In analyzing why major peace initiatives occurred, it is best to consider them in two distinct time periods: those from 1914 through 1916 and, secondly, those from early 1917 through early 1918. In the first time frame, Germany and the United States were the chief actors in trying to get some kind of peace talks going. In Germany's case, its chief efforts were initially directed at France and especially Russia. Driven by their failure to achieve a decisive military victory in the first few weeks of the war and their concern that they could not win a long war against a united Allied coalition, German officials made contact with various French dissident figures from late 1914 through 1916, suggesting that France could have peace in exchange for giving Germany a war indemnity and perhaps colonial concessions. They especially focused on politicians close to ex-Minister President Joseph Caillaux, who they thought opposed the war and the existing French political system. The initiative for a separate peace with Russia likewise began in late 1914 and continued into 1915, peaking in late June and July. German leaders sent out peace offers to Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia through Hans Niels Andersen, a shipping magnate and confidant of Christian X, King of Denmark, as well as to Russian ex-Premier Count Sergei Witte, who was rumored to be pro-German. Germany's Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg assured the Russians that Germany wanted "only small concessions in order to protect our eastern border, as well as financial and commercial treaties." Germany pursued still other contacts through family connections of the Tsar, stating that the Central Powers would allow Russia free passage of the Straits in exchange for peace.
Germany's approach toward peace negotiations took a new turn in late 1916. On 12 December, declaring that the Central Powers "have given proof of their indestructible strength in winning considerable successes at war," Germany and its allies publicly called for peace negotiations with their enemies, stating no specific conditions or demands. On its surface, this peace note appeared based on Germany's confidence in its military position. In reality, the calculations behind it were more complicated. Bethmann, the chief proponent of the initiative in the German government, thought time was not on Germany's side in the war. At home, Germany's largest political party, the Social Democrats (SPD), broke apart over supporting war credits in late 1914, and its majority faction, while still behind the war effort, increasingly demanded assurances that Germany wanted peace and fought only in self-defense, not for conquest. Germany's chief ally, Austria-Hungary, also seemed weak and demoralized and, while Germany's armies occupied enemy territory in the east and west, the Reich faced an Allied coalition with superior resources and a naval blockade that was slowly strangling Germany's economy. Desperate to break the military stalemate, German military and naval leaders were anxious to begin unrestricted submarine warfare, a course Bethmann feared would bring the United States and possibly other neutrals into the war on the Allied side. Bethmann's peace initiative aimed to relieve all of these domestic and international pressures on the Reich. If the Allies accepted Germany's peace offer, unrestricted submarine warfare could be averted and negotiations would be based on the existing status quo, which heavily favored Germany. If they refused, which was likely, the Allies would be responsible for prolonging the war, not Germany. This would rally leftist Germans to the war effort and invigorate Austria-Hungary's determination to fight. By highlighting Germany's desires for peace and Allied intransigence, an Allied rejection of Germany's peace offer might also increase the chances of neutral nations, including the United States, tolerating Germany's unleashing of its submarines. Finally, Bethmann expected that a refusal by the Allies to negotiate would spur antiwar sentiment in France and Russia, which might advance another effort to convince one or both of those countries to sign a separate peace with the Reich.
THE UNITED STATES
Very different motives lay behind the other major peace efforts of 1914-1916, those of President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. The President early on saw himself as a potential mediator of the war. He repeatedly tried to prod the Germans and the British into a discussion of peace terms, usually on the basis of roughly the status quo ante bellum and postwar disarmament. On two occasions, in early 1915 and then again in early 1916, he sent his chief foreign policy advisor, Colonel Edward M. House to Europe for face to face meetings with British, German, and French leaders, trying to find an avenue for wider talks or an opening for an American demand that hostilities cease. In May 1916, Wilson publicly endorsed U.S. participation in a postwar international security organization as a way to entice the belligerents into welcoming a U.S. mediation initiative. He followed this gambit up in December with a formal call for the belligerents to state the exact objects for which they fought and then, in January 1917, gave an impassioned plea that the war end with a "peace without victory" and the establishment of a "League of Peace" that would include the United States.
Wilson's desire to mediate an end to the war arose in part from his conception of America's role in the world. The president deeply believed that the United States had a unique character among nations. Its exceptionalism, he argued, lay in the success of its democratic political system; its embracing of equality of opportunity for its citizens; its diverse population drawn from a wide variety of nations; and, lastly, its lack of territorial ambition and its detachment from the immediate causes of the war. These peculiarities, Wilson felt, made the United States a force for world progress; it had a "mission in the world... a mission of peace and goodwill." If any country could and should bring the war to an end, it was the United States.
Wilson's view of U.S. national security also underlay his mediation efforts. He perceived that the longer the war went on, the more likely it was that the United States would get drawn into it, especially because of frictions with Germany over its submarine warfare. More basically, Wilson thought that balance-of-power politics had caused the war and that if power politics persisted after the war ended, eventually the United States would get caught up in its currents. The president was convinced that if either side of belligerents won a decisive victory, they would continue the arms races, alliances, and secret diplomacy that had fundamentally caused the war in the first place. Sooner or later, another global conflict would occur - and, Wilson warned his countrymen in October 1916, "this is the last war of the kind, or of any kind that involves the world, that the United States can keep out of." By ending the war with the aims of each side frustrated. Wilson hoped the belligerents could be made to see that power politics had produced nothing but disaster and that the security of all nations, including the United States, would be best served through the creation of a new system of collective security, institutionalized in a league of nations.
Fonte:
http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/peace_initiatives
Mais:
A Paz
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