TREATY OF VERSAILLES & EUROPEAN HISTORY

This research paper summarizes and analyzes the impact of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 on European history during the interwar period. The territorial, financial and security framework and arrangements created by and under the Treaty of Versailles ultimately (by the late 1930s) failed to keep the peace in Europe. The tenuous equilibrium among the principal European powers prior to 1914 broke down and was shattered by World War I and its aftermath. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the manner it was imposed on Germany contributed to the continuing instability of Central and Eastern Europe and to revanchist sentiment in Germany. At the same time, the incomplete, inconsistent and later pusillanimous efforts of the Western Allies to enforce the Treaty undermined its effectiveness. However, many other factors, especially political instability, economic decline and the dynamic resurgence of Germany military power under Adolf Hitler were more fundamental causes of the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

The Treaty of Versailles was executed on June 28, 1919 by the Allied Powers, the United States (an Associated Power) and Germany. It came into effect on January 10, 1920. The central decision making body of the Paris Peace Conference was the Council of Four consisting of Prime Minister Lloyd George of Great Britain, Premier Georges Clemenceau of France, American President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Min

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and reparations clauses helped the German General Staff and right-wing leaders propagate the myth that Germany had not really lost the war but had been betrayed by a stab in the back from leftists, Jews, and other domestic traitors. Hitler, as a rising agitator in Munich in the 1920s, struck a responsive chord among the Germans when he termed the Treaty "a peace of shame" and "the instrument of Germany's slavery" (Kershaw 136). Kennan said "this was a peace which had the tragedies of the future written into it, as by the devil's own hand" (69). For a variety of reasons, the Treaty and the associated collective security arrangements thereunder, including the League of Nations, the Anglo-French alliance and French defense treaties with Czechoslovakia and other newly independent nations in Central and Eastern Europe, failed to prevent the resurgence of German power in the 1930s which in the hands of Hitler after 1933 posed an increasingly ominous and eventually mortal threat to Germany's neighbors. The Treaty was not self-enforcing. While the Inter-Allied Control Commission did its best to enforce German disarmament, German military and civilian officials even in the 1920s clandestinely obstructed its efforts, and kept in being th
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Approximate Word count = 3354
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)