Versailles's Necessary Contemporary Reevaluation: A Review of Alan Sharp's Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective

For one, treaties seek to prevent wars. Yet many blame the Treaty of Versailles for igniting the time bomb for the bloodiest war in history: World War II. In an age when information travels instantaneously, many scholars and foreign affairs professionals have become too fixated on the immediate ramifications of international policy. They make final verdicts swiftly and move quickly on to the next trial. George H. W. Bush's foreign policy has been reevaluated only since his death encouraged scholars to give a second look. Alan Sharp's Versailles 1919: A Centennial Perspective discusses long-term outlooks of the Versailles Treaty in a compelling manner which accounts for recent history's connection to this deeper past. Furthermore, this ability to consider the durable potential of international agreements highlights a genre of international affairs thought that is desperately lacking in our contemporary discussion.

The following section seeks to give the flavor of Sharp's argument, for any justified description of his work could be achieved only by reading the book itself. After a sveldt introduction outlining the general context of the Treaty of Versailles, Versailles 1919 boldly attempts to tell five distinct historical narratives detailing the treaty's legacy within different types of settlements from the end of the World War I to the present day. Sharp begins with perhaps the most staining of Versailles's legacies, the German Problem, amending the sole blaming of peacemakers for Germany's resurgence: "Versailles' settlement did not provide an adequate response to the 'German Problem' though the extent to which its failure was responsible for a second conflict is certainly debatable."¹ Note how Sharp's claims about the treaty's effectiveness are soft; he realigns the debate's direction rather than outright claiming an unpopular opinion. This is exemplary of Sharp's argumentative style in the rest of the chapters as well.

His next section celebrates the League of Nations as a "revolution in international relations" despite his admittance that the league wildly failed in functioning as designed.² This section goes on to highlight how this new order dramatically substituted a model of collective security for a balance of power that we largely continue to this day, elaborating on the functionality of the United Nations and other institutions.

Next, Sharp addresses the complications of Wilson's newly implemented principle of self-determination. This section is quick to establish that the witnessed shortcomings of this principle may be no worse than the results that the "old" diplomacy may have achieved under similarly dire circumstances.³

The fourth historical exploration analyzes minority protection, disarmament, and international law as they were developed by the Treaty of Versailles. Sharp rebukes the common narrative that newly drawn boundaries dividing natural nations are wholly responsible for the ensuing conflict, noting that the number of people living as an ethnic minority in their respective European states was reduced from 50 percent in 1914 to 25 percent in 1919.⁴

Sharp's final narrative attempts to place the American ideological progression within the context of the Treaty of Versailles. This section seems not to fit with the rest of the book. It reads more as a forced section seeking to add what has become a declaration many foreign affairs authors apparently find necessary to squeeze into their work—a claim that President Donald Trump will "end the American century."⁵ Given Sharp's painfully sparse evidence (a single paragraph) and tendency to self-restraint with regard to absolute claims about the future, this conclusion quite distastefully ended an otherwise impressive historical analysis of how American ideology has functioned as a dominant force since Versailles.

Alan Sharp's background as an emeritus professor of international history at the University of Ulster shines through his tendency to explain the historical narrative in a highly nuanced manner that carefully details the sequential nature of immediate and globally connected events. Admittedly, his writing style can become quite dry and humorless. Nonetheless, he...