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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: David Stevenson, <D.Stevenson@lse.ac.uk>
Professor, Department of International History
London School of Economics and Political Science

The failure of the Treaty of Versailles raises fundamental questions about
the efficacy of force in international politics. After 52 months of the
first general European war between industrialized Powers, costing the
victorious Western allies alone some $130 billion and 3.6 million lives,
Germany accepted ceasefire terms that reduced it militarily to
helplessness in return for the promise of a peace based on the apparently
moderate and altruistic terms of the American President. In the
formulation of the Allied Generalissimo Ferdinand Foch, one made war in
order to achieve results: if the victors were strong enough to impose
their terms further bloodshed was needless.  The Allied leaders at the
Paris Peace Conference considered victory had given them the right and
duty to legislate into existence a new body of public law, by which both
they and their former enemies would be bound. They might today be seen as
Private Ryans, exhorted to 'use this' by those who had sacrificed their
lives. They came expecting some negotiation with the Germans, but not
simply to concede the latter all they wanted, or for what purpose would
the war have been fought? To be sure, the peace terms proposed by the
Weimar Government in May 1919 were more moderate than the war aims of the
Second Reich. It offered substantial reparations (if less than the
headline figure of 100 million gold marks suggested) and to accept some
disarmament and territorial loss. In its interpretation of the American
peace programme, however, self-determination would leave Germany with more
territory and citizens than in 1914 while the Allies would pay for much of
their reconstruction themselves.

The Germans rejected the thesis that the Allies took for granted, that the
Central Powers' aggression was responsible for the war. In these
circumstances there was little prospect of the victors and defeated
agreeing on terms that the latter would comply with voluntarily. The
Allies faced the prospect of interminable vigilance and confrontation at a
time when most of their citizens desperately wanted to return to normalcy
and cultivate their private lives. The fundamental judgement for the
peacemakers was therefore what balance to strike between coercion and
conciliation, in order to safeguard their economic and security interests
while demanding the minimum in continued effort from their electorates.
Yet these were not the only terms in which the debate in Britain and
America was conducted. Both President Woodrow Wilson and the British Prime
Minister, David Lloyd George, implied that the peace treaty should not
simply be effective in addressing the 'German Question' but also that it
should be 'just' in more universal senses. It should establish restitution
and compensation for Berlin's crimes and limit the victors' gains to what
progressive and humanitarian opinion found reasonable. Yet to frame the
debate thus was to open Pandora's Box, and expose the treaty to an
onslaught from both the Germans and disillusioned Anglo-American liberals
from which its reputation has never recovered. For writers such as John
Maynard Keynes, Harold Nicolson, and Ray Stannard Baker, the peace
conference witnessed a cosmic struggle against selfishness and
vindictiveness, between the cynical traditions of European power politics
and the promise of a more enlightened international order.  Perhaps Wilson
sensed this with his presentiment that Paris would be a 'tragedy of
disappointment'.

The dramas of the peace conference encapsulate many of the dilemmas of
peacemaking in general, and it has lent itself to more intensive
investigation than the more piecemeal and extended settlement after 1945.
Yet a rush of memoirs between the wars by conference participants was
followed by a generation of scholarly neglect until the relevant archives
began to open in the 1960s. Over the next two decades, in contrast,
academic historians pored over almost every detail of the post-World War I
peace process. Many of those involved in this re-examination, from the
USA, Germany, France, and Britain, attended the conference at Berkeley in
1994 on whose proceedings the volume under review is based.[1] Like the
peace conference itself, however, that meeting had a middle-aged air. Few
of the participants were under the age of 40, in this reflecting the more
recent waning of research and publication on the topic. The
historiographical caravan has moved on, to the Cold War and beyond,
facilitating comparisons between the two world war aftermaths but also
indicating that the effort of reappraisal treated in this volume is
largely complete. The centenary gathering in 2019 looked forward to by one
contributor (Keylor, p. 505) may find surprisingly little extra has been
added to our knowledge.

The volume is marked by its origin as a set of conference papers. It does
not supplant Alan Sharp's _The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in
Paris, 1919_ (London, 1991) as the most compendious general account. It
focuses entirely on the treaty with Germany rather than the other Central
Powers and its coverage even of that is uneven. Several aspects of the
Versailles territorial settlement, notably Germany's frontiers with
Austria and Czechoslovakia, are treated only in passing. So is the League
of Nations Covenant. The problem of the Allies' response to the threat of
revolution, raised by Arno Mayer and John M. Thompson a generation ago, is
not reappraised.[2] A number of contributors evidently strayed from their
briefs, with the result that some topics are neglected while others recur
repeatedly. Partly for this reason, the book is unnecessarily long. All
the same, it represents a very considerable contribution to historical
understanding. Every essay contains enough new information and/or
commentary to repay reading, and several of them are outstanding. In
short, this is the most important study to appear for many years of an
event that ranks alongside episodes such as Sarajevo, Munich, and the
Cuban missile crisis among the classic watersheds of twentieth-century
diplomacy.

