The council's other members horse-traded for spoils, as did Greece, Poland and the new Yugoslavia. The austere and unlikable Wilson got nothing returning home, he suffered a debilitating stroke. The Italians, who hadn't won a battle, and the French, who'd been saved from catastrophe, were the greediest, says MacMillan the Japanese plucked Pacific islands that had been German and a colony in China known for German beer. As a rush to make expedient settlements replaced initial negotiating inertia, appeals by many nationalities for Wilsonian self-determination would be overwhelmed by rhetoric justifying national avarice. Although President Wilson had insisted on a League of Nations, even his own Senate would vote the league down and refuse the treaty. and Italy, was busy preparing a "just and lasting war." Six months of parleying concluded on June 28 with Germany's coerced agreement to a treaty no Allied statesman had fully read, according to MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, in this vivid account. A joke circulating in Paris early in 1919 held that the peacemaking Council of Four, representing Britain, France, the U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |