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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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'Oh, What an Ugly Peace'
Review by: Gordon Martel, <martel@unbc.ca>
Professor of History
University of Northern British Columbia

In the land of missed opportunities the Treaty of Versailles dwarfs all
other twentieth-century landmarks. The failures of Anglo-German diplomacy
to end the naval race in the decade before 1914, of Austro-Russian to keep
the Balkans 'on ice', of Franco-German to heal the wound of the lost
provinces were regrettable but -- given the profound causes that produced
the First World War -- none of them in themselves are considered to have
been sufficiently vital to have reversed the tidal wave produced by
nationalism, imperialism and militarism. The failure to stop Hitler when
he took his first fateful step in the Rhineland, to confront him at the
time of the Anschluss, to stand up to him at Munich seem puny in
comparison with the failure of Versailles - which, after all, has been
widely regarded for producing Hitler in the first place. Even after Hitler
was defeated, the failure to convert the wartime alliance between the
United States and the Soviet Union into an enduring system of Great Power
co-operation and the failure to foresee the quagmire that was Vietnam can
be traced back to 1919 and the isolation of the Soviet Union based on
ideological antipathy and the voracious territorial appetites of the
victors for the failure to abolish colonialism. The peacemakers of 1919
had the opportunity to create a New World Order that would abolish
imperialism and militarism while enshrining the right to national
self-determination and instituting the rule of international law. But they
blew it, and we have been dealing with the consequences of their
inadequacies ever since.

At least this has been 'the judgement of history' contained in the memoirs
and recollections of participants in the 1930s, in the monographs of the
1950s and 1960s and in the textbooks and surveys of twentieth-century
history. How ironic then that the Germans, having won the battle for the
hearts and minds of students everywhere, of having their interpretation of
the treaties as a Diktat that imposed a Carthaginian peace, should have
convened a conference seventy-five years after Versailles to 'reassess'
it.  Who, having won, wishes to reassess the victory? This struck me as
peculiar at the time I received an invitation from the German Historical
Institute to participate - but no less ironic than convening at a spot as
far from Paris as Hong Kong - at Berkeley, California. And, in spite of
the unseemingliness of doing so, I must here bite the hand(s) that fed me.
The _Reassessment_, if it does anything, reverses the previous judgement
of history: the Germans won at Versailles but, having won, proudly
declared themselves losers and, as losers, went on to win the sympathy
that is the reward of the unfortunate.

First a few words about what this volume is not. It is not a set of new
explorations or fresh perspectives. Looking at the assembled throng of
experts around those tables at Berkeley I felt - unusually these days - a
youngster again. I would estimate the average age as 60-ish; certainly
those under 50 were few and far between (again, in ironic contrast, the
'experts' gathered at Paris were remarkably young - many were in their 20s
and most were under 40). Anyone coming to this volume looking for new
research, new approaches, for new avenues of investigation, will go away
disappointed. 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.

Instead, what we have here is a collection of essays in which the
essayists have, for the most part, transformed their monographic work into
a shorter piece, usually with a more focused point of view and an expanded
argument. Invited because of their expertise, experts are not likely to
pass on the opportunity to display it. Thus, to give an example from each
of the five parts of the book, Klaus Schwabe (in Part One - 'Peace
Planning and the Actualities of the Armistice') builds upon the foundation
of his Deutsche Revolution und Wilson-Frieden to demonstrate how
Brockdorff-Rantzau attempted to use Wilsonianism against the Allies and
allow Germany to retain her stature as paramount power in Europe;
Georges-Henri Soutou (in Part Two - 'The Peacemakers and Their Home
Fronts') extends his _L'Or et le Sang: Les buts de guerre economiques de
la Premiere Guerre mondiale_ to argue that Clemenceau was a liberal
admirer of Anglo-American values who accepted the Fourteen Points and
believed in a 'just' peace that accepted the validity of a large, unified
German state; Sally Marks (in Part Three - 'The Reconstruction of Europe
and the Settlement of Accounts') conflates articles on reparations written
over a period of twenty years to re-assert her view that the payments
required of Germany have been vastly overestimated and the capacity to
make these payments underestimated; Jon Jacobson (in Part Four - 'The
Legacy and Consequences of Versailles') considers the implications of
Bolshevik dualism that he portrayed in When the Soviet Union Entered World
Politics for the chronic instability of the new order established at
Versailles; and finally Wolfgang Mommsen expands his Max Weber und die
Deutsche Politik to demonstrate Weber's hostility to Versailles (in Part
Five - 'Antecedents and Aftermaths: Reflections on the War-Guilt Question
and the Settlement').

