The World полностью

‘Three all-powerful, all-ignorant men’, observed Balfour, ‘carving up continents’, decided a lot – though much was left up in the air: their Versailles treaty reconstituted Poland and recognized multi-ethnic amalgamations Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia created out of the fiefs of Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and Habsburgs, punished Austria and Hungary, shrinking them drastically. They diminished Germany, returning Alsace to France, demilitarizing the Rhineland, charging reparations and placing millions of ethnic Germans in new Slavic countries. It was impossible to satisfy everyone, but Italy and Japan had fought for the Allies and received little. In Asia, the three Allied powers did not apply Wilson’s principles at all: in China, they awarded German treaty ports to Japan, but when Prince Konoe, the Japanese delegate, demanded a statement that non-white peoples were equal, the powers refused, infuriating both Japanese and Chinese.^* And what to do with the Ottoman empire? LG and Clemenceau bargained for what they called ‘mandates’ over Arab lands like this:

Tiger: ‘Tell me what you want.’

Goat: ‘I want Mosul.’

Tiger: ‘You shall have it. Anything else?’

Goat: ‘Yes, I want Jerusalem too.’

Tiger: ‘You shall have it.’ Clemenceau claimed Syria because the Crusader kings were French and both imperial Napoleons had sent troops to the region. Lloyd George planned to find a kingdom for Faisal, whom Lawrence introduced as ‘the greatest Arab leader since Saladin’. The Turkish heartland would be divided between an international Constantinople, a Turkish rump and two new countries, Kurdistan and Armenia, while Smyrna (I˙zmir) and western Anatolia would join a new Greek empire.^*

Versailles had many flaws but the biggest was that it excluded Europe’s two eastern powers, Germany and Russia. It was always doomed. Lloyd George admitted that the ‘mandates’ were ‘a substitute for the old imperialism’. Yet the war also mobilized imperial resistance. In April 1919, Gandhi, now forty-nine, announced a satyagraha campaign against the British across India, but it was British violence that was to revolutionize his non-violent campaign. In Amritsar, two of his followers were arrested, leading to riots. On the 11th, the British fired on the crowds; rioters killed five Europeans; but two days later a crowd, some celebrating the Baisakhi festival, gathered at Jallianwala Bagh, where a bone-headed British general, Reginald Dyer, arrived with ninety Indian soldiers determined to ‘to punish the Indians for disobedience’.

AS LONG AS WE HAVE INDIA: GANDHI AND NEHRU

Gandhi was back after twenty-one years in South Africa, where he had analysed British power: it only worked, he argued in his book Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), because most Indians cooperated with the British; it was Indian soldiers and police who provided the coercion. Gandhi transformed himself from besuited elite barrister to half-naked activist, wearing dhoti and shawl, homespun Indian cottons, as part of his Swadeshi self-sufficiency movement – in which he called for the population to spin and weave their own handwoven khadi and boycott the fabrics coming from British factories that had undermined the Indian textile industry. A Congress Party, approved by the viceroy, had been founded twenty years earlier but was split between moderates and radicals, and many Indian grandees disdained the movement. Motilal Nehru, a wealthy lawyer, Brahmin pandit (an honorary Hindu title), descendant of Mughal officials, brother of a chief minister, who lived in an Allahabad mansion, believed in Anglo-Indian cooperation and sent his son Jawaharlal to become an English gentleman at Harrow.

But Jawaharlal, after Cambridge and the Bar, now living in the mansion with his wife Kamala, embraced socialism and joined Congress, excited by the return of Gandhi: ‘All of us admired him for his heroic fight in South Africa, but he seemed very distant, different, unpolitical.’ When the thirty-year-old Nehru met Gandhi, ‘We saw that he was prepared to apply his methods in India also, and they promised success.’ Initially keeping out of Congress, Gandhi – known as Mahatma (Great Soul) – proved that his methods could work. The British offered limited Indian participation in local government, but most leaders in London regarded India as essential to British power. ‘As long as we rule India,’ said the ex-viceroy Curzon, now foreign secretary, ‘we’re the greatest power in the world,’ and ‘We haven’t the slightest intention of abandoning our Indian possessions.’ When the British imposed emergency limits on Indian protests, Gandhi organized his first boycott.