Toward a New Central Europe

FORGOTTEN SENTIMENTS: THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY AND CENTRAL EUROPE

ALEXANDER GALLUS

(To the attention of Prime Minister Wilson of Great Britain)

IT is perhaps of some interest now that a Socialist Government has again entered the scene in Britain to recall the policy, aims and views of the Labour Party during and after the First World War, as they materialized in a concern for peace and for a pacified Central Europe.

The main personality to study, of course, is Arthur Henderson. 1) The mounting tensions of the immediate pre-war years, saw the British Labour movement in affiliation with the Socialist Internationale. The Bureau of the Congress of the Internationale sat in meeting in Brussels, when on the 25th of August the Austrian declaration of war against Serbia, was made. But the Bureau still considered organizing an international policy to prevent war, because - according to the theoretical international solidarity of the working classes - they did not consider the possibility of members of the working-class movement being thrown into murderous battles against each other.

"It was still hoped - says Hamilton - that such a meeting would serve to keep the socialists of the world firm in resistance to any threat to world peace on the part of their individual national Governments, in accordance with the solemn undertakings to which they were collectively committed." On the evening of the same day, in Brussels, at a public meeting, Belgian, German, French and British delegates passionately denounced war.

But the participants did not reckon with the national sentiments, which by then, were already aroused. On the 31st of June, Jaures, the French Socialist leader (and one of the speakers in Brussels), was murdered. In Britain, however, at a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square and at various other meetings, the following resolution was adopted by Labor: "We protest against any step taken by the Government of this country to support Russia, either directly or in consequence of an understanding with France, as being not only offensive to the political traditions of the country, but disastrous to Europe.2) And declare, as we have no interest, direct or indirect, in the threatened

quarrels, which may result from the action of Servia, the Government of Great Britain should rigidly decline to engage in war but should confine itself to efforts to bring about peace as speedily as possible."

During the war, Henderson became a member of the War Cabinet and saw the war through conscientiously. But as the possibility of peace drew near, his views became markedly differentiated from those of his colleagues. He wholeheartedly endorsed the speech of Wilson (June 22, 1917), that there should be a peace of reconciliation and not one of force. (Peace without victory.) So his long struggle against imperialistic peace begins. This struggle, though hardly mentioned today, still should be remembered by those who became victims of measures which he wanted to avoid. The revolution in Russia freed Henderson and his movement from the embarrassment of having to work together with the Czarist regime and made it possible for him to reformulate a set of ideals for the common struggle and an ideal peace. In summer 1917, he visited Russia which made his views on a future peace and its terms clear.

He was much impressed by a statement of the new Russian Government on its war aims, which were neither imperialistic nor annexionalistic. two aspects of a possible future peace he especially feared. Thus the prospect of a democratic Russia and the entrance of Wilson's America into the war filled Henderson with hope for a democratic and just termination of the war which would be able to settle or to solve important questions raised by the defeat of the Central Powers, in a spirit of human solidarity.

In order to dispel uncertainties, the Russians suggested calling together in Stockholm an International Socialist Conference for the definition of war aims. Henderson, in various addresses given in Russia, already anticipated the League of Nations: "There should be a family of free nations, with full opportunity to work out their own salvation competing only in science, education and social reconstruction... The free democracies of the world must unitedly work for the great change, for militarism and war are the brutal negation of our highest ideals... These were the ideals in which we believed in 1914, and we cannot desert them in 1917, for they have been made sacred to us by the blood of our sons."

The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, first endorsed the conference, but later under the influence of his Cabinet Ministers, withdrew the official support of the Government. Nevertheless, his telegram, showing his original frame of mind, is of interest: "Re-establishment of a general peace, should not tend towards either domination over other nations or seizure of their national possessions or violent usurpation of their territories. it should be a peace without annexation or indemnation and based on rights of nations to decide their own affairs..."

These formulations which originated with the new Russian Government were acceptable to him "provided that by these phrases it was not intended that French and British should be bound to restore to Turkey, or German mis-government populations in Africa or Mesopotamia which they have rescued from it and also that it was understood that provinces which have been torn from France by German militarism should be restored to her." In plain terms, the reservations voiced by Lloyd George refer to the annexation of German colonies and the "revanche" so dear to France.

