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H-DIPLO-ROUNDTABLE

Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, eds,_ The
Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years_ (Cambridge: German
Historical Institute, Washington, D. C., and Cambridge University Press,
1998)

Roundtable Editor: William Keylor
Reviewers: Robert Hanks, William Irvine, Gordon Martel, David Stevenson
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Review by William D. Irvine, <birvine@glendon.yorku.ca>
Professor of History
York University

I suspect I am like most historians of modern Europe who do not specialize
in diplomatic history. Every year for the last thirty I have given a few
lectures on the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath. Whenever I deliver
them I am uncomfortably aware that much of what I know about the subject I
learned as an undergraduate. In fact, apart from the provocative last
chapter in Niall Ferguson's _The Pity of War_, I think the last scholarly
work on the subject that I have consulted was Marc Trachtenberg's
_Reparations in World Politics_, now twenty years old. Indeed, I fear (and
I doubt that I am alone in this respect) that I am less likely to keep up
with the literature on Versailles than with the literature on almost any
other aspect of twentieth century European history. To some degree this
might be explained by the dauntingly technical nature of some of the work,
especially studies of the economic consequences of the treaty. I do know
that I was sufficiently intimidated by Professor Feldman's 1000 page
volume on post-war German inflation that I put off reading it for years.
Upon reading it, I emerged, if anything, more intimidated. But it is also
the case, I suspect, that I have been operating on the (unexamined)
assumption that there is not very much new to be said about the Treaty of
Versailles. So I approached with some eagerness a 600 page volume entitled
_The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 years_.

The 26 essays and essay-length comments provide a series of well written,
state-of-the art assessments of virtually all aspects of the Versailles
settlements. The quality of the essays is uniformly high - something of an
accomplishment in itself - and any one of them can be read with profit.
And yet, I am not quite convinced that I left this volume with anything
like a radically new perspective on the Treaty of Versailles or, to put it
another way, that I needed significantly to revise my lecture notes.

By way of example, I was seven eights of the way through - and thoroughly
enjoying - Klaus Schwabe's essay on Germany's peace aims when he somewhat
disconcertingly informed me that he was *now* going to "introduce a fresh
approach into a somewhat outworn debate."(p.62) His "fresh approach"
amounts to saying that Germany did, under the leadership of
Brockdorff-Rantzau, succeed in the long run goal of discrediting the
treaty both legally and morally and that an alternate leadership probably
could not have achieved more. I find his argument convincing but it does
not seem to depart very radically from the conventional wisdom on the
subject.

I simply lost tract of the number of times contributors cited Jacques
Bainville's celebrated judgement of the treaty: "Une paix trop douce pour
ce qu'elle a de dur." As one liners go, this is more apt than most but,
again, this is by now surely something like the standard assessment of the
treaty. Certainly it is not a verdict that would surprise those of my
undergraduates who actually read the first chapter of the assigned text,
P.M.H. Bell's _The Origins of the Second World War in Europe_ (To be sure,
Bell does not quote Bainville although he does cite Machiavelli to more or
less the same effect.)

One of the most elegant essays in this volume is William Keylor's vigorous
defense of the treaty. At his hands, the legendary nay-sayer, John Maynard
Keynes, undergoes a severe drubbing. (It might be added here that poor old
Keynes comes in for some rough handling by a number of the contributors.)
It is a source of some irritation for Keylor that the substantial body of
scholarly writings on the treaty has failed to have the desired impact on
the profession and that as a result "the shopwarn pronouncements of Keynes
have stood the test of time." (p.  499). Is this really true? Looking over
the last thirty years of lecture notes, I find that, although I invariably
talk about Keynes, I give as much time to Etienne Mantoux. I do so for no
better reason than the fact that my undergraduate instructors in the
1960's did so and I recall that undergraduates at the University of
British Columbia were forced to march and counter-march (the phrase is
from E.P. Thompson) though excerpts from both _The Economic Consequences
of the Peace_ and _The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes_ (It is true,
though, as Keylor will be quick to note, that Keynes but not Mantoux is
cited in Bell.)

True, most non-specialists will be uncertain as to which of the two
gentlemen were closer to the truth and why. They will receive some help
from Sally Mark's characteristically robust assessment of the reparations
issue. I left it with a feeling that it was past time that I stopped
parroting without qualification the famous figure of 132 billion gold
marks. Or at any rate, before I go on to explain to my baffled Canadian
undergraduates, what a gold mark was in American dollars, how an American
billion differs from a British one and what a milliard actually is, I
should take the time to explain that the effective reparations figure was
closer to 50 billion. It is also true, though, that I would not have had
to await this volume to make that correction, had I paid closer attention
to a book she wrote nearly a quarter century ago.

My brighter students always want to cut to the bottom line. Could, yes or
know, Germany have paid the reparations had they had the will? Yes, says
Marks, who is categorical on the point. No says Gerald Feldman who cites
an imposing array of scholars on his side. So the section in my lecture
notes that says, in effect, "this one is still up for grabs" will remain
unchanged. The famous "transfer problem" is too daunting for all
undergraduates and most of their professors. But, given what a statistical
minefield the whole question is, the latter will be rewarded by a
stimulating, provocative and relatively accessible essay by Niall
Ferguson. Several of the essays remind us that the genesis of and the
logic behind the article 231 is more complex than general accounts (and
undergraduate lectures) admit. This question too has a long history but
any attentive reader of this volume will henceforth not be allowed the
intellectual short cut of saying: "Germany had to pay reparations because
she was deemed guilty of starting WWI." Maybe no one should ever have said
that but I fear I have done so more than once, doing violence to the
historical record in a (possibly misguided) effort to give my students
just one more reasons why they should have cared about the previous few
weeks of discussion about who started WWI.

Arno J, Mayer's well known argument that peace making in 1919 was informed
by a desire to contain Soviet Russia rather than Germany finds little
support in this volume. A number of contributors acknowledge that the
Germans did hold out the prospect of a Bolshevized Germany in a bid to
obtain milder terms from the allies. But there seems to be little evidence
that the allies fell for this ploy, a point made routinely by Mayer's
critics thirty years ago.

As a general rule, France emerges from these essays as being more
reasonable, practical and vulnerable than an earlier (much earlier)
literature allowed. Great Britain, or at least David Lloyd George, comes
across as Machiavellian, and mischievous, where not utterly disingenuous.
This will not surprise many scholars, or at any rate not those who
specialize in French history. Georges-Henri Soutou is something of a
French Fritz Fischer, having earlier stressed the economic war aims of
France, at least since 1916. He mounts, though, a plausible defense of
Georges Clemenceau whom he portrays as a flexible and reasonable
negotiator. His mistake was in sacrificing too much in the expectation,
subsequently disappointed, of a treaty of guarantees from London and
Washington. This too is conventional wisdom.

Antoine Fleury seeks to challenge those historians - the great majority -
who regard the League of Nations as an unqualified failure. He makes much
of its technical achievements, insists that its history compares favorably
with that of its successor, the United Nations, and argues that post 1945
achievements, notably European economic and political integration, can
trace their roots to the spirit of the interwar League. Here he is
probably not wrong although it is unlikely to that the hard nosed
diplomatic historians of the period will thereby change their essentially
negative assessment of the League.

There is a great deal more that could be written about the various essays
in the book under review. But by now it should be clear that there is not
much here that would significantly alter the views of anyone likely to
consult this volume. This said, however, this is also a volume that anyone
interested in the post World War I settlement will want to consult. There
a wealth of information here. My overall assessment of the Treaty of
Versailles may not have changed very much, but my grasp of the issues was
greatly enriched.

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