Background
Under the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the victorious allies imposed the conditions of peace upon Germany. The key players drafting the treaty were American president Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. The expectations were that a just and fair treaty based on the idealism of Wilson’s Fourteen Points would emerge from the Paris Peace Conference. To many observers, however, the true spirit of the Fourteen Points was sacrificed and replaced with a series of tough measures designed to cripple Germany. Economist John Maynard Keynes was a delegate at the peace conference. He abandoned the proceedings in protest over the harsh and unrealistic demands of the treaty. In his famous book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes denounced the treaty. Twenty years after the Treaty of Versailles, the world was engulfed in the Second World War when historian Paul Birdsall published his review of the Paris Peace settlement. In it, he praised Woodrow Wilson and his idealism as well as the overall peace settlement he had inspired. Read each of these viewpoints carefully and complete the questions that follow. (You may want to refer to the Skill Path “Analysing a Reading” on page 14 before beginning.)
John Maynard Keynes
“There are two separate aspects of the peace which we have imposed on the enemy—on the one hand its justice, on the other hand its wisdom and its expediency. I was mainly concerned with the second. But there were certain aspects of the first also with which I thought it my duty to deal carefully.
Its Justice
“The nature of the terms which we were entitled in justice to impose depends, in part, on the responsibility of the enemy nations for causing so tremendous a calamity as the late war, and in part on the understanding on which the enemy laid down his arms at the time of the armistice. In my Own opinion, it is not possible to lay the entire responsibility for the state of affairs out of which the war arose On any single nation; it was engendered, in part at least, by the essential character of international politics and rivalries during the latter part of the nineteenth century, by militarism everywhere certainly in Russia as well as in Germany and Austria-Hungary and by the universally practiced policies of economic imperialism; it had its seeds deep in the late history of Europe. “But I believe, nevertheless, that Germany bears a special and peculiar responsibility for the war itself for its universal and devastating character, and for its final development into a combat without quarter for mastery or defeat. A criminal may be the outcome of his environment, but he is none the less a criminal.
“The evidence which has become public in the past year has convinced me that, during the weeks preceding August, 1914, persons in power in Germany deliberately provoked the war and intended that it should commence when it did. If this be so, the accepted standards of international justice entitled us to impose, at Germany’s expense, any terms which might be calculated to make some part of the destruction done, to heal Europe’s wounds, to preserve and perpetuate peace, and to terrify future malefactors.
“Even so, however, it was our duty to look more to the future than to the past, to distinguish between the late rulers of Germany on the one hand and her common people and unborn posterity on the other, and to be sure that our acts were guided by magnanimity and wisdom more than by revenge or hatred…Above all, should not the future peace of the world have been our highest and guiding motive’…
The Treaty’s Wisdom
“With these brief comments I pass from the justice of the treaty, which can not be ignored even when it is not our central topic, to its wisdom and its expediency. Under these heads my criticism of the treaty is double. In the first place, this treaty ignores the economic solidarity of Europe, and by aiming at the destruction of the economic life of Germany it threatens the health and prosperity of the Allies themselves. In the second place, by making demands the execution of which is in the literal sense impossible, it stultifies itself and leaves Europe more unsettled than it found it. The treaty, by overstepping the limits of the possible, has in practice settled nothing… “The treaty’s claims for an indemnity may be divided into two parts: those which, in accordance with our pre-armistice engagements, we were entitled to make if we judged it expedient to do so, and those which, in my judgment, we had no right to make. The first category includes as its chief items all the direct damages to civilian life and property for which Germany was responsible, more particularly in the invaded and occupied areas of France, Belgium, and Serbia, by air raids, and by warfare of submarines. It includes also compensation for the improper treatment of interned civilians and for the loot of food, raw materials, livestock, machinery, household effects, timber, and the like; and the repayment of fines and requisitions levied on the towns of France and Belgium…
Indemnity Demands
“This is…the claim which we were entitled to present to the enemy. I believe that it would have been a wise and just act to have asked the German Government at the peace negotiations to agree to a…final settlement, without further examination of particulars. This would have provided an immediate and certain solution, and would have required from Germany a sum which, if she were granted certain indulgences, it might not have proved entirely impossible for her to pay. This sum should have been divided up among the Allies themselves on a basis of need and general equity…
The Blank Check
“No final amount is specified by the treaty itself, which fixes no definite sum as representing Germany’s liability. This feature has been the subject of very general criticism that is equally inconvenient to Germany and to the Allies themselves that she should not know what she has to pay or what they are to receive. The method, apparently contemplated by the treaty, of arriving at the final result over a period of many months by an addition of hundreds of thousands of individual claims for damage to land, farm buildings and chickens, is evidently impracticable, and the reasonable course would have been for both parties to compound for a round sum without examination of details. If this round sum had been named in the treaty, the settlement would have been placed on a more businesslike basis…
A Dead Treaty
“Such, in brief, are the economic provisions of the Treaty of Versailles…A year has passed since it came into existence, and authority has already passed from it—not, in my judgment, because there has been much softening of sentiment toward Germany, but because the treaty is no treaty, because it is now generally recognized that in truth it settles nothing. After what has passed, Europe requires above all a settlement, and this the treaty has not given it…”
From John Maynard Keynes, “The Peace of Versailles,” Everybody’s Magazine, 1920 (September) pp. 36-41.
