America's Second Crusade

3. The Collapse of Versailles

3 The Collapse of Versailles It was the announced purpose of the Treaty of Versailles to replace the state of war by a “firm, just and durable peace.” But the peace settlements with Germany and its allies were neither firm nor just nor durable. A century elapsed between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the next general European conflict. But there were only two decades of uneasy armistice between the First and Second World Wars. The Treaty of Versailles might be called too mild for its sternness and too stern for its mildness.The negotiators at Versailles fell between the two stools of a peace of reconciliation and an utterly ruthless, Carthaginian destruction of Germany as a major power. German public opinion could not be expected to accept willingly the mutilation of the country’s eastern frontier, the placing of millions of Sudeten Germans under undesired Czech rule, the inconvenient corridor which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany, the obligation to pay tribute to the victorious powers almost until the end of the century, and what was generally believed to be in Germany “the war guilt lie.” At the same time Germany was left strong enough to cherish some hope of redressing its position. It remained the most populous country in Europe, after Russia. The people were homogeneous; there were no dissatisfied minorities of any consequence within the shrunken frontiers; Germany possessed important assets: scientific knowledge, industrial development, a national capacity for hard and disciplined work. And the great coalition which had brought about the German downfall in the war had disintegrated. America was becoming more and more disillusioned with the fruits of its first crusade. Russia’s ties of alli- [ 40 ] America’s Second Crusade ance with France and Great Britain had been severed by the Bolshevik Revolution. Italy had gone its own way under fascism. There were, to be sure, French alliances with the new and enlarged states of Eastern Europe, with Poland and Rumania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Still more important, Germany during the twenties and early thirties was effectively disarmed. It was on these bases, French armaments and alliances and German disarmament, that the new Continental balance of power reposed. For more than a decade after the end of the war Europe’s fate was in the balance. An act of generous, imaginative leadership, on the part of Britain and France, looking to some form of European union, might have strengthened moderate forces in Germany and saved the situation ; but no such act was forthcoming. Narrow nationalism dominated the scene. Between Germany and Russia, stretching from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, was a belt of thirteen small and medium-sized sovereign states (Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia , Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania). The very existence of many of these states was only possible because such powerful nations as Germany and Russia were knocked out at the same time, Germany by military defeat, Russia by revolution . The continued independence of the states in this area and their economic advantage called for some form of regional federalism. But old national antipathies and petty local interests were so strong that almost nothing was achieved in this direction. The hopes of liberals, especially in Great Britain and in the smaller countries which the witty Spaniard, Salvador de Madariaga, described as “consumers of security,” were focused on the League of Nations. But this body failed to develop the independent authority which would have been required in order to maintain peace. Its membership was never universal.The United States and Russia, among the great powers, were absent from the beginning. By the time the Soviet Union was admitted to the League in 1934, Germany and Japan had given notice of withdrawal. And the Soviet Union’s participation in the League came to an end when it was expelled in 1939 after launching an unprovoked attack on Finland. The Collapse of Versailles [ 41 ] The League never possessed the physical means to check aggression . It possessed no army, no police force. It was not a league, in any true sense of the word, just as the United Nations have never been really united. Its members were divided by clashing interests. It could not be, and was not, any stronger than the national policies of its leading members. So it is not surprising that it failed to meet one big test after another. When Japan upset a...