It was understood that delegations from the German and Austrian Socialist Parties should attend.

Unfortunately, the conference did not materialize, because Lloyd George withdrew his support. When the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, even the Russian support waned. But Henderson's aims were set as he left the War Cabinet. Henderson wanted victory expressed in selfless and "democratic" terms and his views were accepted officially by the Labour Party. He was promptly declared a "defeatist" by the nationalist press, but for Henderson, war was a horror and only justifiable if it had a noble purpose. "The common people" so he said "the democracy, did nothing to create the conditions out of which the war came; but the common people have done everything to realize the ideals for which we entered the war."

He convened a special Labour Conference to formulate the war aims of the Labour Party, independently of the War Cabinet. This conference established as its aims:

1. Just territorial settlements.

2. Self-determination.

3. An international organization to prevent war. (League of Nations as a Supra-National Authority.)

In February 1918, a Conference of Allied Socialist Parties adopted, in essence, the English formulations. Henderson again spoke up: "We do not seek victory of a militarist or diplomatic nature. We seek a triumph for high principles and noble ideals. We are not influenced by imperialistic ambitions or selfish nationalistic interests. We seek a victory, but it must be a victory for international moral and spiritual forces, finding its expression in a peace, upon the inalienable rights of common humanity."

But as the end of war drew near the victory seemed secured, Henderson's hopes to influence events faded. Clemenceau, the British War Cabinet, W. M. Hughes of Australia, moved in the direction of a "Peace of Revenge and Power Policy."

This trend could no longer be halted, not even by an International World Conference of Socialist and Labor Parties, which was convened by Henderson in Bern on January 26, 1919 (Armistice was signed on November 11th, 1918).

In Britain new elections were fought with the above background

that made it easy to misrepresent the public image of Henderson and his party. Charges such as: "Pro-German," "Defeatist," "Bolshevik," and the creation of a new party, the National Democrats, all had their effect and the election was lost. Henderson clearly saw the consequences of his stand, but remained faithful to his principles.

He canvassed for a just settlement, one animated by the spirit of reconciliation and not of revenge. A settlement must not be imposed, but must be arrived at by mutual understanding to be able to safeguard the future. He claimed direct representation for Labor in the planning of the terms of peace. The party platform stated: " the democratic diplomacy which found expression in the war aims of Labour, has been one of the most powerful factors in winning the war, and must be the most powerful factor in the rebuilding of the world. The Peace which Labour demands is a Peace of International Conciliation. It declares absolutely against secret diplomacy and any form of economic war. " Labour appeals to all, "who are determined that the fruits of victory shall not be wasted in the interest of riches or of reaction."

Hamilton strongly criticized the attitude of Lloyd George. "Lloyd George had got to have a party and a majority. He could have secured both for a reasonable and decent program: for peace based on undertakings given to young German Republic and to the people of Great Britain in the pre-Armistice negotiations Had he stood by the outlook he had professed to the Trade Unions at the Laxton Hall in January 1918, he could have won the peace. Instead he chose, almost wanted, to lose it..... He could have mobilized sane emotions, as easily as he mobilized insane.... The Prime Minister could, if he had so chose have gone to Versailles armed against short-sighted nationalism. As it was, he went as the slave of angry passions, he had himself created and in the upshot, had to make the demands of others an excuse for what his own cooler judgment by then saw. to be a fatal course. Yet along this fatal course it was he who led in 1918."

As a result the negotiations became "a Peace Conference of the hoary old type, at which the victors divide the spoils and squabble among themselves over the division."

The joint executives of the Labour Movement in Britain declared that the Peace Treaty is fundamentally defective "in that it accepts and indeed is based upon the very political principles, which were the ultimate cause of the war. The Treaty involves the violation of the principles embodied in Labour and Socialist Conference decisions; it also violates the understanding on which the Armistice was signed, and is therefore a repudiation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of President Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George and other Allied statesmen."

Here we may leave the struggle of Henderson against an inhuman peace and take a glimpse at the sentiments of the rank and file of the

Labour Movement, as expressed in a pamphlet by Charles Roden and Dorothy Frances Buxton (The World after the War, first published in 1920).

