The Treaty of Versailles: Carthaginian Peace or Pragmatic Compromise?

Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the Guilt of Germany: An Essay in the Pre-History of
Appeasement by A. Lentin; Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking,
1918-1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power by Klause Schwabe; Rita Kimber;
Robert Kimber
Review by: Betty Miller Unterberger
Reviews in American History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1986), pp. 398-404
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 THETREATYOF VERSAILLES:
CARTHAGINIANPEACEOR PRAGMATICCOMPROMISE?

Betty Miller Unterberger

A. Lentin. Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the Guilt of Germany: An

Essay in the Pre-History of Appeasement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 1985. xii + 193 pp. Illustrations, abbreviations, notes, bibliog-
raphy, and index. $25.00.

Klause Schwabe. Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peace-

making, 1918-1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power.
Translated from German by Rita and Robert Kimber. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1985. ix + 565 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index.
$36.00.

The Treaty of Versailles was described by disappointed liberals as 'the peace

to end peace."Instead of a Pax Americana based on Woodrow Wilson's Four-
teen Points, the document ending the FirstWorld War was viewed as nothing
more than a bundle of compromises and contrivances, at best a convenient
improvisation. Was the Treaty of Versailles a Carthaginian peace? How did
President Wilson view it? How did the German Revolution and domestic
politics affect the shaping of the Treaty and its future world image? What
were the roles and contributions of the major protagonists, Wilson, Lloyd
George, and Clemenceau? How did the fear of an expanding Bolshevism af-
fect the policies of not only Wilson and the other negotiators at Paris but the
German goverment as well?
The story of the Armistice and of the Versailles Conference has been told in
detail before, but here are two books which make distinctive and valuable
contributions to that crucial period in history. Lentin's study, based on
original research and incorporating much unpublished British material, con-
siders the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles from a new per-
spective. He locates the origins of appeasement in the dissatisfaction with the
Treaty felt among the British delegation at Paris, in its sense of discrepancy
between the liberal ideals held out by Woodrow Wilson, and the perceived
actuality of a single Carthaginian peace. He discusses this disenchantment
against the particular background of Article 231, the notorious "war-guilt

398

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UNTERBERGER/ The Treaty of Versailles 399

clause"whereby Germany was obliged to acknowledge responsibility for the

war and liability for Allied losses.
The protracted struggle between Wilson, committed to a peace of justice,
and Lloyd George, anxious to fulfill - ostensibly at least - his election
pledges of November 1918 to make Germany pay, is the focus of Lentin's
study. While genuinely aiming at a lasting peace, Lloyd George was through-
out the Conference preoccupied by what he called the most baffling problem
in the peace treaty: the overriding need to placate public opinion in Britainby
insisting on exactions from Germany, which he knew to be both unrealistic
and contrary to Allied undertakings at the time of Armistice. He saw an
escape from his dilemma in the inclusion of the war-guilt clause and the post-
ponement of the final settlement of reparations. Lloyd George's dealings with
Wilson and Clemenceau and with his own delegates and colleagues in Cabi-
net and Parliament demonstrate his ingenuity and his mastery of men and
events at a crucial historical moment. Their long-term effect however was to
leave a legacy of guilt in Britain rather than in Germany.
Although Paul M. Kennedy describes appeasement as a British tradition
dating from 1865,1 Lentin, surveying the postwar mood of appeasement, sug-
gests that British guilt over the British role in saddling Germany with heavy
reparations and the war-guilt clause, helped to fashion an essentially mis-
placed and distorted response to the problem of German resurgence in the
1930s. In probing the origins of this debilitating and near fatal malaise, in
seeking to understand the transformation in British eyes of Wilson's Pax
Americana into a perceived Carthaginian peace, Lentin reveals the interplay
of circumstances, policy, and personality behind the inclusion of the war-
guilt clause, thereby shedding further light on the reputation and hence the
fate of the Treaty overall. He offers a chronological account of this twisted,
calculated, little appreciated aspect of peacemaking and focuses on the deci-
sions taken at the highest levels in London and in Paris during the half year
between cease fire and Treaty. He takes the reader behind the scenes and ex-
amines the roles played by the various representatives of the victorious
powers in the shaping of the final peace treaty and the League of Nations. He
follows the strivings, desperately serious, of Woodrow Wilson, for the prom-
ised peace of right and justice based on the Fourteen Points, and indicates the
no lesser insistence of Georges Clemenceau on a peace of security and restitu-
tion. Lentin traces the unfolding contribution of Lloyd George, a protagonist
in this as in so much of the Conference; he seeks to penetrate or divine his
concerns and objectives, to unravel or to infer the motives and the methods of
that remarkable politician, then - in that fateful interval between war and
peace - at the height of his fame and influence. In scrutinizing the erratic
behavior of the British prime minister, he emerges with an unappealing por-
trait of a wiley, double-dealing, selfish Welshman.

