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A New World Order:
Imperialism and World War I
I. A New Imperialism
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Europe in the late 19th century
o In the last one-third of the 19th century, Europe spread her control over 10 million
square miles and 150 million more people, representing one-fifth of the world's
land and 10% of its total population
o What makes this new is that Europeans were no longer content to tax and
administer an area as others had done before. Instead, they actually tried to
raise production and lower costs by applying western industrial and scientific
methods
o Copper and tin, for example, were really part of a world trade and only
incidentally part of an area's local economy
o After western science had improved tropical agriculture, westerners then worked
to undermine it by developing synthetic rubber and a chemical form of quinine,
for example, leaving underdeveloped areas of the world in the lurch.
Beginnings of a New Imperialism
o The move toward imperialism began only late in the 19th century because most
European countries had been stung by the loss of their overseas colonies, such
as England with her American colonies and the Spanish with South America
o Moreover, Europeans had been influenced by the free trade ideas of Adam Smith
that suggested colonies were not necessary
o Reasons for Imperialism
 Raw Materials and New Markets
 But now Europeans needed raw materials they simply could not
produce at home to fuel the second industrial revolution,
materials such as oil, rubber and rare metals
 The colonies were less important as markets because they
simply were not rich enough to be good markets for the industrial
manufactured goods Europe produced
 In fact, Europe's best customers were other industrialized
countries
 Of course, huge profits were to be made overseas
 Ten to twenty per cent profit was not unknown, at a time when
bank interest averaged 3 to 4%
 Need for Control
 But then European countries needed to protect these
investments by establishing political control
 Investment of capital was more important for Britain than for
France or Germany: France had more invested in Russia to
stabilize a valuable ally, than she did in all her colonies
combined
 Overpopulation not a factor in imperialism
 The settlement of overpopulation in colonies was also not very
important
 Most excess Europeans went to North and South
America or to Australia
 Between 1875 and 1914, 36 million Europeans
emigrated, more than two thirds coming to the United
States--largest migration in the history of the world
 But France was the second largest single receiver of immigrants
in the world
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South America received rather few because those countries
found it hard to create enough jobs to lure immigrants
o Medicine and imperialism
 Colony holding was also easier to do because of improvements in
modern medicine
 By the early 20th century, mortality among British and French soldiers
abroad decreased by 80%, due to immunization against typhoid,
rehydration for cholera and ipecac for dysentery
 Problems still remained in tropical areas, primarily because tropical
diseases are frequently caused by worms and protozoa to which one
could not acquire immunity, whereas temperate climates had illnesses
caused by viruses and bacteria to which one could become immune
National Prestige, Nobility, and Imperialism
o A sense of excitement also drove Europeans into colonization, as did strategic
concerns to protect the valuable colonies they already had
 Some colonies were there strictly for national prestige
 German colonies in Africa, for example, had almost no economic
significance
o Some historians argue that imperialism also diverted attention from class
conflicts at home and helped justify the emergence of the political right
 Most colonials were from the English gentry or French bourgeoisie who
felt squeezed at home between industrialists and the urban proletariat
 They had gone to the colonies in the first place to be enlightened
aristocrats, meaning they would not be interested in sharing power with
the indigenous peoples
Development of Imperial Rivalries
o As European countries competed for colonies abroad, rivalries emerged
o Britain and Russia
 One of the most important is the British-Russian rivalry
 We must remember that there was nothing inevitable about the
British-Russian alliance in World War I and that the Germans
knew and counted on it
 Britain was concerned to avoid Russian influence in the eastern
Mediterranean
 To that end she fought the Crimean War, and in 1882, seized
Egypt to avoid the loss of the Suez canal, a vital link to British
colonies like India in the Indian Ocean
 Britain did not want Russian naval power out of the Black Sea either, and
this meant British support for Greece
 The Russians responded by using pan-slavism to appeal to the