Predictable as they are, the essays do add up to a valuable reassessment
of the peace settlement of 1919. It was, after all, most unlikely that
Carole Fink would suddenly discover that the Polish Minority Treaty was a
fair and equitable way of solving the problem of ethnic minorities in
Europe, or that Antoine Fleury would denounce the League of Nations as one
of mankind's mistakes, or that Erik Goldstein would reveal that the
Department of Political Intelligence did not matter in the making of
British policy after all. Unlike the politicians that they study,
historians make their reputations by staking out a claim to their
interpretive territory and defending it until they retire. Or die. Thus
their disparaging treatment of those who are inconsistent may be no more
than envy. Politicians can argue that the times change and that they must
change along with them; historians, recognizing that things change, resent
it and then compensate by refusing to change along with them. A fortress
is a fortress still, even if constructed entirely of footnotes.

Rather than change their own positions historians find it more alluring to
play with the positions of those they study. We know better than our
subjects (or are they objects)? We know what they ought to have done, what
could have, would have, should have, been had they only been as objective,
fair-minded and far-sighted as we. Thus, _A Reassessment_ is filled with a
longing for things to come out differently, with arguments both naive and
sentimental, with certainties unprovable and assumptions contestable.
Perhaps Romeo will not swallow the poison this time around; if not, who
knows what will happen? Thomas Knock longs for Wilson to have kept the
liberals and progressives within the Wilsonian camp, which he believes
might have engendered enough support to have kept the United States in
Europe. Antony Lentin longs for reparations to have been set at a fixed
sum in order to mitigate the poisoning of the international atmosphere and
the obsessive perpetuation of German bitterness over Versailles. Elisabeth
Glaser wishes her German diplomats had abandoned their erroneous
interpretation of Wilson's Fourteen Points and chosen instead to enter
into constructive negotiations in March and April of 1919. Carole Fink
wishes that the victors had explored different avenues in dealing with
minority rights, that they had sponsored bilateral talks between
interested governments or promoted direct talks between their governments
and their minorities. David Stevenson wonders how 'incalculably different'
the results might have been had his British soldiers recognized just how
weak Germany truly was in November 1918 and thus pressed on to destroy the
German army and been able to ignore Wilson's strictures. Incalculable
indeed, as all such fantasies are.

Seventy-five years later and we still don't know whether the peace was too
Wilsonian or not Wilsonian enough, whether the restrictions imposed upon
Germany were too fluid or too fixed, whether national groups were given
too much opportunity to determine themselves or too little. We shall never
know. And we can never know. Instead of torturing ourselves with what
might have been, we need to focus on what was. Instead of encounters over
counterfactuals we ought to confine our debate to what is knowable. The
assumptions that the 'people' want peace and the right to 'determine'
themselves remains unquestioned.

What do we know? What can we know? We now know more about the aims and
anxieties of the participants than anyone in 1919 would have thought
imaginable (and probably thought desirable) and this is due in no small
measure to the efforts of the distinguished group of historians who
attended the conference in Berkeley in 1994, most of whom have contributed
to what constitutes a truly magisterial Reassessment. Disagreements
continue. The old animosities remain. But the bitterness is located in the
realm of fantasy-land as those who long for Weimar to succeed continue to
attack those they see as having a hand in its ultimate demise, as those
who long for a meaningful American presence in Europe search for the
villains who prevented it, as those who long for an earlier New World
Order blame the cynics and the realists for missing the opportunity to
make the ideal real. Strip away the wistfulness and I believe that these
essays reveal the world as it actually was - and actually is.