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400 REVIEWSIN AMERICAN HISTORY / September 1986

It was Lloyd George, Lentin reveals, who insisted that Germany accept full
responsibility for the late war and assume the direct and indirect costs of the
war, even when he knew that these demands were unrealistic and contrary to
the armistice agreement. From Lloyd George's viewpoint, Wilson could af-
ford to be idealistic; the European Allies could not.
Lentin, a Senior Lecturerat the Open University of Great Britain, lays the
basis for the oft-repeated claim that German nationalism in the twenties, and,
in particular, the rise of Hitler may be fairly attributed to the failure of the
Versailles victors to provide for a truly just and lasting peace. Not only was
the treaty not harsh enough to guarantee Germany's inability to initiate war
again, but it deliberately and unnecessarily humiliated a proud nation which
was convinced that the responsibility for the Great War must be shared by
others. Lentin concludes that Lloyd George's chief interest was in playing the
political game and winning it. During the negotiations Lloyd George's posi-
tion vacillated in response to public opinion, and more especially, parliamen-
tary and press critics because he could not fulfill the rash promises he had
made during and after the Coupon Election in November 1918, to extract a
huge indemnity from the Germans. Lord Northcliffe called Lloyd George a
chameleon. Baldwin said he was that "very terrible thing,""adynamic force,"
and Jan Smuts thought him unstable and without any clear principles. His
character clearly baffled his contemporaries.
For Lentin, contrary to the image of Lloyd George drawn by Lloyd C.
Gardner in his recent study of the Anglo-American response to revolution,
there is little doubt.2 In his final pages, Lentin characterizesLloyd George as a
man who, at the summit of affairs in 1919, had been drawn to power like a
moth to a candle, who had come to worship success for its own sake and on
its own terms and to make it the first and last determinant of his actions; and
who for his final appearance on the world stage, a few years after his
Berchtesgaden visit to Hitler in 1936, aspired to a role that would reconcile
power with practical politics. Lentin sees him as the British counterpart to
Marshal Petain; in which capacity, Lentin believed that he could doubtless
have pulled off a better "deal than most."
Lentin concludes that the treaty was unrealistic, too harsh to conciliate
Germany, and at the same time too weak to restrain it indefinitely, a treaty
designed to demoralize, punish, and humiliate the German nation. Although
Lentin, a barrister himself, indicates that he seeks to understand rather than
to judge, at times his volume sounds like a brief for the prosecution. Never-
theless, his book is stimulating reading, guaranteed to provoke thought. Poli-
cies of Wilson and Clemenceau, though ultimately incompatible, were clear
and comprehensible; in reconsidering them from the perspective of repara-
tions and war-guilt Lentin has little to add and much to reaffirm. Wilson, for
all his faults and his detractors emerges as the tragic hero of the Conference.

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UNTERBERGER/ The Treaty of Versailles 401

