History of the World Crisis

Translated by: Juan R. Fajardo, 2016.
Source of the text: Translated from Historia de la crisis mundial, in Obras Completas, volume 8, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/oc/historia_de_la_crisis_mundial/index.htm
Editorial Note: This text is available in print as part of: José Carlos Mariátegui, History of the World Crisis and Other Writings, Marxists Internet Archive Publications (2017); ISBN 978-0-692-88676-2.

The Versailles Peace is the starting point of all of today’s economic and political problems. The Treaty of Versailles has given the world neither the tranquility nor the order which the States hoped for. On the contrary, it has brought new causes of disquiet, disorder, and worry. It hasn’t even a definitive end to martial operations. This peace has not pacified the world. Europe has remained at arms after signing it, and it has continued to beat and partially bloody itself. We bear witness today to the occupation of the Ruhr, which is a military occupation. The treaty does not, therefore, deserve to be called a peace treaty. It deserves, instead, to be called a war treaty.

All statesmen, who hold dear the dream of an European reconstruction, regard as indispensable the revision, correction, practically the annulment, of this treaty – which separates, makes enemies of, and fractures European nations, thus making a policy of collaboration and unity impossible, and destroys the German economy, which is a vital part of the European system. For this reason, the peace treaty is under permanent discussion. Its sanction, ratification, or adoption end up being provisional. One of the main belligerents, the United States, has refused to adhere to it or to sign it. Other belligerents have abandoned it. In light of the occupation of the Ruhr, Germany has refused to continue meeting the economic obligations imposed in its clauses. The study of the treaty is, therefore, of great currency.

Knowledge and examination of the Versailles Peace is also of extraordinary interest to us men in the vanguard, men of revolutionary conviction. Firstly, because this treaty and its economic and political consequences are proof of the decadence, the downfall, and the bankruptcy of the individualist, capitalists, and bourgeois order. Secondly, because this treaty, its weakness and discredit, mean the weakness and discredit of the democratic ideology of bourgeois pacifists of Wilson’s kind, who believe that the security of peace is compatible with the survival of the capitalist order.

Let’s see what the Versailles Conference was, and what the peace treaty is. We must go back to the capitulation, the surrender, of Germany. You well know, from Wilson’s own mouth, that the United States officially declared its war ends, immediately following its intervention. In January of 1918, Wilson drew up his famous fourteen points. These fourteen points, as you are well aware, were none other than peace conditions, for which the Allied and associated powers fought against Germany and Austria. While the armies clashed, Wilson ratified, made clear, and defined these conditions in several speeches and messages. England, France, and Italy accepted Wilson’s fourteen points.

Germany was then in an advantageous and superior military position. As I’ve explained in my previous lectures, more than the American material reinforcements, the Wilsonian propaganda first weakened, and then broke, the strength of the German front. The peace conditions preached by Wilson won over the majority of German public opinion. The German people expressed its weariness of the war, its desire to no longer fight, its wish to accept the peace offered by Wilson. The German generalissimos saw that this same morale was widespread in the army. They understood that, under such moral circumstances, it was impossible to continue the war, and they proposed the immediate start of peace negotiations. They proposed it, in effect, as a means of maintaining the army’s united spirit because it was necessary, in any case, to demonstrate to the army that the German government did not capriciously prolong the war sacrifices, and that it was prepared to end them in exchange for an honorable peace. Under this pressure, the German government communicated to President Wilson that it accepted the fourteen points and requested the opening of peace negotiations.

