Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World By Richard Holbrooke

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A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel—whose troubles haunt us still.Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize • Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize • Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Between January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War.Praise for Paris 1919“It’s easy to get into a war, but ending it is a more arduous matter. It was never more so than in 1919, at the Paris Conference. . . . This is an enthralling book: detailed, fair, unfailingly lively. Professor MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.” —Allan Massie, The Daily Telegraph (London)

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n addition to being a superb and very readable account of events that transpired in 1919 and their aftermath, Margaret MacMillan's "Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World" is a book with purpose. She sets out to debunk, I believe successfully, the long-embraced view that Germany was a victim of a vindictive peace. Without ignoring the political difficulties that the Western powers faced and the failure of their efforts, MacMillan places blame squarely where it belongs; at the feet of Adolf Hitler. Hitler's propaganda war made the fragile Treaty of Versailles an easy target for his own demagoguery.MacMillan traces the theory of German victimization back to arguments first made by John Maynard Keynes at the time of the Paris peacemaking process. The Western powers, according to Keynes, placed such a crushing financial burden on Germany that the defeated state and its people were doomed to failure. Yet as MacMillan points out, Germany ended up paying a fraction of what had been required, and all payments were suspended as early as 1932. The Treaty of Versailles was never vigorously enforced, and Germany had more ability to wiggle out of obligations then has historically been espoused. But perhaps most significantly, the catastrophic intervening depression between the two wars set much of the world into an economic tailspin. Germany was no exception.As a major explanation for what went wrong in 1919, MacMillan focuses on the rise of nationalism that was spreading around the world like wildfire. The Western powers struggled to draw borders in areas overflowing with nationalistic fervor that defied attempts to contain peoples and sentiments within neatly drawn lines. As if all this was not enough, the three major Western powers had to contend with the tatters of four major collapsed empires: Germany, Austria – Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire.The complexities of the task might well have relegated to failure any attempts to put Humpty Dumpty back together. Nationalism had been on the rise since the mid-19th century, and the outbreak of WWI only fueled its flames. The peacemakers were faced with the impossible task of trying to impose order on an irrational world that almost defied resolution.MacMillan aptly describes the personal dynamics that complicated the peacemaking process. Woodrow Wilson brought his myopic brand of idealism from a largely isolationist United States. His was a country still on the rise with more limited power than it would have by the time it entered WWII. Wilson was often at odds with France's Georges Clemenceau who was vigorously defending a country that had already suffered a humiliating defeat to Germany some 50 years earlier. Clemenceau's realpolitik was comprehensible. Meantime, David Lloyd George (who was Macmillan's great-grandfather) struggled to hold together a British Empire on the wane. The three Western leaders were, indeed, an unusual trio with both overlapping, but woefully competing agendas.MacMillian certainly acknowledges that the peacemaking process was severely flawed. From the beginning, Wilson's ill-defined 14 points, while well-intentioned, greatly complicated the task by fortifying countless nationalist groups clamoring for self-determination. The world was becoming almost hopelessly fractured by voices of competing claims to territory.One of the major failures of the Paris peacemaking process was to forge a fair and more lasting resolution between China and the rising power of Japan. China, rightfully so, felt betrayed by the Western powers, and particularly by Wilson, when the formerly German-occupied Shantung region of China was ceded to Japan. And Japan was not much happier with the Western powers for their failure to recognize its principle of international racial equality, contributing to the rise of Japanese nationalism. Again, Wilson was viewed as the ultimate sell-out on this point.MacMillan describes Paris to have been the "center of the world government" for the first six months of 1919. And indeed it was. In addition to the main players, it was populated with such colorful and disparate figures as T.E. Lawrence, doffed in Arabian robes, and Ho Chi Minh, at the time a dishwasher in a Parisian kitchen. MacMillan provides dimension into these and other characters swirling in and around the near hysteria of the negotiating process.MacMillan writes eloquently about the French capital in 1919 as a city of culture, fashion, and intellectual thought. While the peace conference is the centerpiece of MacMillan's book, she does not ignore how the table of Paris is exquisitely set around it. In addition to presenting a comprehensive narrative of the events and forces propelling the world inexorably towards the second world conflagration of the twentieth century, MacMillan succeeds in bringing to life the dynamic personalities, and their respective entourages, who struggled in vain to forge a peace purportedly to end all wars.

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