Peaceless Europe Part 18

For Italy a very curious situation came about. France had but one enemy: Germany. She united all her forces against this enemy in a coherent and single action which culminated in the Treaty of Versailles. France had but one idea: to make the Entente abandon the principles it had proclaimed, and try to suffocate Germany, dismember her, humiliate her by means of a military occupation, by controlling her transports, confiscating all her available wealth, by raising to the dignity of elevated and highly civilized States inferior populations without national dignity.

Austria-Hungary was composed of eleven peoples. It was split up into a series of States. Austria and Hungary were reduced to small territories and shut up in narrow confines. All the other countries were given to Rumania, to Serbia, or more exactly to the S.H.S.

State, to Poland, or else were formed into new States, such as Czeko-Slovakia. These countries were considered by the Entente as allies, and, to further good relations, the most important of the Entente nations protected their aspirations even against the wishes of Italy. The Italians had found themselves in their difficult theatre of war against Galatians, Bosnians, Croats, Transylvanians, etc. But by the simple fact of their having changed names, and having called themselves Poles, Jugo-Slavs, Rumanians, they became friends. In order to favour some of these new friends, it has happened that not only have Italy's sentiments been offended, but even justice itself.

Montenegro was always mentioned in the declarations of the Entente.

On January 10, 1917, Briand, speaking in the name of all the Allies, united at that time _pour la defense et la liberte des peuples_, put forward as a fundamental programme the restoration of Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro: Montenegro was in this on an equality with Belgium.

Just a year afterwards, January 8, 1918, Wilson, when formulating his fourteen points, had included in the eleventh proposition the duty of evacuating the territories of Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro, and restoring them. The exact reason for which it was established that Montenegro should be absorbed (even without plebiscite) by the S.H.S.

State, thus offending also Italy's sentiments, will remain one of the most melancholy pages of the New Holy Alliance that the Entente has become, along with that poor prestigeless organism, the League of Nations. But let us hope this latter will find a means of renovating itself.

While France was ruining the German people's sources of life, the peoples who had fought most ferociously against Italy became, through the War, friendly nations, and every aspiration of Italy appeared directed to lessen the prestige of the new friends and allies.

The territories annexed to Italy have a small economic value.

For more than thirty years Italy had sold a large part of her richest agricultural produce to Germany and had imported a considerable share of her raw materials from Russia. Since the War she has found herself in a state of regular isolation. A large part of the Italian Press, which repeats at haphazard the commonest themes of the French Press instead of wis.h.i.+ng for a more intense revival of commercial relations with Germany, frightens the ignorant public with stories of German penetration; and the very plutocracy in France and Italy--though not to the same extent in Italy--abandons itself to the identical error.

So to-day we find spread throughout the peninsula a sense of lively discontent which is conducive to a wider acceptance of the exaggerations of the Socialists and the Fascists. But the phenomenon is a transitory one.

Italy had no feeling of rancour against the German people. She entered the War against German Imperialism, and cannot now follow any imperialistic policy. Indeed, in the face of the imperialistic compet.i.tions which have followed the War, Italy finds herself in a state of profound psychological uneasiness.

France worries herself about one people only, since as a matter of fact she has only one warlike race at her frontiers: Germany. Italy's frontiers touch France, the German peoples, the Slav races. It is, therefore, her interest to approve a democratic policy which allows no one of the group of combatants to take up a position of superiority.

The true Italian nationalist policy consists in being against all excessive nationalisms, and nothing is more harmful to Italy's policy than the abandonment of those democratic principles in the name of which she arose and by which she lives. If the policy of justice is a moral duty for the other nations, for Italy it is a necessity of existence. The Italian people has a clear vision of these facts, notwithstanding a certain section of her Press and notwithstanding the exaggerations of certain excited parties arisen from the ashes of the War. And therefore her uneasiness is great. While other countries have an economic crisis, Italy experiences, in addition, a mental crisis, but one with which she will be able to cope.

France, however, is in a much more difficult situation, and her policy is still a result of her anxieties. All the violences against Germany were, until the day before yesterday, an effect of hatred; to-day they derive from dread. Moral ideas have for nations a still greater value than wealth. France had until the other day the prestige of her democratic inst.i.tutions. All of us who detested the Hohenzollern dynasty and the insolent fatuity of William II loved France, heir of the bourgeois revolution and champion of democracy. So, when the War came, all the democracies felt a lively pang: the crus.h.i.+ng of France meant the crus.h.i.+ng of democracy and liberty. All the old bonds are broken, all the organization which Germany had abroad is smashed up, and France has been saved, not by arms alone, but by the potent life of free peoples.