Paul Birdsall
“The simple thesis of those who oppose the treaty is that the doctrinaire and unrealistic program of Wilson collapsed under the impact of the power politics of Europe. Nationalist aims triumphed over his principles. There was division of the spoils of war…in defiance of his principles of self-determination. The Allied governments had accepted Wilson’s program. While violating it, still they must pay it lip-service…Keynes in his disillusionment has fixed the legend of a Carthaginian Peace in Wilsonian disguise.
“This is caricature, not history, but like most successful caricature it has enough verisimilitude [truth] to be plausible…The ‘Reparation’ chapter of the Treaty of Versailles, besides being a clear violation of the Pre-Armistice Agreement with Germany, proved in the outcome to be the most disastrous section of the treaty.
“The prosaic [sad] truth is that elements of good and bad were combined in the treaties. There were Carthaginian features like the Reparation settlement and Wilsonian features like the League of Nations. There was actually a distribution of colonial spoils of war, but only after the valuable principle had been established that colonial powers administered their new estates under specified conditions and subject to review and correction by an international tribunal, the League of Nations. The territorial settlement in Europe was by no means the wholesale, iniquitous, [unfair] and cynical perversion of Wilson’s principles of self-determination which has been pictured…
“The populations of central Europe are hopelessly mixed and, therefore, simple self-determination is impossible. Any boundary will leave national minorities on one side or the other. Moreover, the history of the past few years has certainly justified the commissioners in taking account of strategic factors in the award of boundaries to the new states of Europe. If the Allies should ever conquer Germany again, the negotiators of the new Versailles will face precisely the same dilemma…
“Finally, the territorial settlement contained in the various treaties negotiated at Paris is still, with all its faults, the closest approximation to an ethnographic map of Europe that has ever been achieved. If the next Peace Conference does better, it will be because of the achievements as well as the mistakes of Versailles.
“The treaty was essentially a compromise between Anglo-American and French conceptions of a stable international order. On the one hand, immediate French concern for military security was taken care of by the limitation of German armaments, demilitarization of the Rhineland area and Allied military occupation for a fifteen-year period, and—finally—an Anglo-American treaty of military guarantee. These were certainly adequate guarantees, granted the full weight of English and American resources to support them, and there could be every hope that they would enlist France in the cause of an effective League of Nations. They represented the minimum price which English and American negotiators had to pay for French abandonment of their traditional policy of entirely dismembering Germany. They were a realistic concession to French needs without violating the Fourteen Points in any important particular. Above all, they were regarded as essentially interim measures to provide the necessary breathing spell for the consolidation of the league…Military occupation of German soil would end in fifteen years, at the very moment when residents of the Saar valley might vote to return to German sovereignty; German disarmament was to be the prelude to general disarmament; and the Anglo American treaty of military guarantee was to cease when the League itself was thought strong enough to provide general security.
“The Reparation settlement was the chief stumbling block, partly because of impossible financial demands even more because it combined an egregious [flagrant] breach of faith…In both financial and political results it proved disastrous. Yet, even here, American participation in the settlement could be counted upon to exert a moderating influence…The Reparation issue emphasized more than any other the necessity of continuing Anglo-American cooperation to make effective Anglo-American conceptions of a world order…
“The defection of the United States destroyed the Anglo-American preponderance which alone could have stabilized Europe. It impaired the authority and prestige of the League at its birth and it precipitated an Anglo-French duel which reduced Europe to the chaos from which Hitler emerged to produce new chaos…Practically and immediately, it destroyed the Anglo-American treaty of military guarantee which was to have been one of the main props of French Security…
“English sentiment was already developing the guilt-complex about the whole Treaty of Versailles which, among other factors, paralysed English foreign policy from Versailles to Munich. It would be interesting to speculate as to how much that guilt-complex was the result of the brilliant writing of John Maynard Keynes. Devastatingly accurate and prophetic in its analysis of the economic aspects of the treaty, his The Economic Consequences of the Peace included the whole ‘treaty in one sweeping condemnation as a “Carthaginian Peace; and his caricatures of the leading negotiators at Paris immediately fixed stereotypes which still affect much of the writing about the Paris Peace Conference.
“Only too late did British and French leaders observe that Hitler was les concerned about rectification of the “injustices” of the Diktat of Versailles than with the conquest of Europe. The muddle and confusion in liberal and democratic communities about the real character of Versailles contributed to the stupidity of Allied policy from Versailles to Armageddon.”