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Summary: Six days that changed my view of 1919!!
Review: The book is a wonderful, educating, and also entertaining, as Mrs. MacMillan adds funny quotes said by the leaders. The book shows how the victors were concerned very much with Germany, but when it came to China, Middle East and Japan, they didn't pay much attention. This of course, lead to many of the diasters in the future. But the author does not blame the victors for World War 2. In fact, the author writes ""The final crime," declared The Economist in its special millennium issue, was "the Treaty of Versailles, whose harsh terms would ensure a second war" That is to ignore the actions of everyone-political leaders, diplomats, soliders, ordinary voters-for twenty years between 1919-1939." (pg.493) While the author is correct in saying that the Peace Conference delegates tried their best to avoid war, I think she maybe a little too generous to the victors. It seems that the victors had in effect set up the board for the moves to be made that lead to World War 2. While they themselves did not make the moves, they set up the pawns, rooks, knights and kings on the board so that the leaders of the 20's and 30's could make the dreadful moves that lead to World War 2. However, as far as facts about the motivations and decisions made, the book can be your bible about the Peace Conference. A great buy and great reading if you like history or political history.
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Summary: Well-researched, objective
Review: The book is about the treaties at the end of WWI. I think that writer's grasp of the subject is objective, detailed enough and most importantly her style is lively that I read the the book in relatively short time. Her entrance to the book first describing the characters and the region by region going through the relations, problems of the countries, allied countries' opportunistic approach on middle east and china, creation of central european countries, turkey's return to the scene, support from UK to Israel which was generally based on religious tendencies of the UK diplomats in the region as well as the major names of English government representatives of the time. As a whole the book covers nealy all major subjects except the armenian question. Thanks to the writer. She did a great job.
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Summary: Required reading
Review: This is the best non-fiction work I have read in a long time. Anyone who would like a better understanding of the current state of the world - and wouln't we all - would enjoy this wonderfully written, well-researched book. From the events in Paris in 1919, we gain a better perspective about the genesis of current world conflicts, from Bosnioa to Iraq to the US tensions with the French. Macmillan truly captures the atmosphere of Paris 1919 and the key characters but lets the reader draw their own conclusions. Deserving of all the awards and accolades it has received.
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Summary: First-Rate History!
Review: As the United States finds itself ever deeper in the Middle East morass, I continue my reading to find the roots of the turmoil that afflicts this region. One trail took me back to a critical milestone: the reshaping of the Middle East's political landscape coming out of World War I. Ms. MacMillan's book is an excellent primer on this seminal event in the twentieth century. World War I was supposed to be the war that would end all wars. Of course it didn't, and ironically nowhere could this be better presaged than in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.This book is a grand tour of the Peace Conference as well as much of the world in the Great War's aftermath. Ms. MacMillan portrays not only the major combatants, but also many of the lesser combatants and various ethnic groups in a grand arc from the Seine to the Euphrates. Her story is thoroughly researched and rich in detail, not only about people and events, but also the cultural, diplomatic, and historical ambience. Her writing is crisp and clear, factual and anecdotal, and sobering and invigorating. The lynchpins of her tale are the personal involvement of Georges Clemenceau (Prime Minister of France), David Lloyd George (Prime Minister of Great Britain), and Woodrow Wilson (President of the United States) -- their personalities and interactions as well as how they personally shaped the outcome of the conference. A wide variety of other extant and future leaders are included, but none had the same overall influence and power as these three. Through her writing one senses what it must have been like in Paris. It was more than a peace conference; it was the proverbial house upon the hill lit brightly by the hopes and dreams of millions of people weary of war and desperate for a future wherein nations and peoples would respect each other and commune via the rule of law. It was one of those singular moments in history where hope and faith struggled to rise above the loss, destruction, and misery left in war's wake. Unfortunately the moment passed. The human spirit was overcome by human frailties such as fear, greed, nationalism, and avarice. The best of hope succumbed to the bitterness of power politics. