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Peace with Honor |
- By TomStar81
In June 1919, after nearly six months of deliberation and negotiation, the Allied Powers and representatives from Germany, now operating as the Weimar Republic following the collapse of the German Empire in the aftermath of the Abdication of Wilhelm II in November 1918, signed a peace treaty. This achievement marked the official end (such as it were) to the state of warfare in the European Continent and cemented the victory achieved by the Allied Powers not so much as a result of their war strategies but rather as a result of the collapse of several states that had been at war with the Allied Powers throughout much of World War I.
The groundwork for what would become the Treaty of Versailles had been laid in bits and pieces throughout the duration of the war as Imperialist-leaning governments in Europe sought to end the war the way they always had: divisions of land, replacement of reigning monarchs, and splitting up the losing side's overseas territories so that the other empires and kingdoms could benefit from new markets and new acquisitions. To this end several secret deals (such as the Sykes–Picot Agreement) had been made behind closed doors, and imperial governments had reached out to nations outside Europe (such as the German Empire had done with Mexico via the Zimmerman Telegram) to offer assistance with land acquisitions and other regional or financial rewards in exchange for joining the war as a party to the two treat-based powers then fighting in Europe. For this reason it had come as something of a surprise -- and largely an unwelcome surprise -- when US President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points transcended the war effort and the diplomatic effort in Europe to become the de facto framework for peace. Wilson, leading the isolationist United States and joining the Allied Powers late in the war, had proposed his Fourteen Points in an effort to resolve what he thought to be the underlying reasons for the war and to help restore European nations along nationalistic lines.
Although Wilson's points had somehow become the basis for the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson himself had become attached to his final point, the creation of a "League of Nations" in an effort to create an internal body that could help resolve these disputes peacefully as opposed to by contest of arms. This coupled with Wilson's failing health had left the the so-called "Big Four" in the hands of the French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, who was far more concerned with seeing Germany weakened on the domestic front and to that end laid out a great number of clauses that required Germany to accept responsibility for the war (even though it had not been Germany that had started the war), divide its fleet up for acquisition by the Allied powers, pay billions of dollars in reparations, disarm its standing military, and surrender its overseas territory for occupation by European nations or for the creation of independent nations. Having twice witnessed Germany move militarily on French land, Clemenceau was determined to see Germany weakened to a point where it would pose no threat to France.
Meanwhile, delegates present to debate the points and their own agendas had to deal with other issues related to the war effort that had not been fully appreciated at the time, starting with the rise of left-leaning ideologies that had collapsed four of the former great European powers. The Russian Empire's collapse and the death of the Tsar and his family had left a civil war raging in Russia between several factions, while in the resulting confusion a communist government had set itself up in Moscow. Russia itself had been formally excluded from the peace treaty on grounds that they had already made their peace and pulled out of the war by the time of the armistice of November 11, but a delegation from Russia had still come to the conference. Issues related to minority rights in Europe were brought up, with massive divisions of territory proposed along ethnic lines to create havens or otherwise protect minorities in Europe. Because this was the first war in which an Asia-Pacific theatre had been seen to influence the course of a War on European soil, representatives from the Empire of Japan, China, and Korea had arrived to make proposals for the peace treaty. Japan's delegation put forth a Racial Equality Proposal, but it found little support among nations that had long factored racism and racial polices into national politics. Japan's delegation was granted Jiaozhou Bay (a German-controlled colony in China) to the outrage of the Chinese, who had come to demand that Germany's concessions on Shandong be returned to China, and an end to imperialist institutions such as extraterritoriality, legation guards, and foreign leaseholds. The failure of the Chinese delegation sparked the May Fourth Movement in what was at the time the Republic of China, resulting in widespread demonstrations against the Chinese government and others over this and other issues. The Korean delegation had come in an attempt to secure foreign aid to end their status as a Japanese colony, but none of the major European powers took the Koreans seriously, which resulted in its members being entirely overlooked by the conference. Meaningful foreign assistance for Korea would not come until the collapse of the Empire of Japan in 1945, and then it came in the form of a divided Korea, which arguably made this appearance the last official attempt by a single, unified Korea to seek aid from western powers.
As well as these issues, the delegation also took up the cause -- albeit weakly -- of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. While little became of this initial attempt beyond a guarantee that Zionists could have the right to Palestinian citizenship, it marked the first time that major powers had considered the issued as part of a broader racial and ethnic redrawing of the map, which would help lay the ground work for the creation of the modern Israel of today. Additionally, while formally denied seats at the conference, a number of women from different organizations convened the Inter-Allied Women's Conference and sought to establish and entrench women's fundamental social, economic, and political rights (including but not limited to suffrage) within the Paris peace framework. In part because of their efforts Article 7 of the Covenant of the League of Nations states that "All positions under or in connection with the League, including the Secretariat, shall be open equally to men and women."
When the framework and various clauses were debated and finally agreed to in June 1919, the Treaty of Versailles became the first of an eventual total of five peace treaties that collectively ended World War I. These treaties, some agreed to between separate nations, others between the primary factional alliances who fought in the War, delegated an uneasy peace across Europe and officially closed Europe's chapter on the Great War. While celebrated at the time as the official end of the war, these treaties in general -- and the Versailles Treaty in particular -- are in hindsight widely seen as having failed in their goal to maintain peace in Europe for several reasons. To begin with, the Versailles Treaty unfairly singled out the German Empire for causing the war, creating a formal framework for Germany's right-leaning citizens to rally against, eventually resulting in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the creation of the Third Reich. The failure to adopt the racial equality clause is seen as causing the Empire of Japan to pivot to a more nationalistic, and later ultra-nationalist, mindset that helped lay the groundwork for war in the Pacific as she sought to do as the Europeans had done and create a colonial empire of their own. Both in and outside of Europe domestic policies and ideologies also choked off parts of the treaty that had been intended to help prevent such a calamity from repeating itself -- in the US, for instances, the ratification of the foreign treaty required a two-thirds vote from the Congress, but Wilson was never able to secure it and the treaty was thus never ratified despite the fact that the US President's Fourteen Points had been touted as its basis. Similarly, the League of Nations -- created to ensure a diplomatic solution to international incidents could be found as opposed to a military solution to such issues -- lacked an armed force of its own to enforce its mandates, which left those mandates in the hands of great powers of the day who were often reluctant to take action. When it became apparent that the League's mandates could be ignored at no loss for nations then the League's effectiveness in its goal to provide diplomatic solutions to issues effectively evaporated. This combined with a general fear in Europe of repeating the mistakes that lead to World War I largely kept European nations out of each other affairs until it became apparent that it would take a war in Europe to overthrow the Third Reich and its insatiable appetite for conquest.
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