Jonathan Sumption

The peace to end all peace

The first world war was the last major conflict to be brought to an end in the traditional fashion, with a formal treaty of peace.

The first world war was the last major conflict to be brought to an end in the traditional fashion, with a formal treaty of peace. Or, rather, several treaties of peace, one for each of the defeated belligerents. They were all negotiated in Paris, but named after the various royal palaces in which the signing ceremonies were held: Versailles, the Trianon, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Neuilly, Sèvres. These great buildings, arranged like pearls in a necklace around Paris across the hunting grounds of the former kings, were built to impress. But the treaties signed in them were arguably the most prodigious acts of folly in the history of European diplomacy.

The process began on a note of high morality, with President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. ‘The Good Lord only needed ten’, said the cynical Clemenceau, who as Prime Minister of France had the job of chairing the conference. He thought that Wilson was an ignorant and impractical idealist. To Keynes, the American President was the ‘blind and deaf Don Quixote’, bamboozled alternately by Britain and France. Yet Wilson’s Fourteen Points were a serious attempt to lay down the principles for a lasting peace. They were, if anything, less radical than Lloyd George’s ‘Three-point Programme’, which introduced the concept of self-determination: national boundaries based on ethnic and cultural communities.

The real problem was that the concept was not uniformly applied, and was not applied at all to Germany. Germany was almost completely disarmed, and required to pay reparations on a scale calculated to beggar her population for a generation. She lost 10 per cent of her population, 15 per cent of her agricultural production and 20 per cent of her iron, coal and steel. Austria was cut down from a great multinational empire to a modest German-speaking province with few industrial assets, and was forbidden to unite with Germany in spite of substantial majorities in favour in both countries.

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