Yet victory has taken away from France her greatest prestige, her fascination as a democratic country. Now all the democratic races of the world look at France with an eye of diffidence--some, indeed, with rancour; others with hate. France has comported herself much more crudely toward Germany than a victorious Germany would have comported herself toward France. In the case of Russia, she has followed purely plutocratic tendencies. She has on foot the largest army in the world in front of a helpless Germany. She sends coloured troops to occupy the most cultured and progressive cities of Germany, abusing the fruits of victory. She shows no respect for the principle of nationality or for the right of self-determination.

Germany is in a helpless and broken condition to-day; she will not make war; she cannot. But if to-morrow she should make war, how many peoples would come to France's aid?

The policy which has set the people of Italy against one another, the diffusion of nationalist violence, the crude persecutions of enemies, excluded even from the League of Nations, have created an atmosphere of distrust of France. Admirable in her political perceptiveness, France, by reason of an error of exaltation, has lost almost all the benefit of her victorious action.

A situation hedged with difficulties has been brought about. The United States and Great Britain have no longer any treaty of alliance of guarantee with France. The Anglo-Saxons, conquerors of the War and the peace, have drawn themselves aside. Italy has no alliance and cannot have any. No Italian politician could pledge his country, and Parliament only desires that Italy follow a democratic, peaceful policy, maintaining herself in Europe as a force for equilibrium and life.

France, apart from her military alliance with Belgium, has a whole system of alliances based largely on the newly formed States: s.h.i.+fting sands like Poland, Russia's and Germany's enemy, whose fate no one can prophesy when Germany is reconstructed and Russia risen again, unless she finds a way of remedying her present mistakes, which are much more numerous than her past misfortunes. Thus the more France increases her army, the more she corners raw materials and increases her measures against Germany, the more unquiet she becomes.

She has seen that Germany, mistress on land, and to a large extent on the seas, after having carried everywhere her victorious flag, after having organized her commerce and, by means of her bankers, merchants and capitalists, made vast expansions and placed a regular network of relations and intrigue round the earth, fell when she attempted her act of imperialistic violence. France, when in difficulties, appealed to the sentiment of the nations and found arms everywhere to help her.

What then is able organization worth to-day?

The fluctuations of fortune in Europe show for all her peoples a succession of victories and defeats. There are no peoples always victorious. After having, under Napoleon I, humiliated Germany, France saw the end of her imperialistic dream, and later witnessed the ruin of Napoleon III. She has suffered two great defeats, and then, when she stood diminished in stature before a Germany at the top of her fortune, she, together with the Allies, has had a victory over an enemy who seemed invincible.

But no one can foresee the future. To have conveyed great nuclei of German populations to the Slav States, and especially to Poland; to have divided the Magyars, without any consideration for their fine race, among the Rumanians, Czeko-Slovaks and the Jugo-Slavs; to have used every kind of violence with the Bulgars; to have offended Turkey on any and every pretext; to have done this is not to have guaranteed the victory and the peace.

Russia sooner or later will recover. It is an illusion to suppose that Great Britain, France and Italy can form an agreement to regulate the new State or new States that will arise in Russia. There are too many tendencies and diverse interests. Germany, too, will reconstruct herself after a series of sorrows and privations, and no one can say how the Germans will behave. Unless a policy of peace and social renovation be shaped and followed, our sons will witness scenes much more terrible than those which have horrified our generation and upset our minds even more than our interests.

Meanwhile, in spite of the frightful increase of scrofula, rickets and tuberculosis, from which the conquered peoples are princ.i.p.ally suffering, the march of the nations will proceed according to the laws which have hitherto ruled them and on which our limited action can only for brief periods cause small modifications or alterations.

Demographic forecasts, like all forecasts of social events, have but a comparative value. It is true that demographic movements are especially biological manifestations, but it is also true that economic and social factors exercise a profound influence in limiting their regularity and can disturb them very considerably. It is better therefore not to make long prophecies.

What is certain is that the French population has increased almost imperceptibly while the population of Germany augmented very rapidly.

The annual average of births in the five years before the War, 1908-13, was 762,000 in France and 176,000 in Belgium. In Germany it was 1,916,000. The average of deaths was 729,000 in France, 117,000 in Belgium, and 1,073,000 in Germany. Thus, per thousand, the excess of births in France was 0.9, in Belgium 7.7, in Germany 13. The War has terribly aggravated the situation in France, whose demographic structure is far from being a healthy one. From statistics published giving the first results of the French census of 1921--without the new territory of Alsace-Lorraine--France, in the interval between the two census periods, has decreased by 2,102,864; from 39,602,258 to 37,499,394 (1921). The deaths in the War do not represent a half of this decrease, when is deducted the losses among the coloured troops and those from French colonies who fought for France. The new territories annexed to France do not compensate for the War-mortality and the decrease in births.

