The Treaty of Versailles. A Reassessment after 75 Years.

Neilson, Keith

The Treaty of Versailles. A Reassessment after 75 Years, edited by Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser. New York and Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. xii, 674 pp. $85.00.

When the guns ceased firing in November 1918, the victorious Allies faced a task nearly as onerous as winning the war itself. Just over two months later, a conference convened in Paris to attempt to make a settlement that would create a stable and prosperous post-war world. A war that had claimed millions of lives, ended four empires, unleashed the energies of submerged nationalities, and brought about the emergence of Bolshevism, made the achievement of these goals nearly impossible. The task of explaining why this was so has been nearly as impossible for historians.

This book is the result of a conference, sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies of the University of California at Berkeley and the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. As the subtitle makes evident, the conference met in 1994 and the result has emerged four years later. While this four-year lag is considerably longer than the six months that the delegates at Paris took to draft the treaty of Versailles, it is a tribute to the editors that twenty-seven academics were stage-managed effectively enough to get the task completed in so short a time.

The book is made up of five parts, a prologue and an introduction. The latter, written by the editors, introduces the topic, summarizes the contributions and provides a very useful bibliographic survey. The prologue, by Ronald Steel, does not speak directly to the subject of the volume, but instead considers the impact of the forces of national self-determination that were let loose by President Wilson's high-flying rhetoric. As such, it is interesting, but not particularly relevant.

Part One looks at "Peace Planning and the Actualities of the Armistice." There are four contributions, by Klaus Schwabe (on Germany), David French (on Great Britain), David Stevenson (on France) and Thomas J. Knock (on the United States), and a comment by Alan Sharp. In each essay, the author outlines what the belligerents hoped to get from the Conference. For the most part, there is little new in these contributions, with Schwabe, Stevenson and Knock each building on the foundations of their own earlier studies on the topic. French's chapter is new: he shows just how surprised the British were that the war ended as quickly as it did and how this affected the terms that they were seeking. Fearing that if the war were to continue because the Germans would not accept overly-harsh terms (a continuation that would lead to the diminution of the British position at a later peace conference and the increase of American influence), the British agreed to terms that were less that than their maximum desiderata. Alan Sharp's commentary ties this together with Knock's demonstration that President Wilson did indeed intend to shape the peace treaties to his own vision, Schwabe's delineation of the German desire to accept Wilson's fourteen points as the basis for the best possible terms they could get and Stevenson's depiction of a France willing to compromise on her aims for security at Germany's expense, but only if the British and Americans would provide a guarantee.

The second part of the book deals with the home fronts. Again, there are four contributors, Erik Goldstein (on Britain), Georges-Henri Soutou (on France), Lawrence Gelfand (on the Untied States) and Fritz Klein (on Germany), along with a comment by Antony Lentin. What emerges from these essays is that the negotiators at Paris were not free agents; rather, they were constrained by what their various publics wanted and expected from the peace. This meant that the conference did not have scope for tree negotiation. By the time the victorious powers were able to work out a compromise that was (barely) acceptable to their various home constituencies, there was no desire left to jeopardise this precarious equilibrium by embarking on alternatives proposed by the vanquished. The result was that the Germans were forced to sign a Diktat, one to which public opinion in the former Reich never conceded legitimacy.

Part Three looks at some of the practical results of the treaty. This section has six contributors, with a comment by Gerald Feldman, and is necessarily less focused, less comprehensive and more untidy than the preceding two parts. Carole Fink considers matter of the Polish minorities, Stephen Schuker the Rhineland question, Piotr Wandycz the issue of Poland and three contributors, Sally Marks, Elisabeth Glaser and Niall Ferguson, look at various aspects of the economic and reparation issues. The two pieces by Fink and Wandycz are linked in that they both deal with Poland, but show both how the central Wilsonian issue of national self-determination could cut in two contradictory directions and the limitations of the concept in the ethnically-diverse regions of Eastern Europe. The Poles wanted a national state, quite in line with Wilson's precepts, but the Jewish minority wanted a guarantee of their rights within that state. The compromise favoured the former, and established a precedent that spelled difficulties for all minority groups in the future. Schuker shows that the French gave up their desire to separate the Rhineland from Germany in order to ensure their security because that would have precluded any Anglo-American guarantee of that security (and, of course, they never received the latter anyway). Glaser shows similarly that the French also had to give up their stringent demands for reparations in the face of Anglo-American unwillingness to support them. On the paying side of the reparations issue, the controversy (which began in 1919) over whether Germany could pay the sums demanded continues with Marks arguing that it could and Ferguson and Feldman insisting on the contrary view.

Chapters Eighteen through Twenty-One make up the fourth part of the book and deal with the legacies of the treaty. The verdict is mixed. On the negative side, William Keylor, cutting across Knock's favourable view of Wilson, blames the American president for his lack of realism and Diane Kunz contends that the treaty established a League of Nations that lacked any real means of establishing international security. On the other hand, Antoine Fleury argues that the establishment of the League was an important and revolutionary step forward in international relations, whose ramifications extend to the present in the shape of the United Nations (although Kunz's strictures seem to apply equally to New York as to Geneva). Russia, of course, was not represented at Paris. This isolation of the Bolshevik heirs to the Tsarist empire, Jon Jacobson contends, simply foreshadowed the seventy years of difficulties that the international community would experience dealing with the USSR.

The final portion of this study outlines how the treaty was "constructed" by those who evaluated it after it was signed. The bitterness (discussed here by Wolfgang Mommson) about the treaty of individuals like Max Weber, combined nicely with British revisionism (Michael Fry) to ensure that its shelf-life was strictly limited. On the other hand, those who helped shape the treaty often viewed it more positively, as William Widenor shows in the American case.

Where does all of the above leave us? With few exceptions -- that of French comes to mind -- the articles in this book do not really advance our understanding of Versailles. They are all learned, but they are more statements of the state of the art than advances in the art itself -- a very good introduction to the topic for anyone needing to get quickly up to speed with the literature. The only essay that challenges historians to find new interpretations (and suggests some avenues that might be pursued to find them) is Gordon Martel's illuminating and convincing concluding commentary. For him, it is no use to continue to examine old controversies by means of new evidence, but rather the need is to focus on why those who shaped the settlement were unable to defend it subsequently. In short, what change came about that made the views of the critics of the settlement become (or even whether they became) those that were accepted by the broad public? This is to venture into the realm of intellectual history, to perceive shifts in what might be loosely called the perceptual framework by means of which people view their own past. Such an effort is difficult, but, it seems to me, here is where the future lies.

Keith Neilson

Royal Military College of Canada