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T.S. Tsonchev

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After World War I, the nations of the victorious coalition punished the defeated nations without asking themselves the following questions:

What was our role in the outbreak of the war? What motivates us to punish the Central Powers so severely?

We now know that this war was the result of the actions of all the Great Powers, and that the decision of the victors, especially Great Britain and France, to treat Germany more harshly than it deserved was driven by fear, greed, revenge, and lack of political experience.

Before looking at the Treaty of Versailles, which dealt specifically with the future of Germany and thus shaped the post-World War I order, we must say a few words about the general conditions in Europe and the world before the outbreak of war.

Although the twentieth century began with a dizzying development of science, technology, and humanistic ideologies, it was not a truly "rational" age. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century and the relative democratization of Western Europe, the development of communications, the mass press, and mass education did not bring international peace and sustained economic progress. On the contrary, the industrial age transformed Western European societies into a new kind of predatory, self-centered organism. The industrial states of Europe and North America practiced Darwinian capitalism at home and raging imperialism abroad. They continued in a new, more sophisticated way the long tradition of confrontation and violence that had characterized state behavior in all previous historical periods.

In the nineteenth century, European states began a frenzied competition to acquire zones of influence over the last uncolonized regions of the world, believing that expansion and exploitation were the best and only sources of national security and wealth. At first, this common, and ultimately suicidal, competition was relatively peaceful; expansionism was accompanied by fluid international alliances and secret negotiations -- a self-proclaimed "realpolitik" that in fact systematically undermined the foundations of security and prosperity. In such a competitive environment, fear and suspicion were important psychological factors in foreign policy making, and militarization was a constituent part of the race for dominance.

Thus, on the eve of World War I, Europe was divided into two major coalitions composed of participating units (or states) pursuing their own selfish goals and interests. On one side were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy (or the Triple Alliance; Italy left the coalition in 1915), and on the other were France, Russia, and Great Britain (or the Triple Entente). These were the most powerful nations in the world (if we don't count the United States). Their zones of influence and the rest of the secondary powers gravitated around them according to their own goals and interests. At that time, the United States was still following a policy of isolationism, but not pure, because it had its own sphere of influence in Latin America and the Pacific.

The state borders in 1914. Central Powers and Allies are the German Reich, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, and Ottoman Empire. Triple Entante and Allies are Great Britain, France, Russia and others, written on this map with red letters. (Map Source: Der Spiegel Magazine)

Before the war, then, the world rested on a fragile balance of power. According to Paul Kennedy, it was with great embarrassment that the European powers scrutinized the actions, development, and expansionist ambitions of Germany and Russia. [1] At the time, Germany's economic and military power was growing, and Russia was modernizing. In addition, both states, Russia and Germany, were suspicious of each other because of their conflicting interests in the Balkans and the Baltics. In an excellent article published in the journal International Security in the early 1980s, Stephen Van Evera explains the cause of the First World War in terms of the "cult of the offensive" developed during the era of "realpolitik". [2] The war broke out because every major player on the international scene believed that offense was the best defense. The paranoid political environment made the war wanted by everyone. The Europeans, not only the politicians, but also the citizens, wanted this war. A short war, they believed, would relieve the accumulated political pressure at home and abroad and solve their foreign and even domestic problems. In such an environment, war was inevitable. Eventually the conflict began, but it was neither short nor cheap. It ended with Europe devastated and millions of lives lost. In the end, people did not learn their lessons, and Europe's pre-war problems were exacerbated.

The treaties of Paris (including the Treaty of Versailles) were irrational and unfair to the defeated nations. All sides in the conflict were more or less responsible for the outbreak of the war. World War I was a strange war: it was difficult to define who the aggressor was; it was even difficult to argue who the winner was, since there was no invasion of German territory by foreign armies. Germany, Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria, and to a lesser extent Turkey, were condemned to pay the full price for the disasters, and moreover, their territories were dismembered without regard for ethnic minorities and local peculiarities. The defeated nations were excluded from the negotiations. And this was a mistake. In 1919, the Allied powers made it clear - Germany was defeated and responsible for "all the losses and damages" of the war (Article 198 of the Versailles Treaty). The victors, Great Britain and France, ignoring political prudence and the lessons of history, continued the tradition of insult - their fears, hardships, and wartime sacrifices had to be redeemed by their enemies.

