1919 Парис буюу дэлхийг өөрчилсан 6 сар 1-р хэсэг

northern zone voted for incorporation in Denmark, the southern to stay with Germany. The border remains unchanged today.

It was not so easy to settle Germany’s borders in the west, when France’s need for compensation and security ran up against the principle of self-determination and the old British fears of a strong France dominating the Continent. At the northern tip of Alsace lay the rich German coalfields of the Saar. France needed coal, and its own mines had largely been destroyed by the Germans.

Besides, as Clemenceau reminded the British ambassador just after the armistice, Britain had once thought of giving the Saar to the French at the end of the Napoleonic Wars; why not take the opportunity now to erase “any bitter recollection they might have of Waterloo”?

The Saar, however, was only a small piece of the much larger territory on the west bank of the Rhine that stretched north from Alsace-Lorraine to the Netherlands. The Rhineland, Clemenceau argued, should be removed from German control to ensure France’s security. “The Rhine was the natural boundary of Gaul and Germany.” Perhaps the Allies could create an independent state with its neutrality guaranteed, just as Belgium’s had been done, by the powers. “I can see,” reported the British ambassador, “that he intends to press for that very strongly.” Clemenceau in fact was prepared to compromise on many of France’s demands as long as the overriding goal of security was met. Indeed, he was even willing to consider, though little came of it, limited cooperation with Germany, with the two countries working together on rebuilding the devastated areas of France and perhaps developing fruitful economic links.372 Foch did not think in such terms and spoke with the authority of a military man who had spent his life facing the menace across the Rhine. France needed that river barrier; it needed the time that a Rhineland under its control would buy in the face of an attack from the east; and it needed the extra population. “Henceforward,” he insisted in a memorandum to the Peace Conference in January 1919, “Germany ought to be deprived of all entrance and assembling grounds, that is, of all territorial sovereignty on the left