slavic countries of eastern Europe, and especially to Serbia who
already envisaged creating a Yugoslavia, or union of southern
slavs on Greece's border
 British-Russian rivalry continued in the Red Sea and Persian
Gulf, a rivalry which only became more strident with the
discovery of oil in the region
 Britain strengthened India to keep the Russians from moving
farther south after Russia absorbed Georgia and the old
khanates on her southern border
 Britain also gave aid to Tibet and Afghanistan to keep them from
falling into the Russian orbit
 Only in 1907 was a general agreement worked out between Britain and
Russia on spheres of influence, but it only suspended the rivalry
momentarily in the face of a powerful Germany
o It would be taken up again following World War II with the United States stepping
into British shoes and calling it the Cold War

Imperialism in Africa
o Africa proved to be a place to play out imperial schemes without disturbing the
peace of Europe
o In 1875, after centuries of contact, Europe had no more than 10% of African land
o Twenty-five years later, seven European nations controlled over 90% of the
continent
o Africa was an economic gold mine, sometimes quite literally with gold in South
Africa, diamonds, rubber, and coffee
o European divisions of Africa
 However, the divisions Europeans made in Africa for their convenience
were made without reference to tribal divisions and without reference to
tribal forms of government
 This sometimes meant that very hostile tribes would find themselves in
the same country after it achieved its independence following World War
II
 Europeans created caste systems, preferring Christians over animists for
example, but they did not realize that the tribal system elected a leader
by consensus and that such a leader had no right to speak for everyone
 The great number of political entities in Africa, 10,000 at least, meant
that Europeans were able to take advantage to pit one group against
another and so divide and conquer
o The Europeans also imported Indian and Syrian merchants to administer the
economies of these areas, creating problems later when Africans asserted
control of their own destinies and, in some cases like Uganda, kicked these nonAfricans out
o Impact of Imperialism
 It is hard to evaluate imperialism because it is fraught with emotionalism
today
 However, it seems fair to say that imperialism did create peace where
intermittent warfare had existed before, and that it did advance the
economies of the subject peoples as well as providing more effective
public administration
 But this peace came at the price of expropriation of land and goods for
the exclusive use of the imperialist elite
 Moreover, Europeans for the most part failed to train indigenous peoples
to take over after them, and the Europeans were responsible for
widespread destruction of cultural patterns
o Imperialism and ideas of war
 For our purposes here, imperialism also gave a very queer idea of war
 Wars in these far away places were too easy and were almost always
won by the Europeans
 This queer idea of war helps to explain the ease with which Europe
drifted into World War I
II. Prelude to World War I

Germany
o Bismarck
 After the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck was convinced a military option
was too dangerous, so he sought instead to build up an alliance system
that would isolate France and thus prevent war
 He maintained cordial relations with Austria-Hungry and a formal
understanding with Russia, but he counted on the antagonism between
France and Britain and Britain and Russia to keep Britain out of the way
o
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Kaiser Wilhelm II who took the throne in 1888, however, dismissed Bismarck and
took over the running of his own foreign policy
o He almost immediately created ill will with the Russian tsar, and France moved
quickly to woo Russia with loans and arms purchases
o France and Russia signed an understanding which became a full alliance in 1894
Britain vs. Germany
o At first Britain tried to conciliate Germany, feeling herself overextended as a
result of the Boer War in South Africa, but rebuffed by the kaiser, Britain began to
see Germany as a threat
o Naval Buildup
 She feared German domination of the continent, and when in 1898
Germany decided to build a navy larger than anyone elseís, Britain
began to prepare for an eventual war with her
 Germany was building not only cruisers for defense, but also battleships
for attack elsewhere
 Germany had long had the most powerful army on the continent, but the
addition of a navy would allow her to transport that army over the
Channel and attack Britain herself, or go worldwide and attack British
colonies
 German naval supremacy threatened British livelihood as well, because
the raw materials and finished goods critical to the British industrial
