Introduction
Concert of Europe
The nineteenth-century European system of regulation of international affairs by the Great Powers. Although much of the historical literature argues that the system was successful in keeping the general peace of Europe because it was based on a ‘balance of power', more recent work has stressed the importance of shared rules of conduct, values, goals and diplomatic practices in relations between the Great Powers.
Peace is not merely the absence of war. An end to the fighting does not necessarily mean that the antagonisms that originally provoked war and the new ones thrown up by war are resolved. An armistice signifies that an absolute resolution by force is unnecessary because one belligerent has attained undisputed military dominance, but translating battlefield verdicts into political settlements is the task of diplomacy. Bridging the gap between an armistice and peace has proved one of the greatest challenges of modern statesmanship. There is no ultimate recipe for peace. Peace may be founded on hegemony and deterrence or it may come with the formation of a stable security community of states which share common values and goals. Most stable international systems combine these features.
For much of the nineteenth century, the Concert of Europe resembled the latter form of peace. The outbreak of the First World War, however, discredited the ‘old’ diplomatic instruments for maintaining international order: military alliances, secret treaties and balance-of-power politics. Some concluded that order needed stronger international laws and a world court to enforce them, while others demanded an end to the system of international competition and sovereign states altogether. The radical solution was nothing less than a transformation of old social, economic and political structures to found a global brotherhood of working
people.
Precisely because the triple deadlock on the military, diplomatic and home fronts propelled the engine of war forward, and because the Europeans could not bring the war to a decisive end, the advocates of ‘new diplomacy' found millions of ready converts to their cause in 1917. The voices of change came from the great continental powers, the United States and Russia. After the October 1917 Revolution, Lenin, the leader of the minority revolutionary wing of the Russian Communist Party known as the Bolsheviks, became the chief proponent of the revolutionary solution to international anarchy. President Woodrow Wilson shared with Lenin the conviction that the ill effects of inter-state competition had to be alleviated. Old diplomacy had been the practice of autocrats and exclusive ruling elites who suppressed their own peoples as well as minority national groups. The American president therefore advocated a more open diplomatic system, based on the rule of law, composed of free and independent nation-states and guided by the ‘organized moral force of mankind'.Bolsheviks
Originally in 1903 a faction led by Lenin within the Russian Social Democratic Party, over time the Bolsheviks became a separate party and led the October 1917 revolution in Russia. After this ‘Bolsheviks' was used as a shorthand to refer to the Soviet government and communists in general.
The aim of this chapter is to examine the process of peacemaking and European reconstruction from the armistice in 1918 to the end of 1929. It considers the influence of Lenin and especially Wilson on the resolution of the First World War. Broadly, it attempts to answer the question of why the Paris peace settlement failed to lay down the foundations for a lasting European peace. Did responsibility rest on the shoulders of the Paris peacemakers, or with those who later attempted to operate the European system they created? Why did the Allied coalition that had won the war in 1918 fall apart so quickly after victory? What does the period from the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1923 to the Locarno treaties of 1925 tell us about the structural problems associated with peacemaking? Was the European detente of 1925—29 a tragically brief but stable start on the road to peace, or a false dawn?