Setting aside the decided leanings of the authors towards the Bolshevik Movement, which influenced their criticism of the new settlements in Europe, specially as the decisions taken were partly connected with the desire to create a "cordon sanitaire' against revolutionary tendencies, we note here the general tone of their attitude. Already Chapter 2 has a significant title: "The Balkanization of Europe." " on the ruins of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, a bewildering transformation had taken or was taking place... All the distraction and confusion which had made the Balkans synonym for political unrest and danger had now been reproducer, with tragic exactness over a far greater area, and has begun to affect the life of peoples more advanced in civilization and more accustomed to order and culture. The Central Region of Europe was included, in a very real sense, within the frontiers of the Balkans, now moved Northwards and Westwards, to the Baltic, the Oder and the Rhine..."

The former enemy states were economically crippled and the idea of "Public Right" was completely disregarded. "It is true that the sovereignty of certain states - those regarded by Paris as hostile - was very strictly limited, but this did not mean that the rights of the small states were equal to those of the great, or that the strong were controlled for the sake of the weak."

"Public Right" in this sense could only be secured by some genuine form of super-national Government, representing the interests of all the states and capable of being called to account by the humblest of them. The new League of Nations did not constitute such a Government. It was the Allied and Associated Powers under a new name." "As for the principle of "nationality" it received a notable application in the setting up of new states, nominally based upon ethnical considerations. But if old injustices were removed, new ones were created. The national principle was applied where it was advantageous to the Allies from a military point of view, where it promoted the interests of powerful capitalist groups, or where it could be invoked to punish an enemy, In other cases it was violated."

"The test of a genuine national settlement may be put in the form of a question - Does it leave behind it grievances so considerable that men will look forward toward some future rearrangement by war ?" "Judged by this test, the policy of the allies conspicuously failed. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia displayed many of the characteristics of the imperial states out of whose wreck they had arisen, and whose violation of nationality had always been regarded as a menace to peace. Mr. Morgenthau, the former American Ambassador at Constantinople, early pointed out, that these new States... were "spreading themselves out, quarreling, weakening themselves in

the process, and trying to swallow up peoples of different races and aspirations "

"Czechoslovakia included 3 1/2 million Germans, and large blocks of Ukrainian and Hungarian population. Its very name was invented to justify the incorporation in it of the Slovak race, which though ethnically allied to the Czechs, had not demanded to be united with them, and at one stage set up an independent republic in opposition to the Government of Prague. Yugoslavia beside being troubled by the internal dissensions of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Montenegrins and the chronic resistance of her Albanian subjects, had to hold down. a large Macedonian population, whose sympathies lay with Bulgaria and who had been assigned to Bulgaria by a treaty with Serbia herself in February 1912. Rumania included Bulgarian, Ukrainian, German, Hungarian and Serb populations."

To exemplify the chaotic conditions under which the solutions of the Peace Treaty were decided the authors of the pamphlet point out the fate of Hungary. "As soon as the armistice with that country was concluded, in November 1918. its neighbors, Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia were encouraged to invade it. The two former overstepped the limit of their "nationality,' claims and entirely ignored the remonstrances of the "Big Four" sitting in Paris. Rumania did so with sole reason, for the Bucharest Foreign Office held to in its pigeon holes the Secret Treaty of August 1916, promising to Rumania a territory which included great blocks of Hungarian population. When Hungary set up a "Bolshevist" Government, the neighboring states were not only allowed to retain what they had taken (including virtually all the mineral resources of Hungary), but were encouraged to the total overthrow of the Red Army of Bela Kun. Yugoslavia alone refused to join in the attack." They had enough on their hands without this. "They had been in armed conflict with the Italians over the question of Dalmatia; they had fought an other Ally, Rumania, over the Banat and Temesvar, and they had on their hands a third quarrel with the Austrians over their Northern frontier. There had been repeated encounters over the Austria-German towns of Klagenfurt and Marburg, the former of which had been occupied by the South Slavs on direct opposition to Allied orders."

"The actual armed conflicts must be pictured against a background of discontent and misery too widespread and confused to be summed up in any brief description." "The real bearing of the proposal of a League of Nations on the peace settlement can only by appreciated in con junction with the other provisions of the treaties. These transfer -whole populations against their will so alien forms of government, and consign the enemy peoples to a state of economic servitude. Now the immediate task of the League. is to guarantee she stability of these essentially unstable conditions This is the most important of the reasons winch influenced America in her refusal (November

1915) to be bound by any of the more substantial obligations of the covenant.,' Any League endeavoring to implement the above task, would become a "great militarist organization destitute of the healing spirit of reconciliation which alone can make it an instrument of progress." "The political system of Europe, in so far as any such system was emerging at all, was the old 'Balance of Power' in new form."