First, no one who counted was an idealist. Not Lloyd George, not
Clemenceau, not Orlando, not Brockdorff-Rantzau and not even Wilson.
Neither were those closest to them - neither Kerr nor Curzon, neither
Berthelot nor Tardieu, and certainly not House, Sonnino or Melchior. The
desire and the need to create a new structure and a new process of
relations among states does not mean that they were striving to realize
some philosophical ideal. Strive they did, but their struggle was to
produce a system designed to accomplish their national interests as
understood through the prism of political ideology and historical
experience. Mesmerized by 'the German problem' and the presumed failure at
Paris to solve it, we have missed the essence of what was being sought by
each of the Big Four - and that essence was empire. And Powers number Five
and Six - the new Germany and the new Russia - sought it too. Each used
whatever weapons it had at hand in its armoury - armies and navies,
publicity and principles, treaties and contracts - in order to accomplish
its design on the future. Britain wanted a vastly expanded territorial
empire that would immunize her from renewed threats that might come from
continental Europe; France wanted an Afro-Asian empire that would enable
her to act as one of three World Powers; Italy wanted a Mediterranean
empire that would enable her at last to act as a true Great Power in
Europe; The United States wanted an end to the territorial empires of
Europe and an expansion of the commercial empire of America.

With one eye on the past and one on the present the politicians who made
the peace of 1919 imagined a historical future. Everyone who counted was
convinced that the age of the small state had passed; Mahan, Mackinder,
Delbruck and all of the others who thought big thoughts at the turn of the
century had persuaded the politicians who reached their prime during the
war that only great continental states or seaborne empires had the
capacity to lead the world of the twentieth century. Those who wished to
turn the clocks back, to dismantle the work of German unification, to
reconstruct the Habsburg empire, were regarded as cranks. The lessons of
1814/15 hung over the conference like a cloud: what had the Belgian
revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the wars of Italian and German
unification, the Balkan wars demonstrated if it was not the power of
unfulfilled national dreams? The imperial visions dancing in front of the
peacemakers in 1919 required a different Europe, one free of disgruntled
and rebellious Greeks, Hungarians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Poles and Serbs.
A series of small states jealous of their independence, promising to
respect the rights of the inevitable minorities found within their
frontiers and encouraged to co-operate in trade and commerce would not
trouble the Big Four in their pursuit of charting a new World History.

The essays in this volume have little to say about these aspects of the
settlement, about what was readily agreed to and taken for granted amongst
the Allies. With the assumption that the settlement was a failure, and
with all eyes focussed on Germany, we forget what we know. Those who do
look elsewhere - Fleury to the League, Fink to the Minorities, see things
with idealist eyes: they imagine that real solutions were being sought in
dealing with minorities, with labour, with disease. The truth is that the
Powers were doing what the powerful always do - creating mechanisms of
control, laying down the law, setting about to take control of the future.
There would be no permanent solutions to perennial problems, only a new,
modern way of solving difficulties as they arose, according to the wishes
of the Powers. The Council of the League would enshrine once and for all
the right of the strong to sort out the differences of the weak; and even
Germany - once she agreed to play by the rules, to be satisfied with
behaving as a large and powerful European state (no more, but no less)
would take her place among the rulers. This is why Germany was soon joined
by Italy in the revisionist cause when the Italians discovered that their
future too was to be limited to a European (and not a Roman) one. The
Italians are still ignored in spite of the paramount role they played in
challenging the new system from Corfu to Ethiopia: they barely rate a
mention in this volume. But then the Japanese - that third element of
revisionism between the wars - fare even worse. So of the three states
that would dismantle the work of the peacemakers in 1919 we have here a
discussion only of Germany. The assumption behind this is obvious: the
real failure at Versailles was the failure (dare I say it?) to 'appease'
the vanquished.

