H-France Review Vol. 1 (April 2001), No. 10
William R. Keylor, Ed., The Legacy of the Great War: Peacemaking, 1919. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. vii + 259
pp. Chronology of Events, Principal Proper Names, Maps, and Bibliography.
ISBN 0-669-41711-4.
Review by Joel Blatt, University of Connecticut, Stamford Campus.
The Versailles Treaty of 1919 remains one of the most profoundly misinterpreted
international events of modern history. Eighty years after the victors
attempted to put “Humpty Dumpty” back together again, a simplistic account
of the international conference continues to be deeply embedded in public
consciousness and at least some high school curricula. This reading of
the Treaty alleges extraordinarily harsh treatment of Germany, featuring
ruinous reparations that caused calamitous inflation and later the Great
Depression, leaving Hitler and World War II in their wake. William Keylor’s
The Legacy of the Great War offers a contemporary reassessment
in a sagely selected collection of essays in Houghton Mifflin’s Problems
in European Civilization series. Keylor is the author of a text on twentieth-century
international relations, which provides him with a century-long and international
overview, and he has published recently two relevant essays.[1]
In his “Introduction,” Keylor sketches the context of the peace conference,
its historiography, and the structure of his volume. He ascribes the negative
impressions of the Paris Peace Conference largely to the first fifty years
of historiography, which held that a “Carthaginian peace” had undermined
Woodrow Wilson’s moral vision. To wit, John Maynard Keynes’s Economic
Consequences of the Peace “sold like a potboiler” (p. 13). Ray Stannard
Baker and Harold Nicolson reinforced these negative images, while “Revisionist”
historians in the United States cast doubt on Germany’s responsibility
for the outbreak of war. Cold War historiography of the Versailles Treaty
remained negative. For example, Arno Mayer and others stressed the influence
of anti-Communism on peacemaking in 1919. During the 1970s and 1980s,
however, newly opened French archives encouraged more favorable interpretations
of the Versailles Treaty, and the essays in this volume are based primarily
on new archival material. They also address issues relegated to the back
burner at Paris: the rights of minorities, appeals for racial equality
and consideration of the “Third World,” conflicting imperialisms and nationalisms
in the Middle East, as well as the settlement with Germany.
Part I of the anthology assesses the Versailles Treaty’s territorial
settlement. Arthur Walworth provides an overview. The Versailles Treaty
emerged from contradictions between, on the one hand, Woodrow Wilson’s
ideal of national self-determination and, on the other hand, strategic,
economic and political considerations. Would the victors and their populations
defend accords that placed German minorities within Poland, in order to
provide the latter with an outlet to the sea, and within Czechoslovakia,
to make that nation more geographically defensible and more economically
viable? Wilson appealed for a peace of “justice, not vengeance” (p. 30).
In the "Fontainebleau Memorandum," David Lloyd George also called for
a moderate peace. Having advocated a tough treaty during the election
campaign of December 1918, and after achieving a number of his goals,
the British Prime Minister changed direction. He worried that a severe
peace could destabilize German politics and spread “spartacism from the
Urals to the Rhine” (36). He pressed for a peace the Germans could accept.
Georges Clemenceau replied in a riveting debate taken from the minutes
of the Council of Four on March 27, 1919. When Wilson pressed Clemenceau
for “moderation,” the French Premier recognized the need “not to abuse
our victory” but doubted German and allied conceptions of what was “fair”
and “just” would coincide. He emphasized that the United States and Great
Britain had achieved naval security against Germany and insisted that
France required “an equivalent on land,” stating, “America is far away,
protected by the ocean. Not even Napoleon himself could touch England.
You are both sheltered; we are not” (p. 43). Where Lloyd George advised
combatting Bolshevism by recognizing “legitimate aspirations,” Clemenceau
replied that a sense of injustice among the victors might spread Communism
at home. The British Prime Minister also requested Clemenceau’s territorial
restraint. He interjected the views of the South African General Smuts:
“Poland cannot exist without the good will of Germany and Russia,” and
“Germany will remain, despite everything, and it would be folly to believe
that we can reconstruct the world without her assistance” (45-46).