The 28 component essays are divided into five parts. The first considers
wartime planning for the peace and the November 1918 armistice. The second
addresses the relations of the peacemakers with domestic pressures on
their 'home fronts'. The third concentrates on the crucial weeks in March
and April 1919 when the Allied leaders in the Council of Four took the key
decisions about Germany's fate. The fourth investigates the impact of the
settlement on international politics in the 1920s, and the fifth is more
historiographical, tracing the rise of anti-treaty 'revisionism'.

The opening discussion of the wartime antecedents is essential, for it
brings out the differences of purpose underlying the apparent agreement of
all sides at the armistice to conclude a peace based on Wilson's Fourteen
Points and subsequent speeches. As the Danish historian Inga Floto has
described it, the armistice was 'one big diversionary manoeuvre'[3], which
halted the fighting by means of a thoroughly ambiguous agreement. Klaus
Schwabe's essay here reminds us that the patriotic socialists who led the
German revolutionary government gambled that the American programme, or
something like it, would be the basis of the peace settlement, or if not,
at least the springboard for a subsequent campaign against it. Woodrow
Wilson was willing to halt the war when he did because he feared a more
complete victory would make it impossible to restrain Britain and France
(p. 122), but they too were willing to halt now because they feared,
paradoxically, that continuing the war would enhance American influence.
David French's chapter documents the British leaders' perception that
further months of fighting would weaken their army and their prestige
relative to France and the US, and now was therefore the time when, as
they had always intended, they could make peace with the maximum say in
the settlement (pp. 73-80). At the time of their decision they did not
understand how completely German resistance had crumbled and almost
immediately afterwards some members of the Cabinet suspected they had been
precipitate. The French leaders, in contrast, did appreciate the
desperation of Germany's plight, but believed the military terms of the
armistice, largely devised by Foch and placing Allied occupation troops in
all the territories where France had aspirations, would determine the
settlement much more than would Wilson's idealistic pronouncements.
Exactly how the Fourteen Points would be applied was left for the peace
conference to clarify.

Wilson was ill prepared for this test. He sailed for Paris believing that
America was 'the only disinterested nation', and should strive within the
framework of his principles for a 'scientific' peace, designed by the
academics, lawyers, and bankers who staffed his delegation. His hope,
which would be cruelly disappointed, was that once the League Covenant was
in place his negotiating partners would feel reassured, calm down, and be
reasonable. Yet, as William Keylor points out, none of the other delegates
took the League seriously, or espoused it except to humour Wilson (p.
472). This still left the President with economic means of leverage,
which, however, he conspicuously failed to use. True, he insisted on
easing the blockade of Germany in order to rush in food supplies as a
prophylactic against Bolshevism, but he neither applied the stick of
withholding credits from London and Paris during the conference nor
dangled the carrot of American aid for reconstruction. As for Wilson's
second potential weapon - an appeal to public opinion - the enthusiasm
demonstrated for him among the European progressive Left was marginal and
transitory. In Britain, as Erik Goldstein shows, Lloyd George was on
balance under pressure to show firmness, especially over reparations and
the treatment of war criminals, and the overwhelming majority of French
opinion urged Premier Georges Clemenceau to win adequate reparation and
security against renewed aggression. Having broadcast the principle of
open diplomacy in the first of his Fourteen Points in January 1918, Wilson
found himself obliged to insist on negotiating in strict secrecy when he
arrived in Paris a year later (pp. 481-485). If he kept the weapon of
economic pressure in its scabbard, that of public opinion, when he tried
to wield it against the Italian leaders in April, broke in his hand. All
the same, it was essentially in this negative sense, of not being
available to Wilson, that public opinion mattered. Georges-Henri Soutou
concurs with other contributors that it had little influence on the French
peace programme, and Goldstein contends that after April Lloyd George
established his ascendancy over the House of Commons and enjoyed
considerable leeway. As for Wilson, apart from incorporating respect for
the Monroe Doctrine in the League Covenant, he ploughed his furrow in
defiance of the growing opposition to his policies at home.

If the peacemakers had a free hand from their domestic public opinion, the
shape of the peace treaty would depend primarily on the proceedings of the
leaders in the conference's Council of Four. The contributions in Part
Three illuminate the most problematic issues in these proceedings - Poland
(Carole Fink and Piotr S. Wandycz); the Rhineland (Georges-Henri Soutou
and Stephen Schuker); and reparations (Elisabeth Glaser, Sally Marks, and
Niall Ferguson). They also highlight the links between these issues.
Clemenceau supported the Polish claims less energetically once France had
been promised an Anglo-American guarantee in the West (p. 327); France
pursued its reparations claims partly as a pretext for staying on the
Rhine (p. 309). Generally the authors share in the tendency in the
literature since the opening of the Paris archives in the 1970s to show
sympathy for France's viewpoint and for Clemenceau in particular, in
contrast to the demonization of both in older accounts.

