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Paris 1919: How the Treaty That Ended World War I Continues to Shape Modern Europe

• Michele McAloon

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Professor Margaret MacMillan joins us to explore how the 1919 Paris Peace Conference shaped our modern world and why understanding this pivotal moment is essential for making sense of today's European conflicts.

• World War I as the war that made World War II possible and ended the relatively peaceful 19th century
• The challenge of self-determination in ethnically mixed regions where borders created inevitable tensions
• How personalities of leaders like Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau influenced critical decisions at Paris
• The lasting impact of borders drawn in 1919 on conflicts in Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and beyond
• Russia's historical position on the edge of Europe, torn between European identity and Eurasian exceptionalism
• The dangerous precedent set by violating the principle that borders shouldn't be changed by force
• How historical grievances from 1919 continue to fuel nationalist rhetoric in Hungary and elsewhere
• Europe's current moment of reflection about defense and identity after decades of relative peace




Speaker 1:

Hello, you're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle McElhoun, your host. Have a great book interview this week with Professor Margaret McMillan, a phenomenal historian who wrote a book called Paris 1919, over 20 years ago, and the lessons from the end of World War I, when leaders sat down to hammer out the Treaty of Versailles, is something that still affects us today and is a history that we need to understand. I contend that you do not understand European history unless you understand what happened at the end of World War I. You cannot understand the headlines of Europe today if you don't understand the end of World War I. You can find out more about me at Michelle McAloon1x, michelle McAloon1, blue Sky, michelle McAloon1TrueSocial. I also have a website at bookcluescom and I am now a YouTube star at Crossword Author Interviews. So there you go and, if you get a chance, like and subscribe. It helps me out real big. All right, enjoy the interview. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

We are so lucky today to have Professor Margaret MacMillan, a historian of the 20th century and probably one of the best historians of the 20th century. I would say we are going to discuss several of her books. Actually, the War that Ended Peace and Paris 1919, because they all actually are in play today. Professor Margaret MacMillan is the Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Toronto and an emeritus professor of international history at Oxford University. She was provost of Trinity College in Toronto and she was actually a provost or a warden at St Anthony's College, oxford, from 2007 to 2017. Her publications have been translated into 26 languages and, like I said, include Paris 1919, nixon and Mao, the War that Ended Peace, and her latest book is War. How Conflict Shaped Us? Professor McMillan, welcome to Crossword.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much, Michelle, and thank you for that very kind introduction and thank you for that very kind introduction.

Speaker 1:

Well, here we are today in 2025. I almost said 2024, but 2025. And your book that you wrote 20 years ago Paris 1919, seems to be more alive today about an event that happened over 100 years ago, and it feels very much. We're still living a lot of the history that went into World War I, that settled World War I, and I contend that you cannot understand Europe today without understanding Paris 1919, without understanding the end of World War I, because so many ways that shaped Europe in such a profound way, maybe even more than World War II.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think the First World War was the war that made the Second World War possible. It's quite likely that without the First World War we wouldn't have had a Second World War, because there was so much unfinished business left and it is often seen, I think, as the end of a long and relatively peaceful 19th century, relatively because there were wars around the world and a couple of wars in Europe, but relatively peaceful compared to what came next. And a lot of things that we take for granted in our world are, I think, a product or were hastened on by the First World War.

Speaker 2:

And a number of peoples around Europe and elsewhere in the world still look back to how the First World War ended and still have a sense of sometimes grievance, sometimes triumph at the ending of that war and a lot of the issues that they discussed in Paris in 1919, how do you end a war? How do you treat the defeated? How do you try and set up, if you want to, how do you try and set up, institutions that will make another such dreadful war impossible? We're still grappling with some of these questions. How do we prevent war? How do we end war? How do we recognize demands for change. How do we do all that internationally? And I'm not sure we're any on the very edge of Europe, if you don't want to call.

Speaker 1:

Ukraine, europe, and so we are looking at a lot of these same questions. Don't you think of self-determination, of nationality, of ethnic differences, of kind of this? In a lot of ways, what they were looking at 100 years ago.