Speeches by Hitler in 1938 and 1939 follow, portraying Germany as the
victim of the “democratic peace dictators” and the “criminals of Versailles.”
He justified the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland by reference
to national self-determination and then extended the borders of the German
nation back many hundreds of years to rationalize the annexation of the
rest of Czechoslovakia, that “abnormal structure” (48). Typically, Hitler
projected his own mentality, claiming the Czechs wished to “annihilate”
the Sudeten Germans. Hitler railed against “the dictate of Versailles”
as the product of “hatred, malice, and unreason” (50-51).
David Stevenson rounds out Part I with an assessment of the Russian absence
from Paris. The post-World War I settlement proved less stable than 1814-1815
and post-1945 in large measure because of the complexity posed by the
nascent Communist Revolution in Russia. Allied policy encompassed both
halting attempts to negotiate with the Bolsheviks and military intervention.
The latter was sufficient to sow deeper hostility between the Bolsheviks
and the West but insufficient to overthrow the revolutionaries. The Peace
Conference left relations with Communist Russia unresolved and volatile.
Part II of Keylor’s anthology analyzes conflicting schemes for establishing
the postwar international system. Lloyd Ambrosius explores the birth of
the League of Nations. The US and the UK created the League Covenant in
accord with their own conceptions and against those of the French, while
they also diminished the roles of smaller countries. Desiring to make
the League a continuation of the wartime alliance, the French battled
unsuccessfully for the inclusion of a military dimension. Wilson’s promises
amounted to the assurance that, “When danger comes, we too will come .
. . but you must trust us” (75). Robert Cecil, one of the primary British
architects of the League Covenant, warned the French that "the League
of Nations was their only means of getting the assistance of America and
England" (75). He vehemently rejected the notion of the League as an alliance
against Germany and threatened the French with being left absolutely alone
unless they renounced their calls for a military presence in the League.
An article by Walter McDougall explores how, having lost the struggle
for an armed League of Nations, the French sought their postwar security
in the Rhineland. Lloyd George warned of a “new Alsace-Lorraine” (85)
if France wrenched the territory away from Germany, and he leaned towards
the traditional British foreign policy of seeking to balance the power
of a continental victor. Meanwhile, some of Clemenceau’s French critics
encouraged Rhenish independence or autonomy. Poincaré and Foch pushed
for a strong French presence on the Rhine. Ultimately, Clemenceau acquiesced
in the demilitarized Rhineland remaining part of Germany in exchange for
a British-American offer of an alliance guaranteeing French security.
This offer proved to be a case of “bait and switch.” Keylor himself tells
the extraordinary story of the birth and demise of the “unprecedented”
Anglo-American Treaty of Guarantee, a topic that suffered for many years
from scholarly neglect. Without consulting their militaries, Lloyd George
and Wilson offered the Treaty to the French as a means to head off the
separation of the Rhineland from Germany. The Treaty of Guarantee achieved
widespread bipartisan support in the United States Senate and in the British
Parliament. Republicans in the Senate, including Wilson’s bitter foe,
Henry Cabot Lodge, regarded the Treaty of Guarantee favorably. When the
Versailles Treaty failed to achieve ratification in the Senate, however,
the Treaty of Guarantee sank with it. This led Lloyd George to renege
on his commitment, too.
