ABSTRACT
Bold, audacious and utopian, the Versailles Treaty was fatally flawed from the start. It lacked moral validity as the infamous ‘war guilt’ clause only applied to Germany when the other belligerents in World War I had been just as culpable. In practical terms the Treaty sought to combine the ‘Fourteen Points’ enunciated by President Woodrow Wilson with the pursuit of ‘victor’s justice’ by the British and French. The outcome was to allocate millions of Germans to other states where they agitated for pan-Germanic reunion. A new patchwork quilt of Balkan states was too big, and too unstable, to guarantee political longevity. Both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia failed to command the allegiance of their disparate populations. Hungarian populations were allocated to Romania and the Germans of the South Tyrol to Italy. Reparations were rightly condemned by the economist J.M. Keynes as enfeebling Germany to the point of being counter-productive. Sadly the Treaty rearranged the map of Europe for the next war.
