ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of the features of the settlement deemed especially relevant in the context of Europe’s future: the redrawing of the map of Europe; the treatment of Germany; the machinery for reconstruction; and the equivocal attitude of the United States towards the problems of Europe. The inexorable rise of nationalism fed by the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and legitimised by the selective application of Wilson’s Fourteen Points in the Versailles settlement, threw economic coherence out of the window. Virtually all countries in East-Central Europe were polyethnic to some degree and in some cases, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Romania, up to a dozen nationalities and as many religions coexisted unhappily together. Germany had the strength and the motives to achieve territorial domination. Despite the exactions imposed by the Allies, Germany was potentially the strongest power on the Continent after the war.
