Real and Mental Maps at the Paris Peace Conference

Abstract

Woodrow Wilson with maps in his hands was an emblematic figure at the 1919 peace table. His territorial experts had prepared around a thousand, mostly of places outside the range of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. culture at large. As Harold Nicolson vividly observed in his recollections of the Adriatic Dispute at Paris, Wilson sometimes appeared as an officiant kneeling at the altar of geography.1 However, and this is Wolff’s main point, the crucial maps were those present in Wilson’s own mind: colorful, unsystematic, and even irrational ways to look at parts of the world that he never visited, but in many cases politically transformed. Particularly with regard to Eastern Europe, it is crucial to understand how far Wilson’s mental mapping influenced the application of his political principles. Wilson indeed had a leading role in the radical redrawing of Eastern Europe’s political geography carried out at the Paris peace conference: large and long-lasting empires—the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman—were demolished, major states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia were created, and other nations’ borders were profoundly modified. Despite its artificiality, the results of the operation proved to be enduring, surviving wars and changes in political regimes until the end of the Cold War, and thus covering almost the entire twentieth century. It may be identified as one of Wilson’s more lasting international legacies, and it is therefore not only the vastness of the operation that is surprising, but also the relatively scant attention historians have paid to it.