a key part in the defeat of Germany they wanted the conference to take part in Paris take place in Paris partly symbolic because Paris had been attacked and occupied by the Germans in the franco-prussian war of 1870 71 so away this was a symbol of Frances survival and victory the leader of France was Georges Clemenceau who was an extraordinary figure he was an old-line radical which in France meant that he was anti-clerical opposed to the church for human rights for the rule of law all these sorts of things in some ways a progressive figure but in some ways a rather old-fashioned figure very very tough he had been a young man when Paris had been shelled and occupied in 1870 71 and it was said that when he was buried he has to be buried standing up facing Germany may not be true but it says something about his character he had become Prime Minister of France in the course of the first world war when things were looking very very dark for France indeed and he really had held France together and he&#39;d helped it to survive until the ultimate victory he was someone who people said I think unfairly was bent on revenge against Germany I think that&#39;s too strong I think what he wanted for France above all was security and he didn&#39;t want to see what had happened now twice in his lifetime happening again and that is France being attacked and invaded by Germany the British were represented by David Lloyd George who was the British prime minister and like clemenceau radical I&#39;m smaller radical he technically was in his political party was a liberal party he had come really out of a very unusual background for British politics at a time he&#39;d come from a lower middle-class background he came from Wales which was on the fringes of the British Isles and so he was not typical of British political leaders of that time he didn&#39;t come from a grand family didn&#39;t have a private income he hadn&#39;t gone to university he was I think a very skilled man he liked clemenceau had become Prime Minister during the war he led a coalition of liberals and conservatives and he really like clemenceau had held Great Britain together in what looked like a very dark period of the war when it looked like the Allies might lose what he wanted for Britain was security from the German Navy and what he wanted also was Germany&#39;s colonies and Britain had got really both of those before the conference started and so Lloyd George more than Clemenceau was able to take a more detached view and say we shouldn&#39;t be too hard on Germany he was caught however by his own public opinion just as Clemenceau was because both the British and French public&#39;s wanted revenge from Germany they wanted payment from Germany they wanted Germany to be kept down and lloyd-george had run an election campaign shortly before the peace conference opened an election campaign was in nineteen yet just in December 1918 in which he and members of his party had promised that they would make Germany squeeze they would squeeze Germany like a lemon until the pipsqueak and he was caught in a sense by his own promises that Germany would pay and pay a lot and then you had Woodrow Wilson the American president who was an extraordinary figure he&#39;s someone that I certainly personally have never been able to make up my mind about whether or not I would have liked him he was an idealist in some ways he represented I think and perhaps the most idealistic of the big leaders at the Paris Peace Conference he had brought the United States into the war not he said very firmly for any particular gain for the United States but to make the world a better place and what he wanted I think above all else was a League of Nations an association of Nations which would settle disputes among nations which would help to make the world a fairer and more prosperous and more equitable place so that you would not get the sorts of conflicts in the future that you had had in such there&#39;s so much in the immediate past Wilson however was also a realist I mean he wasn&#39;t just a wild-eyed idealist who knew the United States was powerful it was not yet as powerful as it was going to become but it was clearly a rising power and he knew that he had a certain amount of leverage over the Europeans because the United States had learned a lot of money in particular to Great Britain for its war effort and so Wilson was quite prepared to use that power he was someone who I think called himself a Democrat both small D and large D but he was someone who I think had undemocratic tendencies he tended to think if you disagreed with him that you were wrong he tended to think that he was the only one who understood the people and he tended to believe that his other democratically elected leaders with whom he was dealing and with whom he was dealing did not understand the people and like he did and so they were an interesting combination Clemens so the stiff neck rather traditional French gentleman in some ways Lord George the the new man who&#39;d come out of a much lower class background much more lower-class background than Clemens owes but who was a very good negotiator and then Wilson who came from the u.s. bringing very different sorts of ideas from either Clemenceau Lloyd George and one of the interesting things about the Peace Conference is the interaction among those three men because that interaction was going to be very important in some of the decisions that were later made the Germans had a lot of expectations of the Peace Conference some in my view highly unrealistic I think they felt that it would be the old style of negotiation where they sat down with the winners and they tried to get as good a deal as they could and they were very disappointed when that didn&#39;t happen and it later on became something the Germans themselves used as a bludgeon against the Treaty of Versailles the Germans also came to think that they would get a piece that would not really make them suffer very much they believed that Woodrow