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Middle East. There the perceived national interests of France and Britain were not grounded in demographics, but rather were steeped in spheres of influence, oil, and balance of power. President Wilson's attempts to resolve their conflicting strategies didn't help. In one example that reaches us today, "It never seems to have occurred to [Wilson] that a single unit did not make much sense...In 1919 there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked south, toward India and the Gulf; Baghdad had strong links with Persia; and Mosul had closer ties with Turkey and Syria. Putting together the three Ottoman provinces and expecting to create a nation was, in European terms, like hoping to have Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs make one country." (397) Alas, we see this today, but few saw it at the time. Combine this with similar conundrums in the region and then leaven the mixture with Britain's confusing signals concerning a Jewish homeland in Palestine vis-à-vis Arab aspirations, and we can see the flame growing under today's cauldron. The turmoil in the Middle East was paralleled in other regions. Ms. MacMillan weaves together several such stories, from the break-up of Austria-Hungary, to the mad scrabbling between the Balkan nations; from the emergence of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, to the conundrum that was Germany - worn out and overcome, but not defeated. The war left a patchwork quilt of victors and fledgling new and aspiring nations and peoples. Interspersed were the vanquished. Old problems were torn away, only to be replaced by a host of new ones. The United States' role at the Peace Conference was disappointing. We were highly regarded by all, and our support for one peace objective after another was often sought, especially by various ethnic groups. But, as Ms. MacMillan observes, "Power involves will, as the United States and the world are discovering today: the will to spend, whether money or lives. In 1919 that will had been spent in Europe. The leaders of France, Britain and Italy no longer had the capacity to order their peoples to pay a high price for power. Their armed forces were shrinking day by day and they could not rely on the soldiers and sailors who were left. Their taxpayers wanted an end to expensive foreign adventures. The United States alone had the capacity to act, but it did not see itself as having that role, and its power was not yet great enough. It is tempting to say that the United States lost an opportunity to bend Europe to its will before the competing ideologies of fascism and communism could take hold. That is to read back into the past what we know about American power after another great war. In 1945, the United States was a superpower and the European nations were much weakened. In 1919, however, the United States was not yet significantly stronger than the other powers. The Europeans could ignore its wishes, and they did." (Introduction, xxx) This is part of a great historical irony - a reversal of positions wherein today the US is chastised for being too aggressive in world affairs versus 1919 when so many around the world looked to the US for leadership and its populist involvement only to find us slowly withdrawing behind our oceans. The Paris Peach Conference set much of the stage for much of what happened in the ensuing decades. Lessons abound. This is first-rate history, by a first-rate storyteller. It is interesting, sweeping, and relevant to us today. Bravo, and a resounding five stars.
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Summary: Required reading for the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld Axis
Review: This book is required reading for the Bush administration since it demonstrates how foolish regime change, nation building, and the export of unexportable ideas can be. Forget the arrogant Poles, the treacherous Romanians, the pompous Greeks and Italians, the suave but deceitful Czechs, and the other petitioners before the Big Four, really the Big Three, at Versailles/Paris in 1919. The real culprits who prepared the world for another world war within two decades were Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau. With thoughtlessness, ignorance, lack of consistency and lack of integrity these leaders of the great powers made a mockery of peacemaking. Blessed indeed are the peacemakers but these three clowns deserved damnation. A very good book, with entertaining anecdotes when appropriate and good judgments generally, it fails in one important respect. After showing how outrageous an operation the peacemaking was, Margaret Macmillan still has the foolishness to call the treaty with Germany not unfair and not the cause of much woe in the next three decades. What this demonstrates is that good research and intelligence are not enough to keep an author absolutely from stultifying nonsense. Anyone who does not see in the Versailles treaty the absolute certainty of disaster does not deserve in the last analysis to be taken seriously.