Speaker 2:

Yes, the whole notion of self-determination, which was something that was very much taken up and promoted by the American President, woodrow Wilson, the president during and at the end of the First World War, and the idea was that it was to be democratic, that people should have the right to choose their own leaders. But what I think he perhaps hadn't realized fully was just how many possible nationalities there were, especially perhaps in the center of Europe, where you had a huge mix of different peoples as a result of history. So you would have a Hungarian village next to a German-speaking village next to a Czech village. If you look at population maps of the center of Europe in the period around the First World War, it looks like a kaleidoscope. There's just so many different nationalities mixed up together, and so whenever one group wanted to become independent, they were probably going to have another group that didn't want to be part of that independent group, and it was a formula, sadly enough, often for renewed conflicts.

Speaker 1:

Let me ask you a question. Let me ask you a question when we talk about borders and that was one of the really the themes of Paris 1919, how to construct borders to way it was in 1919, but it's definitely in front of us today, with Russia invading Ukraine when does Ukraine begin? Where does Ukraine end? We see it in the Middle East.

Speaker 2:

Now it's one of the very difficult questions facing the world, and always has been, and borders have been settled, sometimes by force, one country has conquered, or one people has conquered another people, often by negotiation. And the question is how do you draw them? How do you draw them fairly? How do you include all the people of a particular nationality inside the same border if they don't all live next to each other? How do you make sure that new states have enough resources? How do you deal with things like rivers? How do you deal with things like mountains? And this is very difficult indeed.

Speaker 2:

But the only places where it's fairly simple to draw borders are on islands, because you can draw them right around the island, but otherwise they're created by human beings and they have been created through. History incorporates this understanding that borders will not be changed by force, that borders have to be changed by mutual consent and often with the consent of the people living on the territories affected, and that's been very important because it's stopped a lot of the conflicts that used to happen in the past over borders. Unfortunately, now, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, its seizing of Crimea in 2014, it's invasion of Georgia, we've seen the violation of that principle and what I really worry about now is that others will be tempted to follow the example. If you get away with seizing territory in violation of that understanding you don't change borders by force then for sure others are going to do it as well, Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

And you worry I don't know if this is a valid worry, but if you look at Eastern Europe again, what was settled in 1919, territory was taken away from countries or saying, hey, that used to be part of my territory, that was part of my territory, Because basically that's what the Russians have done. They've said that's part of my territory, so we're taking our territory back.

Speaker 2:

President Putin has made a number of statements. He wrote this famous essay, or infamous essay called Ukrainians and Russians are one people, which you used to be able to read in English on the Kremlin website I don't know if it's still there where he argues that there's never really been a separate Ukrainian people, that they've always been part of Russia. Therefore, having an independent Ukraine is illegitimate. It doesn't make sense. It's dividing up the great Russian people and that is, I think, a very dangerous thing. And you have all sorts of possible grounds for claiming other territories in the center of Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Speaker 2:

In Hungary, hungarians lost a huge and very important part of their territory at the end of the First World War in Transylvania and in something called the Treaty of Trianon, which was signed in one of the suburbs outside Paris, and the current president of Hungary, viktor Orban, has said that the Treaty of Trianon needs to be looked at again. And this is very dangerous because it is the potential, or has the potential, for creating real conflict between Romania and Hungary. And there are other parts of the world I mean all the borders in Africa virtually were set by powers outside Africa. They weren't established by the Africans themselves. And if the Africans begin to look at the way in which different peoples were divided up and say, you know, all the people who speak a particular language or all the people who come from a particular ethnic group should be in one country, then again we're going to get borders being challenged and the potential for a series of conflicts I think is really terrifying.

Speaker 1:

It really is.

Speaker 2:

It's just wow, you know it's funny because we thought history was settled, remember the end of history and all of that. I can grievance or say that we were once great. We have to be great again, and this can be very powerful. It's one of the things that can mobilize people to do things, and you're getting people remembering histories and those histories being used politically more and more since the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War it didn't seem to matter because everything seemed frozen in the great conflict between the East and the West, but now so much is up for grabs. You have, of course, china saying that Taiwan is historically part of China. That again is really a source of great tension in that part of the world.