Although forced to sacrifice his own principles when he could no longer resist
the stronger wills of Britain'sLloyd George and Clemenceau, Wilson's vision
was noble and enduring, and his defeat was the world's. Lentinconcludes that
Lloyd George's failure lay in "actionissuing from character, or in characteris-
suing in action" (p. xiii).
In Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918-
1919, Klause Schwabe, from the University of Aachen, has undertaken an
analysis of German-American relations between January 1918 and June 1919
on the basis of massive evidence from governmental archives in the United
States and Germany. The study is an abridgement and revision of the
author's book, Deutsche Revolution und Wilson-Freiden(1971). The Ameri-
can version of the German original includes a considerable body of primary
source material not available when the author prepared the first version. It
also incorporates numerous pertinent studies which have come out during the
last fifteen years. Schwabe demonstrates a superb command of this large
body of historical literature about Wilson and the Paris Peace Conference.
What emerges is clearly one of the best informed portraits of Wilson the
diplomatist that has yet appeared.
In his introduction Schwabe describes the two basic patterns of historical
interpretation in regard to the Paris Peace settlement. One that has been
popular for decades in Germany and the United States holds that Wilson
betrayed his idealistic principles in order to help impose a punitive peace on
Germany.3 Another interpretation, by now almost as familiar, is that the
Paris negotiations basically represented a conspiratorial impulse to isolate
and hopefully to destroy the Bolshevik menace. From this viewpoint the Ger-
man Republic was actually allied with the western powers, particularly the
United States, in their struggle against social revolution. Lenin originated this
view and it continues to enjoy canonical status in official orthodox, Marxist
historiography. Arno J. Mayer presents a modified form of this argument in
his important and broadly-conceived study, Politics and Diplomacy of
Peacemaking (1967). A further modification of Mayer's view appears in
Gardner'smassive work. Herbert Hoover, a man whom no one could accuse
of leftist tendencies, presented an essentially similar view. In The Ordeal of
Woodrow Wilson (1958), his analysis of the final phase of the war and the
Paris Peace Conference, he strongly emphasized the role played by the United
States in rescuing Central Europe from Bolshevism. Schwabe subjects these
two seemingly contradictory interpretations to a minute analysis and tries to
arrive at a synthesis that would make room for the believable elements of
both. In this endeavor he acknowledges a similar undertaking by N. Gordon
Levin, Woodrow Wilson and World Politics (1968) and offers some refine-
ments of Levin's position.
In comparing the Treaty of Versailles with Wilson's wartime pronounce-

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402 REVIEWSIN AMERICAN HISTORY / September 1986

ments Schwabe concludes that Wilson was responsible for a "denial"but not
"betrayal"of his principles. Even though Germany was not integrated into a
liberal world order as Wilson had originally intended, the president was able
to persuade himself that the peace accorded with his principles. And Schwabe
points out that German diplomacy increased Wilson's suspicions of the coun-
try and its people. The republican government sought a lenient peace by em-
phasizing its revolutionary break with imperial Germany; yet it vehemently.
denied charges of German war guilt and thereby tended to defend and iden-
tify itself with the old regime. Moreover, Schwabe argues that German
diplomats committed a psychological blunder when they attempted to be
more Wilsonian than Wilson, particularly when they confronted him with the
accusation that the Draft Treaty was a betrayal of his own principles. They
failed to understandWilson's political pragmatism as well as his idealism, and
they failed to heed sufficiently the pressures that were on him both in Paris
and at home. They only drove him into a more uncompromising stand in his
own self-defense. The theme of mutual misunderstanding between Wilson
and the Germans pervades the book. According to Schwabe, that misunder-
standing quickly helped to discredit Wilsonian ideas in both Germany and
America.
As for the other approach, which views the peace settlement as an anti-
Bolshevik enterprise, Schwabe agrees that the German government doggedly
attempted to exploit the universal fear that Bolshevism would sweep Central
Europe. But he argues that its efforts soon proved counter-productive, for by
May and June 1919, when the German government was objecting to the terms
of the Draft Treaty, the situation in Germany was too stable for a Bolshevik
menace to be taken seriously. In any case, the suspicions and animosities be-
tween the German Republic and the western powers were too great for there
to be anything like a positive anti-Bolshevik conspiracy. Schwabe's analysis
throws serious doubt on recent interpretations that have stressed the anti-
Bolshevik element in Wilson's policies. The fear of a "Bolshevized"Germany
in the heart of Europe seems to have affected the president only for a brief
time after the Armistice. Thereafter he consistently failed to respond to Ger-
man appeals for support on that basis. He mistrusted the Ebert government
despite its anti-Communist character, on the grounds that it contained right-
wing and militarist elements. Whereas some historians may debate these con-
clusions, they are challenging, and my own research demonstrates them to be
realistic.4 Contrary to Lentin, Schwabe rejects the notion that the "idealist
Wilson" was outmaneuvered by "realists"like Clemenceau and Lloyd George
and that he therefore betrayed both Germany and his own principles at Ver-
sailles. While conceding that the final settlement did not entirely conform to
the president's stated aims, he contends that the modifications were a con-