On October 8th, President Wilson asked Germany whether, having accepted the proposed terms, its objective was simply to obtain information on the details, on their application. The German reply, dated October 12th, was affirmative. Germany accepted the fourteen points without any reservation. On October 14th, Wilson posed the following preliminary issues: the terms of the armistice would be dictated by the Allies’ military counselors; submarine warfare would cease immediately; the German government would provide guarantees of its representative character. On the 20th of October, Germany declared its agreement on the first two items. Regarding the third, it replied that the German government was subject to the Reichstag’s control. On October 23rd, Wilson informed Germany that he had officially informed the Allies of this correspondence, inviting them – should they desire peace under the stated terms – to charge their military counselors with drafting the terms for the armistice. The Allied military counselors, led by Foch, discussed and drew up those terms. In accordance with them, Germany was to be disarmed and unable to continue the war. Germany, however, submitted. It had nothing to fear from the peace terms. The peace terms has already been explicitly agreed to. The negotiations had no other purpose than setting protocols for their application.

Germany capitulated, then, in light of the Allies’ commitment that the peace would conform to Wilson’s fourteen points and the other substantial conditions set forth by Wilson in his messages and speeches. It was but a matter of coordinating the details of a peace whose general outlines were already established. The peace that the Allies offered Germany was a peace without annexations or reparations; a peace which assured the vanquished their territorial integrity; a peace which did not heave upon their shoulders the victors’ economic debts; a peace which guaranteed the vanquished their right to life, to independence, to prosperity. Germany and Austria laid down their arms on the basis of these guarantees. What did it matter, morally, that those guaranteed were not yet written into a treaty, in a document signed by both warring sides? They were not, for all that, any less categorical, any less clear, nor any less definitive.

Let’s now look at how they were respected, how they were followed, how they were kept by the Allies. The story of the Versailles Conference is known inside and out. Several of the men who took part in the conference have published books dealing with its functioning, its work, and atmosphere. The books of Keynes, England’s economic delegate, of Lansing, the North American Secretary of State, of André Tardieu, the French delegate and Clemenceau’s main collaborator, of Nitti, Italian delegate and Orlando’s Treasury Minister, are all universally known. Also, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Poincaré, Foch, have made various statements about the intimate details of Versailles Conference. There is thus enough authoritative testimony available to make documented judgments about the conference and the treaty. All the testimonials I have listed are Allied testimonials. I don’t want to turn to German testimonials, so that they are not dismissed as full of one-sidedness, spite, or animosity.

All the participating powers sent large delegations to the conference. The great powers, mainly, surrounded their delegates with veritable armies of experts, technicians, and assistants, but these commissions took part in drawing up only the treaty’s secondary clauses. The substantive clauses, the cardinal points of the peace, were agreed upon by just four men: Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Orlando. These four men made up the famous Council of Four, and among them, Orlando had only an intermittent, localist, and limited participation in the work of the council. Orlando hardly took care of Italy’s special concerns. The peace was, therefore, product of just Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George. Of those three men, only Wilson seriously desired a peace based on the fourteen points and his democratic ideology. Clemenceau hoped, above all, for a peace that was advantageous for France, and hard, rough, and inescapable for Germany. Lloyd George was opposed to Germany being treated harshly, not out adherence to the Wilsonian program, but out of interest that Germany not be despoiled to such an extent that its recovery, and consequently, Europe’s capitalist reorganization, would be jeopardized. At the same time, however, Lloyd George had to take into account his government’s position in Parliament. English public opinion wanted a peace which would impose payment of all war debts upon Germany. The English taxpayer did not want the economic obligations of the war to fall upon him. He wanted them to fall on Germany. Legislative elections in England took place before peace was signed, and to avoid being defeated in the elections Lloyd George had to include that desire of the English taxpayer in his election platform. Lloyd George, true to his word, committed himself before the English people to forcing Germany to wholly assume the cost of the war. Clemenceau, in turn, was pushed in the same direction by French public opinion. Those were the exhilarating days following victory. Neither the French people nor the English people had the presence of mind to reason and reflect; their passion and instinct obscured their intelligence and discernment. Behind Clemenceau and behind Lloyd George there were, therefore, two peoples who longed to plunder Germany. Behind Wilson, however, there wasn’t a people devotedly committed to the fourteen points. Rather, the North American public leaned, selfishly, toward abandoning some of Wilson’s lyrical desires. Wilson dealt with heads of state who were strong in parliament, masters of strong majorities in their respective chambers. He himself lacked that firm parliamentary commitment in the United States.