Wilson when he had said we are he wanted a peace without revenge and without retribution was what he was speaking to them and I think they thought that this meant that they really wouldn&#39;t have to pay anything they really wouldn&#39;t lose any territory they also I think believed that they were different Germany because the Germany that had made the First World War was the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany had become a republic at the end of the war as a well in that Wilhelm had slunk off into exile in the Netherlands and so what a lot of German said it were a different Germany when not those people went out the Germany that made the war we&#39;re different Germany so why should we be punished for the sins of our predecessors and the final thing I think which encouraged the Germans to look and perhaps to optimistically at what might happen to them in terms of peace treaties and peace terms was that increasing of the Germans were beginning to convince themselves they hadn&#39;t really lost the war that the Armistice of November the 11th 1918 had been a draw that they had only really asked for it because they didn&#39;t want the suffering to go on and they were doing it really an in a sort of way that was good for everyone and that&#39;s simply not true I mean Germany lost the war the German armies collapsed the German High Command begged the civilian government to try and make a speedy armistice and if you look at the terms of that armistice it&#39;s a surrender I mean Germany surrendered its fleet both its surface fleet and it&#39;s submarine fleet it surrendered all its heavy equipment it surrounded its tanks its field artillery its machine guns I mean that&#39;s a surrender but so what you got it happening in Germany I think was for various reasons an unrealistic mood or an unrealistic expectation growing of what they were likely to get in the way of peace terms and they also I think assume that they would have what they thought of as a negotiation and so that is really I think those are the reasons why when the Germans were finally summoned to Paris when their peace treaty was finally ready there was summoned to Paris and these terms were handed over rather abruptly by Clemens so basically said here they are take them or leave them you know we&#39;re not going to negotiate seriously with you there was a tremendous feeling of betrayal and bitterness in Germany they hadn&#39;t expected this I would argue they should have because I think they were being unrealistic in assessing their own situation but what people think is is as important as what the truth is and what the Germans felt and what they came increasingly to think was that the whole process in Paris was deeply unfair in the peace terms were deeply unfair and there was a tremendous debate in Germany as to whether or not they&#39;d sign and the Allies in Paris actually prepared to reopen the war because they felt they were going to probably have to invade Germany in force Germany to sign the peace terms and at the very last minute in June 1919 in the German parliament approved the peace terms and two German delegates were sent to parents to sign them but in Germany the Treaty of Versailles the treaty that Germany signed at Versailles signifying his loss in the first world war was known increasingly as the dictate the dictated peace the trouble in a way with the Paris Peace Conference is that no one had a very clear plan of what was meant to happen different countries drop agendas I&#39;m the French drop an agenda for example which dealt almost entirely with French interest in the first list of things and then had had other things down the road the Americans had a different view of what they wanted to discuss first they wanted to discuss the league and the British had their own agenda the British Foreign Office drew up the most complicated diagram I have ever seen all with beautiful colors and things swirling around a little boxes here and little round things here nobody really knew what was going to happen and the conference started as a preliminary Peace Conference that was its official title and this was when the Allies were going to get together and hammer out their combined demands that common demands and then they were going to have real peace conference which to which they would invite Germany and the other defeated nations such as Austria and Hungary and an ottoman Turkey and that didn&#39;t happen and as one French diplomat said rather crossly he said this whole conference is an improvisation they don&#39;t know where they&#39;re going they keep on making up their minds they keep on changing their minds and I think you have to remember that that&#39;s very much the character of the conference and initially what was meant to be the centerpiece of the conference was the Council of 10 or the supreme council was given both names where you had the five powers of Britain France United States Italy in Japan the heads of those delegations plus a second there plus all their aides and that lasted for about two months but it was cumbersome and they found it took too long to decide anything and so then would on Woodrow Wilson the American presidents urging they set up a smaller group called the Council of four where you had just Italy France the United States and Great Britain represented and only represented by one person in other words the person who was the head of the delegation so you got that sort of sense that they will really grow groping their way and issues would come up and the leaders of the Peace Conference said well we better set up another committee we better set up another Commission and so you got a proliferation of all sorts of bodies meeting in rooms all over Paris deciding all sorts of questions and that in fact was one of the problems because when they put the German peace terms together they hadn&#39;t really seen them before because it had one commission over here working on Germany&#39;s borders in the West one working on Germany&#39;s