We may presume that if normal conditions of life return, the population of Germany and German-Austria will be more than one hundred millions, that the population of Belgium altogether little less than fifty millions, that Italy will have a population much greater than that of France, of at least forty-five million inhabitants, and that Great Britain will have about sixty million inhabitants. In the case of the Germans we have mentioned one hundred million persons, taking into consideration Germany and German-Austria. But the Germans of Poland, of Czeko-Slovakia and the Baltic States will amount to at least twenty millions of inhabitants. No one can make forecasts, even of an approximate nature, on Russia, whose fecundity is always the highest in Europe, and whose losses are rapidly replaced by a high birth-rate even after the greatest catastrophes. And then there are the Germans spread about the world, great aggregations of populations as in the United States of America and in a lesser degree in Brazil.

Up to now these people have been silent, not only because they were surrounded by hostile populations, but because the accusation of being sons of the Huns weighed down upon them more than any danger of the War. But the Treaty of Versailles, and more still the manner in which it has been applied, is to dissipate, and soon will entirely dissipate, the atmosphere of antipathy that existed against the Germans. In Great Britain the situation has changed profoundly in three years. The United States have made their separate peace and want no responsibility. In Italy there scarcely exists any hatred for the Germans, and apart from certain capitalists who paint in lurid colours the danger of German penetration in their papers because they want higher tariff protection and to be able to speculate on government orders, there is no one who does not desire peace with all peoples.

The great majority of the Italian people only desire to reconstruct the economic and social life of the nation.

Certain tendencies in France's policy depend perhaps on her great anxiety for the future, an anxiety, in fact, not unjustified by the lessons of the past. Germany, notwithstanding her fallen state, her anguish and the torment she has to go through, is so strong and vital that everybody is certain of seeing her once again potent, indeed more potent and formidable than ever.

Everyone in France is convinced that the Treaty of Versailles has lost all foundation since the United States of America abandoned it, and since Great Britain and Italy, persuaded of the impossibility of putting certain clauses into effect, have shown by their att.i.tude that they are not disposed to entertain coercive measures which are as useless as they are damaging.

In France the very authors of the Treaty of Versailles recognize that it is weakened by a series of successive attenuations. Tardieu has a.s.serted that the Treaty of Versailles tends to be abandoned on all sides: "_Cette faillite a des causes allemandes, des causes allies, des causes francaises_" (p. 489). The United States has asked itself, after the trouble that has followed the treaty, if wisdom did not lie in the old time isolation, in Was.h.i.+ngton's testament, in the Monroe doctrine: _Keep off_. But in America they have not understood, says Tardieu, that to a.s.sist Europe the same solidarity was necessary that existed during the War (p. 493).

Great Britain, according to Tardieu, tends now also to stand aside.

The English are inclined to say, "_N'en parlons plus_" (p. 493). No Frenchman will accept with calm the manner in which Lloyd George has conceived the execution of the peace treaty. The campaign for the revision of the treaties sprang up in lower spheres and from popular a.s.sociations and workmen's groups, has surprised and saddened the French spirit (p. 495). In the new developments "_etait-ce une autre Angleterre, etait-ce un autre Lloyd George_?" (p. 496). Even in France herself Tardieu recognizes sadly the language has altered: "_les gouvernements francais, qui se sont succede au pouvoir depuis le_ 10 _janvier_, 1920," that is, after the fall of Clemenceau, accused in turn by Poincare of being weak and feeble in a.s.serting his demands, "_ont compromis les droits que leur predecesseur avait fait reconnaitre a la France_" (p. 503).

Taking into consideration Germany's financial downfall, which threatens to upset not only all the indemnity schemes but the entire economy of continental Europe, the state of mind which is prevalent is not much different from that which Tardieu indicates.

It is already more than a year ago since I left the direction of the Italian Government, and the French Press no longer accused me of being in perfect agreement with Lloyd George, yet Poincare wrote on August 1, 1920:

_L'autre jour M. Asquith declarait au parlement britannique: "Quelque forme de langage qu'on emploie, la conference de Spa a bien ete, en fait, une conference pour la revision des conditions du traite."

"Chut!" a repondu M. Lloyd George: "c'est la une declaration tres grave par l'effet qu'elle peut produire en France. Je ne puis la laisser pa.s.ser sans la contredire." Contradiction de pure forme, faite pour courtoisie vis-a-vis de nous, mais qui malheureus.e.m.e.nt ne change rien au fond des choses. Chaque fois que le Conseil Supreme s'est reuni, il a laisse sur la table des deliberations quelques morceaux epars du traite_.

No kind of high-handedness, no combined effort, will ever be able to keep afloat absurdities like the dream of the vast indemnity, the Polish programme, the hope of annexing the Saar, etc. As things go there is almost more danger for the victors than for the vanquished.

He who has lost all has nothing to lose. It is rather the victorious nations who risk all in this disorganized Europe of ours. The conquerors arm themselves in the ratio by which the vanquished disarm, and the worse the situation of our old enemies becomes, so much the worse become the exchanges and the credits of the victorious continental countries.