We have here one of the causes of Wilson’s dealing and concessions during the conferences, but unlike this one, another of the causes was not an external cause. It was an internal cause. A psychological cause. Wilson found himself facing two astute seasoned politicians, expert in artifice, sophistry, and deceit. Wilson was an ingenious university professor; a somewhat priestly, utopian, and hieratic character, a fellow with a bit of a puritan’s and a protestant pastor’s mysticism. By contrast, Clemenceau and Lloyd George were two cautious, experienced, and skilled politicians, vastly prepared for diplomatic tussles. Two skilled and experienced strategists. Two lying foxes of bourgeois politics. Keynes says, moreover, that Wilson took only general principles to the conference, but no concrete ideas as to their application. Wilson did not know, in detail, the European issues addressed by his fourteen points. It was therefore easy for the Allies to set before him an answer to each of these issues, dressed up in idealist and doctrinal clothing. They did not barter with Wilson over adherence to any of his principles, but they gave themselves liberty to evade them in practice and in reality. They cleverly drafted the clauses of the treaty so as to leave room for convenient interpretations in order to invalidate the very principles that those clauses consecrated and recognized. Wilson lacked the experience and perspicacity to discover the meaning of the grammatical twists and in-between-the-lines meanings of each clause. From this perspective, the Treaty of Versailles has been a masterwork of shysterism from the world’s brightest and most unscrupulous lawyers.

Wilson’s program guaranteed Germany its territorial integrity. The Treaty of Versailles cleaved the Saarland region – inhabited by six hundred thousand Germans – from Germany. The feeling in that region was unquestionably German. The treaty states, however, that after fifteen years a plebiscite shall decide that region’s final nationality. The treaty goes on to amputate other German populations from Germany in order to give them to Poland and Czechoslovakia. Finally, it decides the occupation, for fifteen years, of the provinces on the left bank of the Rhine, which contain a population of six million Germans. Several million Germans have been arbitrarily placed under flags alien to their true nationality, by virtue of a treaty which, according to Wilson’s program, was to have been a peace treaty without annexations of any kind.

Wilson’s program guaranteed Germany a peace without reparations, but the Treaty of Versailles obligates her, not only to reparations for damage caused to civilian populations and the reconstruction of devastated cities, but also to the payment of pensions for the families of the war’s victims and the disabled. Furthermore, the calculation of these sums is done – without appeal – by the Allies, who, naturally, are interested in exaggerating the amount of those sums. The establishment of the size of that war reparation is not yet finished. What is now being discussed is the amount that Germany is able to pay.

Wilson’s program guaranteed the carrying out of the principle of peoples’ right to self-determination, but the peace treaty denies Austria that right. The Austrians, as you know, are German in race, tradition, and feeling. The nations of different races formerly brought into the Austro-Hungarian Empire – Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia – have been made independent of Austria, which has been left reduced to a small nation of purely Germanic, purely German, population. The peace treaty denies this nation the right to join Germany. It does not deny it explicitly, because – as I have said earlier – it is a document of refined hypocrisy; rather it denies it disguisedly and indirectly. The peace treaty says that Austria shall not be able to join another nation without approval by the League of Nations. And, in an apparently innocent ruling, it goes on to say that the consent of the League of Nations must be unanimous. Unanimous. Such that if a member of the League of Nations – just one; France, for example – withholds its consent, Austria cannot decide for itself. This is one of the clever jokes toward his fourteen points, which the Allied governors managed to play on Wilson in the peace treaty.