Clemenceau appears in Soutou's analysis as willing to experiment with
several options - an Anglo-American alliance, collaboration with Rhenish
separatists, and a bilateral entente with the German Government. Soutou's
portrayal of the clandestine negotiations for the latter is intriguing,
although Antony Lentin is probably correct in saying that he over-plays
their significance (pp. 179-181, 232-233). Soutou and Schuker agree,
however, that Clemenceau's priority was a continuation in some form of the
wartime alliance with Britain and America, coupled with as much of a
military and political presence in the Rhineland as was compatible with
it. Reparations interested him less, and the contributors accept the new
orthodoxy established twenty years ago by Marc Trachtenberg: French
reparations policy was more moderate than Britain's and Clemenceau's
advisers pressed their claims in part because the denial of continued
American assistance left them with no alternative short of reconstructing
their own country from its own resources and to Germany's power-political
gain. In contrast, Clemenceau's negotiating partners both emerge badly.
Lloyd George was two-faced over reparations and hypocritical in seeking to
conciliate the Germans at other people's expense, most of Britain's own
claims having been satisfied in the peace conference's opening weeks.
Wilson had little idea of how to lead his delegation or of what he wanted
in the substantive clauses of the treaty. Preoccupied with the largely
irrelevant distraction of the League, he allowed his economic experts to
pursue a laissez faire course that undercut his plans for European
political stabilization. He treated his guarantee of France lightly, and
reneged on his pledge to submit it to the Senate. Clemenceau's fault, in
fact, so far from his being the Machiavellian of Keynes's caricature, was
to ignore warnings from his critics and to commit France to the peace
treaty before Britain and America had delivered on the guarantee. As
Schuker ruminates, 'Clemenceau had struck the best deal he could for his
country under the circumstances. The deal he had struck did not work out.
But so it is with many reasonable choices - in diplomacy as in life.' (p.
310).

Several essays in the volume address the rise of British and American
anti-treaty revisionism, which emerged in the two countries' delegations
almost as soon as Germany received the terms and drove Lloyd George into a
last-minute effort to redraft them (cf. especially chapters 8, 23, and 24
by Lawrence E. Gelfand, William C. Widenor and Michael Graham Fry). Gordon
Martel comments at the end of the volume that the Berkeley proceedings
showed how 'the revisionist agenda still organizes our discussions of
Versailles' (p. 616). Manfred Boemeke, introducing it, agrees, but adds
that 'Scholars, although remaining divided, now tend to view the treaty as
the best compromise that the negotiators could have reached in the
existing circumstances' (p. 3). This overstates the case. There is
undoubtedly a contrast between the research presented here and the
revisionist dismissals of the treaty that still figure in many textbooks
(p. 503). But over the reparations issue, and possibly others, the
specialists remain divided. True, it seems accepted that the Article 231
'war-guilt clause' formed part of a package that was intended to protect
the Germans by exempting them from liability for Allied war costs. But
whereas Marks asserts that a 'substantial degree of scholarly consensus
now suggests that paying what was actually asked of it was within
Germany's financial capacity' (p. 357), and Schuker apparently accepts
that compliance with the 1921 London Schedule of Payments was feasible[4],
Gerald Feldman expressly disagrees with Marks (pp. 445-446) and Niall
Ferguson considers that the Schedule 'put an intolerable strain on the
[Weimar] state's finances' (p. 425). Ferguson appears also to have little
time for Keynes, however, and the burden of a complex argument in his
chapter is that German payments to the Allies after 1919 did not result in
an uninterrupted depreciation of the mark or a surge in Germany's exports
to the country's former enemies. He implies that a more deflationary,
stabilization-oriented policy might have had more success in persuading
the Allies to amend their policy (p. 436). But if that is so, the
obstacles to raising taxes and complying with the London Schedule were as
much political as technical, which is essentially Marks's contention (pp.
360-361). To this reviewer it seems that to an extent the two sides are
talking past each other. Another conference may be needed at which their
arguments can be juxtaposed directly.

