ABSTRACT
The Treaty of Versailles represents the formal opening of the period covered by this book, and that is fully justified because it gave international recognition to the new Europe which the forces unleashed by the First World War had created. Indeed, in retrospect, the ‘creations’ of the Conference itself were probably negative rather than positive in their impact: the establishment of the free city of Danzig, the imposition of an unrealistic burden of reparations on Germany and reliance on a League of Nations to which nobody was willing to give serious support and which America declined ever to join.