Furthermore, the peace treaty has deprived Germany of all its immediately negotiable wealth. By virtue of the treaty, Germany has been dispossessed not only of its navy, but also of its merchant fleet. At the same time, it has been banned from rebuilding its merchant fleet, having had imposed upon it the obligation, for five years, of building the steamships required by the Allies. Germany has been dispossessed of its colonies and of all German state properties within them: railways, public works, etc. The Allies have, furthermore, reserved the right to expropriate, with no compensation whatsoever, the private property of German subjects resident in those colonies. They have reserved the same right in regard to the property of German subjects in Alsace and Lorraine, and in the Allied countries or their colonies. Germany has also been dispossessed of its coal mines in Saarland, which are made property of France, while the inhabitants of the region are accorded the right to chose – in fifteen years – whose sovereignty they prefer. The pretext for handing over of these German coal mines lies in the damage to French coal mines caused by the German invasion; but, in another clause, the treaty contemplates reparations for said damage, imposing on Germany the obligation of consigning to France a quantity of coal equal to the difference between the production from the damaged or destroyed coal mines and their production before the war. This imposition by the treaty on Germany assures France of an annual amount of coal identical to that which its mines gave before the German invasion. In spite of this, in the name of the damage suffered by French mines during the war, it has been found necessary to deprive Germany of the Saarland mines. Finally, Germany has been deprived of the right to open and close its borders to whomever it pleases. The treaty forces her to give the Allied nations that customs treatment accorded to most-favored nations, with no right to any reciprocity whatsoever. In a word, it forces her to open her borders to invasion by foreign merchandize, without its own merchandize enjoying the same openness for entry into Allied countries or their associates.

To list all the spoliations which the treaty inflicts upon Germany I would need to talk all night, besides which, I would need to go into a series of tiring and dry technical or statistical details. I believe the light review which I have already made will suffice for you to form an idea of the magnitude of the economic burdens heaped upon Germany by the peace treaty. The peace treaty has taken from Germany all means of restoring her economy, it has mutilated her territory, and it has virtually suppressed her independence and her sovereignty. The peace treaty has given the Reparations Commission – truly an instrument of extortion and torture – the ability to intervene at will in German economic life.

The Allies have made sure that the peace treaty places Germany’s economic fate in their hands. They have, themselves, had to give up on the application of many clauses which handed Germany’s life over to them. For example, the treaty gives the Allies the right to claim the gold held by the German state. However, as this gold backs up the German currency, in order to prevent the German currency from losing all value for lack of a metallic back-up, the Allies have had to abstain from demanding its hand-over. The treaty is thus largely inapplicable, and has, therefore, all the potentialities of a noose around Germany’s neck. To kill Germany the Allies have but to tug on that noose. Currently, the talks between France and England have no other meaning than this: France believes it convenient to asphyxiate Germany, whose life is in her hands; England does not deem it convenient to end Germany’s life. It fears that the rotting German corpse might mortally infect Europe.

The peace treaty, in short, betrays Wilson’s principles, in whose name Germany capitulated. The peace treaty has not respected the terms offered Germany to induce her to surrender. The Allies often say that Germany must be resigned to her fate as a defeated power, that Germany has lost the war, that the victors are entitled to impose a harsh peace on her. But such affirmations distort and misrepresent the truth, for such has not been the case for Germany. With precisely the aim of inducing Germany toward peace, the Allies had previously stated their terms, and they had solemnly pledged to respect and maintain them. Germany capitulated, Germany surrendered, Germany laid down arms, on the basis of those terms. There was, therefore, no right to impose a harsh and inclement peace upon a disarmed Germany. There was no right to change the peace terms.

How could Wilson tolerate this disavowal, this violation, of his program? I have already explained this in part. At times, Wilson was put before a series of shysterish and hypocritical skilled distorters of the application of his principles. In other instances, Wilson accepted the points of view of France, Belgium, England, knowing that they attacked his program; but he accepted in exchange for the acceptance of the idea of the League of Nations. In Wilson’s judgment, it did not matter that some of his aspirations – freedom of the seas, for example – not gain immediate application in the treaty. What was essential, what was important, was that the cardinal number of his program not fail. That cardinal number of his program was the League of Nations. The League of Nations, Wilson thought, would make what is not doable today, doable tomorrow. The reordering of the world, on the basis of the fourteen points, was automatically assured with the existence of the League of Nations. In the midst of his most painful concessions, Wilson consoled himself with the idea that the League of Nations was safe.