Speaker 1:

Your book Paris 1919, does a great job of showing how personalities played into diplomacy and into making the decisions, specific agendas. They had constituents that they had to deal with back home, but they also had goals that they wanted to achieve with the Treaty of Versailles, and I think that's one thing that people forget is that personalities of the diplomats, of the leaders, actually play in to the story and history of how things are solved or how things go forward.

Speaker 2:

I think it often matters who has the power, and particularly if that person has great power over a powerful country, it can really make a difference. I mean, if we think of the history of the 20th century, if Hitler had been killed in the trenches in the First World War, as he very nearly was, then we would have had, I think, a very different history. We might not have had a Second World War. There might have been tension between Germany and its neighbors over territory, but I don't think we would have had the horrors of the Second World War or the horrors of the final solution. That was very much down to Hitler, and so his individual personality, I think, mattered a great deal, because he was in charge of a very powerful country in the very heart of Europe. And you could say the same thing with Stalin in what became the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. I mean, stalin controlled a very big country with a great deal of power, and what he said went, and so personalities do matter.

Speaker 2:

I mean, what's fascinating to me about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 is that the leaders of a number of the most powerful nations in the world sat there for six months talking to each other.

Speaker 2:

I mean we'd never get that again, ever. I mean, when world leaders now meet, it's two and a half days, usually in very choreographed and heavily scripted meetings. But these three men in particular that you mentioned plus quite often the Italian prime minister sat together in a room chatting to each other and they got to know each other and they didn't always agree, but they did develop a sort of fellow feeling. They were all facing tremendous pressures from their own publics, they all had tremendous burdens on them and they did sometimes talk. Some people made notes of their casual conversations. As well as the formal stuff, they sometimes talked about the difficulties they had trouble sleeping, for example, or how they didn't like to make mistakes and so it wasn't that they became great friends, but they did develop a sort of camaraderie and they did often make the sort of compromises that you need to make if you're going to get an agreement sounds me is President Wilson left the country for six months.

Speaker 1:

I mean, how do you leave the presidency for six months in an age of very slow communication? Now I know he did go back. He had kind of a midwinter break. He went back like in March of 1919. I think he went back for a month. But then to me that I mean that's unfathomable to me for a president just to leave the country and come back, especially this country.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I agree, and I think there was a lot of criticism of him actually, because it was unprecedented and some said it was unconstitutional and I think he felt it was so important that he be there and participate and bring, he hoped, the United States with him to participate in what he felt was one of the most consequential meetings of the time that would, if he was right or if his hopes came true, set up an institution, the League of Nations, which was an early forerunner of the United Nations, set up an institution that would prevent future dreadful wars.

Speaker 2:

I mean, the First World War which, of course, in those days was only called the Great War because they hadn't had a second one was so horrific to Europeans and to those who'd looked to Europe as a civilized part of the world this was the language they used at the time. They thought Europe was in advance in science, in political organization, it seemed to be an extraordinary part of the world and yet it had torn itself apart in this brutal, deadly war which had left nine or 10 million young men dead, who'd done the fighting, countries devastated, towns ruined. And so I think what Wilson felt, and a lot of people on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world felt it was that we can't do this again. This is horrific, and if somewhere like Europe can do this, what hope is there for the rest of us? And so we have to try and find ways of avoiding conflict.

Speaker 1:

You have a great comment in your book about how it was World War. I was so much about human loss so a lot of people actually didn't see the trenches or didn't live in the trenches, but it was just horrific human loss.

Speaker 2:

where World War II was actually about breaking bricks, where it was physical destruction of everything, Civilians were affected, of course, by the First World War, but the large-scale damage to civilian housing, to civilian cities, to civilian factories, factories where civilians work, was something that happened much more in the Second World War. I mean, you see pictures of Berlin after the First World War. It's unscathed, it's pretty much unscathed. It looked like it did in 1914 when the war started. You see pictures of Berlin in 1945, and it's flattened.

