MARGARET MACMILLAN ON THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES (1919)

Margaret MacMillan,

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World

(New York: Random House; 2003), pp. 493, 494.

‘[I]it became commonplace to blame everything that went wrong in the 1920s and 1930s on the peacemakers and the settlements they made in Paris in 1919, just as it became easy to despair of democracy.

Pointing the finger and shrugging helplessly are effective ways of avoiding responsibility.

Eighty years later the old charges about the Paris Peace Conference still have a wide circulation.

“The final crime,” declared The Economist in its special millennium issue, was “the Treaty of Versailles, whose harsh terms would ensure a second war.”

That is to ignore the actions of everyone political leaders, diplomats, soldiers, ordinary voters for twenty years between 1919 and 1939.

‘Hitler did not wage war because of the Treaty of Versailles, although he found its existence a godsend for his propaganda.

Even if Germany had been left with its old borders, even if it had been allowed whatever military forces it wanted, even if it had been permitted to join with Austria, he still would have wanted more: the destruction of Poland, control of Czechoslovakia, above all the conquest of the Soviet Union.

He would have demanded room for the German people to expand and the destruction of their enemies, whether Jews or Bolsheviks. There was nothing in the Treaty of Versailles about that.

‘The peacemakers of 1919 made mistakes, of course. By their offhand treatment of the non-European world, they stirred up resentments for which the West is still paying today.

They took pains over the borders in Europe, even if they did not draw them to everyone’s satisfaction, but in Africa they carried on the old practice of handing out territory to suit the imperialist powers. In the Middle East, they threw together peoples, in Iraq most notably, who still have not managed to cohere into a civil society.

If they could have done better, they certainly could have done much worse. They tried, even cynical old [French Prime Minister] Clemenceau, to build a better order. They could not foresee the future and they certainly could not control it. That was up to their successors. When war came in 1939, it was a result of twenty years of decisions taken or not taken, not of arrangements made in 1919.

‘Of course things might have been different if Germany had been more thoroughly defeated. Or if the United States had been as powerful after the First World War as it was after the Second and had been willing to use that power. If Britain and France had not been weakened by the war or if they had been so weakened that the United States had felt obliged to step in. If Austria-Hungary had not disappeared. If its successor states had not quarreled with each other. If China had not been so weak.

If Japan had been more sure of itself.

If states had accepted a League of Nations with real powers.

If the world had been so thoroughly devastated by war that it was willing to contemplate a new way of managing international relations. The peacemakers, however, had to deal with reality, not what might have been. . . .’

**************************

↑ Return top of page ↑