David on Treaty of Versailles

“It was the young Keynes who most famously chronicled the hope-smothering defects of the treaty that was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. Wilson had envisioned a liberal peace, a peace without victory, a peace that would magnanimously restore Germany to its rightful place in an open world of free trade and democracy. In that world commerce would be unshackled from political constraint, politics would be based on the principle of self-determination, and order would be maintained by a new international body, the League of Nations. But what emerged from the ordeal of the Paris peace negotiations was a document that mocked those ideals.”

“The Versailles Treaty, Keynes wrote in his embittered and astute tract of 1919, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, contained three lethal flaws. It transferred important coal, iron, and steel properties from Germany to France and prohibited their utilization by German industry. ‘‘Thus the Treaty strikes at organization,’’ Keynes declared, ‘‘and by the destruction of organization impairs yet further the reduced wealth of the whole community.’’ The treaty further stripped Germany of her overseas colonies, foreign investments, and merchant marine and restricted her control of her own waterways and tariffs. Most economically punishing of all, the victorious powers then imposed on this drastically weakened Germany a colossal bill for some $33 billion in reparations payments. Adding insult to injury, the treaty’s Article 231—the notorious ‘‘guilt clause’’—forced the Germans to acknowledge sole responsibility for the outbreak of the war. The treaty, Keynes concluded, insanely perpetuated in peacetime the economic disruptions of the war itself. To the military catastrophe of the fighting was now added the economic burden of a vengeful peace. Germany, struggling to become a republic, bore most of the fearful tonnage. But all nations, victors and vanquished alike, were bowed beneath its crushing ballast in the interwar decades.”