Читать книгу Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History - Hugh Williams - Страница 15

The Treaty of Versailles formally brought the First World War of 1914–18 to an end. Its terms had the effect of making a defeated Germany feel impoverished and resentful. In trying to build a world of peace it laid down foundations that would lead to another war.

In 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, an armistice was signed that ended the fighting of the First World War. Barely a month later, on 10th December, 75,000 soldiers of the German army marched back into Berlin. They were greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Friedrich Ebert, a socialist politician who was the new Chancellor of the nation. ‘Welcome to the German Republic,’ he shouted. ‘Welcome home. You should march home with your heads held high. Never have men achieved greater things.’ Warming to his theme, he continued: ‘Your sacrifices have been unparalleled. No enemy has conquered you.’ With those words the mood of the new Germany was born. It was an undefeated country that had either been sold out by conspirators in its own ranks or was suffering from difficulties imposed by the punitive terms of an unfair treaty. The Kaiser’s Fatherland was not just a memory. It still existed. It could rise again.

The Kaiser’s Fatherland still existed … it could rise again.

Ebert was facing a situation that was in danger of running out of control. He and the other moderate socialists that he led, had supported the war as a necessary patriotic measure. He had not wanted to see the end of the monarchy and felt that the proclamation of Germany as a republic following the Kaiser’s abdication had been premature and needed to be ratified by a nationally elected assembly. But he was overtaken by events. By the time he addressed the first meeting of Germany’s new national assembly the following year, 1919, the German Republic was a fact and the country’s mood of resentment more entrenched. To maintain power he needed to respond to it. Germany’s enemies, he told the assembly in his opening speech, were seeking ‘to indemnify themselves at the cost of the German people … These plans of revenge and oppression call for the sharpest protest. The German people cannot be made the wage slaves of other nations for twenty, forty or sixty years.’ His remarks were met with loud applause. Ebert wanted above all to create a true democracy in his defeated homeland – but the task he faced proved hopeless. In the end the German people looked to the right-wing parties to redress their sense of grievance. Within fifteen years, the Nazis had assumed power, democracy died and Europe was on the road to war once more.

The victorious Allies who met in Paris at the end of the First World War wanted above all else to destroy German militarism. They also wanted to establish world peace, rearranging the fragments of disintegrated empires in a way that would ensure the future happiness and prosperity of their subjects. The task they faced was immense and probably impossible. The Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary had arisen out of the old Holy Roman Empire established by Charlemagne in 800 AD, and, in various forms, governed the whole of central and Eastern Europe for centuries. The Hohenzollern Empire of the German Kaiser, the Allies’ main enemy, had used its Prussian base to unite the German states during the second half of the nineteenth century, creating a formidable military machine intent on expansion and conquest. These two great engines of state had collapsed and the people they had once governed were looking for new, democratic freedoms. The Allies recognised these ambitions, but they also wanted to punish the aggressor. Graciousness in victory is the greatest of all political virtues but it requires a degree of altruism unusual in human beings. At Versailles the Allies’ understandable desire for punishment outweighed their careful consideration of the future and undermined the hopes of those who thought they had been liberated from imperial control.

Bismarck and the Creation of the German Empire

On 18th January 1871, German princes gathered in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. They had come to witness the crowning of the Prussian King, Wilhelm I, as Emperor of a newly-formed nation – Germany. Before 1871, Germany was a patchwork of independent states over which Austria exerted the predominant influence. But German nationalism was growing. In 1848 revolutionaries demanded unification, offering the Prussian King the imperial throne. He refused, worried that it would lead to military intervention from Austria. But as Prussia’s military, diplomatic and economic power grew, the whole idea of unifying Germany without Austria started to become a real possibility.