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Summary: A highly readable revisionist look at the peace conference
Review: Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World This book is another fine narrative history in same vein as Robert Massey's Dreadnought, and Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. If you have an interest in the Great War and want history to come alive on the page, this book is one for you. In the introduction Professor MacMillan says; "For six months in 1919, Paris was the capital of the world. The Peace Conference was the world's most important business, the peacemakers its most important people." The six-month session in Paris that took place between January and June1919 and involved representatives of 29 countries drew many of the boundaries of Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans that exist to this day, recreated Poland, set the terms by which the major powers would attempt to live with one another and forged the model for the future United Nations, among many other things. MacMillan tells the story by getting under the skins of the three primary actors, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau. She presents them with all their flaws and qualities and does not judge whether they were good men or evil fools as they struggled with a task of monumental difficulty as best they could. In the end, the author is writing what we may call a revisionist history of the subject. It has long been felt that the Peace Conference was a miserable failure, that narrow national and partisan interests ruled the peacemakers, that the terms offered to Germany were too harsh and contained within them the seeds of the next war. Wilson, George and Clemenceau have been excoriated over the years but Professor MacMillan holds that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. "Hitler did not wage war because of the Treaty of Versailles," MacMillan writes in her concluding chapter. Even if Germany had retained everything that was taken from it at Versailles, he would have wanted more: "the destruction of Poland, control of Czechoslovakia, above all the conquest of the Soviet Union" as well of course as the annihilation of the Jews. This is true but it is incomplete. The issue isn't whether Hitler would have been less cruel and bloodthirsty if Versailles had been more equitable, but whether he and his maniacal regime would have come to power at all. Margaret MacMillan is professor of history at the University of Toronto and the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George.
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Summary: This should be required high school History...
Review: I so badly want to give this book 5-stars, simply because of the great research, presentation, and 'inside' notes and documents which were consulted in order to give a comprehensive look at the conference. One of the problems with the book (mentioned, I believe, by another reviewer) is the lack of maps. Yes, at the beginning we get a few overall maps at different points in chronological time - but there should be a map or two at the start of every chapter. So complicated was this process of re-drawing nearly the whole of Europe, Asia, the Mid-East, etc., and so diverse and complex were the nationalities vying for a piece of it, that one loses track of who had what (if anything) before the war, and who wants how much afterward. Maps would help greatly in following this most important process. Nothing less than a pivotal point in World history whose reverberations still shake our globe nearly a full Century later, this book shows just how shaky and confused the victors were (let alone those who 'lost') as well as the naivety of Wilson, specifically, and of his "Fourteen Points". A great, if sometimes confusing and difficult read.
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Summary: A new well written account
Review: The Versallies peace conference has been widely studied and debated. THis new treatise is well worth the time though. It probably doesnt reveal new information but it does present existing information in a highly readible and riveting format. This read also emphasis the Peace Conferences effects on Turkey, the Middle east and Africa and Asia. Most books on the conference emphasize the redrawing of europe, the book gives a broader and more insightful interpretation. The chapter set up in this book are excellent. Covering each incident seperatly the author investigates the birth of Poland, Yugoslavia, the territorial disputes of eastern europe and of course the long vaunted reparations. The author analyzes the players, Lloyd George, Wilson and Clemenceau. It also looks at luminaries like the Greek Statesman and Ataturk's effects on the conference. This riveting account helps lay the groundwork for the many territorial disputes that effect the world today. Included are the authors observations of the creation of Palistine and Transjordan as well as the Lebanon, two states that would arbor much unrest in the second half of the twentieth century. Important events such as the Armenian genocide are not overlooked and this lends credibility to the volume. A very readable account, not easily put down, highly recommend.