borders in the East one working on how much money Germany should pay in reparations and so on one working on disarmament causes for the treaty and so the whole thing was really I&#39;m very decentralized and then they suddenly threw it together and the treaty turned out to be rather harsher than people had expected and so the conference itself was was a curious thing I think it wasn&#39;t planned out and perhaps you couldn&#39;t have done because so many issues kept coming up and there was so many different things they had to grapple with and there were real crises of course in the conference I mean you had different nations suddenly getting crossed and saying I&#39;m not getting or we&#39;re not getting anything we wanted the Italians walked out the Italians foolishly in my view had fixated on a small port at the top of the Adriatic when they already had ports in the Adriatic but they wanted this little one called fiume which today is called Rica and it&#39;s right up at the top and it&#39;s part of Croatia and the Italian and Italians and their public opinion had sort of fixed on this and said we must have few made it&#39;s makes up for all the sacrifices officially and Woodrow Wilson said look I&#39;m not giving you fiume because it&#39;s inhabited by a majority of slavic people they&#39;re not italians and i don&#39;t believe in giving people of one ethnicity a way to be ruled by people of another ethnicity and say italians marched out and a half the Japanese threatened to march out because they didn&#39;t get a clause they wanted in the Covenant of the League of Nations the Chinese threatened to work out and in fact in the end didn&#39;t sign the treaty because what had been German possessions in China were handed over not to the giant Chinese who felt they were entitled to get their own property back and they&#39;d been on the winning side but handle it hand it over and said to the Japanese the Belgians threatened to walk out because they weren&#39;t getting what they saw as adequate compensation for all they had suffered during the First World War and so there were real moments of crisis there were also tremendous disputes between for example the American president and Georges Clemenceau the Prime Minister of France the French wanted security they wanted ideally to take land away from Germany to have a buffer between themselves in Germany and Woodrow Wilson was not prepared to give that and so you&#39;ve got a real sort of head-to-head on that you&#39;ve got a terrific fight between the British and the French over carving up the Arab territories which had belonged to the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and it is said that in the course of this fight clemenceau challenged Lloyd George to a duel which would have been disaster for Lloyd George whose Clemenceau had actually fought a number of duels and Lloyd George would absolutely hopeless but things were gradually smoothed over and so you had tensions running very very high because every nation had its own interests every nation wanted to get what it could you also had real really serious disagreements over the best way to treat Germany the best way to build a League of Nations the best way to do a whole lot of things and so it was not an easy negotiation and there were times when people really dispensed that the whole thing is gonna collapse it&#39;s a disaster there were many important moments at the Paris Peace Conference but some of them I think are important for their symbolism and for what actually that more for that than for what actually happened and of course I think the most important symbolic moment of the Paris Peace Conference is when Germany signs its treaty the Treaty of Versailles it is signed at the Great Palace of else.i that was built by louis xiv the son king who had dominated Europe in his time and it was the period the room in which the treaty was signed the whole of Mirrors at Versailles if you ever go there and see it it&#39;s extraordinary it&#39;s this huge room which runs the full length of the Great Palace with these giant mirrors and this wonderful view outside of the grounds and it was in that room in 1871 that the new Germany had been proclaimed after Frances defeat so this room and this Palace has tremendous symbolism the Palace of louis xiv who had once dominated Europe the palace where Germany had been proclaimed after Frances defeat and now in 1919 the place where the treaty with Germany is signed which now proclaims Germany&#39;s defeat and so I think that is really one of the moments of the peace conference and of course it was a huge crowd there and a huge crowd outside and when the treaty had been signed the cannon went off and the fountains what came on and I suppose for France for a moment there was a sense that maybe finally this time we&#39;re safe and they want to know that 20 years later another German army becoming into France and this time there&#39;d be another German defeat there are great many stories at the Paris Peace Conference because you had such an extraordinary range of characters and of course I mean one of them is my one of my favorites is is that piece of work Queen Marie of Romania who was very very pretty and I think rather promiscuous had married a very dumb husband but he happened to be king of Romania so so she was quite happy to be queen of Romania and she came to Paris bringing two rather sort of I think unattractive daughters who she hoped to get married off and also to buy some clothes you know she hadn&#39;t been able to get to Paris during this in the war and she was rather suffering from not being able to buy French clothes but she said I&#39;m only doing this for Romania she said to think that I wouldn&#39;t get what we need if I didn&#39;t have the right hat so she came partly for herself but partly also for Romania and she came and she asked for basically half of Hungary for Romania in the most breathtaking way and she made quite an impression on what George and Clemenceau who loved pretty