Treaty of Versailles

"You offer terms. I ask none."
--Balian of Ibelin (Kingdom of Heaven)

Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles. Although conventional wisdom is that the treaty marked the end of war and the institution of peace, the reality is that it motivated a period of unprecedented statism and war.

The Treaty of Versailles was actually a collection of treaties signed by individual countries in a series of settlements. In January, 1919, delegates from Britain, France, Italy, and the US convened in Paris for a preliminary conference to decide amongst themselves the terms to offer Germany. Germany was not summoned to Paris until May, and it was not permitted to negotiate terms. Because this violated precedent for resolving post-war differences, the fact that treaty terms were dictated was bound to breed contempt in Germany.

Germany signed the treaty forced on them on June 28, 1919.

The several clauses of the treaty, heavily influenced btw by British economist John Maynard Keynes, intensified the bad taste in German mouths. The military clause disarmed Germany. However, German disarmament was supposed to be part of a general European disarmament sponsored by the League of Nations. But the Allies did not fulfill their promise to disarm, and this broken promise infuriated German public opinion.

The reparations clause, upon Keynes's recommendation, did not fix the amount of reparations that Germany was to pay for wartime damages. Instead, Germany was forced to sign a blank check, which permitted the country to complain that its citizens had been condemned to indefinite slave labor. Moreover, the reparation sums demanded by Britain and France subsequently indebted Germany to the point of the Weimar hyperinflation and country's economic collapse in the early 1920s.

The reparations clause also included Article 231. Article 231 required that Germany accept sole responsibility for starting the war. This was folly, of course, because all major European powers shared responsibility for starting the war. Sadly the charade of Article 231 has been perpetuated in most history books.

The territories clause caused Germany to lose 13% of its land and 10% of its population. Alsace-Loraine went to France, territory in the east (along with Russian and Austro-Hungarian land) went to recreate Poland, the Polish Corridor to the sea cut off East Prussia from the Germany, the Austro Hungarian empire was shattered to create the new nation of Czechoslovakia, and the unification of Germany and Austria was prohibited. Not only did these moves deny the people in these territories the right to self determination--a self-determination that was promised by the Allies prior to the treaty conference--but it festered ill feelings inside Germany about surrounding locales that had been created by force rather than by freedom.

The German people thought the treaty unfair, and they wanted someone to oppose it. The platform for Hitler's rise to power was built on the Treaty of Versailles.

The scope of the treaty also facilitated land deals in Italy, Asia, and the Middle East--all motivated by imperialistic impulses of the Allies. These deals were forced, and violated principles of self-determination for the peoples involved. Negative outcomes subsequently followed, including Italy's fascism and proclivity to side with the Axis in WWII, extremism in the Middle East, communism in Russian, China, Korea, and Vietnam, and militarism in Japan.

It is difficult for the reasoned mind not to conclude that many if not most of the major social and economic problems faced by the world today were set in motion one hundred years ago from yesterday.