ABSTRACT
War debts and reparations were one of the most complex and controversial problems blighting international relations between the Armistice in November 1918 and the early 1930s when this unsustainable edifice of inter-governmental indebtedness finally collapsed under its own weight. The reasons for this pivotal significance are not hard to understand. First, there was the vast scope of this web of inter-governmental obligations. Altogether a total of 28 countries (plus a further three self-governing dominions of the British Commonwealth) were ensnared in either war debts or reparations; a list which encompassed all the European belligerents except Turkey, every one of the new ‘successor states’ created by the Treaty of Versailles and all of the European neutrals except Spain. A second factor which both magnified and aggravated the position of these so-called war debts was the labyrinthine complexity of this pattern of financial obligations. Of the 28 countries involved, five were debtors only, ten were creditors only and the remaining 13 were both creditors and debtors. Germany was the largest debtor with 11 creditors, while America was the largest creditor with 16 debtors, and it was owed over half of the total. Yet even smaller nations like Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Czechoslovakia had as many as nine or ten creditors each.
