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Canadian History
Treaty of Versailles pg 1
The Treaty of Versailles: 1919
Twenty-seven Allied nations participated in drawing up the Treaty of Versailles, named for the
magnificent old palace outside Paris where the final document was signed on June 28, 1919. In
reality, the Big Four made most decisions at the Paris Peace Conference: Britain, France, the
United States and Italy. However, Italian Premier Vittorio Orlando soon complained of being
slighted by his powerful partners, and Italy came away disappointed, carrying its resentment
against the Paris peace into the post-war world. The achievement of the conference was to bring
together different views: the hard-line demands of Clemenceau to dismember Germany, the more
moderate Lloyd George to keep Germany and France in balance, and the idealistic plan of
Woodrow Wilson to Germany by bringing it into a new world order of democratic and
independent nations. Observers called the result a compromise peace. The compromise,
however, was only between the victors. The defeated nations were given no place and no voice at
the peace table. To Germany, therefore, the treaty was a Diktat, a peace dictated by the Allies.
Germany itself had dictated a much harder peace to the Russians at Brest-Litovsk in 1918.
Critics said that the Versailles settlement, in contrast, was hard and soft at the same time. The
reason was perhaps that Europe itself was of two minds. Many people were moved by Wilson's
ideal of a just peace but they were also out to punish Germany. The Allies were going to
"squeeze Germany like a lemon,"' British leader, "and keep squeezing until you can hear the pips
squeak." The Versailles Treaty reflected the toughness and the moderation of these moods. The
victors slashed Germany's military strength to ribbons, reducing its army to 100 000 troops.
Germany lost Alsace and Lorraine to France. It lost eastern territory to the revived state of
Poland which was also granted a land corridor to the Sea. This corridor separated East Prussia
from the rest of Germany. Germany lost its colonies around the world but the country was not
dismembered: it nation of 60 million remained larger than any of its neighbours; its factories and
mines-some temporarily under French control-remained capable of returning the nation to the
status of an industrial power. The German giant had been defeated but it was still a giant.
Austria paid a higher price in the Treaty of Saint-Germain. (Separate treaties were signed with
the defeated powers.) Western liberals had viewed Austria-Hungary as a land of repressed
minorities, peoples longing for nationhood. In Woodrow Wilson’s mind, this repressed
nationalism was the cause of war, of the Sarajevo assassination, and of European discontent. The
way to peace, he believed, was to complete the revolution of nationalism in European history, to
give the right of self-determination to all national peoples. The result was the dismemberment of
the old Hapsburg Empire and the emergence of the new nations of Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Poland, and Yugoslavia. When the Big Four were finished, the empire of Austria-Hungary had
disappeared from the map. What remained was Austria itself, now a little republic of less than 7
million.
The time was up for the Ottoman Empire as well. Despite Allied promises to recognize the
independence of Arab lands after the war, most of these lands were taken over by Britain and
France as mandates from the new League of Nations. The mandate system, designed to do away
with old-style imperialism, included a provision for the great powers to govern particular regions
during a period of development. Britain, given a mandate over Palestine, kept its wartime
promise to provide for a Jewish national home in the Holy Land, setting the legal foundation for
the future state of Israel. Arab peoples, for their part, saw little difference between old-style
Canadian History
Treaty of Versailles pg 2
imperialism and new-style mandates. To them, the right of self-determination appeared to be for
Europeans only.
Thee peacemakers were more interested in an old empire closer to home, where communism had
replaced czarism in the largest country on earth. Already, in 1917, Allied troops had been sent to
Russia to try to keep that country in the war against Germany. Afterward, with fears rising that
communism could spread to the West, they stayed on through most of the Russian Civil War.
Mostly, these troops of Britain, France, the United States, and Japan-about .100 000 in all-were
warriors in the dark, half involved in supporting the fight of the so-called White armies against
the Red forces, half involved, in trying to stay out of it. However, with the Bolsheviks thus tied
down in a fight for survival, new nations were able to emerge in the old Romanov lands in the
west: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. As the old empires broke into pieces, the
result was the most immense shuffling of borders in the history of the state system on the
Continent.