revolution came and went by sea
 British Diplomacy
 with Japan--Britain broke her traditional diplomatic isolation to
sign an alliance with Japan in 1902, freeing up her fleet to
concentrate on Europe
 with France--in 1904, the British and French buried the hatchet
and signed the Entente Cordial
 with Russia--in 1907, the British even signed an alliance with
Russia, temporarily settling issues of spheres of influence
between them
 German Reaction
 But this left Germany terrified of encirclement, with Britain and
France on the one side and Russia on the other, and so
Germany sought out her only reliable ally, Austria-Hungary to the
south
 This would prove disastrous as Serbia in the Balkans was allied
with Russia in one alliance system, but surrounded by AustriaHungary in the other
Entangling Alliances
o During this period, the major powers of Europe began forming alliances with one
another
o These alliances called on the signees to come to each others' aid in the event of
an attack on one
o The Triple Alliance--Britain, France, and Russia
o The Triple Entente--Germany, Austria-Hungary, (and later) Turkey (the Ottoman
Empire)
Austro-Hungarian Actions
o In 1908, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, a area traditionally
held by Turkey
 The latter, however, had just had a revolution which brought the Young
Turks to power under Ataturk, and Austria-Hungary acted quickly before
Turkish power could be brought to bear
 Following the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, Russia was in no
position to stop the annexation, although she did protest loudly
o Serbs tried to get Austria-Hungary out of the area
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Serbia attempted to form Yugoslavia, the Union of Southern Slavs
Austria-Hungary feared this revolutionary movement, having no intention
of allowing Yugoslavia to be formed
o The Assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand
 In June, 1918, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Ferdinand, and
his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia
 Austria decided to use this as an excuse to crush Serbia and its antiAustrian propaganda once and for all
 She put forward a list of 21 demands after clearing the move with
Germany whose young kaiser apparently did not think through what
would happen to the giant European alliance system if Russia, in the
other alliance system, chose to support Serbia
 Serbia agreed to 19 of the demands and agreed to negotiate the other
two, but Austria claimed she was not satisfied and began to bomb
Belgrade
Oh what tangled webs alliances weave
o The Serbs called on Russia for help
o Russia responds
 The Russians had intended only to mobilize the part of her army directly
bordering Austria-Hungary
 but all her battle plans had assumed a war with Germany and so she
could not just mobilize one part of the army, but the entire thing,
including the part next to Germany
o Germany has second thoughts
 Germany tried to back out of what was becoming a major war
 but Austria-Hungary held her to the alliance they had signed
 Schlieffen Plan
 The Germans had been willing to be reckless before, because
they had a secret plan, the so-called Von Schlieffen plan, by
which she could fight and win even a two front war
 The plan involved attacking France by going through Belgium,
but keeping so close to the sea that the British would not be able
to land reinforcements
 Russia would take three months to come to full mobilization, but
by the time she did, France would have been defeated without
British help and Russia would be facing not one half of the
German army but the whole thing
 Rather than fight, Russia would surrender
o With the Russian mobilization begun, however, time was running out to put the
Von Schlieffen plan into practice
 A terrified Germany, therefore, launched the attack on France to take
advantage of the long period of Russian mobilization, and thus snapped
the two alliance systems into action
 What was a minor incident in the Balkans had just become World War I
o Austria-Hungary had deliberately started the third Balkan war to survive against
Serbian nationalism that threatened the shaky foundations of her polyglot empire
 Germany had goaded Austria-Hungary on, without realizing what could
lay ahead and was responsible for turning a little war into a great war by
attacking France through Belgium
 Worse, the Germans did not have enough faith in their battle plan and so
did not stay close enough to the sea
o Britain landed reinforcements and together, British and French troops threw
themselves before Paris, saving the city, and denying the Germans the quick
victory over France they had assumed was theirs
o Almost all participants thought the war would be over quickly, within a few
months at the very most
o
Instead they found themselves enmeshed in the great meat grinder of World War
I which would drag on for four years.