Speaker 2:

There are very few buildings left standing, and so I think the scale of the destruction, the weapons, are much greater. The explosives are much stronger. It was possible in the Second World War, thanks to long-range aircraft, to get to the enemy towns and cities in a way that it hadn't really been that possible in the First World War. I mean, paris was shelled by long-range artillery in the First World War and zeppelins were used to drop bombs on civilian targets, but the capacity to hurt civilians was much greater in the Second World War, and we don't know how many people died in the Second World War, but one conservative estimate is something like 50 million.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's just amazing. I mean just amazing. I tell you, in some of the numbers that are coming out of Ukraine and Russia right now, they're estimating a million dead or injured in three years. So I mean war's deadly. It's just deadly and grisly, yeah, okay, talk to us a little bit about Wilson's 14 points and why that was so important during the peace talks of 1919.

Speaker 2:

Well, the first of the 14 points was this notion that there should be a League of Nations to which nations would belong and which would be responsible for creating peace in the world and preventing conflict. And then there were other, some of them very specific. There were things about Poland, which had been disappeared as a country at the end of the 18th century should be reconstituted. There's something about Russia being left to carry out its own fate without outside interference. And then there was talk, I believe, about disarmament and free trade. So it's a mix of very specific things, but collectively, what the 14 points add up to is a vision for a new sort of world, a world in which nations band together in this league and they give each other collective security, which means that if someone attacks one of them, everyone comes to the defense of that one nation. And the vision was also that some of the conditions of war the economic competition, the competition for economic supremacy should be removed, that there should be freer trade so that the world will become more linked together by trade. That was a very longstanding wish of many economists and others in the 19th century. They believed that free trade would bring a fairer and more peaceful world, and so the idea was that not just to deal with specific things like Poland being reconstituted, but also to try and set up this vision of a different and these institutions for a different sort of world.

Speaker 2:

It was very powerful. It wasn't just the 14 points, it was various speeches that he made. I mean, he was very eloquent. If you read his speeches, he really knew how to express his ideas very well, and it was a very powerful vision, and a lot of people in the United States supported it. Of course, there were criticisms, there was bound to be a debate over it, but a lot of Europeans supported it as well, and so did people in the Middle East, so did people in European colonies around the world who thought we're going to see a fairer world, we're going to have a chance to determine our own fate, and so it was a vision as much as it was a specific document.

Speaker 1:

And this is where NATO and the EU really comes into play and how important it has been to maintain basically 80 years of peace because of NATO and EU, about the same amount of time or some kind of economic union or economic cooperation, because there really has been peace in Europe for 80 years really had there really has been peace in Europe for 80 years?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, I think a lot of the Europeans who were overrun by Nazi Germany or by fascist Italy, a lot were in exile, a lot were in exile in London. They had a lot of time to think and talk about what had gone wrong in Europe and I think there was a very strong feeling that we have got to stop this nationalism which leads us to compete with each other, including economically, and we've got to try and build something together. And one of the leading proponents of what was going to become the European Union was in fact a French bureaucrat, jean Monnet, who was an extraordinary figure and who was prepared to forgive and forget with Germany, which was very difficult considering what had happened. But I think there was a lot of thinking, and I think the statesmen Franklin Roosevelt of the United States, winston Churchill of Britain, in particular, thought seriously during the war, not just at its end, about what they could do, and so plans for a United Nations and the Charter of the United Nations were discussed and drawn up well before the war finished, as would what are called the Bretton Woods organizations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, which took a rather longer time to come into effect, and the World Trade Organization, which only came into effect much later on.

Speaker 2:

These institutions were meant to create a world in which, again, the causes of war would be removed, and what Roosevelt was very concerned about was that the United States, this time, should join the United Nations. It hadn't joined the League, partly because Woodrow Wilson, I think, hadn't managed the politics very well. He wanted the US in the United Nations. He wanted the Security Council of the United Nations what were then the four great powers of the world to have real power so that they could intervene and push for peace. And what he also wanted was Europeans to support it as well. I mean, it was something that he really wanted to be truly international.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about Russia and where Russia was in 1919 and how they chose to deal with this. And you know, one of the things that your book brings out and I somehow I knew this, but I didn't really realize this they really were very cognizant of the Bolshevism. This was something that was a palpable fear for them. You kind of compared it to sort of like where radical Islam, violent Islam, that Bolshevism was a specter in 1919.