The issue is important because it bears on the conclusion to be drawn
about Versaillles as a whole. Was the treaty too repressive or too
lenient? The sorry saga of inter-war diplomacy could be cited on behalf of
either viewpoint. The treaty terms helped undermine Weimar democracy and
yet were inadequate to contain Hitler. In the words of the French royalist
Jacques Bainville, cited by more than one contributor, the treaty was 'too
gentle for what is in it that is harsh' (pp. 108, 275). Yet such a
judgement - that Versailles fell between two stools - may be too glib, and
there is merit in Soutou's and Lentin's contention (pp. 187, 243) that it
was more supple than is commonly credited. It would be, Clemenceau told
the Chamber of Deputies, 'what you make of it' (p. 101). It included
provision for the Rhineland occupation, the main enforcement instrument,
to end before or be prolonged beyond the stipulated fifteen-year term;
reparations could be modified by agreement, and the League itself was
created as an instrument not only for enforcement but also for peaceful
revision. Between 1924 and 1932 the treaty's operation was indeed
substantially modified by multilateral negotiation. On the other hand, its
disarmament and occupation clauses, together with the guarantee of France,
contained enough to prevent another all-out war with Germany for as long
as they were implemented. When Hitler came to power in 1933 this was still
the case, as he himself acknowledged. For many reasons, conditions in
Germany being foremost among them, the prospects for stability in Europe
after 1919 were poor, but it is going too far to see the treaty as
foreordaining a second war. Probably the best course open to the victors
in the 1920s was to seek a combination of both coercion and conciliation,
as was achieved after 1945. This would have entailed leniency over
reparations but a resolute upholding of the security clauses until such
time (if ever) as a pacific democracy in Germany was solidly established.
Naturally such an enterprise would have required inter-Allied solidarity
and the patience for a very long haul indeed, conditions which in Britain
and America (with their isolationist traditions) were sadly lacking, and
were beyond the reach of France alone.

Where next? As implied at the beginning of this review, this volume
testifies both to the vigour of the historical reappraisal of Versailles
in the 1970s and 1980s and the slackening of scholarly activity in the
last decade. Is the treaty doomed to become as neglected a field of study
as those of 1814-15? The events of 1989-91 have now given us a third
example of 'peacemaking' to juggle with, alongside those after 1918 and
1945 (as discussed in the introductory essay by Ronald Steel), and several
writers, including Ferguson and Charles Maier, have attempted longer-term
comparisons and contrasts. Whether this work will lead to a wholly new
interpretative 'paradigm' for peace conference history seems doubtful. The
last attempt to construct such a paradigm was Mayer's in the 1960s, but
although later writers have felt obliged to address his contentions there
seems agreement among the contributors here that the peacemakers' primary
concern in framing the treaty was containing Germany rather than
Bolshevism.[5] But even short of a radical reinterpretation there is still
work to do. Over reparations there remains no scholarly consensus, and
exhaustively though the German inflation has already been analysed it may
be that further macro-economic research on the early 1920s may help to
clarify the limits of the possible and narrow the gap between the opposing
views.

Moreover, the strategic context of the conference's decisionmaking has
been neglected. We need to know more about Allied and German planning and
preparedness for a possible resumption of hostilities. New intelligence
sources (such as the French Deuxieme Bureau archives in the process of
repatriation from Moscow) may help reconstruct the perceptions held by the
parties of their antagonists' and allies' strengths and weaknesses and of
their negotiating postures. They may also shed light on the assumptions
about national characteristics that formed part of the negotiators' mental
furniture. Manfred Boemeke suggests a way forward in this latter respect
with his essay on 'Woodrow Wilson's Image of Germany' (ch. 25), and other
contributions attempt the same for Clemenceau.  Finally, the peace
conference marked a turning point in the history of international
institution building, and it is remarkable, as Antoine Fleury points out,
how the League of Nations continues to be sidelined as a research field
(ch. 20). One of the most arresting contrasts between 1919 and the
European peace processes after 1945 and 1989 was the virtual absence in
both later cases of the quasi-millenarian enthusiasm that Wilson inspired.
Rhetorical catchphrases apart, few statesmen or lobbyists after him
genuinely aspired to found a new world order or establish a peace of
'justice' at one fell swoop. A more pragmatic and incremental approach
predominated. If the experience of 1914-1918 made all later generations
cynical about war, that of 1919 may have similarly disabused them about
peace.


Notes:

1. Including this reviewer, who contributed Chapter 3, 'French War Aims
and Peace Planning', pp. 87-109.

2. Arno J. Mayer, _Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Revolution and
Counter-Revolution at Paris_ (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968); John
M. Thompson, _Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace_ (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1968). In his chapter in this volume on 'The
Soviet Union and Versailles' Jon Jacobson deals (as he was asked to) with
events after the conference.

3. Inga Floto, _Colonel House in Paris: A Study of American Policy at the
Paris Peace Conference, 1919_ (Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget i Aarhus,
1973), p. 60.

4. Stephen A. Schuker, _ American "Reparations" to Germany, 1919-33:
Implications for the Third-World Debt Crisis_ (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988), p. 19.

5. This is of course not to deny that the Allies and Americans wished to
check the expansion of Bolshevism in Russia and Central Europe, and that
in order to do so they carried out executive acts such as the food relief
programme. But anti-Bolshevism had little influence on the drafting of the
Versailles Treaty.

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