II. World War I
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World War I was at heart about the balance of power on the European continent
o This was the main issue of the conflict, not economics or war guilt or breaking of
treaties
o Germany and her allies were threatening the balance of power by arming
themselves and threatening the borders of Europe, as she would do again in
World War II
o In fact, some European historians now refer to this as the Great War, lumping
what we call World Wars I and II together as a single violent period, punctuated
by an uncertain peace in the middle
o It was the geographical position of Germany which gave her the edge, sitting as
she does astride the flat plain of northern Europe while at the same time having
access to the sea
Allied strengths
o Troops
 Britain and her allies actually had more men under arms than did the
Central Powers
 but this is less important than might appear, for most of those men, 12
million, were Russians who were poorly led and abysmally equipped
o Naval and Economic Power
 In fact, what may have turned the tide in the end was the British navy,
which bottled up the German navy in the North and Baltic Seas
 This allowed Britain to open a lifeline to the rest of the world, resupplying
herself and getting raw materials for her industrial revolution by sea,
while Germany could not, trapped as she was in the waters close to
home
 By prolonging the war, Britain could wear down Germany and make
German stockpiles meaningless; the winter of 1916-17 was known in
Germany as the Turnip Winter, because with her food supplies gone that
was about all the Germans had to eat
 Moreover, the British navy helped keep the British economy strong by
allowing industry to function and keeping the workers and the army fed;
thus, neither the rebellions behind the lines due to starvation which the
Germans had been counting on, nor the economic collapse of Britain
occurred
 The domination of the British navy also allowed her to keep control of her
far-flung colonies which could be resupplied by sea; thus, the colonial
rebellions which would sap British will and resources never materialized
either
Fighting World War I
o World War I was not a war of movement, unlike World War II
 After a few weeks of dazzling maneuvers following the Schlieffen plan,
the war settled down into trench warfare
 Trenches swept from the English Channel to Switzerland, producing a
new kind of brutal war which emphasized attrition rather than liberation of
territory
 The war thus produced enormous losses for very little gain
 In 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, Britain and France
gained 125 square miles at a cost of 600,000 dead or wounded
 At Verdun, the Germans lost 500,000 men for 20 square miles
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One reason for such slaughter was the use of new types of weapons
 Improved artillery and the machine gun inflicted the most
casualties
 Poison gas and air power were used primarily as weapons of
terror
o Impact on European culture
 With such horrendous losses, the struggle became a war for control of
people's minds, leading to the widespread use of propaganda
 Rubella became known for the first time as "German" measles, and
many areas in France and Britain outlawed the playing of German
classical music in the interests of national honor
 The war helped to kill off the aristocracy of Britain and France, as young
aristocrats led their men in hopeless charges and were cut down as a
result
 The war further gave a sense of honor and importance to the enlisted
men; those who survived the horrors of the trenches demanded political
and economic rights after the war was over
o Introduction of the Submarine
 With the naval war going in favor of the British, the most important new
weapon introduced may have been the submarine
 With German supplies dwindling and with her navy blocked in the North
Sea, Germany needed to cut the supply route Britain and France had
opened with the United Sates, a lifeline which allowed them to hold on
seemingly forever
 Thus, since she could not go through the British navy, the Germans were
compelled to go under it, using a new weapon which violated the usual
laws of naval conduct
 It proved devastatingly effective against allied shipping, at least until the
convoy system was introduced in 1917 to cut losses and permit the
shipment of the American army from the New World
 In fact, these submarines were directly responsible for bringing the
United States into the war in the first place
The United States
o Americans were officially neutral, but almost from the beginning public opinion
both inside and outside the White House leaned in the direction of Britain and
France
 The Americans did lend money and equipment to the allied countries, but
these loans were a mirror of our national security interests
 simply put, we wanted the allies to win and were prepared to underwrite
their economies to do so
 The weapons makers, the so-called "Merchants of Death," did not bring
the United States into the war to salvage these loans
 arms, ammunition and munitions of war represented only 10% of
American exports
 while 90% were in the form of food and raw materials like cotton
for British mills
 In short, almost everyone in the United States benefited from trade with
Europe
o But economics were not the main issue for Americans any more than they were
for Europeans
 Germany represented the same threat to American interests as she had
to others
 if Germany had been successful in winning the war, dominating
the continent, and destroying the British navy, the United States
would have been frozen out of Europe, one of our chief trading
partners
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the US would perhaps have been called upon to vastly increase
military spending to protect ourselves from a hostile Germany
 German intentions were clearly shown in the Zimmerman note, which
promised the Mexican government major territorial concessions if she
would declare war on us and pin the American army down in the New
World as a result (there is great question as to the validity of the
Zimmerman telegram today--British Intelligence coup)
President Wilson wanted to remain neutral, but he steadily increased the
definition of what was in fact neutral
 Were the Germans allowed to sink belligerent passenger ships?