In a second essay on the Anglo-American Treaty of Guarantee, “The Treaty
That Never Was,” Antony Lentin suggests that Lloyd George resorted to
“premeditated guile” (116), as he peddled “a masterpiece of legerdemain”
(117) to Clemenceau. Over time, often unknown to Clemenceau, Lloyd George
qualified his proposal. In the end, Great Britain would “only” honor its
commitment if the United States ratified the Franco-American alliance
first (112-113). That is, fearing that French Rhineland policy threatened
British economic and security interests in Europe and future peace, Lloyd
George exaggerated his commitment until Clemenceau, a man who kept his
word, agreed to settle the Rhineland conundrum with a compromise. According
to Lentin, Clemenceau “surrendered the substance for the shadow, the strategic
frontier for a piece of paper” (114), just as his critics alleged. As
to the ethics of Lloyd George’s policy, Lentin quotes the British Prime
Minister in another context: “If you want to succeed in politics, you
must keep your conscience well under control” (116).
Part III, “The Wreck of Reparations,” begins with Keynes’s broadside
against the economic terms of the Versailles Treaty, followed by contributions
from Marc Trachtenberg and Sally Marks that encapsulate much of the recent
post-revisionism. In an article published in September 1920, after the
United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty, Keynes appealed for
“magnanimity and wisdom” over “revenge and hatred” (120-121). In spite
of Wilson’s Hamlet-like failings, Keynes admired the American President
as the only leader to have “sought ideal aims” (122). Still, the peace
failed on a range of economic issues, particularly by destroying Germany’s
economy. Keynes found the reparations and coal components of the Treaty
“foolish, idle words” (136) and urged immediate rather than piecemeal
revision.
In an article of 1979, Marc Trachtenberg challenged the “Manichaean interpretation”
in which France allegedly pursued “a Carthaginian peace," while the United
States represented moderation and Great Britain fell between them. The
reparations issue, wrote Trachtenberg, emerged only after the United States
bluntly rejected French requests for the continuation of the Entente’s
economic cooperation. After briefly threatening high reparation demands
as a bargaining chip with the United States, the French settled into “an
essentially moderate reparations policy” (145). Meanwhile, British representatives
repeatedly proposed the largest reparations figures at Paris. Indeed,
British “intransigence” bore ultimate responsibility for the failure to
establish a fixed reparations sum in 1919. German archives reveal additional
evidence of French moderation. French disappointment with its allies finally
led to an exploration of “collaboration franco-allemand,” but the Germans
never tested the seriousness of these demarches. Trachtenberg interprets
French pursuit of economic cooperation with Germany from 1919-1922 as
“an initial stage” of “an important strain -- in some respects the dominant
strain--in France’s postwar foreign policy” (155).
Sally Marks shatters “the Myths of Reparations” in a 1978 article that
traces reparations from the Versailles Treaty until the mid-1920s. Article
231 of the Versailles Treaty never used the phrase “war guilt”; instead,
it asserted “the responsibility of Germany and her allies” for all the
“loss and damages” caused by their “aggression.” Yet if Article 231 opened
the possibility of unlimited assessments, Article 232 “narrowed” the field
of “civilian damages.” Broadening civilian damages to include “war widows’
pensions and allowances for military dependents” accentuated interallied
friction and increased the British share of reparations but did not alter
the figures established in 1921 on the basis of German capacity to pay.
When the Reparations Commission established the London Schedule of Payments
in April-May 1921, the figure of 132 billion gold marks as the total German
responsibility was illusory. German payments were divided into A, B, and
C bonds, with the C bonds, the largest of the German debt, "deliberately...chimerical,"
meant principally "to mislead public opinion in the receiver countries...”
(159). Actually, Germany was asked to pay 50 billion gold marks (approximately
$12 1/2 billion). During the summer of 1921, Germany paid 1 billion gold
marks in cash, but thereafter paid little in cash until after the Dawes
Plan, while in kind payments fell beneath established levels.
During this period, German inflation climaxed. German leaders blamed
reparations, while Allied experts (and Marks sides with them) claimed
that “Germany was deliberately ruining the mark, partly to avoid budgetary
and currency reform, but primarily to escape reparations” (160). In December
1922, the Reparations Commission held Germany in default in timber shipments.
