South Tyrol.
In general, this principle was stretched to the limit whenever it would work to the disadvantage of the defeated powers and disregarded when it would operate in their favor. So there was no self-determination for six and a half million Austrians, the majority of whom wished to join Germany, or for three million Sudeten Germans who did not wish to become citizens of a Czecho-Slovak state, or for other ethnic minorities belonging to the defeated powers.
The Treaty of Versailles was especially disastrous on the economic side. It embodied two inconsistent principles, revenge and rapacity; the desire to make Germany helpless and the desire to make Germany pay. The completely unrealistic reparations settlement was to contribute much to the depth and severity of the world economic crisis ten years later. This crisis, in turn, was a very important factor in bringing Adolf Hitler into power.
Many of Germany’s economic assets—her colonies, her merchant marine, her foreign holdings, her gold reserves—were confiscated. Under the terms of the treaty Germany lost about 10 per cent of its territory and population, one third of its coal, and three quarters of its iron ore. At the same time it was saddled with an enormous and at first undefined reparations bill, far in excess of any sum ever collected after any previous war.
This bill was finally fixed by the Reparations Commission at 32 billion dollars. (French Finance Minister Klotz, who was later appropriately committed to a lunatic asylum, had at first proposed a figure of 200 billion dollars, two hundred times the indemnity exacted from France after the Franco-Prussian War.) Germany could only hope to pay this tribute, which under the later Dawes and Young plans was set at annual payments of about half a billion dollars, by developing a permanent large uncompensated surplus of exports over imports.
There were two insoluble dilemmas in this attempted financial settlement. First, a weak Germany could not produce such a surplus, while a strong Germany would be inclined to balk at payment. Second, the only feasible method of transferring wealth on this scale, the use of German labor and material on reconstruction projects, was ruled out. And, in times of unemployment and failing demand, foreign countries were unable or unwilling to purchase German goods on a scale that would make possible the desired surplus of exports over imports.6
One of the many dragons’ teeth sown by the Treaty of Versailles was Article 231, which read:
The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her Allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.
This linked up Germany’s obligation to pay reparations with a blanket self-condemnation to which almost no German could have honestly subscribed. In the objective retrospect of postwar years few students of the subject in Allied and neutral countries upheld the proposition that Germany was solely responsible for the outbreak of World War I. There were differences of opinion about the degree of responsibility borne by Germany, Austria, Russia, and other belligerent powers. Fairly representative of the judgment of impartial scholarship is the opinion of Professor Sidney B. Fay, of Harvard University, the conclusion of an exhaustive inquiry into the causes of the conflict:
Germany did not plot a European war, did not want one and made genuine, though too belated efforts to avert one. . . . It was primarily Russia’s general mobilization, made when Germany was trying to bring Austria to a settlement, which precipitated the final catastrophe, causing Germany to mobilize and declare war. . . . The verdict of the Versailles Treaty that Germany and her allies were responsible for the war, in view of the evidence now available, is historically unsound.7
By the time the Treaty of Versailles was cast in final form and imposed upon the Germans, scarcely a trace of the Wilsonian spirit remained. A bitter gibe became current in Europe. It was said that Wilson deserved the Nobel Prize not for peace, but for mathematics, since he had made fourteen equal zero. It is interesting to note the judgment of a well-known British participant in the peace discussions who sympathized with Wilson’s ideals. The economist John Maynard Keynes, in his Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan), wrote:
The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe—nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new State of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves.
Wilson was partly reconciled to the sacrifice of his ideals of political and economic justice by the hope that the newly formed League of Nations, with the United States as a member, would be a force for reform and reconciliation. This hope was not fulfilled. The President experienced his final tragedy when, after his nervous and physical breakdown, the Versailles Treaty, in which the League Covenant had been incorporated, failed to win ratification in the Senate. There was an unbreakable deadlock between the President’s insistence that the Covenant be accepted with, at most, minor changes and Senator Lodge’s insistence on strong reservations. A majority was not to be had for either proposition and the United States remained outside the League of Nations.8
The submarine remained a permanent weapon of warfare against merchant shipping. For every injustice the Treaty of Versailles redressed, it created another, equally flagrant and disturbing to future peace. The failure of the new and enlarged states in eastern and southeastern Europe to band together in close voluntary federation created an unhealthy fragmentation of the European economy and made it easier for Nazi and Communist careers of conquest to get under way.
The greatest failure of all was in “making the world safe for democracy.” Communism and fascism, not democracy, were the authentic political offspring of World War I.
There remains the argument that America, by taking part in the war, had frustrated a German design for world conquest. But this design looked less and less convincing as high-powered war propaganda receded into the shadows. The contention that the British and French fight was “our fight” did not convince Wilson’s confidential adviser, House, even in the first weeks after the end of hostilities. Discussing this question in his diary on January 4, 1919, House observes:
I for one have never admitted this. I have always felt that the United States was amply able to take care of herself, that we were never afraid of the Germans and would not have been afraid of them even if France and England had gone under.9
The ghostly tramp of imagined German legions, marching through the streets of American cities, may have frightened a few nervous Americans in 1915 and 1916. But by 1933 most Americans would probably have agreed with the sentiments expressed by William Allen White in a thoughtful Armistice Day editorial:
Fifteen years ago came the Armistice and we all thought it was to be a new world. It is! But a lot worse than it was before.
Ten million men were killed and many more maimed, fifty billion dollars worth of property destroyed, the world saddled with debts.
And for what? Would it have been any worse if Germany had won? Ask yourself honestly. No one knows.
Is this old world as safe for democracy as it was before all those lives were lost?10
By no standard of judgment could America’s First Crusade be considered a success. It was not even an effective warning. For all the illusions, misjudgments, and errors of the First Crusade were to be repeated, in exaggerated form, in a Second Crusade that was to be a still more resounding and unmistakable political and moral failure, despite the repetition of military success.
WILSON’S BLUEPRINT
