The implementation of the peace

For all its flaws, the Paris peace does not deserve the often-cited verdict that it amounted only to ‘an armistice for twenty years'. To be sure, the imperfect solutions to the German problem and Europe as a whole certainly set out the battle lines for the future.

see Chapter 3

isolationism

The policy or doctrine of isolating one's country by avoiding foreign entanglements and responsibilities. Popular in the United States during the inter­war years.

Unfortunately, the first victim of the peace was inter-Allied solidarity. America's withdrawal from the settlement, occasioned by the Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919 and again in March 1920, was the most tragic. Wilson had raised expectations for a new era of world politics so high that he was bound to disappoint (disillusioned Wilsonians rushed to print stinging criticisms of their former hero).

The Soviet Union likewise remained isolated. Despite some sparks in Germany and Hungary, Lenin's world revolution failed to materialize. Moreover, the experience of civil war, Allied intervention, the Red Army's defeat at the hands of the Poles, and the loss of Finland, Bessarabia and the Baltic States all warned of

the dangers of survival in a world system dominated by the twin forces of capitalism and imperialism. Soviet Russia was vulnerable. The tension between the need to spread revolution (the source of the regime's legitimacy and identity) and the need to strengthen the regime generated a dual-track policy: the Soviet Union would promote the overthrow of capitalism by supporting the inter­national communist movement and, at the same time, build ‘socialism in one country' in order to provide itself with security.

When the Anglo-American security guarantees fell through, Clemenceau hoped Lloyd George would make good his promise anyway. Negotiations towards a security pact in 1921—22, however, made no progress. Some British officials recognized the French need for British reassurance. Many more, especially the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, believed that the French harboured ambitions of Napoleonic proportions. Balance-of-power rhetoric provided a high- sounding rationale for what was really a turning away by Britain from Europe's problems, motivated by a deep and understandable aversion to another military commitment on the scale of1914—18. At the same time, J. M. Keynes, in his best­selling study of the peace, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), undermined the legitimacy of Versailles in British (and American) minds by attacking reparations as both vindictive and ruinous.

Just like the Treaty of Sevres, the Treaty of Versailles was not self-enforcing. The split in the Entente provided Germany with the opportunity to challenge the peace in the same fashion as the Turks. Indeed, any defeated Power faced with such a coalition would have done so. France after the Napoleonic Wars and Russia after the Crimean War had sought to reverse their defeats. What was different about Germany between the wars was the intensity of hatred towards the ‘Versailles Diktat. The explanation for this lay in the mismatch between what was expected from a peace based on Wilson's fourteen points and the terms the Weimar's socialist coalition was forced to accept unconditionally in June 1919. The Allies, fearful that their unity would unravel if talks with the Germans were opened, refused to bargain, leaving the German delegates indignant, humiliated and scornful. In Germany, an overpowering sense that a great injustice had been done and the popular myth that the German army had not been defeated on the battlefield made for a heady cocktail and a widespread determination to under­mine Versailles took hold. In the 1920s, the publication of pre-1914 German diplomatic documents provided German scholars and liberal revisionists in the English-speaking world with ammunition to dispute the official Allied doctrine that Germany and its allies were responsible for 1914.

The principal battlefield was reparations. As Sally Marks has argued, nothing less than the verdict of1918 was at stake. The danger for the Europeans, especially France, was that the cost of reconstruction would ruin their economies and leave Germany, which had suffered less physical damage, economically dominant. American debt forgiveness would have eliminated this prospect and might have encouraged a Franco-German economic reconciliation. Instead, the Europeans were left to choose between ruining themselves or their former foe. The electorates had been promised that it would be Germany. On 27 April 1921, the Reparations Commission set payments at 132 billion gold marks in cash and goods. This sum was set to appease public expectations and as a bargaining chip in debt negotiations with the Americans. German politicians pleaded that 132 billion gold marks was impossible to pay and (arguably) they plunged the German economy into an inflationary spiral to prove it. The real figure of 50 billion gold marks over thirty-six years, buried in the complex technical details, though still substantial and burdensome, probably fell within Germany's capacity to pay, had it tried. Indeed, the way both sides exploited the 132 billion figure to send different messages to their electorates instead of facing the unpalatable truths (for the Germans, defeat; for the Allies, the pitfalls of a settlement premised in Germany's voluntary compliance) illustrates that the struggle over reparations was primarily a political one.

As Berlin anticipated, the battle over reparations generated friction within the Entente.

So the disputes over reparations continued. British willingness to grant Germany a six-month moratorium ran up against the French condition that Berlin turn over its Ruhr mines as ‘productive guarantees’ in exchange for the suspension of payments. At this point, the French were ready to try their own solution. On 26 December 1922, the Reparations Commission in a three (France, Belgium and Italy) to one (Britain) vote declared Germany in default of reparation payments. On 11 January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Rhineland. As Lloyd George had been forced to resign in October 1922, this crisis in Anglo-French relations fell on the shoulders of the new prime minister, Andrew Bonar Law. Any German hopes that the British might block or obstruct the French were quickly dashed. Bonar Law’s cabinet issued only diplomatic protests. The British would wait and see. On the question of what Poincare hoped to achieve, historians are divided and the evidence is ambiguous. Some believe that the occupation was really a bid to support Rhenish separatism and detach the Rhineland. Others criticize the French premier for the lack of any clear strategy at all. Perhaps in his own mind he lurched back and forth from a policy of straightforward treaty enforcement to one of initiating Germany’s breakup? Whatever Poincare’s goals, pursuing them proved a grim task. Occupation troops met with widespread passive resistance that sometimes had to be overcome with bayonets. In Berlin, Chancellor Cuno printed marks to pay striking workers. Hyper-inflation was the result. By the end of 1923, however, the French had successfully imposed their will. The mines produced coal and freight trains moved across the frontier. In September, the new chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, called an end to resistance.

French victory came at a very great price. The occupation further alienated Anglo-American opinion. Anyone who had previously entertained suspicions of a Napoleonic thirst for mastery now appeared to have had their suspicions confirmed. Britain from this point onwards firmly planted itself between France and Germany as a mediator, and not as a French ally. Poincare, who should have first explored the possibility of a bilateral deal with Germany, instead turned to the Anglo-American Powers to rescue the German mark and the rapidly falling French franc. In 1924, as a result of the plan devised by an expert committee headed by the American banker Charles Dawes, reparations were scaled down and the Reichsbank was reorganized. An American loan financed German reparations payments on a new, lighter schedule. American and British loans to France were conditional on the acceptance of the Dawes Plan and the evacuation of the Rhineland. The powers of the French-dominated Reparations Commission were also curtailed. Independent treaty enforcement, which in any case had been beyond France's reach, was no longer an option.