The principal architect of this extraordinary achievement was a skilful and loyal diplomat called Otto von Bismarck (1815–98). During the 1850s he became convinced that unification could be achieved in Prussia’s interests. When in 1862 he was appointed Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Prussia he began to employ astute diplomacy blended with timely military intervention to secure his ends. With the assistance of two Prussian soldiers, Albrecht von Roon and Helmuth von Moltke, the army was reorganised into an impressive fighting force. In 1866 it defeated the Austrian army at Königgrätz, east of Prague. This enabled Bismarck to annex the north German states including Hanover, Frankfurt and Saxony. France, frightened of being encircled by the growing power of Prussia, declared war in 1870. Prussia pounced. Having defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck wasted no time in negotiating with the leaders of the southern German states to complete unification.

Bismarck’s political system ensured strong monarchical authority. As Imperial Chancellor, he pursued a policy of pragmatic, peace-oriented diplomacy that made the new German Empire a powerful country. But his approach met with criticism, not least from Wilhelm II, who became German Emperor in 1888. Wilhelm’s politics were more expansionist and militarist than his Chancellor’s and he forced Bismarck to resign in 1890. The man who more than any other built the modern German state lived in restless retirement until his death in 1898.

‘It was,’ said Troeltsch, ‘reminiscent of the way Rome treated Carthage.’

The terms of the Treaty of Versailles were imposed upon Germany. The Germans took no part in any of the discussions prior to their being told what the Allies had agreed. Apart from being forced to reduce their army to 100,000 volunteers and to severely restrict their manufacture of weapons, the Treaty demanded that Germany accept sole responsibility for starting the war. It also insisted on severe economic penalties, forcing the country to make reparations – in the first instance settled at about $31.5 billion – stripped it of all its overseas colonies and reassigned a large part of its European territory to France, Belgium, Denmark, Czechoslovakia and Poland. France was also given all rights for fifteen years over the German coalfields in the Saar on the eastern border between the two countries. Some of these conditions were to be expected: Germany was bound, for instance, to have to hand back Alsace to France and to restore the land it had taken from Belgium. But the economic demands, combined with the requirement to accept all the guilt for causing the war in the first place, aroused the anger of the defeated nation. ‘It was,’ said the German writer, Ernst Troeltsch, ‘reminiscent of the way Rome treated Carthage.’ He was not the only person to feel that the Treaty was unfair. In Britain the economist John Maynard Keynes urged re-negotiation of the terms. In his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919, he said that: ‘Great privation and great risks to society have become unavoidable.’ A new approach was needed to ‘promote the re-establishment of prosperity and order, instead of leading us deeper into misfortune.’ And he quoted the writer Thomas Hardy, whose long verse-drama, The Dynasts, is set in the Napoleonic war that had engulfed Europe a hundred years previously:

… Nought remains But vindictiveness here amid the strong, And there amid the weak an impotent rage.

The economic demands aroused the anger of a defeated nation.

In fact France was treated rather more carefully in 1815 than Germany a hundred years later, not least because the French negotiator, Talleyrand, participated in the Congress of Vienna where the peace terms were agreed. Talleyrand was the great survivor of the European politics of his day, a famous prince who had played an important part in the early days of the French Revolution, served as Napoleon’s Foreign Secretary, fallen out with him and then, after his defeat, planned the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The German representative at Versailles, Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff Rantzau had no such pedigree. Summoned to hear the terms of the peace the Allies had agreed, he and his delegation were kept waiting for several days before they were read out to them. They were shocked at what they heard. Brockdorff Rantzau wrote a letter to the President of the Peace Conference, the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, describing the attitude of the Allies as ‘victorious violence’. He declared that the ‘exactions of this treaty are more than the German people can bear’.

