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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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Introduction by William R. Keylor <wrkeylor@bu.edu>
Professor of History and International Relations
Director, International History Institute
Boston University

In the spring of 1994 the German Historical Institute sponsored a
conference to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the signing of
the Treaty of Versailles.  It was held at the University of California at
Berkeley under the hospitable patronage of the Center for German and
European Studies and its genial director, Professor Gerald Feldman.
Twenty-five scholarly specialists on the peace settlement from five
countries (Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and
Switzerland) gathered to discuss an important turning point in the history
of our world that, as some of the commentators in this Roundtable observe,
has been neglected by diplomatic historians in recent years. The
sun-drenched, verdant campus presented a vivid contrast to the frigid,
rainy, flu-filled atmosphere of the meeting in Paris three-quarters of a
century earlier that was being reassessed at what many of us have
playfully referred to ever since as the "Versailles Conference." The
absence of a French delegation initially gave rise to some speculation
about a Gallic boycott of this German-sponsored conclave dominated by
Anglo-Saxon professors until it was announced that the two Parisian
invitees, Andre Kaspi and Georges-Henri Soutou, had been obliged to
cancel, with deep regret, for personal reasons.

Unlike many scholarly conferences, in which participants present papers on
themes largely of their own choosing, each one of us was assigned a
particular topic that was subsumed under one of five general rubrics:
"Peace Planning and the Actualities of the Armistice;" The Peacemakers and
Their Home Fronts;" "The Reconstruction of Europe and the Settlement of
Accounts;" "The Legacy and Consequences of Versailles;" and "Antecedents
and Aftermaths:  Reflections on the War-Guilt Question and the
Settlement."  The commissioned papers spanned the spectrum of
specificity-generality from Carole Fink's splendid piece of research and
analysis on the Polish Minority Treaty to my own contribution on
"Versailles and International Diplomacy." The results of the conference
were published by Cambridge University Press in the volume under review
below.

When I received the four contributions that you are about to read, it
became apparent that they collectively constituted a much lengthier and
more substantive Round Table discussion than is customary on H-Diplo.  I
therefore decided to condense my own prefatory remarks to keep the on-line
review of this important book brief enough to entice members of this list
to take the time to read the assessments of the four scholars below. That
effort will be lavishly repaid, for these four commentaries raise many of
the trenchant controversies that have surrounded the peace settlement of
1919 since the Treaty of Versailles was signed an sealed on June 28, 1919.

I have decided to confine my remarks here to one important theme that
emerges briefly in the contributions of Gordon Martel and Rob Hanks,
because I believe that it strikes at the very heart of the diplomatic
history enterprise and is worthy of further consideration.  In his witty
and erudite assessment of __The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After
75 Years__, Martel laments the absence of "a set of new explorations or
fresh perspectives....Although there are a few bits new enough to whet the
appetite of jaded palates, this is a subject without a Said, without a
subaltern studies; there is no equivalent here to the phenomenon of
post-colonialism in which the very meaning of the subject is resituated as
the ethics and ideologies of those who gave it meaning in the past comes
under hostile fire from below."  By contrast, Hanks celebrates the
volume's "impressive vindication of traditional historical research
methods over trendier structuralist and post-modern intellectual trends."

I know Gordon Martel and his work well enough to be confident that he is
not proposing here the adoption of new methodologies for their own sake,
merely because they are novel (or, as Hanks would say, "trendy"). Instead,
he seems to be warning "traditional"  diplomatic historians that they
cannot hope to win a broader audience for their scholarship unless they
take into account the new approaches to knowledge that have become
commonplace not only in literary studies but also in many sub-branches of
our own discipline.  A small but growing number of diplomatic historians
have been receptive to the epistemological theories of post-modernism,
post-structuralism, post-colonial studies (what Peter Novick once referred
to as the "post-toasties"). A reassessment of the peace settlement of 1919
from such a fresh "new" perspective, which the volume under review
certainly is not, might very well open up fascinating new lines of inquiry
and provide more exciting reading than studies of the "transfer problem"
of reparations or the strategic significance of the Rhine frontier for
France.  One might mention two examples of topics that have preoccupied
scholars in other fields who march under the banner of postmodernism but
are entirely absent from the volume under review: gender and race.