"The territory of the beaten group was amputated on all hands, large blocks of German, Austrian, Hungarian and Bulgarian population being handed over the rule of their enemies. Of the economic provisions... it is enough to say that they had the effect of ruining the enemy states as commercial rivals. Large quantities of their agricultural stock and railway material; and the main part of their merchant shipping were handed over to the victors. their industry was deprived of its main sources of supply.,' A further effect of the Peace Treaties was "the denial- to the beaten states of reciprocity in commerce, and of the equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace which was promised to them by the third of President Wilson's Fourteen Points." "Finally the Peace Treaties imposed an overwhelming financial burden upon the defeated countries." ' The Armistice Agreement of November 11, 1918 was made upon the basis of President Wilson's Fourteen Points." It was on the faith of this agreement that Germany laid down her arms." "The Peace Treaty violated every one of the principles on the faith of which Germany laid down her arms; and it was not long before the "Fourteen Points" were openly repudiated by the Allied press." ". the (economic) blockade was the most powerful weapon they had for enforcing of terms contrary to the Armistice Agreement." "Perhaps, however, the aspect of Allied policy which is destined to leave the deepest impression on posterity is its betrayal of the principle of nationality. No principle was more loudly and continuously professed during the war." "The right of national self determination was violated. The right of peoples to decide their own destiny, first raised as an inspiring war-cry, has sunk to the position of a rather stale joke." This principle was violated by secret agreements. "Similar agreements were probably made among the enemy Governments. The difference was that these Governments did not propose the same lofty ideals. The Allied statesmen have hardly completed the series of speeches in which proclaimed the disinterested purposes of the War, before they had begun to wave a network of secret engagements, wholly incompatible with these purposes. It was the disastrous series of secret agreements which prevented every attempt at peace on the basis of self-determination and public right."

Thus "Wilsonism" failed to materialize, and the statesmen did not realize that: "wrongs done to Germany or Russia, to Hungary or Bulgaria, were merged in the greater injury to humanity, including,

of course, the injury to ourselves. They were not great enough to call a halt in the process of destruction, in order to preserve or reconstruct the indispensable basis for the civilization of the future. " If the sense of responsibility towards the interests of other peoples is not again restored "we shall drift back into the same attitude of indifference to the interests of other peoples and to our relations with them, which helped to render this War possible and which will contribute, if we revert to it, towards the making of other wars in the future.'

I feel that these excerpts will suffice to prove the trend of opinion of an important sector of the British public, which was critical toward the reorganization of Europe on a basis completely alien to the humanistic ideals born in America and represented by Wilson.

It is now a truism, that this analysis of the situation created after World War I, has in its essence withstood the test of time. The Second World War was largely the consequence of the faults made in the Peace Treaties after the First World War, and especially of the failure of the statesmen in coming to a satisfactory and humanistic solution of the ethnic difficulties in Central and Eastern Europe. These difficulties are still unsolved. A new settlement, if past mistakes should be avoided, must be based on some simple and commonsense principles. These are:

1. The solution must be agreed upon by all concerned and not imposed by force.

2. The solution must be based on the right of self-determination for all ethnic units in the area.

3. The solution must lead to the optimum human well-being of the inhabitants of the area and not serve the well-being of a selected few, or the interests of power outside the area.

4. A reorganization of the area is the sole concern of its inhabitants and cannot be based on any outside interference whatsoever.

5. The solution must lead to a new political form of peaceful cooperation within the area, which will make it possible for the present state boundaries - which dissect ethnic boundaries - to become the concern of administrative reorganization, and that the administrative units thus constructed, will not in future block the free cultural and ethnic development of national or ethnic units, which not so long ago have cohabited the area without harming each other, in an intricate pattern of neighborly, side by side settlements.

1) Arthur Henderson; a biography, 1938. By M. A. Hamilton

2) All italics by A. G.

Toward a New Central Europe