women did not make such a good impression on Woodrow Wilson she went for lunch with him she turned up late she brought along extra people and then she sat there and talk to him about whether a woman should take levers or not which was not what you talked to Woodrow Wilson about he was very puritanical so she was a wonderful character there was that very enigmatic and curious figure of TE Lawrence who came with Prince Faisal trying to get a kingdom for Prince Faisal who&#39;d fought in the war in the desert and the two of them got absolutely fed up with the whole peace conference they felt they weren&#39;t getting what they wanted and they don&#39;t ask me why they did it they took a little plane and flew over Paris throwing rolls of toilet paper down on everyone the standard view of the Treaty of si for many as among historians and others was that it led pretty directly to the outbreak of war in 1939 that you can trace the origins of the Second World War in Europe right back to what happened in 1919 in Paris and I always thought that&#39;s an oversimplification to begin with that 20 is and lots is going on in those twenties and people are making decisions and not making decisions and so what were they doing what was everyone doing in all those 20 years and there were moments in those 20 that 20 appeared where things could have gone in very different directions increasingly today historians are looking at the 1920s and I think what they are finding and I certainly am persuaded by it is that the 1920s were a period of rebuilding of regeneration of rebalancing in Europe and that there was a very good chance that countries such as Germany which had lost the will be brought into some sort of international order would become participants in it would would have a stake in it and would contribute to it and Germany after all joined the League of Nations eventually so you you do get I think in the nineteen twenties a sense that there is optimism there there&#39;s a chance that Europe is not going to go down a road towards war again now there are always those in Germany who attacked the treaty and certainly radical right-wing nationalists like Hitler made very great play with it I mean Hitler in mind comes talks about the chains of their side he talks about how he&#39;s going to break it and in fact in the end that&#39;s what he does one by one he breaks the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles but Hitler was a right-wing nut in the 1920s he represented a fringe group he did not represent mainstream German political opinion and the center parties they said that the Democratic parties in fact were quite strong and so I would argue that if it hadn&#39;t been for what happened at the end of the 1920s people like Hitler wouldn&#39;t have made the showing that they later made and of course what happened at the end of the 1920s was the Great Depression and the Great Depression the great catastrophe which hit the world economically of course was translated into political catastrophe because what you got when the Depression started as unemployment began to rise as trade fell off you got countries following policies which were in their own individual terms probably made sense with disastrous they put up tariff barriers they made it difficult for goods to come in it became too expensive to buy goods from abroad this was to protect their own industries and what it did was lead to even more diminutive world trade the world trade fell off even more and countries became increasingly selfish increasingly concerned about looking after themselves and what it led to in domestic politics was people looking for more extreme solutions and so you&#39;ve got a rise of parties on both the left and the right you&#39;ve got the radical fascists people like the night season in Germany the fascists in Italy growing in strength and you also got communists on the other extreme growing because it seemed as though capitalism had really failed it come to a dead end and so I think that had as much the Great Depression and what its consequences had as much to do with the outbreak of the Second World War as the Treaty of Versailles and the war in the Treaty of Versailles in the League of Nations which was set up as a result of the Paris Peace Conference provisions for changing international agreements and so that could have been changes and indeed some changes had been made peacefully and so I think if you look at the 1920s and 1930s the picture is a lot more complex and I think to say what happened in 1919 we can see a very neat straight line right to 1939 it&#39;s too simple and it really leaves out the decisions and the events that happen in those very important ears what historians always do is change their minds about things and I think we&#39;ve been changing our minds about the Paris Peace Conference for some years now I mean it used to be seen really in terms of its failure the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 did not prevent another war in 1939 and I think we&#39;ve tended to look back and see the Paris Peace Conference in those terms I would say that it&#39;s legacies is more complex than that it did help to sort out borders in Europe some of which many of which have survived to today countries came out of the Paris Peace Conference not all of which have survived Yugoslavia has broken up Czechoslovakia has broken up but again many of the borders in Europe have survived what also I think came out of the Paris Peace Conference that was very good was a sense that the world ought to work together the League of Nations again is tired with with its own failure to prevent war in 1939 but we moved away along a path which I think is very valuable and important path where you get nations submerging their individual interests and trying to work together and a number of the institutions that was set up with the League of Nations in fact have survived the International Labour Organization for example is still with us today and so the league I think did