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UNTERBERGER/ The Treaty of Versailles 403

scious result of Wilsonian realism and clashed more with the illusions enter-
tained by the Germans and by "Wilsonians"elsewhere than they did with the
beliefs of the president himself.
Schwabe's analysis emphasizes the pragmatic character of Wilson's "ideal-
ism" and reveals the president as an essentially conservative statesman whose
new international order was far more traditional than is often assumed.
Wilson regarded the territorialsettlement with Germany as conforming to the
Fourteen Points and resented German attempts to deny this. He clearly be-
lieved in German war guilt from the beginning and was never convinced that
the nation had been sufficiently reformed. He therefore saw neither injustice
nor a deviation from principle in the provision for war crimes trials or the
postponement of German membership in the League, and he looked askance
at the efforts of German spokesmen to defend their national honor by deny-
ing culpability. Moreover, as Seth Tillman points out in Anglo-American
Relations at the Paris Conference of 1919 (1961), Wilson considered the Ver-
sailles Treaty a feasible basis for postwar peace.5
Only on the question of reparations did Wilson consciously retreat, and he
did so for the most practical of reasons. Without some compromise on this
issue the Peace Conference would have undoubtedly broken up. To Wilson
that would have been a resounding personal defeat, with catastrophic politi-
cal repercussions at home. It would also in all likelihood have brought more
rightist governments to power in Britain and France, led to a resumption of
hostilities, and made more difficult the achievement of the stable world order
that Wilson sought. To risk all of this either in the name of abstract principle
or in the interest of the defeated enemy was never a realistic alternative and
that fact clearly limited Wilson's room for maneuvering.
The Germans, in their dealings with Wilson, were profoundly mistaken on
two counts. They failed to understand that Wilson's concept of justice in-
cluded the belief that nations must accept the consequences of their wrongful
acts and could not expect to escape these by protestations of innocence or ap-
peals to a morality they had violated. Far from allowing them to play off the
Americans against the Frenchand British, that very disunity forced Wilson as
the man most sincerely committed to peace and order, to make concessions.
Lentin also supports this latter interpretation.
Schwabe has uncovered a wealth of evidence and succeeded in delineating
the complexity of the situation both for the German government and for the
United States, and in the total context of postwar Europe. In this respect, he
corrects Levin's thesis, which focuses exclusively on domestic politics and
Wilsonian ideology, neglects foreign sources, and ignores the foreign policy
of Germany and the German delegation at Versailles. Schwabe is particularly
good at defining the communications problem and in describing the activities

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404 REVIEWSIN AMERICAN HISTORY / September 1986

of various middle men such as McNally, Herron, and Conger on the Ameri-
can side and Hahn and Loeb on the German.
Literary and scholarly styles vary among countries. With over five hun-
dred pages of detailed text on a monographic topic, the book is a typical Ger-
man habilitationsschrift. To many readers it may suffer from actual overkill.
And yet, in line with the best of contemporary diplomatic histories, the book
views diplomatic policies as only part of a larger whole, also involving do-
mestic political and socioeconomic pressures, which cannot be ignored. Most
important, the book represents a dedicated effort to achieve a balanced inter-
pretation where the reader is exposed to a complexity of relationships and
tentativeness of historical judgments. This book is clearly a solid contribution
to the literature and establishes Schwabe as a recognized authority on inter-
national relations at the close of the First World War.

Betty Miller Unterberger,Department of History, Texas A&M University, is

the author of "Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution," in Arthur S.
Link, ed., Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World (1982), and a forth-
coming volume on "The United States and Revolutionary Russia: The Czech-
oslovak Connection."

1. Paul M. Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870-1945 (London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1968), pp. 13-41.
2. Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution,
1913-1923 (1984), p. 262, and passim.
3. Ernst Fraenkel, "Das deutsche Wilsonbild," Jahrbuch fiur Amerikastudien (Heidelberg:
Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1960) 5: 66-120; George Kennan, Russia and the West under
Lenin and Stalin (1961), p. 210; Harry Rudin, Armistice, 1918 (1944), p. 82.
4. For further supporting documentary evidence, see Arthur S. Link, David W. Hirst, John
E. Little et al., eds., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 56 vols. to date (Princeton, N.J. 1966-),
vols. 55 and 56; Betty Miller Unterberger, "Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution," in
Arthur S. Link, ed., Woodrow Wilson and a Revolutionary World (1982), pp. 49-105, and
America's Siberian Expedition: A Study in National Policy (1968), pp. 135-49.
5. For additional supporting or differing views, see Lloyd E. Ambrosius, "The Orthodoxy of
Revisionism: Woodrow Wilson and the New Left," Diplomatic History 1 (Summer 1977):
199-214.

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