At the beginning of 1919, the Allied Powers (except Russia) began to work out in Versailles the post-war treaty regulating the post-war peace with Germany. The largest nation in Europe was deprived of the Saar Basin (articles 45 and 49) and Alsace-Lorraine (article 51). As compensation for the destruction of French coal mines, the Saar Basin, with a German population of nearly 800,000, was ceded to the League of Nations for a period of 15 years, while France received exclusive rights to exploit the mines in the area. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, and Germany was forbidden to build any fortifications on the left bank of the Rhine (Article 42). Germany was forced to accept the creation of a weak Austrian state (Articles 80 and 81; the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved) and to recognize the complete independence of Poland (Article 89). The agreements of Brest-Litovsk were annulled in favor of Russia, which regained its territories as of August 1914 (Article 116). Germany lost its overseas territories (Article 119) and was obliged to demobilize and reduce its military forces (Article 159). All of these "preventive" and "punitive" measures, along with additional reparations, crippled and humiliated Germany, the most powerful nation in Europe.

Why did the Allied powers, in drafting this document, allow their emotions to prevail over justice and reason? First, the war was over, and it was not easy for Clemenceau and Lloyd George to resist public opinion, which saw the Central Powers as the main cause of all the death and devastation. The public needed a simple, clear reason to explain the irrationality of the slaughter they were witnessing. People were being slaughtered for a reason. And in the public mind, the reason was Germany. The Reich was the guilty party. State propaganda and the nationalist education of the masses before the war played a large role in these public feelings. Second, France was afraid of a strong Germany. The French simply did not know what to do with the Germans, and they used the old methods of defense - to stifle the enemy's power, to keep it weak and subdued. Third, the old order and political habits did not die easily. The Allies remembered very well what the Germans did to Russia at Brest-Litovsk - and felt that if Germany had a chance to win, her fate would not be different from the fate of the Russians, who had been forced to make large land concessions to Germany a year before the end of the war.

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It is a fact that time corrects every injustice or mistake of the past. The most irrational decisions of the Treaty of Versailles were later disputed or were a constant point of tension. For example, reparations were constantly renegotiated, the Saar was returned to Germany, Austria was annexed by Hitler, Alsace-Lorraine was contested again during the Second World War, the nationalist economic policy that burdened Germany with reparations and restrictions - a mirror of the aforementioned "realpolitik" of fierce competition and selfishness - facilitated the effects of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Despite the efforts of France, Germany managed to regain its central position as the economic and military power of Europe, and its nationalist madness was cured only at the end of the bloodiest war conflict of all time - the Second World War.

The world went through World War II, partly a direct result of Versailles. It went through the Cold War, which was one of the results of the Second World War. In recent years we have witnessed a series of conflicts in the Middle East, we see an isolationist European Union, a weakened and economically depressed America, and a rising authoritarian East Asia. Whether we have learned the lessons of history, whether we know that fear is not a good counselor and aggression is not a good policy, only time will tell. The future will show what the illusions of the present are, just as it showed what the illusions of Versailles were more than a hundred years ago.

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Illustration: "CARICATURE MAP OF EUROPE 1914" by Keith Thompson, www.keiththompsonart.com

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Related articles:

The Treaty of Versailles: Peace without Justice

"To what extend the Treaty of Versailles is a cause for the Second World War?"

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The Origins of the Second World War

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The Peace that led to War

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[1] See Paul Kennedy, "The First World War and the International Power System," International Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer, 1984), pp. 7-40

[2] See Stephen Van Evera, The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War , International Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer, 1984), pp. 58-107

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