In January 1923, after “the thirty-fourth coal default in thirty-six months”
(161), France, Belgium and Italy, against British opposition, occupied
the Ruhr. For Marks, the Ruhr occupation represented France’s “last trump,”
either victory or “permanent defeat.” For Raymond Poincaré, "the fundamental
issues were...survival of the Treaty and of France's victory in the war"
(163). The British “won the propaganda battle,” and the disruption of
the German economy aided British exports. But the Ruhr action also made
money for the occupiers, while “the astronomic inflation...a result of
German policy, not of the occupation itself” (163), ultimately allowed
the German government to pay off its debts and benefited some German industrialists.
Ironically, according to Marks, the aftermath of the Ruhr occupation
cost France the postwar advantage. Beset by its own financial crisis and
by international isolation, France ultimately accepted unfavorable terms
in the Dawes Plan and particularly during the London Conference of July-August
1924, which limited future independent French action. “The ultimate effect
of German failure to pay reparations in substantial quantity,” writes
Marks, “was transfer of the burden to the victors...It is evident that
the net effect of World War I and the peace settlement was the effective
enhancement of Germany’s relative strength in Europe . . .” (166). She
estimates that Germany ultimately paid total reparations of “just over
20 billion gold marks or $5 billion, which was predominantly financed
by foreign loans, many of which were eventually repudiated by Hitler”
(166). At bottom, Marks concludes, reparations was “a political issue.”
The central question was not Germany’s capacity to pay but its “will to
pay or . . .determination not to pay” (167).
Part IV explores the colonial settlement, the manner in which the Allies
parceled out the German Empire in Africa and Asia and part of the Ottoman
Empire in the Middle East. Alan Sharp provides an overview. Prior wartime
decisions and the trumpeting of high moral standards and expectations
exacerbated the difficulties of colonial peacemaking. The "device of mandates"
served as a "figleaf," squaring allied acquisitiveness and Wilsonian scruples.
The American President had no qualms about demolishing the German Empire,
but he accepted self-determination in the guise of trusteeship. Thus,
in the tradition "admired by some as pragmatic realism and condemned by
others as hypocrisy" (171), Lloyd George and Jan Smuts, Prime Minister
of South Africa, devised the mandate system.
Sharp analyzes the emergence of the modern Middle East during World War
I and the Paris Peace Conference. Many factors shaped negotiations regarding
the Middle East: the Anglo-French rivalry; the Russian Revolution; the
strengthening of Turkey under Mustapha Kemal; and the rise of Arab nationalism
and Jewish nationalism (Zionism). Sharp regards the emerging Arab-Zionist
conflict from the perspectives of long-term British policy interests and
perhaps with a tilt towards Arab nationalism. Sharp's major interpretative
thread is the manner in which Anglo-French pursuit of wartime and postwar
advantages, "in the worst traditions of the pre-war imperialism" (186),
shaped the Middle East settlement. The Anglo-French rivalry was temporarily
softened in later 1919 and early 1920 by compromises over territory and
oil, but Anglo-French rancor remained, and Arab nationalism had been "disregarded."
Arab revolts in 1920 presaged the future.
Next, Keylor, the Editor, balances a letter from Jewish leaders to Woodrow
Wilson appealing for recognition of Jewish "aspirations" in Palestine
and Prince Faisal's appearance before the Council of Ten calling for self
determination and independence for the Arabs.
Arthur Walworth focuses on the intense dispute between Japan and China
over the spoils of German defeat. Japan had entered World War I in 1914
and occupied islands and parts of China held by Germany. In 1917, in return
for Japanese naval support, Great Britain had agreed to favor Japanese
claims to former German holdings in Asia (also see Sharp's excerpt, 174-175).