Speaker 2:

It was because the First World War, I mean there had been. The Bolshevik party was a tiny little party which very few people knew about when the war started, but there had been various left-wing movements saying we need to change society before the First World War and there had been attempts at revolution, most of them not successful at all, but the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia because of the impact of the war on Russia. The old regime just collapsed, the Tsarist regime collapsed and the Bolsheviks seized power in what was really a coup d'etat in the fall of 1917. And because of the impact of the war across Europe, it wasn't just on Russia. I mean a lot of societies had really suffered and there was a lot of unrest. I mean in Germany there were protests against the war. Housewives would march in the streets by 1917, banging their pots to show that they couldn't get any food to feed their children. And there were strikes and mutinies in the French army.

Speaker 2:

There were strikes in Britain and there was a fear that in the chaotic scenes and the collapse in the center of Europe of a number of empires, including the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire, that Europe was moving into a state of anarchy where you would get all sorts of revolutionary tendencies. You'd get peoples fighting peoples, and so there was a fear that what the allies called Bolshevism. They didn't actually know much about it because communications with Russia were almost non-existent, because all the communications had been cut. But what they did know was that it threatened to upturn what was left of European society. And so there was a real fear, and there was a big debate in Paris about whether they would invite the Russians, the new leaders of Russia, to come. Those again said look, to begin with, they're revolutionaries and we don't want to have them in Paris. Clemenceau said I don't want them anywhere near France. The other thing was that Russia, like all the other allies, had promised not to drop out of the war on its own, and it had done so. So the argument was that Russia's no longer an ally and doesn't deserve to be at the Paris Peace Conference.

Speaker 2:

On the other hand, I don't think the Bolsheviks themselves wanted to come to Paris very much.

Speaker 2:

Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, was convinced that what had happened in Russia would be the first spark of what he called a prairie fire, which was just simply a revolution that would spread across the whole of Europe. So why would he bother to go to Paris In any case, he was desperately trying to consolidate his power inside Russia and a civil war was breaking out, and so the idea that he would have been able to come to Paris, or that he wanted to come to Paris, I think, actually wasn't on the cards. And so there was some talk of a meeting on an island off Istanbul where the Russians would come through the Black Sea and the Europeans would powers, including a representative of the United States, would come and meet them, but I don't think it was ever really serious. I think there was no wish on the part of the Bolsheviks to come to Paris, and there was really not much of a wish on the part of the world leaders there to have them come.

Speaker 1:

And you know, what's so interesting is that we once again, it's Russia on the outside, russia on part of the European continent, but on the outside of the European continent and a place where that they have really held, I would say, for the last 300 years, that they are on the edge, as it's difficult to negotiate with the Russians because I think there's a lot of assumptions that we think that they are European but their thinking is very different.

Speaker 2:

Russians always had this curious tug and you see it going right through Russian history of are we European or not or are we something else?

Speaker 2:

And you get it with Putin and what he talks about. There's this one thread that runs through Russian thinking about the rest of the world is that they're a Eurasian power, they're more religious, they're the proper heirs to the Byzantine church, the Eastern church, the Byzantine empire, that they're different from the rest of Europe and Europe is decadent and Europe doesn't have the backbone that the Russians have. But you've always had another thread running through Russia and that is emulating the West. The West is more advanced, always has been pretty much looking towards the West, wanting to keep up with the West, feeling a sort of envy perhaps of the West, but also feeling an admiration, and I think we see this. The Russians are very much pulled by these different forces. At the moment, it's those who say Russia is a unique civilization and it's not Europeans who have the upper hand. It really is, it's wow, say Russia is a unique civilization and it's not European who have the upper hand, it really is.

Speaker 1:

It's wow, it's been that one's difficult. It wasn't just Russia that fell apart, it was the Habsburgs. I mean every kingdom fell apart, every sense of governance fell apart. The old, traditional ways just absolutely fell apart, and that I don't think I really understood just how deep and how profound the change was. Because you got rid of the Kaiser, you've got rid of the Habsburgs, you've got rid of the Romanovs, these ancient ways of ruling Europe, and these men in Paris 1919, they were actually interviewing people to figure out how to draw these borders. That, to me, was fascinating.