The whole approach to peace was also very different in Vienna in 1815 from that which existed in Paris in 1919. The monarchs and princes who set about rearranging Europe at the end of the Napoleonic Wars were trying to put things back to where they were before Napoleon’s attempt to create a European continent in his own image. Talleyrand helped them by supporting the return of the Bourbons even though he knew, in his own phrase, that ‘they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing’. After the First World War, the politicians making peace wanted to look forward, and to build a world in which war would not happen again. The American President, Woodrow Wilson, was intent on forming a ‘League of Nations’, a multinational body designed to discuss and debate grievances rather than allow them to slide inevitably into conflict. He got what he wanted, even though America did not join the organisation because Congress refused to ratify its membership. The victors also created new countries out of the fragments of dismembered empires. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia came into existence as new independent states; Poland was given independent statehood for the first time in more than a hundred and twenty years; and two small and severely weakened countries, Austria and Hungary, came into being as separate entities. All this seemed fair and proper, responding to Woodrow Wilson’s ‘fourteen points’ for peace in which he explained how he believed Europe should be divided up to give autonomy and self-determination to its different ethnic groups.

The League of Nations

The carnage of the First World War generated widespread international agreement ‘to develop cooperation among nations and to guarantee them peace and to avoid future bloodshed’. The League of Nations was established by the Treaty of Versailles to pursue this aim. It was the brainchild of the American President, Woodrow Wilson, who saw it as a mechanism for the promotion of diplomacy, the prevention of war through collective security, and a way of safeguarding human rights for minority groups. But he failed to persuade the American Senate of its value, and the United States never joined it. During its first ten years of operation, the League successfully resolved several disagreements and international diplomatic activity began to be conducted through it. It oversaw an international judiciary as well as a number of agencies dealing with pressing international issues such as refugees, health, disarmament, opium and slavery.

Structurally, though, the League was flawed; it was bureaucratic and unwieldy, and lacked teeth. In 1931 it declared the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in northern China to be wrong but was unable to enforce a withdrawal when Japan withdrew its membership from the organisation. Nor did it halt Hitler’s militarism, which directly contravened its commitment to disarmament and failed to prevent the German invasion of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. The outbreak of the Second World War was final proof of the League’s ultimate powerlessness. It was eventually disbanded in 1946 following the foundation of the United Nations, which the Americans joined, and which inherited the League’s ideals as well as many of its agencies.

Germany seethed with resentment. Stripped of much of its territory and saddled with the enormous cost of reparation it seemed to have been treated very harshly. In fact, however, its position was rather stronger than it first appeared, not least because the new countries that had been created were so weak. Furthermore it never repaid all the money that the Treaty of Versailles demanded. France and Britain put great pressure on Germany to pay its debts – they needed the money because they themselves owed $10 billion to the United States. When eventually Germany defaulted on the reparations, the country was leant $200 million in a loan floated on the American market by the banker, J. P. Morgan in 1924. It was quickly over-subscribed. The Great Depression of the 1930s brought further hardship to all the countries struggling with the aftermath of the war, and in 1932 the Allies agreed to cancel reparations altogether in return for one final payment. The German economy started to recover, the new, struggling countries surrounding it became victims of Hitler’s demands for national Lebensraum – living space – and Europe was once again in conflict.

The destruction of empires, whether well-intentioned or not, is never easy. The Treaty of Versailles made two fundamental mistakes. First of all, it imposed economic terms on Germany that proved impossible to fulfil. Secondly, it created a patchwork of weak countries that ultimately fell prey to their aggressive neighbour, Germany. Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria had all come under German control by the time the Second World War broke out in 1939. Implicit in both of these mistakes was a lack of economic common sense. In trying to repair a broken world, the Allies had thought hard about rewards and punishment, but had given little consideration to how any of it was to be paid for. They overlooked the fact that in the years leading up to the war, Germany, as the biggest industrial nation on the continent of Europe, was an important source of wealth for the countries that surrounded it. Their aims were almost entirely political – and in the case of Woodrow Wilson, almost religious. Of the Allies’ approach to the post-war reconstruction, Keynes wrote that ‘that the fundamental economic problems of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse (their) interest’. The First World War destroyed the wealth of nineteenth-century imperial Europe. The Treaty of Versailles failed to provide a framework in which it could be replaced.