China had entered World War I in August 1917, and at the Paris Peace Conference
demanded sovereignty over its own territory. The issue climaxed in late
April 1919 at the same moment that Italian leaders had temporarily left
the Peace Conference. Wilson feared a threatened Japanese withdrawal from
Paris might doom the peace conference and the League of Nations, tempt
Germany to reject the Versailles Treaty, and encourage a German-Japanese-Russian
alliance. Although widespread sympathies for China abounded in the American
delegation, the United States and Wilson acquiesced in Japanese demands
for control of Shantung and hoped that the League of Nations would protect
China. Ultimately, China refused to sign the Versailles Treaty, complaining
that it violated both justice and its own principles.
At the beginning of Part V, “The Abortive Quest for Human Rights,” Keylor
emphasizes the Conference’s rejection of appeals by W.E.B. Du Bois and
Ho Chi Minh for self-determination in Africa and Vietnam, observing that
Wilson’s ideal of self-determination did not extend beyond “white Europeans”
(224). Wilson never responded to a letter from Du Bois requesting a meeting
nor to his memorandum proposing independence and “modernization” for the
African inhabitants of Germany’s former colonies. Both documents are included
in this volume.
Carole Fink next traces the dense historical context from which emerged
another significant but little-considered aspect of the Paris Peace Conference,
the Polish Minority Treaty. Fink terms as “myths” the interpretation of
the Polish Treaty as primarily “a Wilson invention, a Jewish victory,
or a Polish defeat” (237). On November 22, 1918, Polish forces entered
Lemberg (Lwow) and launched a major pogrom against Jews, followed in April
1919, as Polish forces invaded Belorussia and Lithuania, by pogroms in
Pinsk and Vilna. Western Jews demanded protection for their co-religionists.
Parenthetically, given the subsequent history, it is a cosmic irony that
Germany and Jews frequently collaborated on minority issues in the immediate
postwar years. Fink suggests that the Western nations acted out of fear
that, if new countries would not assimilate minorities, the resulting
turmoil might provoke ground swells of emigration. Polish instability
in particular might encourage expansionist responses by Germany and Russia--
or even a “German-Bolshevik rapprochement” (232-233).
With minority issues bubbling in Eastern Europe, on May 1, 1919 President
Wilson established a committee to draw up a Polish Minority Treaty. The
leaders of the new states protested this incursion on their national sovereignty,
but Wilson affirmed that the great powers “cannot afford to leave elements
of disturbance unremoved which they believe will disturb the peace of
the world” (233). “Moments” after the German signing of the Versailles
Treaty on June 28, 1919, Polish leaders reluctantly signed the Polish
Minority Treaty, which spelled out Poland’s obligations to its minorities.
This accord became the model for treaties with Czechoslovakia, Romania,
Yugoslavia, Greece, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and later with the Baltic
states, demanding “full and complete protection of life and liberty to
all inhabitants . . . without distinction of birth, nationality, language,
race, or religion” (234). The Committee hammered out compromises on thorny
fundamental issues such as citizenship, language, education, and religious
observance. Future disputes were turned over to the League of Nations,
which tended to sympathize more with the new states than with their minorities.
For all its failures, Carole Fink adjudges the Minority Treaty “a genuine
accomplishment,” even though, in the end, neither the United States nor
the Allies nor the League defended these accords.
In Keylor’s final selection, Paul Gordon Lauren describes the dramatic,
unsuccessful Japanese struggle at Paris for racial equality. Smarting
from severe discrimination against Japanese in the United States, Canada,
and Australia, desiring recognition as a great power, and encouraged by
Wilson’s words, the Japanese proposed inclusion of “racial equality” in
the League Covenant. But Japanese representatives ran into an American,
British, and Australian wall. The southerner Wilson had defended segregation
publicly, while Prime Minister William Hughes had bluntly proclaimed his
commitment to “a White Australia” (244). British Foreign Secretary Arthur
Balfour characterized the American declaration “that all men are created
equal” as a false “eighteenth-century proposition.” In response to the
opposition, a divided Japanese delegation toned down its amendment, requesting
only an affirmation of “the principle of equality of nations and just
treatment of their nationals” (248). Although the Japanese were supported
by the Italians, French and others, Wilson, pressured by segments of American
public opinion, ultimately blocked an eloquent appeal by the Japanese
delegate Baron Makino before the League of Nations Commission. At the
last plenary meeting of the Commission, Makino characterized the racial
issue as “a standing grievance which might become active at any moment.”
