A costly settling of accounts

The allied peacemakers at Versailles, as Sir Herbert Butterfield once observed, were anxious to avoid the mistakes of 1815, when the Congress of Vienna had famously not paid enough attention to the national question. Instead, of course, they made the mistakes of 1919. The resulting settlement was a catalogue of paradoxes and absurdities. It destroyed three multinational empires - Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary and Turkey - and erected a series of unstable new multinational statelets in their place. Czechoslovakia, for example, had a larger German than Slovak population, as well as a substantial Hungarian minority. The new state of Yugoslavia was made up not only of South Slav Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, themselves soon bitterly divided, but also of Hungarians, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians and Germans. In the west, German-speaking Eupen-Malmedy was handed to the now trilingual Belgium, while within the British Isles, the London government, so quick to promote national self-determination at Germany's expense, prepared to lock horns with Irish nationalists, whose mandate for independence, outside of Ulster, was indisputable.

Since 1919, many Germans and not a few observers from allied countries have noted the striking disparity between these facts and the high-flown rhetoric of the peacemakers, especially that of US President Woodrow Wilson. His famous "Fourteen Points" of January 1918 - which among other things called for limited territorial changes in accordance with the freely expressed wishes of the populations - were supposed to lay the groundwork for a new, humane and rational international order. As the German-Jewish financier Max Warburg, who had been seconded to the German delegation at Versailles, put it in a letter to his wife: "To announce a new era to the world, to speak of love and justice, and then to perpetuate pillage on a global scale, to sow the seeds of future conflicts and kill all hope of better times, is to commit the greatest sin in the world." Moreover, unlike the French at Vienna 100 years before, the Germans were not permitted to engage the allied delegation in oral negotiation at the conference. Instead, they were confronted with a fait accompli , which they had either to sign or face the resumption of hostilities.

But perhaps the greatest paradox lay in the fact that the territorial provisions of Versailles, far from containing Germany, actually increased her relative weight in Europe. With Austria-Hungary and the Tsarist empire dismembered, the Soviet Union a pariah state banished to the outer margins of the Continent and beset by internal strife, the United States on the verge of retreating into isolationism, and France crippled by economic devastation and demographic decline, Germany was in geopolitical terms potentially the great victor of the war.

Why all this should have been so is one of the themes of the superlative The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years , which assembles the world's experts on the treaty within the confines of a compact, excellently produced and edited volume. It makes clear that the outcome of the peace conference was not, and could never be, the result of the application of abstract Wilsonian principles. Rather, the final document reflected the complex interplay between the national interests of the victors and their many clients and supplicants. Stephen Schuker, for example, defends German territorial losses with reference to the need to safeguard French security; Piotr Wandycz argues that the inclusion of large chunks of German-populated territory was essential to the military and economic sovereignty of the new Polish state. Moreover, as Sally Marks points out in her characteristically clear and rather brutal exposition, Germany had to pay reparations, not so much because she was guilty, but because she had lost; and because failure to insist on financial redress would have reversed the outcome of the war, by allowing an undamaged Germany to overawe the rest of Europe. Besides, she claims, Germany could have paid, not necessarily through a disruptive export drive, but simply by raising her level of taxation to those current in Western Europe. Indeed, she argues for the "relative moderation" of the reparation claims and the treaty as a whole, which was less onerous than those inflicted by Bismarck on France in 1871 and by Imperial Germany on the Soviet Union in 1918.

Yet this defence of the Versailles settlement, though spirited, is not entirely persuasive. After all, the German government on whom the agreement was imposed was a moderate, centrist coalition of liberals, social democrats and Catholics; many of them had voted for the famous Reichstag "Peace Resolution" of 1917 calling for a negotiated peace without annexations. Since then, the Kaiser had been deposed and the new government was trying to establish a liberal-democratic regime. To claim that the terms of Versailles were milder than those that Imperial Germany would have imposed on Britain and France, or had already imposed on the Soviet Union, misses the point. The new German government had agreed to the punitive armistice terms - which effectively disarmed Germany - in the belief that the resulting peace settlement would be broadly based on the Fourteen Points, to which they too subscribed.

It is therefore unsurprising to find not merely German conservative nationalist opinion - which was in a curious way vindicated by allied severity - but especially German liberal and social democratic opinion outraged by the treaty. As the social democratic chancellor Philip Scheidemann observed upon hearing its terms, "the hand that signs this treaty must wither"; he promptly resigned, bringing down the government. Another opponent was the prominent liberal sociologist and historian Max Weber, a longtime advocate of electoral reform in Prussia and a compromise peace. As Wolfgang Mommsen shows in his sympathetic account, Weber furiously rejected the notion of German "war guilt", emphasised the defensive nature of the war against Tsarist Russia and counselled rejection of the treaty, even at the price of an allied occupation. Interestingly, his main concern was that an association with the humiliation of Versailles would cripple the young republic at birth. Although it is no longer fashionable to say so in some quarters, the subsequent course of events was to prove him right. Many, though by no means all, of the travails of German democracy before 1933 can be traced back to 1919.

This theme is taken up by at least two authors in the present collection. As Niall Ferguson argues vigorously and variously throughout his thought-provoking contribution, reparations were a crippling burden on the German economy, and they did help to undermine the fledgling Weimar Republic. Further humiliation was to follow in 1923, when Germany defaulted on her payments, and the French responded by occupying the Ruhr. This provoked even the saintly Woodrow Wilson to observe that the French leader Poincare was a "skunk" and "sneak", and to express the wish that Germany would "wipe (France) off the map". But the occupation of the Ruhr was no more than the logical outcome of the narrow territorial and economic mercantilism which had informed the victors at Versailles. Their deliberations were based on a zero-sum game, which saw no room for cooperation with democratic Germany; they could not see that their own security could only be bought at the price of the absolute insecurity of the losers. It proved to be a costly miscalculation, and Gerald Feldman does not exaggerate when his parting shot hints at "the unhappy way in which the accounts were finally settled".

Brendan Simms is director of studies in history, Peterhouse, Cambridge.