The Europe of kings and emperors gave way to the sovereignty of the people. France and
Portugal were the only republics in Europe before the war; after, there were more republics than
monarchies. Many, however, were weak and defenceless. Most had troubles with minorities
within their borders. The different peoples of the continent simply lived too entangled to make it
possible for different peoples to have their own states. Despite Wilson's ideal of selfdetermination, large national minorities, such as Germans living in Czechoslovakia, continued to
five unhappily outside the country of their choice. With the fall of the old empires, therefore, the
middle of Europe was made up of small and inexperienced states, with revolutionary Bolshevism
to one side and a discontented Germany on the other. Critics of the Versailles Treaty argued that
this new Europe was more unstable than the old one. The settlement of World War 1, they
concluded, planted the seeds for World War 11.
The American President was aware of the problems of the peace. His faith was that they could be
set right in coming years by the League of Nations. The League was Wilson's idea, a way to
bring international cooperation to a jumbled world of more and more nations. He first included
his idea in his Fourteen Points and, in Paris, he worked successfully to establish the League as
part of the Versailles settlement. After a history of American isolation from Europe, Wilson led
his country into the affairs of the Continent. Many Americans did not want to stay. When the
United States Senate refused to ratify the peace treaty or join the League, the United States
returned to its original isolation and left the problems of European security to the Europeans.
Britain, in turn, decided to go back to its own isolation and left the problems to France. The real
trouble with the Versailles peace, some historians have concluded, was that the peacemakers did
not stay around to enforce it.
The result was that the German problem came back to challenge Europe all over again. The "war
to make the world safe for democracy" made Germany a difficult place for democrats. Leaders
of the new Weimar Republic (so named because of its beginnings in the city of Weimar) wanted
to show the world a Germany of culture and peace. The defeat, however, left behind too much
resentment. The Versailles Diktat and the guilt clause added more. In 1921, Allied experts set the
cost of reparations at 33 billion dollars. Some economists, even in Allied countries, warned that
the sum was too high and ruinous for all concerned. In Germany, anger over the reparations was
added to the anger of a defeated and humiliated nation. The Weimar Republic was heading for
self-destruction.
Canadian History
Treaty of Versailles pg 3
The famous guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty was not included merely to humiliate Germany
but to give a legal basis to Allied claims for reparations. The cost of the war had been immense.
It had been financed on the Allied side by loans, especially from the United States, turning the
countries involved into debtor nations. The logic of the guilt clause was plain: Germany was
guilty of starting a war of aggression, thus Germany was responsible for the damages. Twelve
years earlier, nations at the Hague Peace Conference had considered war to be an accepted
instrument of state policy.
This war was different. The new level of violence, the horror of gas weapons, the attacks on
civilians by submarines and aircraft, made war on this scale appear to be a threat to civilization
itself A war of this kind could not be accounted for as "the continuation of foreign policy by
other means." The guilt clause represented a different principle for the twentieth century: to wage
an aggressive war was in violation of international law. Thus, World War I changed the way in
which the West viewed war and peace in modern times.
World War I
Canadian History
Treaty of Versailles pg 4
The Results of the War
World War I was a great divide in history. It ended a
period of relative peace and began a period of total war
and totalitarian movements. The events of 1914-1918
were a war and a revolution, which in turn unleashed
other wars and revolutions. Most important were the 4
revolutions that shaped the rest of the century 1)the
communist revolution, 2)the fascist revolution, 3)the
revolution in technology (esp. military), and the 4)the
anti-Western revolution. It is important to point out
these revolutions all arose from the horrible experiences
of World War I.
The most outstanding characteristic of this war is that it
was a death experience, a human massacre of enormous
proportions. In all, some 10 million were killed, and 30
million were wounded. From all this destruction came
forces and moods that no peace settlement could
overcome. Although the war appeared to be a victory
for democracy, it gave rise to two radical movements
that would carry state power over the individual to new
limits in Western history. Both communism and
fascism had their origins in the 19th Century, but the
war gave them new form and passion. After the Allied
victory of 1918, the biggest tests for democracy were
still to come.
Some historians use the term “the Second Thirty Years
War” to refer to this period of “the German problem”
and the challenge to Western democracy between 1914
and 1945. They mean that only a brief peace separated
World War I and World War II. The enemies were the
same; what changed was the scale of destruction. From 1914 onward, a momentum toward
greater destruction became obvious as military leaders, with the western front in deadlock,
extended the war to the civilian population by the use of submarines and aircraft. To military
strategists new weapons and easier targets appeared to be the way out of the stalemate. The
world had now entered the realm of “total war”, were the line between military and civilian
targets was now blurred. In other words, the total war of 1914, made possible the “more total”
war of 1939-1945.