Conclusion

Young Plan

Name given to a financial scheme, worked out in 1929 by a committee chaired by the American businessman Owen D. Young, to reduce German reparations and arrange fresh credit for Germany.

Nazis (or Nazi Party)

The abbreviation for the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP)). It was founded in October 1918 as the German Workers Party by the German politician Anton Drexler to oppose both capitalism and Marxism. It took on its more notorious title in February 1920. One year later Hitler became the Nazi Party Führer (German: leader).

protectionism

The practice of regulating imports through high tariffs with the purpose of shielding domestic industries from foreign competition.

The onset of the global economic crisis after October 1929 wrecked the Locarno equilibrium. It functioned briefly because Stresemann pursued moderate revisionist goals from within the system. He died of overwork weeks before the start of the ‘great crash'. In any case, Germany's precarious domestic political balance was coming under severe strain long before Weimar lost its foreign minister. Germans were impatient with the slow pace of revision. Right-wing agitation against acceptance of the Young Plan helped to legitimize the Nazi Party in the eyes of the German electorate. Not just in Weimar Germany, but across Eastern Europe, where recently established democratic institutions were linked closely with the imposition of the post-war order, the crisis in capitalism seemed to herald the end of democracy and the Paris peace. It is not surprising that this revisionist trend found one form of expression in the vilification of minorities, especially Jews, and the desire to recast Europe into exclusive national com­munities.

As the domestic supports of stability crumbled, governments desperately sought to shelter their economies from the global slump. Rather than taking joint action to lessen its impact, the Western Powers turned to protectionism, imperial preference and competitive devaluation. The bitter recriminations that followed this failure to co-ordinate policies further divided the war-winning coalition of 1918, just when Western unity to enforce the status quo was needed most. The pattern of the 1920s continued into the 1930s. Finally, when the crisis that Stresemann had anticipated over Poland came, Eastern Europe's frontiers were not redrawn at a summit of Great Powers, at which Germany benefited from the goodwill it had engendered by behaving as a responsible member of the states system. Instead, Nazi and Soviet revisionism conspired in the summer of 1939 to destroy Poland.

Recommended reading

On the end of the war and the coming of the armistice, this chapter has relied on David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1991). For the illusory strategy of the Central Powers in 1918, see Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914—1918 (London, 1998). Students should also consult Bullitt Lowry, Armistice 1918 (Kent, OH, 1996), Arno J. Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917—18 (New Haven, CT, 1964) and the excellent set of chapters by Stevenson, David French, Thomas Knock and Alan Sharp in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds), The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after

Debating peacemaking in 1919

The opening phase of the debate on the 1919 settlement was dominated by the memoirs of former members of the British and American delegations to the Peace Conference.

After a period of some scholarly neglect, the ideological polarization and the political turmoil of 1960s' America gave rise to a fresh interpretation. In Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (London, 1968), Arno Mayer argued that the peacemakers, alarmed by the spectre of Lenin and the threat of Bolshevism, were more concerned about reversing the revolutionary tide in Europe than about founding a truly just social,economic and political order.Although many took issue with Mayer's portrayal of peacemaking after 1918 as a contest between the 'forces of order' and the 'forces of movement', the historiographical debate benefited from his shift in focus away from the German question to the broader ideological and domestic political influences working on the minds of the peacemakers.

In the early 1970s, the French archives opened for research.The new sources initiated not only a positive reassessment of French policy, but also a full challenge to the negative verdicts of the inter-war writers.

75 Years (Washington, DC, 1998). This impressive collection of essays is essential reading on the Paris peace and marks the culmination of the revisionism of the 1970s and 1980s.

The best introductory text on peacemaking in 1919 is Alan Sharp, The Versailles Settlement: Peacemaking in Paris 1919 (Basingstoke, 1991). William Keylor (ed.), The Legacy of the Great War: Peacemaking, 1919 (New York, 1998) reprints useful essays and Keylor's introduction provides an excellent overview of the historical debate. On the policies of the ‘Big Three', students should read David Stevenson, French War Aims against Germany, 1914—1919 (Oxford, 1982), Michael L. Dockrill and J. Douglas Goold, Peace without Promise: Britain and the Peace Conferences, 1919—1923 (London, 1981), Anthony Lentin, Lloyd George and the Pre-history of Appeasement (London, 1984), Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War and Peace (1979), Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonian Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism during World War I (Wilmington, DE, 1991) and Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany and Peacemaking, 1918—1919 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985). For an excellent recent reassessment of Wilson's diplomacy, see Ross Kennedy, ‘Woodrow Wilson, World War I and the American Conception of National Security', Diplomatic History (2001), vol.

The opening up of the French archives in the 1970s inspired a wholesale revision of our understanding of French foreign policy and the reparations question: for a review of the literature, see Jon Jacobson's ‘Strategies of French Foreign Policy after World War I', Journal of Modern History (1983), vol. 55, pp. 78-95. For a statement of Marc Trachtenberg's views, see his ‘Versailles after Sixty Years', Journal of Contemporary History (1982), vol. 17, pp. 487-506 and his Reparations in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916— 1923 (New York, 1980). See also Stephen Schuker, American ‘Reparations’ to Germany, 1919—1933 (Princeton, NJ, 1988) and Walter McDougall, France’s Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914—1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1978). Anthony Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France’s Bid for Power in Europe, 1914—1940 (London, 1995) offers a cogent counter­argument to the revisionists. For a vigorous defence of the reparations settlement, which also serves as a succinct guide to the complexities of the post-war financial settlement, see Sally Marks, ‘The Myth of Reparations', Central European History (1978), vol. 18, pp. 231-55 [reprinted in Keylor's collection] and her contribution to Boemeke et al., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years.

On the 1920s, the best short survey on Europe is Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918—1933, 2nd edn (Basingstoke, 2003) and the best comprehensive survey of international relations overall is Zara Steiner's The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919—1933 (Oxford, 2005).

On Franco-British relations, see Philip M. H. Bell, France and Britain, 1900—1940: Entente and Estrangement (London, 1996) and Alan Sharp and Glyn Stone (eds), Anglo-French Relations in the Twentieth Century: Rivalry and Co­operation (London, 2000). Also read Brian J. McKercher, ‘Austen Chamberlain’s Control of British Foreign Policy, 1924—29’, International History Review (1984), vol. 6, pp. 570—91 and E. Keeton, ‘Politics and Economics in Briand’s German Policy, 1925—31’, in Carol Fink (ed.), German Nationalism and the European Response (Norman, OK, 1985). On the diplomacy and policies of the United States and the Soviet Union, see Melvyn Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919—1933 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979) and Teddy J. Uldricks, ‘Russia and Europe: Diplomacy, Revolution and Economic Development in the 1920s’, International History Review (1979), vol. 1, pp. 55—83. For two broad studies of the Weimar Republic, which include chapters on foreign policy, see E. Kolb, The Weimar Republic (London, 1988) and Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London, 1992). The best comprehensive study of Locarno is Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1925—1929 (Princeton, NJ, 1972). For an entirely convincing and positive reassessment of Stresemann’s diplomacy, see Jonathan Wright, ‘Stresemann and Locarno’, Contemporary European History (1995), vol. 4, pp. 109-31.