THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES:

PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE

 

By T.S. Tsonchev

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The Montreal Review, December 2010

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To what extent was the Treaty of Versailles a cause of the Second World War? The attentive reader will immediately notice that the question, as I have posed it, is itself half the answer. I deliberately do not ask, "Was the Treaty of Versailles a cause of the Second World War?" There has been enormous debate about that question. But I do ask, "To what extent is it a cause?" This means that, in my opinion, the Versailles Treaty is not the sole cause of the Second World War, although it is a critical element in the long chain of causes without which the war might not have happened.

For the convenience of the reader, I will divide the narrative of my answer into a few main parts. First, I will try to answer the question of why the Allied Powers created such a peace settlement in 1918-19. Do we have the right to blame the politicians who participated in the Paris Conference for their decisions, which were obviously not the best possible? Later I will say a few words about the territorial and economic arrangements of the treaty and their effect on Germany and European politics in general. After that, I will show both the German views and aspirations in the interwar period and the French positions on the treaty. Finally, I will write about the treaty in general, its consequences, and its true place among the causes for the outbreak of the bloodiest war in human history.

It is very easy for our generation to accuse the politicians who met in Paris in 1919 to draw up the new world order after the First World War (1914-1917) of weakness and short-sightedness. It is also easy to excuse them.

To blame British Prime Minister Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Clemenceau, and American President Wilson for their inability to reach an agreement that would ensure a peaceful future for Europe and the world is not to put oneself in the position of the postwar leaders. On the other hand, excusing their decisions seems to be a compromise with moral sense and reason, tolerating a world that repeats its mistakes.

My reading of commentaries on the peace treaty led me to the conclusion that most of the people who excused the weakness and short-sightedness of the engineers of the post-Versailles order were politicians and analysts of the interwar period, the same people who would later bog down in the bloody quagmire of World War II. That is why I asked myself what position to take when looking at the motives behind the treaty and the way it was made. And I chose the most comfortable position: the Aristotelian middle ground. The British, French, and American politicians, along with their less powerful allies, worked out a very bad, very irresponsible treaty that did not improve the world, but laid the foundations for future destruction. But as men of their time, they could do little else.

How confusing the post-war period was for contemporaries can be seen from the different accounts left by participants in the Paris Peace Conference.

Lord Riddle's recollections, for example, which I will quote below, reflect the feelings of the majority of the victors who attended the conference, while the lone voice of Lord Keynes, which I will quote later, represents the mood of the marginal group of skeptics in the victorious camp, as well as the general feelings of the vanquished, who watched the Paris talks from afar, having not been invited to the conference.

"The opening meeting took place at the French Foreign Office, a palatial building on the Quai d'Orsay," remembers Lord Riddle. "It was an impressive scene - the greatest and most important international conference ever held. Germany, Austria, Russia, Turkey, and Bulgaria were absent, but the colour and drama were imparted to the proceedings by picturesque representatives from India, China, Japan, and the Arab States. It looked as if all the great ones of the earth had been gathered together." 1

John Maynard Keynes recalls in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, "Paris was a nightmare, and everyone there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene: the futility and smallness of man before the great events confronting him... Seated indeed amid the theatrical trappings of the French Saloons of State, one could wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson and of Clemenceau, with their fixed hue and unchanging characterization, were really faces at all and not the tragic-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show. The proceedings of Paris all had this air of extraordinary importance and unimportance at the same time. The decisions seemed charged with consequences to the future of human society; yet the air whispered that the word is not flesh, that it was futile, insignificant, of no effect, dissociated from the events..." 2

Why did the Allies decide to exclude the defeated nations from the peace talks? Why did they decide to demand reparations from Germany that did not correspond to her ability to pay, why did they separate from her territorial body important regions in the East and West, leaving more than 3 million Germans under foreign rule, why did they throw the entire guilt for the war on Germany's shoulders (Article 231)? Why did they miss the chance to remake the world forever?