Speaker 2:

Well, they hadn't had to really think about it. A lot of them didn't actually know where some of these places were. There are stories of Woodrow Wilson and Clemenceau, the French prime minister, and Lloyd George, the British prime minister, kneeling on the floor on top of a great big map and saying, well, let's put the line there. I mean they had some advisors who knew where things were, but they also had huge pressure on them, because what they were getting constantly were deputations and delegations saying we must have this, I mean the new Czechoslovak state, which a lot of these states sort of announced. They were there, they formed themselves on the ground, and then they came to Paris and said would you please recognize our borders? And the new Czechoslovak state, for example, and Hungary both claimed the same little rich coal mining areas. So what are they to do in Paris? Which country deserved it?

Speaker 2:

This was really tricky, and so a lot of the borders were drawn through consultation in Paris, but under pressure from various groups that were coming in. From various groups that were coming in. Some of them were later determined by plebiscite, where you had really mixed populations. The New League of Nations held plebiscites where people could vote to be either, say, part of Poland or part of Germany, but that left unhappy people on both sides and, as you say, revanchism, where people said we have to get back what we've lost. We have to bring back into the fold our Germans who are suffering under Polish rule, or the fold are Germans who are suffering under Polish rule, or we have to bring back into the fold the Hungarians who are suffering under Czechoslovak rule. This led to endless tensions and bickerings among the nations in the center of Europe, in particular between the two world wars.

Speaker 1:

You know, even though I lived in Croatia for two and a half years three years actually I did not understand how much Yugoslavia, croatia, serbia was affected by Paris 1919. That went all the way up into the 90s, when we had Europe had to go to war. And we still have troops in Kosovo today. So it's still living today.

Speaker 2:

First World War, I mean Serbia. Initially some of those states, serbia was already independent. Croatia, however, was part of the Habsburg Empire, part of Austria-Hungary, and in Croatia they said what do we want to do? Perhaps we should be independent now? And then they realized they were a bit too small. So there was a move to unite with Serbia, but a lot of the Croatians were really unhappy about it.

Speaker 2:

The Serbs were Orthodox, they were Catholic by and large. They felt they were much more Western than the Serbs, who they saw as rather rough and ready. Croatia was a more prosperous part of the Balkans and I think they felt, came to feel they'd been taken over by Serbia and the state the new Yugoslav state was run for the benefit of Serbia. And the same thing was felt by the Slovenes, who came in as well, and then the Montenegrins, that the state was being run by the Serbs for the benefit of the Serbs, and the other peoples were not getting a look. And in a way it's true, it was the Serbian king who became the king of the new Yugoslavia and it was the Serbian army that became the army of the new Yugoslavia and those tensions and resentments came out when Yugoslavia broke up. It helped to contribute to that breakup.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, and I tell you, you speak to a Croatian or a Serbian today and it's still living. There's no question about it, even though it has been settled. But it is the Balkans.

Speaker 2:

What was that wonderful phrase of Winston Churchill's? He said the Balkans produce more history than they can consume.

Speaker 1:

That's right. I read that in your book. That's great.

Speaker 2:

I love that phrase.

Speaker 1:

That's absolutely true. So you know what? Let's talk about Germany, because Germany was the elephant in the room about how to deal with Germany. You contend that the reparations were not what caused World War II, but there was a lot of ground set that was not settled, that probably led to World War II, and this I mean.

Speaker 2:

Germany was definitely the elephant in the room on this case 1871, when several German states were brought together under the dominance of Prussia, which occupied a position rather like Serbia occupied in Yugoslavia. It was very much the dominant power within the new Germany and there was talk of breaking it up. But Lloyd George, I think the British Prime Minister, said quite rightly look, before Germany came together, German nationalism caused troubles for Europe. If we break it up again, we'll get the same thing all over again and we'll get wars again over the unification of Germany. And so it was agreed that Germany would lose some territory. A lot of it in the East, which was largely Polish-speaking, went to Poland, and two provinces which Germany had taken from France, Alsace and Lorraine, went back to France.