 Only ships which resisted?
 Only ships on which there weren't any Americans?
Unrestricted submarine warfare
 When the Germans in desperation declared unrestricted submarine
warfare in January, 1917, to end the Turnip Winter and cut off supplies to
Britain and France, war between the Germans and Americans became
inevitable
 After eight merchant ships had been sunk by German submarines, the
United States entered the war on April 6, 1917
Wilson pitched the war as the Great Crusade to make the world safe for
democracy, the war to end all wars
 But in doing so he promised more than he could ever deliver
 thus, he paved the way for great disillusionment when the war was over
Russia
o The Eastern Front
 During 1914-1915, the Russians fought a relatively even war on the
eastern front against the Germans and Austrians
 However, by 1916, Russian armies began to lose control of the situation
 The losses in the Russian armies were staggering--in some cases
exceeding over 3 million men per year
o Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
 as a result, Russia backed out of the war with the humiliating treaty of
Brest-Litovsk in early 1918
 According to this treaty, the Russians surrendered one million square
miles, one-third of her arable land, one-third of her factories and threequarters of her coal and iron deposits
The final year of the war in the West
o With the Russians out of the way, Germany was free to push against the
exhausted West, but by the time she got her troops to the western front in France,
fresh new soldiers had arrived from the United States
o At the very end of the war, the allies used tanks to smash through the trenches, a
lesson which would be learned to great effect by Fieldmarshal Erwin Rommel,
who developed theories on tank warfare which he used so effectively against
British North African forces in World War II
o The arrival of tanks and fresh American troops to the western front turned the
tide
Germany surrenders
o As the German general staff contemplated the war in 1918, they concluded they
had lost, and so, they opened negotiations for a surrender
o Wilson insisted that the Kaiser would have to go, so the Weimar Republic was
established when the Kaiser abdicated
o German allies withdrew from the war as well
o Thus the war came to an end at the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the
eleventh month in 1918. It had killed between 10 and 13 million people, one third
of whom were civilians
o And for every soldier killed, two or three had been wounded or maimed

Impacts of the Great War
o For the first two years of the war, most soldiers and civilians supported their
governments, in part because of propaganda
o By 1916, however, resolve began to crack
o At Home
 Strikes and protests over inadequate food struck both warring camps
(particularly Germany--starvation became a real threat), and some troops
just refused to fight at all, especially in France where a semi-dictatorship
of Clemenceau was established in November, 1917
 In Ireland, Irish nationalists staged the Easter Rebellion in 1916, forcing
the British to deal with their demands for independence while fighting
Germany at the same time
 The war created inflation which wiped out middle class savings, leading
to a right wing resurgence in the late twenties and thirties as the middle
class demanded an end to inflation and depression
 Women's work during the war helped to cause governments to give
women the right to vote, in Britain in 1918, in the United States in 1920
o Post-War impact
 War debt
 In 1914, Europe had been the world's greatest lender of money,
but by 1918, its states were debtors, usually to the United States
 Paying off these loans would create resentment among the
former allies in the 1920s
 Germans react
 Worse, as the war came to an end, the German people seemed
unaware that their army had been defeated in the field
 After all, they saw no foreign soldiers on German soil and their
leadership had not explained how dire their circumstances had
become
 They expected a mild, negotiated settlement, similar to the ones
Europe normally prepared after wars
 But unlike the 18th century conflicts which had been fought almost
exclusively by professional armies, or the Congress of Vienna where the
landed aristocrats of Europe had rearranged the map of Europe to their
pleasure, World War I was fought with a draft system, meaning many
people had suffered during the conflict and were looking for revenge
when it was over
 Thus, the Treaty of Versailles, the Paris Peace treaty, was written after
the war
 The Germans regarded it as a betrayal, and their sense of
outrage helped lead to Adolph Hitler.
