The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 - Essay Example

?Britain/America wanted to rehabilitate Germany, France wanted to humiliate it. Discuss this comment on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Introduction Historical accounts of the Paris Peace Conference 1919 typically portray France as seeking revenge against Germany or at the very least unreasonably demanding reparations as a solution to its economic and war-torn conditions.1 Historical accounts also represent a disparaging conference with France mounted against an Anglo-Saxon team represented by US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister George Lloyd.2 Conclusions drawn tend to point to a vengeful France and a united Anglo-Saxon front with the later rallying for sustained peace and more realistic sanctions against Germany. In order to fully assess the underlying motives of France, Britain and the US in negotiating the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 it is necessary to identify the post-war conditions and experiences of the France, Britain and the US at the time. It is argued, that while France wanted reparations regardless of the cost to Germany, it was primarily motivated by a need to rebuild a war-torn France. It is also argued that France, like the US and Britain also wanted to rehabilitate Germany, although in a different way. The US and Britain wanted a strong and stable Germany united with Europe. France wanted to ensure that Germany was unable to rise to power again. In this regard, it can be argued that France was just as committed to safeguarding world peace as the US and Britain. France merely had a different vision as to how to prevent the rise of tyrannical power and its threat to world peace. For France, the answer was isolation, punishment via reparation in way that crippled Germany. For the US and Germany, the answer was political and economic reform that would ultimately strengthen Germany and unite it with the rest of Europe. In order to demonstrated that France was not altogether determined to humiliate Germany and that the US, France and Britain were united in principle relative to preventing a second world war, this paper is divided into two main parts. The first part of the paper provides an overview of the conditions in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War and demonstrates how those conditions and experiences informing the three allies’ motives in negotiating the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The second part of this paper provides an analysis of the negotiations and the final agreement at the Paris Peace Conference. Post World War I and Conditions in Europe The post-war period beginning in 1919 represented the initial stages of an on-going 20th century effort to stabilize Western Europe.3 The need for stability in the aftermath of the First World War was particularly urgent given the conditions in Europe immediately after the war. Allies were forced to think ahead in terms of preventing another catastrophic war, and in the short term as conditions in Europe commanded immediate solutions. European infrastructure had been destroyed in the war effort. Thus economic disruption was obvious. In the meantime, the Austrian, Turkish and Russian empires had been demolished indicating political instability in Europe. Germans and many other Europeans were suffering from food shortages. Germany was particularly hard hit as a result of the British blockade during the war which blocked food imports to Germany.4 It would therefore appear that although the First World War had ended, immediate peace was threatened as political and economic unrest indicated that the conditions were incapable of sustaining peace. Not only was there a need to alleviate suffering immediately, but a need to implement reforms and reparations that would ensure sustainable peace and stability. These conditions and factors and the threat of immediate crises as well as crises in the future were necessarily driving forces for the negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference on 1919. Out of the three states, France, US and Britain, France took a more direct and brutal hit from Germany. Not only had France lost Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871,5 the German invasion of France during the First World War cost France significant damages to life and property. Most of north France was completely destroyed and France emerged from the First World War morally and economically crippled, saddled with a significant war debt. By 1920, France’s “internal debt” in terms of “ratio of its national product was 1.64” compared to Britain’s 1.26 and the US’s 0.27.6 Thus compared to Britain and the US, France’s post-war experience was more serious and urgent. Immediate recovery was urgent and therefore the desire to safeguard against a reoccurrence of destruction of the kind experienced during the First World War would be more urgent and personal to France than it would be for the US and Britain. Britain sustained significant damages during the Second World War, but not nearly as much as the French had. Just as importantly, Britain had not been invaded by Germany, but instead had declared war on Germany in August 1914 after Germany attacked Belgium, a neutral state. More importantly, Britain felt obligated to defend France after it was invaded by Germany. Moreover, when the war ended, Britain had possession of some of Germany’s territory, a claim the French could not have made.7 Thus Britain had not suffered the moral humiliation that France had suffered. Of the three allies (France, Britain and the US), the US sustained the least amount of damages and France and Britain were in fact, indebted to the US for supplies for the duration of the First World War. The US did not enter the First World War until 1917 and did not begin officially fighting until 1918. Thus the US’s direct involvement in the First World War was minimal compared to France and Britain. The US lost only 117,000 soldiers compared to 900,000 for Britain and nearly one and a half million for France.8 It is also worth noting that the US as a physical state was removed from the battlefield and was therefore spared damages to its infrastructure. Thus of the three allies discussed in this