In all of my own archival diggings in the vast primary source literature
related to the peace conference, I have rarely encountered messages to or
from, or even references to, women. All of the plenipotentiaries and
almost all of the minor players were men (__pace__ Frances Stevenson,
whose love letters to and from Lloyd George are worth a visit to the House
of Lords Record Office, and Gertrude Bell, who made a brief cameo
appearance in Paris on behalf of her idol Feisal before being elbowed
aside by the redoubtable Lawrence of Arabia). Assessing the role of women
or the significance of women's concerns at the peace conference of 1919
would require the imagination and interpretive acumen of a close reader of
subtexts, because the relevant texts are few and far between. Here is a
topic worthy of further exploration, if for no other reason than to rise
to the daunting challenge of locating the few needles in the haystack that
might yield a credible "gendered analysis" of the topic.

The "trope" (as they say) of race has been explored in a few studies of
the abortive bid by the Japanese delegation to secure approval for their
"racial equality amendment" to the League Covenant (which was blocked, it
should be recalled, by that notable progressive idealist Woodrow Wilson,
despite the fact that it won the assent of a majority -- including the
reactionary French and Italian delegations -- on the League Commission).
Some scholarly attention has been devoted to W.E.B. Du Bois's Pan-African
Conference that met across town as a kind of "counter-peace conference" in
1919 while the white statespersons and a few token representatives of the
non-Western world in the British Empire Delegation sat at their baize
tables in the clock room of the Quai d'Orsay. But the scholarly literature
on "gender and race at Versailles" is nothing compared to the vast
collection of monographic studies on the strategic, political, diplomatic,
and economic context and consequences of the peace conference.

And yet it seems to me that "traditional" diplomatic historians
researching the peace conference of 1919, while welcoming scholarly work
on these understudied topics with these unconventional methods, have no
reason to throw up their hands in despair with the lament that there is
nothing "new" to be learned about the political, diplomatic, strategic,
and economic context of the peace settlement.  Were they to do so they
might as well close up shop and follow the rest of the discipline of
diplomatic history -- and the contributors to H-Diplo, I might gently add
-- into the study of more contemporary topics. David Stevenson is entirely
correct in noting that "The historiographical caravan has moved on, to the
Cold War and beyond."  So why not abandon the entire field before, say,
1947, and concentrate on events covered by the "new" archival material
that continues to appear (not only in Western countries but also in
previously inaccessible places such as Russia)?

The most obvious riposte is the truism that new interpretations of even
the most exhaustively researched historical events may provide valuable
insights about the past. Imagine a scholar of the American revolution or
medieval France complaining that there is nothing "new" to be said on the
topic. But there is another important reason for continuing to study the
Versailles conference that is specific to that particular topic. As I have
written elsewhere, the historical memory that we retain today of that
important turning point in the history of international relations was to a
large extent formed by accounts -- most of them by participants in the
deliberations--that appeared in the interwar period, BEFORE most of the
private papers and government records had made available to scholars (1).
Except for Arno Mayer's monumental, idiosyncratic tome of the 1960s, which
portrayed the peacemakers as obsessed with the containment and suppression
of bolshevism at the expense of all other issues, we have not had a
multiarchival study of the Paris Peace Conference. And even that
reassessment appeared before the declassification in the 1970s of the
French archives for the period.(2). Contrary to popular opinion, we do not
know the full "story" of the Treaty of Versailles -- "story" not in the
sense of the historian's "text" that postmodernists assure us is the only
true reality of history, but rather "story" in the sense of an
archive-based, coherent narrative that captures the complexity and drama
of the diplomatic tug-of-war during that six month period in Paris when
the leaders of the victorious coalition redrew the map of Europe and
determined the fate of much of the rest of the world. For those of us who
still believe that it is worthwhile to engage in the elusive, frustrating,
perhaps impossible, but still essential task of seeking the closest
possible approximation of truth about a past through honest, scrupulous
research in the available records, the full story of what David Fromkin
called "the peace to end all peace"  remains to be recounted. The essays
in the volume under review, and the commentaries below, form important
parts of that ongoing enterprise.

NOTES:

(1) William R. Keylor, ed.,__The Legacy of the Great War: Peacemaking,
1919 (Boston, 1997), pp. 3-4.

(2) Arno J. Mayer, __Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Revolution and
Counter-Revolution at Versailles, 1918-1919__(London, 1968).  Arthur
Walworth's monumental __Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy and
the Paris Peace Conference__(New York, 1986) focuses (as its title
suggests) on the American delegation and relies almost exclusively on
American sources.

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