He also returned to the initial Japanese phrasing of the question with
direct reference to “race” (252). Thus Japan became “the standard bearer
of the colored cause” at Paris (254).
With William Keylor’s anthology as the stimulus, let me add some observations
about the Versailles Treaty, its durability, its role in the coming of
World War II, and its place in twentieth-century history. “The Carthaginian
Peace” interpretation always rested on shaky foundations. The key question
about the Versailles Treaty’s alleged harshness ought to be: COMPARED
TO WHAT? The Treaty of Brest Litovsk imposed by Germany on Russia in March
1918 was significantly harsher than the Versailles Treaty, as was the
peace of 1945. Bismarck’s Peace of Frankfurt in 1871 at the end of the
Franco-Prussian War was arguably harsher. In contrast, the Treaty of Vienna
of 1815 was more moderate. Keynes’s standards for judging the Versailles
Treaty were Anglocentric, focused on economics, and contrasted the outcome
of the peacemakers’ work unfavorably with the maximum potentials of Wilsonian
idealism.
The German propaganda assault against Article 231’s “war guilt” allegation
provided another pillar of “the Carthaginian Peace.” In one of the century’s
most effective propaganda campaigns, the German government systematically
distorted the historical record about Germany’s role in the coming of
World War I, coerced German historians, and enticed American historians
to take the German side.[2]
Keylor’s volume demolishes the legend of “the Carthaginian Peace.” Yet,
if not “Carthaginian,” then what was it? A middle-level peace, neither
harsh nor conciliatory; a hard compromise among the victors. Germany lost
some continental territory and its colonies, but its heartland remained
fundamentally intact. Germany paid reparations but never huge sums, and
some reparation was surely legitimate. Much of northeastern France and
Belgium lay in ruins, as the Schlieffen Plan failed to bring quick German
victory but ensured that the Western Front would run through its enemies’
territories rather than its own. To compound wartime French losses, Germany
sabotaged French coal mines and other resources during the retreat of
1918. Then, when the engines of destruction threatened to roll into Germany
in 1918, Germany sought and received an armistice, saving itself for another
attempt at hegemony.
Nevertheless, there was at least one area in which the Allies treated
Germany harshly: Pride. And pride matters. The War Responsibility Clause
(a more apposite phrase, taking Sally Marks’ essay into account) was gratuitously
provocative. Barring Germany from the negotiations of 1919, in contrast
to the inclusion of defeated France in the Congress of Vienna, wounded
German pride. Excluding Germany and Communist Russia, potentially the
two most powerful continental countries, from the peacemaking in 1919
virtually guaranteed the future of integral revisionism against the postwar
settlements.
Another conclusion suggested by these essays is that after the Great
War “the struggle for the mastery of Europe” (A.J.P. Taylor’s phrase)
was far from over. The cycle of German-French wars had not ended. It was
only in 1945, when Germany’s defeat was so total, its crimes so monstrous,
its power so contained, that the German phase of the struggle for supremacy
in Europe seemed finished--or at least postponed for decades. What would
it have taken to have ended the cycle of violence in 1919? Could another
sort of peacemaking have avoided a third German-French war?
The Versailles Treaty did not cause World War II. Rather World War I,
previous and ongoing trends, and massive economic convulsions largely
separate from the Versailles Treaty triggered the Second World War. Mountainous
problems faced the peacemakers of 1919. The damage was vast, while the
Bolshevik Revolution presaged a major intensification of ideological conflict.