paper, the US sustained the least damages and as a result was arguably the stronger ally moving forward with the negotiations. In this regard, reparations from Germany itself should not have been as high of a priority for the US as it could have been for France or Britain. In other words, the First World War experiences of the US, Britain and France provide some insight into understanding and interpreting their demands for a solution to the German problem and for safeguarding against a second world war. The Paris Peace Conference The Paris Peace Conference is described as a post-war plan for peace via establishing a system of world order such as the resulting League of Nations. In this regard, the talking points and the tone of the negotiations were informed by Wilson’s Fourteen Peace Points.9 How Britain and France accommodated Wilson’s Peace Points was largely influenced by their specific experiences during the First World War and how they prioritized security moving forward. France’s Position at the Paris Peace Conference Essentially France sought to limit Germany’s political, economic and military strength. This approach has been described as a desire by France to destroy Germany “politically” and to destroy Germany’s “economic and military capabilities”.10 These kinds of characterizations contribute to the perception that France was motivated by a desire to humiliate Germany and fail to take account of France’s experiences during the First World War and how those experiences might have informed France’s vision of security and peace. Lentin puts France’s position in its proper perspective by arguing that from France’s perspective: The exaction of reparations from Germany appeared as a political, geo-political, economic, financial and psychological necessity: a means of exerting some control over Germany with a frightening potential for resurgence, of financing reconstruction along the devastated Western Front, of balancing the French budget, of counterbalancing crippling war-debts...11 Making matters worse for France, the US was unwilling to write-off the war debt owed by France.12 Thus France was confronting a serious and virtually insurmountable dilemma created by Germany and wanted Germany to take responsibility for repairing the damages it created. While there is nothing unreasonable in those demands, it was unfair to expect a crippled Germany to repair the damages in France and to return France to its pre-war status. However, France was not concerned with humiliating Germany as much as it was expecting Germany to make amends for its humiliation of Germany and to safeguard against the risk of Germany invading France in the future. It therefore follows that France insisted on the establishment of independent states such as Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia to contain any threat that Germany may pose in the future by serving as power balancing states. France also proposed the creation of a Rhineland state as a means of weakening Germany’s economic growth and to act as a barrier between Belgium and Germany and France and Germany. In this regard, an opening address by the French leader Georges Clemenceau on 18 January 1919 as the president of the Paris Peace Conference is very instructive. Clemenceau said: The greater the sanguinary catastrophe which devastated and ruined one of the richest regions of France, the more ample and more splendid should be the reparation – not merely the reparation for material acts, the ordinary reparation, if I may venture to say so, which is due to us – but the nobler and loftier reparation – we are going to try to secure, so that the people may at last escape from this fatal embrace, which, heaping up ruins and sorrows, terrorizes the populations and prevents them from devoting themselves freely to their fear of the enemies who may spring at any moment.13 While the words used by Clemenceau can be interpreted as a veiled attempt to exact revenge from Germany or to humiliate Germany, it appears to be more consistent with a leader attempting to rebuild his country after a devastating loss, and to reassure his citizens that rebuilding would not be in vain: the country will be safe from another attack of the kind experienced during the First World War. It was simply not enough to rebuild if Germany could rise to power and launch a similar attack in the future. France wanted urgent and immediate reassurance that Germany would not rebuild its military and economic power and that France could recover some of its debt from Germany in its rebuilding process. France was under considerable pressure to rebuild as a means of safeguarding against political and economic unrest at home. France’s combined war debt to the US and Britain was around US$3.5 billion. In addition, Russia owed France 12 billion Francs which was disputed by the Bolshevik government and therefore France had no hope of recovering that particular debt. Meanwhile, thousands of mines, homes, factories and businesses had been completely destroyed in France during the First World War.14 France was therefore crippled by the war and the war had been Germany’s war. It therefore follows that France had no choice but to turn to Germany for reparations for the damages sustained and assurance that Germany could not threaten France’s security in the future. Obviously, France’s proposals for reparations and assistance would essentially humiliate Germany, but in the end, it was merely collateral damages and merely incidental to what France thought was necessary for rebuilding France and at the same time ensuring that Germany was punished as a means of deterring future threats to France’s security on the part of Germany. After all, wrongdoers are always punished as a method of deterring and preventing undesirable behaviour and thus punishment in the appropriate circumstances is not frowned upon as attempts to humiliate the wrongdoer. Britain and the US’s Position at the Paris Peace Conference Britain’s Prime Minister Lloyd George had spoken of what might amount to humiliation of Germany in his pre-conference speeches at the Imperial War Cabinet and thus can be said to have been effected by the war in a manner akin to that of Clemenceau. In the Imperial War Cabinet in March 1917, George indicated that the felt that