1981 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN 0-8078-1451-2
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 80-13698
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Marks, Sally.
Innocent abroad.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. European War, 1914-1918Belgium. 2. European
War, 1914-1918Peace. 3. Paris. Peace Conference,
1919. 4. BelgiumForeign relations1914-1951.
I. Title.
D651.B3M36 940.3'493 80-13698
ISBN 0-8078-1451-2
Preface
Few of the countries whose representatives ceremoniously put their signatures to the peace treaty with Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919 were satisfied with it. In fact, dissatisfaction ran rampant not only in Germany but also among the victors, large and small, for a variety of reasons, some more valid than others. Among the dissatisfied was Belgium. At first glance this seems surprising, for one might expect, as Belgian leaders did expect, that Belgium would occupy a privileged position at the Paris Peace Conference. After all, it was the German violation of Belgium that, more than anything else, escalated the 1914 hostilities into a world war. Allied oratory and propaganda had to a high degree focused on "brave little Belgium," and disagreement over her future had been a consistent impediment to a compromise peace. Moreover, the sine qua non of every Allied statement of war aims was the restoration of Belgium.
Belgium was restored in the sense of liberation but not in the broader sense. This was a major cause of dissatisfaction both at the popular level and within the government. Though Belgium gained important concessions on reparations, she had been promised much more by both Germany and the Allies. Another grievance was that she had almost no voice in the peace settlement despite wartime promises of participation. Because invasion of Belgium constituted not only aggression but also violation of international law and because Belgium was the only established European small power with direct interest in the German settlement, her leaders had assumed that her position at the peace conference would be different from that of the other small powers, but by and large it was not. Despite her constant protests, Belgium remained excluded from the decision-making process even on German questions, where the great powers took it for granted that she, alone among the small nations, would contribute substantially to enforcement of their decisions.
Belgium was also dissatisfied because she gained so little from the Versailles treaty. Her expectations had been much larger. Because she possessed an articulate foreign minister, an abnormal and temporary national consensus of opinion, a special moral position in regard to the war, and a strong legal case on some of her claims, Belgian hopes were high; yet they were soon sharply disappointed. In the territorial respect, her European acquisitions were miniscule, far less than those of any other Continental victor except Portugal. There was the added problem that so few Belgian questions were actually decided by the Versailles treaty. Moreover, those that were settled showed a disconcerting tendency to come unsettled, returning to complicate not only the difficult relationships within the Western Entente but also its increasingly problematic relationship to Germany. Among the questions not decided at all were Belgium's future status and her security. The post-Versailles controversy about these two related issues constituted in a broader sense one of the crucial debates over the nature of the Western Entente and its relationship to Germany and over whether there was to be a west European security system.
It is surprising that Belgium's role at the peace conference and in broader aspects of the peace settlement has not hitherto been studied in depth. Several books have examined the activities of various small powers at Paris in 1919, but Belgium, whom the other small nations there recognized to be primus inter pares, has received scant attention despite her prominence in wartime oratory, propaganda, and peace conditions; her undeniably strategic location; and her importance in prewar trade. In addition to Jonathan Helmreich's recent survey of Belgian diplomacy from 1830 to 1966, Belgium and Europe: A Study in Small Power Diplomacy (1976), and a number of general histories, there exist four studies of interwar Belgian diplomacy. Of these, only Baron Pierre van Zuylen's Les Mains libres: politique extrieure de la Belgique, 1914-1940 (1950), and Fernand van Langenhove's La Belgique en qute de scurit, 1920-1940 (1969), are based upon access to Belgian Foreign Ministry papers; but van Langenhove's brief summary largely excludes the peace conference and van Zuylen was a career diplomatist whose career much influenced his views. Jane K. Miller's Belgian Foreign Policy between Two Wars, 1919-1940 (1951), and Orner de Raeymaeker's Bel-gi's internationaal belied, 1919-1939 (1945), are both careful works written before the Belgian and great-power archives for the era were opened or the Dutch diplomatic documents became available. Thus none of these early studies of interwar Belgian diplomacy could examine fully either Belgium's unhappy experiences at the Paris conference of 1919 or her place in the Europe that emerged from the peace settlement. This needs to be done. To omit Belgium is to leave a gap in our comprehension of the postwar power structure, particularly within the Western Entente and in its relations to Germany. Indeed, even the most particular-appearing Belgian problems, such as revision of the 1839 treaties or the fate of Luxemburg, prove to have much broader implications. Thus there are many questions to be posed.
Why, for example, did the small nation that had occupied such a distinctive position in regard to the war and that, as a consequence of this position and the outspoken nature of her foreign minister, had become the de facto leader of the smaller states at Paris fare so poorly in the peace settlement? The answers to this question are diverse and require examination not only of Belgium's diplomacy but also of the policies of the great powers toward that small nation which was of such vital significance to two of them. There are additional questions as well. Why were so many of the decisions made at Paris on Belgian questions the subject of repeated efforts at revision by the great powers? Further, one must not only explore the underlying implications of the Allied debate over Belgian security but also ask why and how this weak little nation, which was so excluded at Paris, suddenly and quickly emerged as the only small-power member of the Western Entente as it grappled with enforcement or nonenforcement of the Versailles treaty. Moreover, did Belgium's prominent but junior role in the Entente matter, and where, in brief, did this little nation fit into the increasingly unstable diplomacy of the early postwar years? Once again, one cannot confine oneself to a study of small-power diplomacy, for the answers involve the attitudes of Britain and France toward Belgium, each other, and Germany.
