The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History

Bought this for myself to combat husband for his birthday, he is a big history buff.good service and prompt shipping. Good value for the money. Thanks for selling

This is an excellent 100+ pages book on how the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 came to be written. It was a combination of idealism, hard-headed European security and balance-of-power concerns, ethnic desires for self-government and independence, a dose of the effects of the Russian Revolution and the fear of Bolshevism, and a large amount of wishful thinking and naivety. There was also a significant influence of international power politics in the form, for example, of the Japanese demand for control of the Shandong Peninsula in China and the influence of the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Great Britain and France regarding the Middle East.The Treaty of Versailles has been criticized as a “victor’s treaty” because of its harsh terms, but as pointed out in page xiii in the “Preface,” it was no more vindictive than the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918 that Germany imposed on Russia or the Treaty of Bucharest that Germany imposed on Romania. It was likely less vindictive than any treaty that Germany would have imposed on Britain and France had the situation been reversed.I got a kick out of a statement on page 19 of David Lloyd-George’s political enemies accusing him that “he had more mistresses than principles.” I thought the most interesting chapter was Chapter 4 “Drafting the Treaty,” which discusses how some of the key terms got included. The chapter also describes how the “Mandate” system was created by which the major powers of the world administered former German colonies and Ottoman territories in the name of the League of Nations.A major issue in writing the Treaty was the international political naivety of American President Woodrow Wilson. He was obsessed with the creation of a League of Nations and the idealism of his “Fourteen Points.” The real problem, I think, was that the US in general and Wilson in particular had zero experience in negotiating international treaties involving a large number of nations with differing ideas on what a peace treaty should accomplish. The US had no negotiating experience such as the Congress of Vienna of 1815, the Congress of Berlin of 1878, the various treaties involving the Balkan Wars of 1912 – 1913, or the Agadir Crisis of 1906. By comparison, European foreign ministries had decades, if not centuries, of negotiating major international treaties.Another major issue was that the Treaty of Versailles created new nations such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia with significant numbers of ethnic Germans and other minorities within the new borders. The diplomats who created the borders had almost no personal knowledge of where ethnic majorities and minorities in Eastern Europe lived. This was almost a guarantee for future strife.The consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, the Sykes – Picot Agreement of 1916, the Treaty of Sevres of 1919, and the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 echo to this day. Promises regarding homelands or independent countries for Jews, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and Arabs were either not fulfilled or were distorted into colonial dependencies or protectorates until the 1950s.A couple of other good books on this subject are:• “A Shattered Peace: Versailles and the Price We Pay Today” by Andelman (2014). Excellent discussion of the long-term consequences of the 1919 Versailles Treaty. As a consequence of this ill-serving document, the current Middle Eastern problems exist due to creating artificial nations such as Lebanon, Iraq and Syria with their boundaries drawn with no regard to ethnic, religious, or historical considerations. Similarly, the artificial country of "Yugoslavia" was created in the Balkans, only to disintegrate eventually in the 1990s for the same reasons. As the author of the book so aptly puts it, Yugoslavia consisted of regions containing two alphabets, five languages, and three religions. It could not possibly work, and it did not. Of course, decolonization of China and southeast Asia was never going to happen peacefully. As a direct consequence of Versailles, we ended up with Communist China and Vietnam.• “The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End” by Gerwarth (2016) describes the continuing warfare, even if unofficial or undeclared, that occurred in Eastern Europe and in Turkey. The Great War (World War I as it was later designated) may have officially ended with the Armistice of November 11, 1918 and the Versailles Treaty and other Treaties of 1919 - 1921, but fighting continued through the middle of 1923 as the new European and Asiatic states (e.g, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Russia, etc.) tried to establish their boundaries and ethnic composition. These wars killed people by the hundreds of thousands, even millions, and caused untold human misery. More than 3 million people were killed in the Russian civil war. Another 500 thousand died fighting in the Greek - Turkish war from 1921 to 1923, and that does not even include the estimated 1.2 to 2.0 million (Armenian, Greek, and Moslems) who were massacred because they were of the wrong ethnic or religious group. Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Eastern Europe died of famine after the end of WW I.

Recommended for a course I’m taking. Perfect to get a quick, very readable background for a more careful study to come.

Best book I've ever read about the Versailles Treaty. So much detail, clear, enticing and well thought out. A Plus read!!!

Love this book and seller!

This is a short but interesting recap of the treaty. A quick read, but does help one understand the events of the day that lead to this treaty.

Arguably the best introductory book about the Treaty of Versailles.

Highly informative an most relevant in 2019