Treaty of Versailles

Background

The Paris Peace Conference convened in January 1919 to write the formal peace terms ending the First World War. Thirty-two states sent delegations; the substantive bargaining was conducted by the 'Big Four' — Wilson for the United States, Lloyd George for Britain, Clemenceau for France, Orlando for Italy — with Japan taking a watching brief on Pacific questions. Germany was not present at the bargaining; the treaty was presented for signature, with no real possibility of negotiation, on 7 May 1919, and signed on 28 June (T&H 270–280).

Quigley emphasizes that the negotiation took place against the backdrop of three incompatible programs: Wilson's Fourteen Points (national self-determination, open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, a League of Nations); Clemenceau's program of permanent French security against any German revival (reparations, demilitarization of the Rhineland, dismemberment of Austria-Hungary); and Lloyd George's effort to extract maximal British imperial gains (the German colonies, Ottoman Middle East mandates) while keeping enough Germany intact to balance France on the continent (T&H 273–285; AAE 154–158).

Quigley's framing — the Milner Group at Paris

The reading that distinguishes Quigley from standard diplomatic histories is in The Anglo-American Establishment: the Milner Group 'dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919' (AAE 5). He documents this in detail. Milner himself, Colonial Secretary, was one of the signers of the Treaty (AAE 47). Leo Amery, Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), Smuts, Lord Robert Cecil, and a long list of more junior Group members served as advisers, drafters, or plenipotentiaries (AAE 154–158, 182). The British delegation's intellectual core — the men writing the briefs, drafting the texts, advising Lloyd George — were almost without exception either Kindergarten graduates or Round Table associates.

More importantly, in Quigley's reading, the Paris conference is where the Group built its peace-time institutional architecture. At meetings at the Hôtel Majestic in May–June 1919, members of the British and American delegations — including Lothian, Curtis, and on the American side Colonel House's foreign-policy advisers — agreed to found parallel councils on foreign affairs in London and New York. The British body became the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), founded 1920; the American body became the Council on Foreign Relations, founded 1921 (AAE 182–192). The treaty was thus, in its by-product, the moment the Anglo-American foreign-policy establishment Quigley anatomizes was institutionally born.

Outcomes — the treaty text

The Treaty imposed: (1) sole German 'war guilt' under Article 231 — a clause Quigley regards as both factually false and politically disastrous, providing the legal hook for the open-ended reparations claim and the propaganda hook for the German revanchist right (T&H 290); (2) reparations payments whose final amount was deferred to a Reparations Commission, eventually set at 132 billion gold marks in 1921 — a sum the Weimar economy could service only with a continuous inflow of American loans, which the Dawes Plan of 1924 organized (T&H 320–322); (3) territorial cessions: Alsace-Lorraine to France, the Polish Corridor and Danzig separating East Prussia from the rest of Germany, Eupen-Malmédy to Belgium, and a fifteen-year occupation of the Saar; (4) demilitarization of the Rhineland, a 100,000-man army, no air force, no submarines, no tanks; (5) the transfer of Germany's overseas colonies as League of Nations mandates, with Britain and France acquiring the African territories and Japan acquiring the Pacific ones; and (6) the League of Nations Covenant as Part I of the treaty itself (T&H 270–290).

The parallel treaties — Saint-Germain with Austria, Trianon with Hungary, Neuilly with Bulgaria, Sèvres (later Lausanne) with the Ottoman Empire — settled the rest of the eastern questions. Quigley reads this complex of treaties as a single settlement and treats 'Versailles' as a shorthand for the whole (T&H 273).

Consequences

Quigley's verdict is that the treaty was neither harsh enough to prevent German revival nor lenient enough to reconcile Germany to the post-war order — a critique he shares with Keynes (whose Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919, was substantially correct in Quigley's reading) but extends in his own direction. The deeper failure, he argues, was that the post-war powers refused to enforce what they had signed. France wanted enforcement but lacked the strength to enforce alone; Britain wanted reconciliation but provided no security guarantee; the United States, after the Senate's rejection of the treaty in 1920, withdrew entirely (T&H 295–305).

The complex of Dawes (1924), Locarno (1925), and the Young Plan (1929) were British-and-American attempts to manage the contradictions of Versailles without abandoning its formal terms — what Quigley calls 'the most complicated and most deceitful international agreement made between the Treaty of Versailles and the Munich Pact' (AAE 220). When American credit dried up in 1929, the structure failed; Germany defaulted; and the political consequences of the Versailles burden — by then a decade old and unresolved — produced Hitler.

For the Milner Group, Quigley argues, the treaty was both a public diplomatic failure (the men responsible had not built a stable peace) and a private institutional triumph (they had organized themselves into a permanent Anglo-American policy network). The contradiction haunts the inter-war period and frames the appeasement of the 1930s: a Group whose published policy was rapprochement with Germany was a Group whose officials had drafted the very treaty Germany was determined to overturn (AAE 220–238).

Legacy

Quigley devotes substantial space in both Tragedy and Hope and The Anglo-American Establishment to the Versailles settlement and to the men who made it. The treaty is one of his most heavily cited events — 131 substantive mentions across the corpus, with the longest treatment in AAE Chapter 8 ('War and Peace, 1915-1920') and T&H Chapter 7 (T&H 153, 270–310; AAE 154–192).

The historiographical aftermath, he insists, was largely written by the Group itself. Lothian, Curtis, Temperley (editor of the standard six-volume A History of the Peace Conference of Paris), Wheeler-Bennett, and Arnold Toynbee all wrote books, edited document collections, or directed Chatham House research that set the terms of inter-war discussion in English (AAE 188–192). The story the public received was the story the Milner Group wanted told; Quigley wrote AAE in significant part to make this hidden authorship visible (AAE 6–8). In Quigley's frame, Versailles is the case study for how a coordinated informal network can capture not only diplomacy but the writing of diplomatic history.