Any student of diplomacy and foreign affairs will immediately recognise the genesis, development and trajectory of the demand for “open covenants openly negotiated” being a product of the First World War which leaders blamed on “secret diplomacy“. The total casualties of the conflict have been estimated at about40 million people, broken down to around 15 to 22 million deaths and about 23 wounded military personnel ranking it among the cruellest and deadliest conflicts in human history. This estimate perhaps did not take account of the casualties of colonial subjects like the famous “Senegalese tirailleurs” from France’s empire in West Africa and soldiers from British and German colonial empires who were drafted to fight in a conflict for which they knew nothing about the cause.
The end of the war was also followed by the so-called Spanish influenza pandemic which killed between 50 to 100 million people worldwide between 1918 to 1919.
To say that this tragedy was caused mainly by the events that followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro- Hungarian Empire by a Serbian nationalist in Croatia in Sarajevo in 1914 is simplistic. But it is true that if the Vienna regime did not have a secret treaty with the German Second Reich’s supporting it for any action it might take against Serbia, it would have been more restrained in its reaction. The moment the Serbian government was given an almost impossible ultimatum which it still complied with and the Vienna government mobilised against it militarily, Russia came into the picture on the side of Serbia as a protector of Slavic peoples and Germany responded by ordering military mobilisation and both France and Britain because of their secret treaty obligations to Russia, mobilised to support their ally Russia, thus the event in Sarajevo led to a world-wide conflagration. It was therefore understandable for people to find out the fundamental cause of the war which was zeroed on “secret treaties”.
The democratic forces in Europe, led by the centre for democratic control of foreign policy in Britain, and by the European socialists, following the overthrow of the Kaiser in Berlin, and the emergence of the new Bolshevik government in Russia, following the overthrow of the Czarist regime in Saint Petersburg, supported the idea of secret treaties being responsible for the war. Governments all over Europe published official national documents blaming the pre-1914 governments for the failure of diplomacy in Europe. This apparently was picked up by the American government of President Woodrow Wilson who made the abolition of secret deals as means of conducting foreign policy the core of his foreign policy and guiding principle of the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations.
Since then, foreign policy experts have laboured to keep sensitive information away from the public but the American penchant for exhibitionism has always prevailed to the chagrin of the whole world which the whole world saw in the fracas just short of blows between the American president, Donald J. Trump, aided by his vice president, JD Vance and president Volodymyr Oleksanddrovych Zelenskyy of beleaguered Ukraine in the White House last Friday, February 28. Despite embracing “open covenants” as a new way of conducting foreign policy, the Second World War still broke out in 1939 because of the onerous diktat of the Versailles peace settlement of 1918-1919 which ignored genuine and fundamental reasons for the First World War.
It is arguable whether the settlement of 1945, based on total defeat of Germany and Japan and a world peace imposed by the United States and Russian hegemony would endure in the face of rising powers of China, India, Germany and Japan and other countries not happy with the current situation.
by Jide Osuntokun @TheNation