As Keylor shows so well, around the edges of the conference flickered
the sparks of global change. Despite its shortcomings, the Versailles
Treaty was potentially viable. But its successful implementation required
wisdom and strength. Instead, divisions among the wartime allies, due
at least as much to the United States and Great Britain as to France,
augured ill for its survival. What does Keylor’s anthology tell us about
the victors? At the top of a pecking order of power, the Anglo-Saxon countries
treated France shabbily, and their failure to honor their promises to
France had long standing consequences. France’s enormous human losses
and precarious economic and financial condition allowed its two allies
to get away with this abdication of responsibility. Too often during the
interwar years, the United States and Great Britain asked much of the
French and offered too little or nothing in return. At Paris, both the
United States and Great Britain first secured their own interests--naval
security, trade, oil,--and then took the moral high ground in response
to French demands for equal treatment. The Treaty of Guarantee could have
soothed French worries about security and provided a strong underpinning
for Franco-German reconciliation--maybe even a peaceful revision of the
Versailles Treaty before Hitler destroyed the postwar rules of the game.
The lost Guarantee contributed significantly not only to the French catastrophe
of May-June 1940, but to Great Britain’s lonely, desperate, heroic summer
and fall of 1940. It also led to Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. My students
believe that the United States rescued France during World War II, which
is partially true, but it is as accurate to say that the United States,
by its failure to honor the Treaty of Guarantee and its absence in 1940,
played a major role in making D-Day necessary. The Anglo-American misreading
of power and the narrowness of their self-interestedness in 1919 and during
the interwar years contributed as much as French policies to dooming the
Versailles Treaty.
Keylor’s Legacy of the Great War achieves its goal of convincing
us of the significance for the twentieth century of the things “not done”
at Paris, such as Wilson’s refusal to countenance a meeting with African-Americans
about Africa’s future and the rejection of Japan’s eloquent appeal for
racial equality. Japan, like the other major powers, had dirty hands,
combining a compelling defense of human rights with exploitation of its
Chinese neighbor. One also can contrast China’s battering in 1919 with
its position at the start of the twenty-first century, when the China
Question occupies a position comparable in some measure to the German
Question at the beginning of the preceding century.
On another paramount issue of the twentieth century, the essays by Sharp
and Fink provide images of both Jews and Arabs as victims. The clash between
Israelis and Palestinians has always seemed to me to be primarily a conflict
between victims. Perhaps recognition of the other’s victimization might
eventually provide a basis for a compromise Middle East peace. Finally,
mass murders of minorities have preoccupied the international community
during the last decade and pose similar dilemmas to those faced by the
peacemakers of 1919. The quandary over minority rights again recently
threatened the peace of the Balkans in a manner similar to before World
War I.
Keylor’s anthology is designed for college students. It offers students
opportunities to analyze a range of interpretations in secondary sources
as well as a number of primary sources. The book includes the following
helpful appendages: a “Chronology of Events,” an annotated list of the
major participants in the creation of the Versailles Treaty, relevant
maps, and an extensive bibliography.
NOTES
[1] William Keylor, The Twentieth Century World: An International
History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 3rd. Edition
1996, 1992, 1984); ibid., "Versailles and International Diplomacy," in
The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, ed. Manfred F.
Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 469-505; and ibid., "France and the
Illusion of American Support, 1919-1940," in The French Defeat of 1940:
Reassessments, ed. Joel Blatt (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn, 1998),
204-244.
[2] See Holger Herwig, "Clio Deceived: Patriotic Self-Censorship in
Germany after the Great War," in Forging the Collective Memory,
ed. Keith Wilson (Providence and Oxford: Berghahn, 1996, 87-127).
Joel Blatt
University of Connecticut, Stamford Campus
JOEL.BLATT@UCONN.EDU
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (April 2001), No. 10
ISSN 1553-9172
