Review: A Shattered Peace

Abstract

A SHATTERED PEACE Versailles 1919 and Price We Pay Today David A. Andelman Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008. 326pp. US$25.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-471-78898-0)No peace settlement in modern history has provoked more widespread controversy than Paris peace treaties of 1919. For much ofthe 20th century, historians and policymakers alike have debated extent to which Paris peacemakers of 191 9 should be blamed for subsequent breakdown of international order. The condemnation of Versailles began immediately after signing of treaty. John Maynard Keynes, himself a junior member of British delegation to Paris, famously argued that victors provoked German hostility by pursuing an unnecessarily vindictive settlement, while Woodr ow Wilson's friend and advisor in Paris, Edward Mandell House, admitted in his diary that the treaty is bad and should never have been made.Almost 90 years after conclusion of treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, and Trianon, matters no longer seem so stark and straightforward. Few people would dispute that treaties were a diplomatic disaster, offending vanquished and many of those smaller aspiring nations that had joined allied war effort in an attempt to gain recognition as independent states. Yet much of literature on Paris peace treaties over last 15 years has complicated picture of western ill will with a heightened recognition of highly limited scope of action that western policymakers had in face of nationalist expectations in their home countries after four years of uninterrupted bloodshed on a historically unprecedented scale. Thanks to inspiring works such as Margaret MacMillan's Peacemakers (2001), Zara Steiner 's The Lights That Failed (2005), and Manfred Boemeke's The Treaty ofVersailles (1998), we know a great deal about obstacles and constraints faced by key policymakers, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau, as well as divergent national war aims and shifting domestic coalitions that shaped final treaty document. Confronted with tough realities of building a new world order from ruins of 19thcentury diplomacy, peace treaties constituted no more and no less than minimal consensus on which key players could agree.At same time, historians have begun to acknowledge that peacemakers' efforts to reconstruct wartorn Europe were not altogether unsuccessful. The League of Nations in particular, often charged with responsibility for failing to prevent rearmament and outbreak of Second World War, certainly made substantial contributions in fields of healthcare, drug control, economic cooperation, labour legislation, and laws to prevent illegal trafficking of women. Its work foreshadowed aspects of European and global cooperation that are usually described as emerging after Second World War, both in terms of policy content and impact that members of League's secretariat had on post- World War II institutions such as United Nations, European Community, World Health Organization, International Court of Justice, and International Labour Organization.David Andelman's new account ofVersailles and its aftermath certainly strikes a more sombre tone. …