III. Treaty of Versailles

Basis of the Treaty
o In theory, the Treaty of Versailles was based on the Fourteen Points President
Wilson put forward in January, 1918, before World War I was actually over
 The 14 points did shorten the war in that Germany agreed to surrender
on the basis of them, but by announcing his peace program so far in
advance, Wilson allowed those who disagreed with him to get ready to
defeat the treaty
o Major points
 Among the most important 14 points was "Open covenants openly
arrived at"
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This meant that the treaty was to be published in full (no secret
codicils) and the negotiations to develop the treaty should be
handled in public
 Freedom of the seas was ill-defined, but supposedly why the United
States had entered the war in the first place
 Popular determinism meant letting the people decide what form of
government they wanted, where they wanted borders drawn, etc
 And finally, the League of Nations would be created to enforce this
peace
Key Players at Versailles
o Wilson arrived in Paris in early 1919, to meet the major figures he would have to
work with
o David Lloyd-George
 The conference was dominated by David Lloyd-George of Great Britain
 Himself a moderate, Lloyd-George had nonetheless just won election on
the platform "hang the kaiser" which gave him little maneuvering room for
compromise
 He was determined in any case to destroy the merchant and naval power
of Germany which had threatened Britain in the first place, to get some of
the German colonies and most important to make Germany pay for the
war
o Clemenceau
 Clemenceau of France had lived through the Franco-Prussian war and
thirsted for revenge on Germany as well as for greater security for
France
 He wanted a defensive border on the Rhine river and a weak Germany
 He especially wanted guarantees from the United States to defend
France in the event of a German attack
o Wilson
 Wilson was idealistic and had trouble dealing with two such seasoned
veterans of European politics
 Most important, the president did not enjoy the support of the American
Congress which had gone Republican in the November, 1918, elections
 That put Henry Cabot Lodge in charge of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee through which Wilson's treaty would have to pass to be
ratified, but Wilson could not bring himself to take Lodge along
 In Europe, Wilson found himself greeted almost as a savior; he forgot his
help was no longer needed, however
 The war was over, and while Europeans were grateful to the
Americans, without whose help Britain and France would have
surely lost the war, Wilson was in no position to dictate to the
leaders of Europe
 Sensing this, Wilson prepared to appeal to the European
peoples over the heads of their elected leaders
Negotiations
o Even if Wilson had been more forthcoming, the Europeans would never have
accepted the 14 points which they found naive if not plain dangerous
o Open covenants openly arrived at would mean negotiating in the open, which in
turn would inevitably lead to grandstanding for political gain at home
 The Europeans might have been willing to accept open covenants
secretly arrived at, but to accept open negotiations would result in the
failure of those negotiations
 If talking failed, Europeans would be obliged to settle their disputes
through war
o Freedom of the seas was left so vague that nobody knew exactly what it meant

o
o
o
o
o
After all, the real question is what exactly goes free on the highs seas:
passenger ships of neutral nations (which were clearly covered by
international law), passenger ships of belligerent nations (which were not
covered by international law but which Wilson had insisted on following
the attack on the Lusitania), unarmed merchantmen?