The Armistice of 1918, based on the Wilsonian "Fourteen Points," promised self-determination, justice, and peace for all - winners and losers; but its promises did not mitigate the postwar treatment of the defeated nations.

There are two possible, fundamental explanations for this injustice: first, the level of political maturity of the early twentieth-century world; and second, the immediacy and weight of the practical task facing the victors.

In an essay entitled "The Problem Before the Peacemakers," Professor C.K. Webster argues that the political leaders of 1918 had neither unlimited time and authority nor a clean slate on which to draft their treaty. 3 Before the end of the war the people enthusiastically accepted the "Fourteen Points", but after the war they passionately wanted a culprit for their suffering, they wanted security, the Rhineland, the Adriatic, more colonies and territories. C.K. Webster says that the statesmen were not able to make the peace treaty in a "detached and scientific spirit, with their eyes on the future." 4 They were pressured not only by the immediate problems of the war-torn world, but also by the illusion that a hastily forged peace would suffice to restore pre-war prosperity. The rapid industrialization and state propaganda of the last fifty years before the war had taught people to have higher expectations and false feelings about their neighbors. What hope could there be for a successful peace settlement in a world whose economy still functioned on the pillars of nineteenth-century wisdom, composed of states breathing nationalism that was not at all in keeping with the progressive spirit of the League of Nations? The world did not have the political maturity to cultivate the will for compromise and peace.

On a more practical level, the political leaders, especially Lloyd George, were pressured by public opinion, Wilson lacked the support of Congress to commit American power to the creation of a more secure Europe, Clemenceau was afraid of the "crazy" German doctrine of universal supremacy, 5 France was left alone without guarantees that the German colossus lying next to her would be restrained by common efforts. And a third reason for the inadequacy of the Versailles peace settlement, which I discovered in the observations of Professor Arnold Toynbee 6 and would like to mention, is that the peace was made by statesmen who had waged and won a war. War leaders, Toynbee notes, have a special mentality and temperament that corresponds to their duty to protect the nation from aggression. When peace comes, they naturally continue the struggle. This perhaps explains the predatory claims against the defeated nations in 1918. Peacemaking is for peacemakers.

In 1918-19, groups of experts accompanied the statesmen in Paris to study the Congress of Vienna and make proposals for a new peace settlement. But the Treaty of Vienna was useless because the defeated nations did not participate in the Versailles talks, and because twentieth-century Europe was much more economically interdependent than nineteenth-century pre-industrial Europe. The Old Continent needed an entirely new system of international relations based on cooperation and growing economic integration. Perhaps if Germany had been accepted as an equal participant in the peace talks, the economic and territorial arrangements would have been different, and the interwar years would not have been spent in constant revision of the decisions made in 1918-19.

Last September (2010), the European newspapers announced that the First World War officially ended, Germany paid the last debt of 59.5 million pounds.7 In 1919, under pressure from France, the political leaders in Paris accepted the idea that Germany, as the sole perpetrator of the war, would have to pay the entire price; German economic power would have to rebuild the devastated continent. Keynes was quick to predict the consequences of such a decision. Germany, the continent's largest and most economically advanced nation, would be impoverished, and the result would be this: "Men will not always die quietly. For starvation, which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair. And these in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual. This is the danger against which all our resources and courage and idealism must now cooperate." 8These words were written in 1918-19, well before the Great Depression and the radicalization of German politics that led to the rise of Hitler. Before the war, Germany had been transformed from an agrarian to an industrial society, and Keynes feared that the economic arrangements of the treaty would hit the industrial base of the state. In fact, despite inflation, the French occupation of the Ruhr, and rising unemployment, the Germans not only survived the 1920s, but did quite well. 9 The Great Depression did what the Versailles economic sanctions could not.