get us used as people living in this world to the idea that nations can work together and we can have international institutions and international organizations which work together for the collective good what happened at the Paris Peace Conference was the German colonies were handed over to the League of Nations to administer and the League of Nations then handed them over to individual countries as mandates now you could argue that that&#39;s just the old-style colonialism but in fact it introduced a very important idea and that was at such possessions the former German colonies now being run as mandates by South Africa for example or Britain or France or Belgium should be administered for the benefit of their populations and it did introduce a very interesting new idea that people living in the empires actually had to be considered they&#39;re good and their wishes and their needs had to be considered where the Paris Peace Conference has also had a very interesting legacy I think of course is in the Middle East because with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the mid least something had to be done or so the powers thought and so countries were created in the Middle East pretty much with the borders that we see today Iraq is a creation of the peace process at the end of the First World War Syria is a creation of that process Lebanon&#39;s a creation of that process the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine which then of course resulted in the birth of the State of Israel Israel initiated was initiated at the Paris Peace Conference I think the Peace Conference of 1919 was really important for Canada it was part of our growing up as a nation Canada of course was still very much part of the British Empire it was relatively in fact a very new country and had only gradually begun to acquire some sort of control over its own foreign affairs I mean the fact that we called our department External Affairs that meant dealing with anything outside the British Empire but as far as being in the British Empire meant it meant that really the British had sort of a majority say I would not a majority say the British it was British foreign policy that really was Canadian foreign policy and we were gradually as a country beginning to assert ourselves we had already begun to take responsibility for our relations with the United States because we felt quite rightly that Britain would not really be always seeing things in the Canadian way and it wasn&#39;t safe well sensible to allow Britain to run Canada&#39;s relations with the United States and so I think we were already beginning to move down that road what the First World War did I think is give Canada more sense of itself as a nation and of course it&#39;s the time when Canadian troops fought together as a unit with their own general General Sir Arthur Currie and I think this was important for us that we were beginning to distinguish ourselves from Britain we still I think most Canadians felt themselves to be part of the British Empire but increasingly we saw themselves we saw ourselves as a separate component of that Empire with often separate needs and separate views and separate interests we also I think and again I&#39;m speaking as a Canadian here we&#39;re losing perhaps the all with which we had treated British leadership increasingly becoming critical our Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden who in 1914 tended to speak very deferentially to the British by 1917 was hammering his fist on the table and saying I don&#39;t like the way you&#39;re running the war and we demand the greatest say and the running of the war we demand the greatest say in the policymaking of the British Empire and so you see a Canada which is growing up which is becoming more assertive which is getting more sense of itself the Peace Conference is the first major international gathering at which Canada is represented as Canada initially the British wanted to simply have a British Empire which should be staffed by people from Britain and they would take along a couple of Colonials and the Canadians and the Australians made a real fuss about this and said no we we have contributed to your war effort our men have died money has gone into the war effort our resources have gone into the war fit we&#39;re not going to be told now that we don&#39;t count and so the British took a British Empire delegation to Paris on which the leaders of New Zealand Australia South Africa and Canada were represented and there was a huge and some issue at the peace conference of whether Canada would sign all the various international agreements that came out of it separately or as part of the British Empire in the end the compromise on the treaties was that the British sign for the British Empire and then so indented slightly who has separate signatures for each of the dominions in the British Empire and for India Canada joined the League of Nations as Canada Canada joined the International Labour Organization as Canada and this would have been unthinkable in 1914 so I think what you see as a result of both the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 is Canada moving a good way down to full control over itself in international affairs the question of what leaders learn from history is a very interesting one and when leaders of today look back at something like the Paris Peace Conference what did they learn I&#39;m not sure that history ever offers very clear lessons what it does do I think is give examples of where you can really make a mistake about things I mean if I were looking at the Paris Peace Conference I say they were probably trying to do too much although a lot was simply thrust upon them and they didn&#39;t have much choice I would say that they probably didn&#39;t take into consider enough because consideration enough of the wishes of people on the ground they would probably be dialed by their own power and that happens all the time I mean they sent round tables in Paris