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Summary: A superb book - by far the best on the subject
Review: I can see why this book has won so many literary prizes back in the UK - it is simply superb. Macmillan, a descendant of David Lloyd-George, puts the Versailles Treaty into its proper context - how they saw things at the time, rather than in the light of what then happened in 1939. Looked at this way, we can see that the 4 statesmen in Paris did the best that they could possibly do in the circumstances. This book will change how we see 1919. Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003)
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Summary: Vision and Revision
Review: "Wilsonian" diplomacy, as taught in any mid 20th Century class on foreign affairs, was synonymous with failure -- ideals like disarmament, that took hold in Europe if not America, not only did not prevent WWII. By weakening the Allies, they made Hitler's aggression possible, indeed inevitable. In short, the idealism of the "do gooders" was repeatedly outflanked by the realism of the "do badders." Whether stated elegantly by Hans Moranthau ("Politics Among Nations"), or more efficiently by Mao Tse Tung ("political power flows out of the barrel of a gun"), "realism" was, and is, the order of the day. The only check on power is other power. By failing to do that, the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, deserve an "F" -- unqualified failure. At one level, MacMillan's book represents an arguably significant revisionist view of the causal role of what happened in Paris in 1919. Her thesis is that what happened AFTER Paris in 1919 was every bit as responsible for the disaster of 1939 as the actions AT Paris. Indeed, she argues, the supposed harsh terms of the Peace Treaty were more valuable to Hitler as propoganda than they were actual burdens on the German people. The loopholes in the treaty's limits on commissioned officers were exploited by the simple expedient of multiplying the numbers of non-commissioned officers. Shell companies in foreign countries could build the prototypes of arms outlawed in Germany. The failure to enforce the breaches of the treaty by later leaders was as important a contributer to war as was the original, flawed charter. This is the revisionist thesis. There is another notion buried in the subtext of this book -- the idea that even when not successful, some of Wilson's ideals have persisted to this day, and in fact triumphed, at least partially. If the folks in Paris in 1919 did not adequately perceive the folly, for instance, of distributing the Kurdish people over parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran, the fact is that today the Kurds are beginning to receive implicit recognition of their entitlement to the protection of a national state, autonomous or semi-autonomous, that conforms in broad principle with the ideals Wilson advocated. A personal anecdote underscores the point. Over the Christmas holidays of 1991, I spent my accumulated frequent flyer miles to travel with a 20 year old nephew to Warsaw, Prague, Budaphest and Istanbul. Twelve years later, the outstanding memory from the trip is sitting at various bars when, after the beers we ordered had already arrived, two more beers or two sandwiches or two whatever simply appeared. Invariably, the bar tender's response to our mystified expressions, was a finger pointing to some guy at the end of the bar, and the comment that he just wanted to say "Thank you." Two half-baked, and anonymous but conspicuous, Americans were receiving a symbolic gesture of thanks from people who were inhaling freedom for the first time in half a century (or more). And they knew from whence that freedom had come. These guys were reaching across generations to say thank you to more than one generation of Americans for standing by them, thank you for paying the price, thank you for believing our lives were deserving of dignity. Leaving Prague by train, again I was struck by the acknowledgment of America's role, long term, in the multiple rebirths of Eastern Europe -- the obviously new sign on the train station read: "Woodrow Wilson Station". Men come and go, ideas endure. Reading Margaret McMillan's "Paris 1919" it is easy to become engrossed by the warts of the individuals, and the rich, telling examples of cupidity, hypocrisy and simple stupidity, that drove some of the decisions made. This comment is not intended as a criticism but rather as a caveat to the reader to be mindful that the Paris peace conference was an extraordinary human undertaking, undertaken by, yes, all to ordinary humans. MacMillan spends 494 pages chronicling, with humor and harshness, Clemenceau's blinding hatred of the Germans, Lloyd George's superficial grasp of history, and Wilson's inconsistent, and hypocritical, "principles", all of which led to frequent mistakes (and occasional successes) of the "Big Three". Her concluding paragraph, though, in an almost forgiving tone, acknowledges that the peacemakers had to deal with the real, not the ideal. That the reality they confronted was enormous. Beyond them, and beyond us. That we too are still grappling, all too feebly, with the same problems they addressed: Taming nationalism and religious passion that threatens peace. Outlawing war. The power of the book is, like the event it chronicles, simply the scale of the undertaking -- a litany of all that was attempted. Added to this scale is an extraordinary richness of detail for the second tier players, the representatives of all the teeming masses seeking to be free, who came to Paris on behalf of their people back home. You find yourself wishing that Wilson, Clemenceau and George had had MacMillan's information available at the time -- ah, the beauty of hindsight! In sum, a great survey through the initial draft of the last century's effort to create a "new world order". And a useful, if cautionary, read for anyone pretending to undertake that task today.
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