Something similar happened in Lloyd George’s spirit. Lloyd George resisted many of the French demands. Lloyd George, for example, fought against the military occupation of the left bank of the Rhine. Lloyd George worked so that the treaty not mutilate nor attack German unity, but Lloyd George gave in to the French demands because he thought it was not the right time to discuss them. Lloyd George believed that, bit by bit, as the delirium of victory faded, the fixing of the treaty’s unrealizable clauses would be accomplished. For the moment, what mattered was getting along. What was needed was to sign the treaty without worrying too much about its defects. Everything that was absurd in the treaty would disappear over time by virtue of successive corrections and successive agreements. For now, the treaty had to be signed; later one would look to the way of improving and fixing it. There was no need to argue theoretically about the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles. Reality would take care of constraining the interested nations into acknowledging those consequences and adjusting their behavior to the needs created by those consequences.

In short, Wilson’s thinking would be: The treaty is imperfect, but the League of Nations will improve it. Lloyd George’s thinking would be: The treaty is absurd, but reality, the force of events, would take care of fixing it.

The League of Nations, however, was but a dream born of Wilson’s ideology. The League of Nations has been reduced to a new and powerless Hague Tribunal. According to Wilson’s wishful thinking, the League of Nations would have included all of the countries of Western civilization and, through them, all the countries of the world because the Western countries would rule over the countries of other civilizations of Africa, Asia, etc. Reality, however, is different. The League of Nations does not even include all of the victorious nations. The United States has not ratified the Treaty of Versailles nor has it joined the League of Nations. Germany, Austria, Turkey, and other European nations, are excluded from the League and placed under its tutelage. Russia, which weighs upon the European economy with all the weight of its one hundred twenty million inhabitants, is not part of the League of Nations. Moreover, it is dominated by a regime which is opposed to the order represented by the League of Nations. The dangerous continental balance would be reproduced within the League of Nations. Some nations would ally with others. The League of Nations was to have put an end to the system of alliances. We see, however, that Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania have formed an alliance – the Petit Entente – and that the pacts between groups of nations are renewed.

Above all, the League of Nations is no such league of nations. It is a league of governments. It is a league of states. It is a league of the capitalist order. The League of Nations can count on the support of the dominant classes, but it cannot count on the support of the dominated class. The League of Nations is the Capitalist International, not the Peoples’ International. No nation wants to give up a given right in favor of the League of Nations. Go tell France to submit the issue of reparations to the League of Nations. France would answer that the problem of reparations is her problem, not the League of Nations’ problem. The League of Nations is, at most, interesting as an expression of the internationalist phenomenon. The bourgeoisie has conceived the idea of the League of Nations under pressure from phenomena which tell it that human life has become more united, more international. The idea of the League of Nations is, from this point of view, my friends, an involuntary homage from the bourgeoisie toward our proletarian and class-conscious ideal of internationalism.

I have spoken, friends, of these issues, equally distant from all Francophilia as from all Germanophilia. I am not, nor can I be, a Germanophile nor a Francophile. My sympathies do not lie with one nation or another. My sympathies are with the universal proletariat. My sympathies go with the German proletariat and the French proletariat, alike. If I speak of official France with any aggressiveness in language and lexicon, it is because mine is a polemical, belligerent, and combative temperament. I don’t know how to speak unctuously, euphemistically, measuredly, as academics and diplomats speak. I have, toward ideas and toward events, a polemical position. I study events with objectivity, but I speak out about them without limiting, without inhibiting, my subjective sincerity. I do not aspire to the title of impartial man, because – on the contrary – I am proud of my partiality, which puts my thinking, my opinion, and my feeling on the side of those men who wish to build, upon the ruins of the old society, the harmonious edifice of the new.