punishment was the correct response to Germany once the war came to an end. George reportedly said” The conviction must be planted in the minds of the civilised world...that all wars of aggression are impossible enterprises. Men must in future be taught to shun war as every civilized being shuns a murder; not merely because it is wrong in itself, but because it leads to inevitable punishment. That is the only sure foundation for any league of peace.15 It would therefore appear that Britain and France were both reacting to their own experiences with the War and the need to safeguard against Germany or any other country exacting the same kind of damages in the future. As the war came to an end, George remained unrelenting in his vision for Germany. In fact, George even used the word “humiliating” stating that Germany should essentially be treated to a taste of its own medicine and should experience “an even more humiliating defeat”.16 When it was suggested to George that “revenge” was “too expensive”, George responded that it was not revenge, but rather it was “justice”.17 It can therefore be argued that from Britain’s perspective, Germany not only deserved to be punished, but it was justice for the damages it inflicted and only right in terms of repairing the damages it inflicted. In this regard, Germany and France appeared to have the same motives going into the Paris Peace Conference. Even so, as the Paris Peace Conference took shape, George tempered his sentiments and reflected perhaps a more holistic approach to the German problem and appeared to be more amenable to the US proposals for peace. It became apparent that although George wanted reparations just as much as France did, George was more realistic about Germany’s ability to make reparations and the long-term consequences of crippling Germany. George was not prepared to “kill the potential golden-egg-laying goose” particularly “since he also hoped to see Germany once more become chief customer to economically hard-pressed Britain” and wanted to “conclude large-scale agreements with Germany and Russia in the interests of general economic recovery”.18 Essentially, Britain like the US took the position that an economically strong Germany was good for a united and strong Europe and would safeguard against the prospects of war in the future. France, however took the position that if Germany were to gain economic strength it would be tantamount to gaining military strength.19 France’s fear was not unfounded since, a strong economy would essentially provide Germany with the means to rebuild its military and to invest in weaponry and thereby provide it with the means by which to wage a war against Europe in the future. This was especially likely if Germany was appeased rather than punished.20 Splelvogel argues that both the US and Britain were motivated by “considerably more pragmatic” concerns in negotiating the Paris Peace Conference.21 Britain and the US took into account the possibilities of disruption in world peace with the Soviet Union emerging in the international order. There was a united Anglo-American front relative to preventing the Soviet Union spreading its communist ideology and practices abroad. It was therefore felt that appeasing Germany and integrating a peaceful and stable Germany into the world’s trade system would ensure that Germany was not vulnerable to Soviet influence.22 Therefore looked at from this perspective, the US and Britain were more inclined to rehabilitate Germany but not in a way that ruled out the possibility of some measure of punishment. After all Wilson’s peace points did call for Germany to lose the territory annexed during the First World War and to ensure that Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France.23 However, in terms of economic reparations, both the US and Britain took the position that an economically stable Germany would be in a better position to repay damages sustained by the allies during the First World War.24 Britain also wanted to retain its naval supremacy and thus argued for eliminating the naval threat posed by Germany prior to and during the First World War. However, this proposal was accomplished by a natural act of the war itself when Germany’s fleet surrendered as a means of complying with the November 1918 armistice. In addition, the US and Britain did not agree on all of Wilson’s peace points. For example, Britain did not accept Wilson’s proposal that all states should be at liberty to use all seaports in times of peace and war. Ultimately Wilson withdrew this proposal.25 It would therefore appear that Britain and the US were more amenable to each other’s proposals and apparently had common interests. This might explain why historians typically lump the US and Britain together and argue that they were both committed to rehabilitating Germany while France was hungry for revenge and wanted only to humiliate Germany. However, it would appear that France and Britain primarily shared the same feelings about Germany’s culpability and how it should be dealt with. However, Britain looked at the larger picture and the future of Europe in the long term. Since Britain’s view was shared by the US, it was easier for the US and Britain to come to terms with what was best way to deal with Germany as Europe rebuilt and moved forward. Conclusion An examination of the conditions in post-war Europe and particularly in France, arguably justify any claim that France may have had for reparations. France had a responsibility to its own citizens and in doing so was not merely satisfied to accept bare reparations, but wanted to ensure that Germany would not be in a position to devastate France in the future. Britain initially shared France’s concerns and idea of justice. However, other political and economic concerns brought Britain closer to the US’s vision for peace and stability in Europe. Therefore it might appear to be correct to argue that France wanted to humiliate Germany while the US and Britain wanted to rehabilitate Germany. However, it is perhaps closer to the truth to state that France wanted to rebuild France and if it humiliated Germany in the process, Germany had itself to blame because it put France in the position that it was in. 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