The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy: The Failure of the Wilsonian Vision by Norman A. Graebner and Edward M. Bennett (review)

A profound critique of "collective security" and the statesmen who relied on it, this impressive study by two distinguished American diplomatic historians examines international relations during the interwar period through the refractory lens of the Versailles Treaty. As in the painting on the book's cover—Sir William Orpen's "The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, 28th June 1919"—the complex world depicted in The Versailles Treaty and Its Legacy, as glimpsed through the elegant windows reflected in the mirrored wall behind the seated figures of President Wilson and other peacemakers, is cloudy, distorted, and broken. Could Wilson's Covenant, and the League of Nations soon established (albeit without American participation), have corrected this fractured image, bringing lasting peace rather than allowing—or even causing—the more devastating next war that came to Europe and the world? The fundamental question posed by this book concerns the efficacy of treaty making, for good or for ill, in a dynamic world, in which paper commitments may not contain changing realities, in this case the rising power of Germany under Adolf Hitler.

Graebner and Bennett dissent from the view of MacMillan and other historians who consider that "the work at Paris was in no way responsible for what occurred later" (60, n.), and who hold that to blame the treaty itself is to ignore the actions of political leaders, diplomats, soldiers, and also ordinary voters for what happened in the twenty years following.¹ Graebner and Bennett assign primary responsibility to the work of the peacemakers—what they did, what they thought, and, crucially, what they (Wilson in particular) caused others to think. Their view is that the creators of the Versailles system, led by Wilson, "saddled the world" with misleadingly "attractive post-war notions regarding international life," including "the promise of collective security." This "determined the behavior of nations between 1919 and1939." A fatal pattern was established. "That behavior, marked by the refusal of all of the victors at Versailles to assume responsibility for the defense of the treaty, ended with the catastrophe of another world war" (60, n.).

The Versailles Treaty with the League Covenant, in short, functioned as a political and intellectual straitjacket, which not only inhibited Germany but also constrained the Allies and Associated Powers. People supposed that the structure erected in Geneva made military alliances unnecessary and that peace could be maintained cooperatively. Omnium contra unum was the prevailing doctrine. The injustices that resulted from the compromises made at Paris in 1919 were not completely ignored, but most of them were assumed to be minor. The prevailing idea was that the League of Nations could make any necessary corrections by employing Article 19 of the Covenant, in the name of "peaceful change." Such was the theory that Graebner and Bennett identify with American "internationalism." They equate it with a rationale for keeping the status quo. It made no allowance whatsoever for violent change, on any scale. This outlook Graebner and Bennett consider unrealistic, even "utopian" (87).

The authors' philosophical realism, influenced (for Graebner especially) by the writings of Morgenthau, is evident throughout this work—a cogent, dense amalgam of political reasoning and fine historical analysis (grounded in extensive archival research, such as that undertaken by Bennett for the book's excellent description of Anglo-American relations).² Their reality-based view of "what underlay the disaster of war" in 1939 and, by implication, of war in 1914, was a breakdown in the understanding of the balance of power, of the need for political flexibility, and of what they term the "diplomatic tradition" (247, 67). Graebner and Bennett's emphasis on the factor of diplomacy, and its absence, is original and distinctive. They propose that a nation's interests in the world can not only be expressed but also identified through the competitive process of direct diplomatic...