Speaker 2:

The real problem with the treaty, in my opinion but it's something that's much debated and not everyone would agree with me is that the Germans didn't think they lost the war, even though they did. And so if you don't think you've lost the war, you are not going to like any treaty. You're going to say this is really unfair. We didn't lose. Why should we get this which they thought they would be? In the end, they were called for two weeks, given the terms of the treaty and told to put any objections in writing. And then they came to think they hadn't started the war either. Someone called it the battle of the archives, where different countries ransacked their own archives and selectively published things to show that they weren't responsible for the war. It was the other guy's fault.

Speaker 2:

And so the Germans didn't think they'd started the war, they didn't think they'd lost it, they didn't think they should therefore pay any particular penalties they felt it was really unfair and reparations where Germany was to pay for the damage it did to France which it had invaded.

Speaker 2:

Germany invaded France in 1914, not the other way around, and Belgium, which Germany had invaded in 1914, not the other way around, invaded in 1914, not the other way around. Germany was meant to pay for the damage, and it was huge, because much of the Western Front pretty much all of the Western Front was on either Belgian or French soil. None of the war in the West was fought in Germany, and so the Germans were obliged to pay for damage done and hand over things like timber and so on to rebuild Belgium and France, and they resented it and they felt the bill was much too high. In the end they never paid that much for various reasons, and when Hitler came to power, he just canceled all the reparations anyway. But it was the idea. Ideas matter, emotions matter in international relations, and what people think matters, oh, absolutely. Let me ask you a million-dollar question here.

Speaker 1:

Looking at Europe today, Let me ask you a million-dollar question here. Looking at Europe today, they've had 80 years of peace. There was 1815, Congress of Vienna 1870, Franco-Prussian War 1914, World War I 1940, World War II. Cold War Is peace and aberration in Europe 80 years of peace.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's an unusual long period for Europe. The 19th century was a relatively peaceful time for Europe as well, between 1815 and 1914, there were the wars of German unification, a war with Denmark, a war with Austria-Hungary and a war with France, but they only involved two powers and they were brief. And there were a couple of other wars in the Balkans. But on the whole, it was a peaceful period for Europe. And when you read memoirs of people before the First World War, they say you know, war isn't something we do anymore, that's something that other peoples do, people who are, as they would have put it, less civilized. And so, yes, I think the 19th century was a good period for Europe.

Speaker 2:

If you look at the 18th century, there were lots of wars. The 17th century, you had the 30 Years' War, which was dreadful and devastated large parts of Europe, so that if you look back into European history, wars were very frequent and very much accepted. The 20th century has seen two dreadful wars, and now we're seeing a war in Ukraine, which I don't think certainly speaking for myself I ever thought I would see another major war in Europe like this one. I really didn't. The breakup of Yugoslavia was accompanied in the 1990s by violence, and that had to be outside intervention and it did kill a great many people, but it was not on the scale of the war in Ukraine, and I think this has come as a real shock to Europeans who, as they did before 1914, thought they had moved beyond needing war or using war.

Speaker 1:

A history is made every day, in the present, with choices made. Where do you see Europe today?

Speaker 2:

I think Europe is very much trying to work out what it stands for, what its role is. The present administration in the United States is making it perfectly clear that it's not going to solve Europe's problems for it, and the Europeans have really had to face up to having to take much more responsibility for their own defense. They are facing up to having to decide on what it is they want, what it is they value. I mean, this is, I think, a very important moment for Europe. How can they work together, europe? How can they work together? And it hasn't helped.

Speaker 2:

I think, in my opinion, that Britain decided to leave because of Brexit, although Britain is still very much involved in diplomacy and security discussions. But I think that decision by the British, which I think now majority now regret, has weakened Europe. But what Europe has got to decide? How can it look after its own defense? What is it going to do? How much is it going to spend? Because it's got an unfriendly Russia to the east and I don't think, whatever happens in Ukraine, that Russia is going to stop probing into Europe, probing around its borders, trying to get back what it sees, or what Putin sees, as legitimate Russian territory.

Speaker 1:

Part of China looms well in Russia right now. I keep asking historians and military specialists to explain to me, to speak real slowly and tell me how, over the last couple of years, we're not at world war with, when we're looking at Iran and when we're looking at the involvement of all these players, especially with the technology we have today.

