Permanent peace could never come from a one-sided application of
the principle of disarmament, especially when it was coupled with
the guarantees clauses. History does not record an instance where a
great people, deprived of its means of defense, with portions of its
territory under military occupation and neighboring enemy countries
still armed to the teeth, did not find some means, internally or
through alliances, to break the grip of its enemies. In 1870, by
annexing Alsace-Lorraine, Bismarck made an armed camp of Europe. In
1919, by occupying the Rhine and disarming Germany without promising
themselves to disarm, the Allies, in the Treaty of Versailles, laid
the foundation for a greater and more dangerous unrest than Europe has
known in modern times. Lack of reciprocity in the military, naval,
and aërial clauses was practicable only (a) if the enemies of Germany
were ready to form a permanent alliance and keep several million men
under arms, or (b) if they were willing to kill indefinitely all male
children born in Germany--and also the existing male population under
twenty-five.
The resurrection of Poland could have been a glorious and blessed
result of the Paris settlement had it been conceived and carried out in
the interests of the Poles. But the resurrection of Poland, as provided
for in the Treaty of Versailles and the supplementary treaty, was an
attempt to create an artificial state for old-fashioned “balance of
power” purposes. The real interests of the Poles were not considered at
all. Their only hope of succeeding in rebuilding their national life
lay in having boundaries that would not in the future create against
them fatal antagonism on the part of their two powerful neighbors,
Germany and Russia. Had Polish and not French interests been considered
in writing the Treaty of Versailles, the new Poland would not have
been saddled with the Danzig corridor, and Upper Silesia would have
remained German territory. A combination of fear and greed, without
statesmanlike vision, made a Poland that can never last. The frontiers
of Poland, as drawn in the Treaty of Versailles, heralded war and not
peace. They were a perpetuation of the worst evil from which Europe
had been suffering. The corridor and the “free port of Danzig” were
declared to be necessary in order to give Poland an outlet to the sea,
despite the fact that Danzig is an indisputably German city. But the
same men at the same time took away Trieste and Fiume from Austria and
Hungary, despite the dependence of their hinterland upon them, invoking
the argument of the population of the ports, the validity of which was
hotly denied by them when Germany invoked it!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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