So did Versailles fail? Gerald Feldman is absolutely confident that it
did. The territorial, economic and financial settlements (and there was,
in truth, little else that mattered) 'were horrendous failures by any
standard one wishes to employ and whatever position one takes on the
historical debates surrounding them.' He is joined by Lentin who finds the
failure in 'a settlement bedeviled overall by a lack of genuine consensus
both between former enemies and former allies.' This is frustrated
wishfulness carried to its logical extreme, and one which portrays
Versailles according to the narratives of those publicists and idealists
that they admire, by imagining that the war was really fought to end wars,
that it was really fought to make the world safe for democracy. It
suggests that there can be, has sometimes been, a 'genuine consensus' both
within a coalition of great powers and between victors and vanquished.
Look closely at the Napoleonic Wars or the Crimean and what will one see?
allies competing with one another for advantage, for control of the future
even as they confront the common enemy. Ought we to be surprised that two
of the essential ingredients in the armistice recipe of November 1918 were
the British assessment that they risked losing influence over their allies
if the war was prolonged (as David French shows) and the American
assessment that keeping Germany intact would increase the dependence of
the Allies on the U.S. (as Knock shows)? The view of Wilson, as quoted by
Stephen Schuker is perfectly clear and readily understood: 'When the war
is over, we can force them [the Allies] to our way of thinking, because by
that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands'.
Look closely at the settlements that followed 1815 and 1856 and what will
we see? losers content to resign themselves to their fate because they had
reached a 'genuine consensus' with the victors? This will come as news to
those Frenchmen and Russians who spent the next generation attempting to
overcome the results.

But Feldman and Lentin, in spite of the confidence that their conclusions
are widely shared, are now in a distinct minority. Those who look closely
at Germany now agree that Germans of practically every political
persuasion were resolved to retain their paramount position in Europe -
and even to save the colonial empire beyond it. Schwabe, Mommsen and Fritz
Klein demonstrate in various ways how the German delegation and the
politicians behind it were determined to use (or distort) Wilsonianism in
order to preserve what they regarded as rightfully theirs - that their
definition of 'self-determination' would have denied independence to the
Poles if as little as 34 per cent of the voters in a plebiscite were
opposed to having it, that it would have meant the addition of
German-speaking Austria and an actual increase in German territory and
population that would have amounted to 80 million (i.e. twice the size of
postwar France). They also show how the Germans were prepared to launch a
revisionist campaign against anyone and everyone who stood in the way of
their interpretation of the Fourteen Points.

Of course, as we now know, that campaign succeeded. The idealist experts
who filled the delegations of the Allies at Paris, those who had been
mobilized as part of the unprecedented effort to persuade the public to
volunteer for service, to support conscription, to pay higher taxes, to
subscribe to war loans, saw for the first time the real way of the world
at Paris. And they didn't like what they saw there. It made a nonsense of
their efforts to combat militarism and autocracy, to replace these evils
with democracy and liberty. The unfortunate fate of the politicians and
the professionals who were ultimately responsible for the peace was that
their neophyte experts and amateur diplomats truly believed in the ideal
that they had been encouraged to conjure up, and which they had themselves
embellished. It was the disillusionment of the experts among the allies
that fertilized the ground upon which the Germans would begin to sow the
seeds of their discontent. As Lawrence Gelfand and William Widenor,
Michael Fry and Manfred Boemeke show, popular support for the treaty
settlement began to unravel almost immediately, as the Germans
successfully connected reparations with the 'war guilt' clause - which
Goldstein, Marks and others show was actually designed to reduce the
payments, not add to them.

Finally, there is a consensus that the 'failure' of the treaty settlement
came after 1919, that there was nothing inherently wrong with the
settlement per se. The conditions regarding the payment of reparations,
concerning the terms of the Rhineland occupation, providing for
disarmament and for adjusting frontiers in the future were all flexible
enough that they could be adjusted to changing circumstance and adherence
to the principles of the treaty settlement - which were, contrary to
popular myth, fundamentally fair. Glaser shows that - contrary to Keynes -
the Allied economic terms 'did not frame a Carthaginian peace' and that
they consciously agreed to preserve the essence of Germany's economic
potential; Ferguson shows that reparations did not devastate the German
economy. Stevenson argues that it was the abandonment of disarmament in
the 1930s that destroyed the security system put in place in 1919; Soutou
argues that Clemenceau deliberately designed terms that would permit
either the conciliation or the repression of Germany; Piotr Wandycz passes
a verdict of 'not proven' on the charge that the Polish provisions
contained the germs of war in the future; Klein cannot agree 'that
Versailles made Hitler's takeover of power inevitable. The Germans had a
choice when they decided to take this path.'

A world in which people are reasonable and behave reasonably, in which
good will and good intentions will overcome bad feelings and a bad past
would indeed be a pleasant place to live. But this is certainly not the
world as it was in 1919, nor is it the world as it is now. The best essays
in this marvellous book build on this common experience an enable us to
understand a world that we only thought we had lost.


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