Thus, the economic arrangements of the treaty cannot be seen as a leading factor in the outbreak of the Second World War. The territorial arrangements were more significant. Some of the decisive decisions of the Allies were: Alsace and much of Lorraine were returned to France, the Prussian provinces of Posen and West Prussia were ceded to Poland, Upper Silesia was transferred to Czechoslovakia, East Prussia was placed under the control of France and later annexed by Lithuania, the industrial Saarland was placed under the control of the League of Nations for 15 years, Austria had no right to seek a merger with Germany. These arrangements showed the victors' disregard for the principle of self-determination that had been promised in the armistice as a guiding principle for the creation of the postwar order.

The territorial arrangements are one of the main causes of the next war because they gave Germany the moral right to revise the treaty and to act unchecked by the Allies for too long. This moral right was felt not only by the Germans, but also by France, Britain, and the U.S. All important interwar diplomacy and international politics was based on joint efforts to modify the obligations of the treaty to meet German needs without threatening France. Interwar politics was a potent cocktail of realpolitik, diplomacy, and political maneuvering, amplified by economic tremors and hypnotic scarlet lights from the East. In 1933, Germany was already drunk, and the Allies were already dizzy, unable to understand the character of the German Kaiser and the massive will behind his mad ideas.

In 1935 in London, Baron Werner von Rheinbaben, who represented Germany at the League of Nations and the Conference on Disarmament, revealed German feelings and ambitions after the war. In a broadcast speech later 10 published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd., he summarized German feelings and aims as follows: the Treaty of Versailles had "robbed" Germany of her "freedom and honor" and therefore the European system had to be revised without "war" or "other methods of force. The revision described by Rheinbaben was in keeping with the contemporary "official" line of Hitler's policy. In 1934, Germany wanted to regain the Saar territory from France, gradually revise the Polish arrangements, establish "close relations" with Austria, recognize its "independence" while acknowledging its German character, 11 and defend the culture and identity of the German minorities, their "Volkstum". All this, according to Rheinbaben, had to be done peacefully, but this conciliatory spirit somehow disappeared under the implacable words at the end of his speech that Germany "can never give up her claims", that she "can never forget" that the Austrian State "has always been German and wants to remain German". Although the economic arrangements of the Treaty had not hurt German economy too much, after the war every economic problem of the country was explained with the reparations, and in his speech, Rehinbaben did not miss the chance to express resentment again. "If Germany to-day is, to her great regret, in a position where the repayment of her private debts strains her to the very uttermost and weakens her purchasing power abroad, that too is ultimately the result of Versailles. In this way the German people have been daily reminded for the last fifteen years of the harshness of the victors in 1919." 12 The disarmament of Germany was another source of discontent. According to Rheinbaben, Germany wanted reciprocal demilitarization from the Allies in the spirit of the League of Nations, and no one could argue with this demand. His last words were that Germany would seek an "evolution" and "revision" of the clauses of the treaty.

In the same broadcast, the French representative, Professor Denis Saurat, did not oppose the German aspirations in principle. He admitted that the treaty needed to be revised, but with guarantees for France and within the framework of international institutions. France excused the imperfections of Versailles not by the absence of the defeated nations in Paris in 1918-19, but by the reluctance of Great Britain and the United States to enter into a defensive pact with her and thus to guarantee the future of peace. France justified its efforts to prevent easy modification of the agreements by blaming its allies: "England and America began to wonder and to ask aloud why the French stuck to the Treaty; the answer is: because England and America would give France nothing else to stick to." 13 The immediate threat that Germany posed to France made them aware of the dangers of German revisionism, but their vigilance was not supported.

The important point here is that the Allies had internal disagreements, and while they blamed each other for the flaws in the treaty, they reinforced the German sense of criminality committed and strengthened the German sense of moral superiority. In this way, the Allies were unable to pursue strong, concerted, and impartial diplomacy against Germany, nor were they able to consider preemptive military action when Hitler's expansion abroad began. The Treaty of Versailles created an ideological and political weakness among the victors that the Nazis successfully exploited. Hitler's foreign policy, his so-called "diplomatic revolution," had only one crucial source: the Allies' confusion about what was right and wrong policy in a world system they had created. They had no clear answer to the question of the justice of German claims and the most effective policy for dealing with them.