Speaker 2:

I think so far there isn't a great power with weapons of mass destruction that does want to use them, partly because I think they're afraid of the consequences. Once you start something like a major war, you never know where it's going to go, and the capacity for destruction is so great now that the destruction would absolutely be immense. I think sides have held back. Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons, but that threat has been repeated enough, I think, that he hasn't carried through, and so I'm not sure people place as much credence in it as they once did did. Iran, I think, has actually been fairly careful. The last thing they want is a major war, and the last thing they want is for Israel to attack its key weapons sites, and so I think, although the rhetoric coming out of Tehran can still be quite violent, if you look at what the Iranians have actually done in response to what's happened in the Middle East, they've lost their tools in Hezbollah and Hamas, at least for the time being, but in fact they have not responded as they might have done, and I think that's because they're terrified of what the consequences might be.

Speaker 2:

The United States certainly doesn't want a major war, and I don't think China wants one either. So I think at the moment, those powers that have the capacity to wage a large-scale war don't want to do it. I mean, I think Putin got involved in Ukraine because he thought it would be easy and he thought the war would be over in a week. He didn't and he wasn't counting on a three-years war, and if he had to do it again, if he'd known what was going to happen, he might well not have done it. But once in, of course, he couldn't afford to back down.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting. So maybe, at the end of the day, what is really is this is really about the transformation of Europe and how Europe looks at its own defense, as you said, in this very identifying and kind of reflective moment that they're having right now.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think a lot of countries are doing this and we're looking possibly at a world divided into spheres of influence, with China dominant in the Pacific, in its own neighborhood, or at least dominant in the western part of the Pacific, the United States probably still dominant in the eastern part, the United States dominant in the western hemisphere we're very much aware of this in Canada at the moment and Europe, well, if it can pull itself together. Another power, but at the moment it looks the powers that have capacity to dominate their neighborhoods are China and the United States. Russia, in my view, would like to dominate its neighborhood, but I don't think it has the capacity to do it and it has been seriously weakened by the war in Ukraine. I think its military has been badly damaged, its economy has been damaged and Russia itself has become much more dependent on China, which is not, I think, a comfortable position in the long run, Absolutely absolutely Okay.

Speaker 1:

Professor McMillan, I have to ask you what are you as a historian? What are you reading at this moment in time?

Speaker 2:

I'm reading about the Second World War because I'm actually very interested in the decisions and the interrelationship of the three big powers I mean two democracies and one dictatorship and how they came together to work as a coalition, and whether there are any hopes of building the peaceful world that certainly Churchill and Roosevelt and many of their citizens wanted, or whether Stalin was always going to be someone who disrupted peace. I think he was prepared. My own view is he was probably prepared for a 20-year period of peace, certainly not for Russia to become democratic, but for the Soviet Union to rebuild itself and reconstitute itself from all the damage it had suffered. So I'm fascinated by that period because in a way they were dealing as they were in 1919, with many of the same problems we're dealing with today.

Speaker 1:

Very interesting. Well, I hope there might be another book out there by Margaret MacMillan.

Speaker 2:

Thank you One of these days. I'm moving very slowly at the moment, so I'm rather focusing on what's going on in the world at present.

Speaker 1:

Good, good, well, you know, I mean, that's what we need. We need deep historians to look at history. As we said, history teaches us about ourselves and about the decisions that made, and hopefully they influence the decisions in the present. So, if we're wise enough to, and patient enough and not myopically arrogant about that, we have all answers for all time right now and we don't.

Speaker 2:

No, nobody ever does, nobody ever does, and there's always chance and there's always things coming unexpectedly and I think a certain humility as we look at ourselves and our capacity to do things is not a bad thing.

Speaker 1:

It's not, and your Paris 1919 actually brings that out that they knew it wasn't perfect, that it was what they thought was a beginning of a beginning right. I believe one of the characters said that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, and it depends on us all, you know. It depends on how we all behave and how we all react, so that you know one generation succeeds another and you just have to hope that the next generations will do things better than we did.

Speaker 1:

That's the prayer. Professor McMillan, thank you so much. It was such an honor to speak to you and thank you for taking time out of your schedule and I hope we have another book interview in the future.

Speaker 2:

Well, don't hold your breath is all I can say, but I am working on something. But, michelle, it was a pleasure to talk to you. No-transcript.