Yet, in some of the exaggerated ideas of France and other countries of the Entente, there is not only the rancour and anxiety for the future, but a sentiment of well-founded diffidence. After the War the European States belonging to the Entente have been embarra.s.sed not only on account of the enormous internal debts, but also for the huge debts contracted abroad.

If Germany had not had to pay any indemnity and had not lost her colonies and mercantile marine we should have been confronted with the absurd paradox that the victorious nations would have issued from the War worn out, with their territories destroyed, and with a huge foreign debt; Germany would have had her territory quite intact, her industries ready to begin work again, herself anxious to start again her productive force, and in addition with no foreign debt, consequently ample credit abroad. In the mad struggle to break up Germany there has had part not only hatred, but also a quite reasonable anxiety which, after all, must be taken into consideration.

Even to-day, three years after the War, Great Britain has not paid her debt to America, and France and Italy have not paid their debts to America and Great Britain. Great Britain could pay with a great effort; France and Italy cannot pay anyhow.

According to the accounts of the American Treasury the Allies' War debt is 9,587 millions of dollars: 4,277 millions owing from Great Britain, 2,977 millions from France, 1,648 millions from Italy, 349 millions from Belgium, 187 millions from Russia, 61 millions from Czeko-Slovakia, 26 millions from Serbia, 25 millions from Rumania, and 15 millions from Greece. Up to last July Great Britain had paid back 110 millions of dollars. Since the spring of 1919 the payment of the interest on the amounts due to the American Treasury has been suspended by some European States. Between October and November, 1919, the amount of the capitalizing and unpaid interests of the European States came to 236 million dollars. The figure has considerably increased since then.

According to the _Statist_ (August 6, 1921) the Allies' debt to the United States on March 31, 1921, amounted to ten milliards and 959 million dollars, including the interests, in which sum Great Britain was interested to the sum of 4,775 million dollars and France for 3,351 million dollars. But the _Statist's_ figures, in variance to the official figures, include other debts than strictly war debts.

The debts of the various allied countries' to Great Britain on March 31, 1921, according to a schedule annexed to the financial statement for 1921-22, published by the British Treasury, came to 1,777,900,000, distributed as follows: France 557 millions, Italy 476 millions, Russia 561 millions, Belgium 94 millions, Serbia 22 millions, Portugal, Rumania, Greece and other Allies 66 millions. This sum represents War debts. But to it must be added the 9,900,000 given by Great Britain for the reconstruction of Belgium and the loans granted by her for relief to an amount of 16,000,000. So, altogether, Great Britain's credit to the Allies on March 31, 1921, was 1,803,600,000, and has since been increased by the interests. Great Britain had also at the same date a credit of 144,000,000 to her dominions.

France has credit of little less than nine milliard francs, of which 875 millions is from Italy, four milliards from Russia, 2,250 millions from Belgium, 500 millions from the Jugo-Slavs, and 1,250 millions from other Allies. Italy has only small credits of no account.

Now this situation, by reason of which the victorious countries of Europe are heavy debtors (France has a foreign debt of nearly 30 milliards, and Italy a debt of more than 20 milliards) in comparison with Germany, which came out of the War without any debt, has created a certain amount of bad feeling. Germany would have got on her feet again quicker than the victors if she had no indemnity to pay and had no foreign debts to settle.

France's anxieties in this matter are perfectly legitimate and must be most seriously considered without, however, producing the enormities of the Treaty of Versailles.

a.s.suming this, the situation may be stated in the following terms:

1. All the illusions as to the capacity of Germany being able to pay have fallen to pieces, and the indemnities, after the absurd demands which tended to consider as inadequate the figure of 350 milliards and an annual payment of from ten to fifteen milliards have become an anxious unknown quant.i.ty, as troublesome to the victors as to the vanquished. The German circulation has lost all control under the force of internal needs, and Germany is threatened with failure.

The other debtors--Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria--have need of succour, and can pay nothing. Austria has need of the most indispensable objects of existence, and everything is lacking.

2. The indemnity which Germany can pay annually in her present condition cannot, calculating goods and cash payments altogether, represent more than two or three milliards at the most.

3. The victorious countries, such as France, have won immense territories and great benefits, yet they have not been able to pay the War debts contracted abroad, and not even the interests. France and Italy, being countries of good faith, have demonstrated that, if they cannot pay, it is absurd to demand the payment of much higher sums from countries like Germany, which has lost almost all her best resources: mercantile fleet, colonies and foreign organization, etc.

4. The danger exists that with the aggravation of the situation in the vanquished countries and the weakening of the economic structure of Europe, the vanquished countries will drag the victors down with them to ruin, while the Anglo-Saxon peoples, standing apart from Continental Europe, will detach themselves more and more from its policy.