The First World War and its aftermath opened to gates to international politics and warfare as we know them today. After five years of brutal and slow stalemate, American intervention finally broke the back of Germany. The abdication of the Kaiser and unconditional surrender of the Weimar Republic led to treaty negotiations at the Paris Peace Conferences in 1919. The world that Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, and other conference participants found themselves tasked with reshaping was in terrible ideological and political turmoil. War sickness dominated the popular psychology of Europe. Russia was in the midst of a total communist metamorphosis under Vladimir Lenin. The people of France demanded revenge against their most hated rival.
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The now obvious error of this approach was not recognized by many at the time. British economist John Maynard Keynes, who would later receive great acclaim for his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (which inspired much of the economic policy behind the New Deal and the international response to the 2008-2009 global financial crisis) was one of the few who recognized major long term structural faults in the new peace. Keynes’s 1919 work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was instrumental in formulating the modern historical consensus that the Treaty of Versailles was a flagrant illustration of victor’s justice, a peace that was clearly designed to punish Germany and further the geopolitical aims of the victorious forces (I think that France’s rabid desire to “get even” with the Germans was especially to blame on this front). Keynes eventually left the conference, citing disillusion with the hardheadedness of the Allied leaders and “it became evident that hope could no longer be entertained of substantial modification in the draft Terms of …show more content…
Wilson’s arrival in Europe was widely celebrated. He was greeted by the cheers of a war weary Europe that viewed the Americans as saviors. His Fourteen Points represented hope for a new future free from war, disenfranchisement of the weak, autocratic government, and the establishment of a new world “made safe for democracy”. The language and attitude of his idealism seems almost reminiscent of John Winthrop’s “shining city on a hill”. Alas, the Treaty of Versailles was starkly different from Wilson’s new vision for the world. Keynes muses: “By what legerdemain was this policy substituted for the Fourteen Points, and how did the President come to accept it?” Keynes views Wilson’s defeat and capitulation in Paris as “one of the decisive moral events in history” and Wilson himself as “lacking that dominating intellectual equipment necessary to cope” with the environment in Paris, 1919. (An interesting charge to level at a man who was President of Princeton University with a doctorate in political science.) Keynes describes him as being “not sensitive to his environment at all,” and generally less perceptive and politically savvy than his French and British counterparts. This first hand view of Wilson was quite at odds with the popular perception of the man as a “philosopher king” type. This dichotomy damaged Wilson’s credibility at the conference. Another damaging factor for Wilson was his relative
The now obvious error of this approach was not recognized by many at the time. British economist John Maynard Keynes, who would later receive great acclaim for his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (which inspired much of the economic policy behind the New Deal and the international response to the 2008-2009 global financial crisis) was one of the few who recognized major long term structural faults in the new peace. Keynes’s 1919 work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was instrumental in formulating the modern historical consensus that the Treaty of Versailles was a flagrant illustration of victor’s justice, a peace that was clearly designed to punish Germany and further the geopolitical aims of the victorious forces (I think that France’s rabid desire to “get even” with the Germans was especially to blame on this front). Keynes eventually left the conference, citing disillusion with the hardheadedness of the Allied leaders and “it became evident that hope could no longer be entertained of substantial modification in the draft Terms of …show more content…
Wilson’s arrival in Europe was widely celebrated. He was greeted by the cheers of a war weary Europe that viewed the Americans as saviors. His Fourteen Points represented hope for a new future free from war, disenfranchisement of the weak, autocratic government, and the establishment of a new world “made safe for democracy”. The language and attitude of his idealism seems almost reminiscent of John Winthrop’s “shining city on a hill”. Alas, the Treaty of Versailles was starkly different from Wilson’s new vision for the world. Keynes muses: “By what legerdemain was this policy substituted for the Fourteen Points, and how did the President come to accept it?” Keynes views Wilson’s defeat and capitulation in Paris as “one of the decisive moral events in history” and Wilson himself as “lacking that dominating intellectual equipment necessary to cope” with the environment in Paris, 1919. (An interesting charge to level at a man who was President of Princeton University with a doctorate in political science.) Keynes describes him as being “not sensitive to his environment at all,” and generally less perceptive and politically savvy than his French and British counterparts. This first hand view of Wilson was quite at odds with the popular perception of the man as a “philosopher king” type. This dichotomy damaged Wilson’s credibility at the conference. Another damaging factor for Wilson was his relative