Treaty of Versailles

Context

No continent's affairs were ever dictated entirely by one power at any time in world history, and Europe in the early twentieth century was no exception. On June 28, 1914, a Serbian terrorist assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, who was on a goodwill trip through Sarajevo. The Austro-Hungarian government declared war on Serbia a month later, which prompted Serbia's longtime ally, Russia, to declare war on Austria-Hungary. As various alliances were activated, all the major European powers ended up at war with one another—Austria-Hungary in alliance with Germany and in opposition to Russia, which was in alliance with Serbia, Britain, and France. The Great War, as Europeans came to know it, began in August 1914.

Seemingly, Serbian terrorists and the Serbian government that was alleged to support them were to blame for starting the war, but at the time politicians, intellectuals, diplomats, and soldiers on all sides debated which power was truly responsible for the war, and historians continue the debate to this day. Those on the side of the Allies held that Germany's determination to assert its military and diplomatic power in Europe created a climate in which war was likely. The German government of Kaiser Wilhelm II had built a massive navy to challenge Britain, had twice threatened war with France over colonial claims in Morocco, and had dismissed the Russians as an inferior people whose vast territory was a focus for German expansion. Such belligerence, coupled with the defensive alliances to which all the major powers belonged, provided the diplomatic context in which an all-out European war would be waged. On the other hand, it was the assassination in the Balkans that actually sparked the war, and the Germans declared war on Russia only when Russian troops began mobilizing on the German border.

The nature of the conflict was such that blame for the war's origins became central to its propagation, on both sides. The first two months of the war saw more casualties than all the major wars since the Napoleonic wars combined. Soldiers began to dig trenches on the Western Front to defend themselves against machine guns; for the next three years “battles” consisted of simply throwing more men and ammunition into the line than the other side had immediately available, in the hope that a breakthrough might be achieved. On the Eastern Front there was more movement, which meant there were more casualties; the Germans advanced over the bodies of Russian soldiers until they melted into the vast Russian steppes, unable to come up with the men or supplies to make a concerted march on Saint Petersburg or Moscow. The result in both cases was a bewildering stalemate that forced many thinking people to question not just the nature of the war but the very nature of Western civilization, capable as it was of such senseless murder. Critically, however, most soldiers found reasons to fight and found purpose in the war, particularly on the side of the democratic states of Britain, France, and the United States. For most soldiers, victory over the expansionist and authoritarian German monarchy was important enough to merit continuing to risk their lives in what otherwise seemed to be senseless slaughter.

The threat against which they fought was likewise real. In September 1914, as the number of casualties mounted and the German offensive in France ground to a halt, the German political and military command sat down to write up a series of objectives to be attained, should they win the war. The so-called September Program called for the establishment of a Germanocentric economic bloc called Mitteleuropa; the annexation of Poland, Belgium, and the Netherlands; the crippling of the French economy; the expansion of the German peasantry into Russia; and unity with Austria, an ally that had no idea that winning the war would mean its own subservience to Germany. These war plans remained secret from the German public itself throughout the war for fear that the populace would turn on its leadership if they knew such slaughter was being conducted in the name of conquest as opposed to defense. Still, German military conduct of the war and its strategic aims, particularly on the Eastern Front, were aimed at fulfilling the terms of the September Program at all times. Effectively, the only difference between German war aims in the two world wars was the Holocaust—and the German leadership was hardly short on anti-Semitic feeling during World War I.

In sum, for the democratic allies and their soldiers the war was well worth fighting and winning. Even without knowing what the German government's true aims were, they sensed, correctly, that should they lose, they faced certain catastrophe, right down to the life of the lowliest private in any European army. As such, when the war finally turned in the allies' favor in 1918, its slow, bloody, painful but inexorable march toward victory was met with a powerful sense of satisfaction and a desire to punish the German aggressor. But there was also a desire to create a new world, one in which similar wars would not be possible. As the United States geared up to send troops to the continent, President Wilson made a speech to Congress on January 8, 1918, laying out a declaration of U.S. war aims known as the Fourteen Points. Among them was a call for a stop to arms races, an end to secret alliances, national self-determination, free trade, democracy, and a “general association of nations … for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” These war aims were openly declared and favorably received by people on both sides. When the German government agreed to an armistice on November 11, 1918, it was on the assumption that the terms of the peace treaty would be based on the Fourteen Points. This was already in sharp contrast to the terms of the armistice, which amounted to surrender and required German withdrawal from all occupied territories, the surrender of German arms, and the promise of reparation for damage done.

With the end of the war came the collapse of the German monarchy and empire, the atomization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the birth of Turkey out of the Ottoman Empire, and the fear of further Bolshevik revolutions after the 1917 collapse of the Russian Empire. Italy, a victorious ally of the French and British, was wracked by leftist strikes, and the barely independent Hungary experienced a short Communist revolution in March 1919. Communist strikes took place in Glasgow, Scotland, and Chicago experienced race riots. Basically, the Western world lay not quite in ruins but ready for potential revolution and collapse.

The negotiations that took place in Paris thus had a dual nature. There was an air of hope and resolution, a determination to end the menace of the spread of Soviet Communism and to implement Wilson's Fourteen Points. Even so, the peace conference was also infused with an atmosphere of vengeance, blame, and recrimination for the destruction wrought on Europe by Germany's army. The eventual Treaty of Versailles reflected this desire to punish the German aggressor.