Historian Sheldon Anderson argues that if Hitler had died before 1939, war might have been averted regardless of the Treaty of Versailles. World War II was Hitler's war, he says. 14I agree with him. But the important thing is what brought Hitler to power and why his insane policies were possible in Germany. Is the Treaty of Versailles in any way responsible for Hitler's rise? The answer is not simple: not only the Treaty of Versailles, but also the Great Depression, the German conservative forces that fought mercilessly against progressive forces and cultural and political modernization, the myths of German exceptionalism, the lack of well-developed strategies for collective security, the easy and bloodless German expansion after 1934, and so on. The combination of all these factors facilitated the rise and political success of Nazism.

I see Hitler as A.J. P. Taylor saw him 15 - not a very intelligent man, who had vague imperialistic plans, but who was brutal and shameless enough to use every political opportunity for his advancement, at home and abroad. Hitler was surfing on the tides created by others; in this sense, the Treaty of Versailles was a key event, but not the only one, that set in motion a European system with weak moral foundations, unable to deal with the dangers of populism and revisionism. Finally, in the international system, when politics does not meet justice and peace does not meet politics, war becomes a natural means of solving problems.

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1 Lord Riddle, "The Scene and the Personalities" in "The Treaty of Versailles and After," (George Allen & Unwin Brothers Ltd. London, 1935), p. 11. Lord Riddle was appointed in November 1918 to represent the London and provincial newspapers at the Peace Conference in Paris.

2 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Prometheus Books, 2004), pp. 55-56

3 C.K. Webster, "The Problem before the Peacemakers" in "The Treaty of Versailles and After," (George Allen & Unwin Brothers Ltd. London, 1935), pp 24-41

4 Ibid. p. 28

5 Georges Clemenceau "French Demands for Security and Revenge" (in "Sources of Twentieth Century Europe," Houghton Mifflin, 2000) p. 80.

6 Arnold J. Toynbee "The Main Features of the Landscape" in " The Treaty of Versailles and After," (George Allen & Unwin Brothers Ltd. London, 1935), p. 46.

7 Allan Hall, "First World War officially ends" (The Telegraph, 28 September, 2010)

8 P. 241

9 According to Eichengreen and Hatton (a research quoted by Peter Temin in "Lessons from the Great Depression,"), between 1921-1929 industrial unemployment rates in Germany were 9.2%, for comparison in U.K the rates were 12%, in U.S. 7.9%, in France 8.8., but the Great Depression hit Germany hard - the unemployment raised to 21.8% (average for 1930-1938) while the levels in UK and France were as follow 15.4% and 10.2%. Wholesale prices and industrial production data shows that after 1925 Germany was did not perform much differently than other industrial countries. (See Peter Temin " Lessons from the Great Depression, " MIT Press, 1991)

10 Baron Baron Werner von Rheinbaben , "How the Treaty looks to Germany to-day " in "The Treaty of Versailles and After," George Allen & Unwin Brothers Ltd. London, 1935, pp. 113-131

11 He said "as Hitler pointed out some time ago, there is no question and no attempt whatever by the Reich to absorb Austria." (p.119) It is strange why the Anschluss in March 1938 did not alarm the Allies that Hitler's ambitions go well beyond his talk, and why they did not used this experience in Munich in September 1938.

12 Baron Baron Werner von Rheinbaben , "How the Treaty looks to Germany to-day" in " The Treaty of Versailles and After," (George Allen & Unwin Brothers Ltd. London, 1935), p. 123

13 Denis Saurat, "How the Treaty looks to France to-day" in " The Treaty of Versailles and After," (George Allen & Unwin Brothers Ltd. London, 1935), pp.103-104

14 Sheldon Anderson, "The myth of Versailles Treaty and the Origins of World War II" in " Condemned to Repeat " (Lexington Books, 2008), p. 48

15 A.J. P. Taylor, "The Origins of the Second World War" (Penguin Books, 1991).

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