Popular determinism was an even greater fiasco according to the Europeans
 Most borders on the continent were artificial, creating countries
comprised of many different ethnic and sectarian groups
 Yugoslavia, for example, created at the conference, was composed of
six nation states who cordially detested one another
 Czechoslovakia, another creation, contained not only the Czechs and
Slovaks who spoke different languages and which despised one another,
but as well three and a quarter million Germans who wanted nothing
more than to return to Germany
 Letting the people decide borders would result in ethnic strife and
warfare, especially if the defeated party would not agree in advance to
be bound by the results of an election
The Europeans were willing to accept the League because they planned to use it
to enforce what many came to see as an unjust peace on Germany
 Wilson called it the League covenant, a word used to describe a contract
between a people and their god, leading one historian to call the treaty
"less the 14 points than the Ten Commandments according to Wilson"
Even Clemenceau joked that, "The Lord gave us Ten Commandments. We
broke them. Mr. Wilson has given us 14 points. We shall see."
The League reflected Wilson's ideas of collective security
 Wilson believed that any upset anywhere threatened world security
 This position is different from the one historically followed by the United
States and virtually everybody else which states that some things are
threats to security and must be dealt with, while others are more like
annoyances rather than security threats and should be left to work
themselves out, no matter how unfortunate they may be
 Article X bears out Wilson's interpretation
 It seems innocent enough: all League members agree to
preserve a member nation's territorial integrity against
aggression
 Theoretically, if a country knew that all the other countries in the
world would attack her if she invaded a neighbor, aggression
would cease
 But what if the country being attacked had no territorial integrity?
 Suppose it had just been created out of a variety of different
ethnic groups, like Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. What if it did
not have defensible borders?
 Moreover, Lodge would later ask how the United States would get
involved in any possible war caused when Americans decided to protect
another country's territorial integrity
 Would Congress be consulted as the constitution provides, or
would troops be sent on the president's authority alone, and if
the latter, how was that different from a dictatorship?
 The questions raised by Lodge caused the Senate of the United
States not to ratify the treaty when Wilson brought it home in
1918
 However, the Americans continued to act in concert with the
League even though not a member of it
 Failure to enter the League did not cause World War II
The problem was that the peace that the League of Nations was enforcing was
unjust to Germany in that it did not reflect battlefield conditions when the war
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ended, and after a period of time Germany simply stopped abiding by the treaty
and war broke out again
Terms of the Treaty
o The treaty may have been so severe because the participants hoped that their
maximum provisions, taken to please the folks back home in the open
negotiations, would be negotiated down later
o In fact, the treaty was written so quickly that the maximum terms were usually
written into it
o Germany was dismembered in favor of Belgium and Denmark, ultimately losing
here and elsewhere 10% of her prewar population and 13% of her prewar
territory
o A demilitarized zone of 50 kilometers was created on the Rhine
 France had originally wanted 200 kilometers, but Wilson convinced them
to accept only 50 in return for an American treaty guaranteeing the
security of France
 (When the United States did not ratify the treaty, and France, which had,
asked the Americans for her mutual defense pact the treaty promised,
the United States reneged on her promise to provide one.)
o A Polish corridor was created between two pieces of Prussia so that the newly
created Poland could have access to the sea at Danzig, a German city which
was then internationalized (and later turned into Gdansk when it was turned over
to Poland following World War II)
o German and Turkish colonies were made into League mandates and handed out
to the victors; to those living in areas like Iraq and Palestine, however, this
arrangement looked very much like being colonies again, only under different
masters
o Germany was obliged to pay reparations
 She had already agreed to pay for damages suffered by the civilian
population, but Britain and France demanded she pay for the pensions of
all those hurt in the war as well, including widows and orphans
 That put the total at $33 billion which Germany could never repay
o The German army was cut to 100,000, the same size as that of the United States,
but this move had the effect of throwing out of work thousands of German
soldiers into the postwar depression that gripped Germany
 Without work and with bills to pay, they nursed their anger against the
Weimar Republic which they accused of stabbing them in the back
France, feeling betrayed by both Britain and the United States, turned the League into an
instrument for maintaining the status quo and for assuring French dominance of Europe
Most important, the treaty had not dealt with the real cause of the war--what do you do
with a united Germany capable of dominating Europe?
At the end of World War II, the victors decided the question by disuniting Germany
between East and West
At Versailles, however, they wrote the worst possible treaty: one that hurt Germany badly
enough to make her want revenge, but not badly enough to keep her from getting it