they said oh we can put these people here mean but those people there and we&#39;ll create this country called Iraq and it&#39;s you know a piece of cake and I think if there&#39;s a lesson in that I think it&#39;s a lesson of humility that your powers as a nation is never as great as you think it is that you should not expect you can sort everything out to suit yourselves that you should worry about what people whom you don&#39;t think are very important are likely to do because sometimes they&#39;re going to do things that surprise you and cause you real problems as the Americans discovered in Vietnam I mean then it never thought the Vietnamese would defeat them or cause them such problems so I think those are the sorts of lessons not very specific lessons but more general lessons that can be learned try and have your goals clearly defined try and be very clear about what it is you want to accomplish try not to do too much try not to be unreasonable in what you hope to accomplish and I guess at the end remember that with all the best will in the world you&#39;re bound to make mistakes at some point I think somewhere in the 1970s I got fascinated by the Paris Peace Conference I was teaching and I was teaching largely modern history and every time not every time but so often when I was teaching about a particular subjects that Euless la vía I would find that it went back to the Paris Peace Conference or the League of Nations went back to the Paris Peace Conference or when I started to teach a little bit about the Middle East again I had to go back to the Paris Peace Conference really to understand how the modern Middle East was was brought into being and so I thought this is really interesting I&#39;m so many issues were discussed there and these are not just dead issues these are issues were still still dealing with today I mean how do you run the world how do you have international peace how do we all work together when we all have different interests and so I thought really this is a fascinating subject then I thought look who&#39;s there I mean it was it was a good story too because you had all these world leaders I mean we&#39;ll never again I think get so many world leaders sitting in one place with six months and it&#39;s absolutely unthinkable and you had all sorts of other people you&#39;ve had John Maynard Keynes the great economist you had John Foster Dulles who later on became a US Secretary of State you had a Japanese prince who was later on going to be tried for war crimes you had Lawrence of Arabia Ho Chi Minh was there as a sort of minor figure on the periphery so I just thought this is you know a fascinating story with fascinating characters and so I started to read about it and I started to collect books and I thought someone&#39;s bound to have written a big book on it and I found this book in that big book but there wasn&#39;t anything like what I wanted to do I mean there would be a book on Romania at the peace conference so a sulli at the peace conference so japan at the peace conference and i thought i want to do the whole lot which was crazy now i think of it and i sometimes so why did I ever think I&#39;d do it but I kept collecting books and then I&#39;d go off and do research and so I&#39;d you know if there was an academic conference somewhere that had an archive I wanted I&#39;d make you know get a grant to go there and so I went to Edinburgh I went to Washington I went to where else would I go I went to Ottawa a lot because they&#39;re very good papers there I went to Paris which is not a hardship I mean it was absolutely lovely I spent a summer in Paris doing research I went to London I did research in London I went to Yale I went here and there and you know I did it over the years and I gradually began to write it and then I tried to find a publisher and I couldn&#39;t find one and people said this was probably the 1980s they said who wants to read about about a bunch of dead white men sitting around a table talking about peace treaties it isn&#39;t relevant for today and I said well I think it is but nobody so listen to me and then finally I got a publisher and by this point it was the 1990s and my timing was very good because suddenly after the end of the Cold War it actually method that Serbs and Croats couldn&#39;t stand each other apparently couldn&#39;t stand each other and suddenly history matters and so my thought that a lot of stuff goes back to the Paris Peace Conference was now one that other people began to see something in and so that&#39;s how I did it I took a very long time to do it and I had really wonderful time doing it what people have said to me and I&#39;m very flattered and touched when they say it is it helps them to understand the world of day that they didn&#39;t really know why there was such trouble between say Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East and they said the Paris 1919 book has helped them to understand the background to issues and that I feel I&#39;m very pleased about because that&#39;s what I hoped it happened and I think if you live in this world and you have a curiosity about it you want to know how we got there and I think it&#39;s also important for the general public to know something about the past which has affected its lives affected the lives of the general public because politicians and political leaders often use history and they say history teaches us this we must do this we must do that and I think we all need to know a bit about history so we can say wait a minute I&#39;m not sure that lesson is there or I&#39;m not sure I agree because history is misused in my view in a great many ways and I think we need to know enough about it so we can say I don&#39;t know we need to be able to ask questions so it&#39;s partly for understanding but it&#39;s partly also to help us ask good questions of those who are leading us you

Transcript for:Paris Peace Conference: Challenges and Legacy

Transcript for:
Paris Peace Conference: Challenges and Legacy