Do you agree with the view that the Treaty of Versailles was a bad compromise between a treaty based upon force and a treaty based upon Wilson's Fourteen Points?

Answer:

The Treaty of Versailles satisfied neither the punitive intentions of France nor the idealism of Wilson. It emerged as a compromise between the two, and in being neither sufficiently conciliatory to reconcile Germany nor severe enough to disable her, it proved unstable.

The two competing conceptions

• Clemenceau sought security through the permanent weakening of Germany.
• Wilson's Fourteen Points promised self-determination, open diplomacy and a League of Nations.
• Lloyd George occupied a middle position, wanting German recovery for trade.
• The armistice had been concluded on the basis of the Fourteen Points.

Elements of force in the treaty

• Article 231 assigned Germany sole guilt for the war.
• Reparations were fixed later at a figure widely regarded as crushing.
• The army was limited to a hundred thousand men and the Rhineland demilitarised.
• Alsace-Lorraine returned to France, and the Saar was placed under League control.
• All colonies were forfeited and Germany excluded from the League until 1926.

Elements of Wilsonian idealism

• The League of Nations was created as Part I of the treaty itself.
• New states in eastern Europe embodied national self-determination.
• Mandates replaced outright annexation of the former colonies.
• Plebiscites determined some frontiers, as in Schleswig and Upper Silesia.

Why the compromise failed

• Self-determination was applied to the victors' friends but denied to Germans and Austrians.
• Germany was not invited to negotiate, so the treaty was denounced as a Diktat.
• The United States refused to ratify it and never joined the League.
• Keynes argued its economic terms would impoverish Europe and prove unenforceable.
• It was too harsh to conciliate and too weak to cripple, the worst of both.

The wider settlement

• Separate treaties, St Germain, Trianon, Neuilly and Sevres, dealt with the other powers.
• Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were dismembered entirely.
• New states in eastern Europe contained large dissatisfied minorities.
• The settlement created grievances that Hitler would later exploit.

One may therefore agree with the view. As Keynes warned at the time and later historians confirm, Versailles left Germany embittered but not powerless, and the resentment generated by a punitive peace clothed in idealistic language contributed directly to the collapse of the settlement within twenty years.