Still picking up the tab.

Paris 1919 Six Months that Changed the World Margaret Macmillan Random House, $35, 570 pp.

In Peacemaking, his classic memoir of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Harold Nicholson regretted that he could not capture "the double stress of turmoil and time-pressure" that shaped his experience as a junior member of the British delegation: "One writes the sentence: 'It was a period of unremitting strain.' The sedative notes of such a sentence, as applied to the scurrying cacophony of the Peace Conference, forces one to smile." The great achievement of Margaret Macmillan's Paris 1919 is to provide a lucid and orderly account of the conference without losing sight of the chaos, conflict, and confusion that constantly attended its proceedings.

The task confronting the peacemakers was daunting: they had to create a new world order after one of history's most destructive wars. Thirty-one countries--from great powers like France and Britain to minor ones like Haiti and Cuba--sent delegates; in addition, a variety of would-be nations--Poles, Arabs, Armenians--struggled to get a place at the conference table. Everyone felt the need to act swiftly. The Western front was quiet, but Eastern and Southern Europe were in turmoil; that Bolshevism might spread beyond its Russian base was an ever-present danger and a quite reasonable source of anxiety.

Diplomats in 1919 did not enjoy the kind of lavish social life that characterized the Congress of Vienna in 1815. (That Congress did not meet, one contemporary remarked, it danced.) Paris offered its own distractions. Elsa Maxwell, still in the early stages of her legendary career as hostess, accompanied Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary, on his first visit to a nightclub. "Allow me to thank you," Balfour wrote, "for the most delightful and degrading evening I have ever spent."

Considering all they had to do, the peacemakers accomplished a remarkable amount in six short months. They formulated the treaties to be imposed on the losers--Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey--which, among other things, required that they redraw the political map of eastern and southern Europe. They disposed of the Germans' colonial possessions and the Ottoman Empire's Arab territories (which required a new map for the Middle East). They prepared treaties designed to protect ethnic minorities within the newly created states. Last but not least, they established the League of Nations, the first truly global organization of states. Most of this was done by three men and their advisors: Woodrow Wilson (the first American president to visit Europe while in office), David Lloyd George (the leader of a newly elected parliamentary majority in England, bent on making the Germans pay for the war), and Georges Clemenceau (born in 1841, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, committed to preparing France to withstand the next German assault). Everything depended on their ability to overcome the enormous differences in temperament, national interest, and experience that divided them. Macmillan's account beautifully captures the intensely human drama of the Big Three's conflicts, compromises, and ultimate consensus.

Of course, much of what Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau accomplished did not last. The Turkish treaty was never enforced and had to be rewritten at Lausanne in 1923. The Germans evaded the strictures of the Versailles Treaty whenever they could; by 1936, Hitler had shredded its most important provisions. The League of Nations, which Wilson had hoped would make up for all that he had sacrificed to reach agreements with the French and British, never recovered from its rejection by the United States Senate. Nonetheless, some aspects of the peace proved remarkably durable. The new states of Eastern Europe survived the next war more or less intact, as did most of the Middle East, including what became Iraq. And although the League of Nations collapsed in 1939, it was reborn six years later as the United Nations.

The most lasting legacy of the Paris Conference was the principle of self-determination, which Wilson had so passionately articulated in his wartime speeches. As the president himself eventually realized, national self-determination was much harder to achieve than he had originally thought. "When I gave utterance to those words [that "all nations had a right to self-determination"]," he told Congress at the end of 1919, "I said them without the knowledge that the nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day." Again and again, the peacemakers had to sacrifice the principle to other interests; they almost always did it at the expense of the defeated or the weaker powers. Even when good will was present on all sides (admittedly a rare event), it was frequently impossible to impose the unforgiving precision of state boundaries on Europe's inherently imprecise ethnic frontiers. Nevertheless, the Paris conference helped instill as the foundation of modern politics the idea that people had the right to determine their own political destiny. So seductively clear in theory, so painfully elusive in practice, it continues to inspire, challenge, and confound us, just as it did the peacemakers in 1919.

Macmillan's book is the best general account of the Paris conference's character and implications. She writes clearly and gracefully, with an impressive mastery of the sources and a keen eye for significant details and memorable quotations. Critical but never condescending, she is aware of her protagonists' failures as well as their accomplishments. Best of all, Paris 1919 has a much broader range than earlier works on the conference. Thus, while Macmillan does not underestimate the importance of the German question for Europe's future, she is equally concerned with the peace settlement's impact on Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Her book helps, therefore, to illuminate much of what happened in the twentieth century. Reading it reminds us just how difficult it is to impose order on a world broken by war and divided by hatreds and ambitions.

James J. Sheehan teaches European history at Stanford University. His most recent book is Museums in the German Art World (Oxford).