The triumphs of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Fascists in Italy set up the two poles within which both the domestic politics of each country and the international relations of inter-war Europe functioned. For that reason alone, instability could be expected over the next decades. However, the forces in Germany which had pursued policies of world domination before 1914 remained powerful and expectant. The Versailles Peace Conference did little to ensure that their ambitions would not rise resurgent at some point in the short to middle term. One essential element in future German strength would be the existence of numerous small national groups, previously submerged in the great Turkish, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires, who successfully clamoured at Versailles for their independence. The plethora of new nations, together with the chaos and destruction of war, severely undermined the economic stability of the old system. The future military threat of Germany was perceived with greatest intensity by the French who believed that the decision of 1871 should be reversed and the Reich broken up into smaller units. However, both the British and the Americans favoured a lenient peace to draw the new Weimar Republic into a new stable world. Germany was both economically important and perceived as a necessary buffer against revolutionary Russia. The resulting compromise was the worst of all worlds. Germany was allowed to keep its borders. But, to appease the French, punitive financial and industrial reparations were demanded, German military capability was severely limited, the Rhineland was occupied. To a nation which had been subjected to incessant wartime propaganda guaranteeing victory, the humiliating and impoverishing clauses of the Versailles Treaty seemed not to be a just punishment for national misdemeanour but a savage and cruel Diktat to be shaken off as soon as possible.
Within Germany, the right had gambled everything on victory and yet, with the exception of the loss of the Kaiser, had skilfully avoided the consequences of its actions. The acceptance of the Weimar Republic was a small price to pay for survival and the stifling of revolution. Nevertheless, the German right denied that there had been any Allied victory and attributed all of the country’s ills to the Social Democrats who were denounced as the ‘November Criminals’. National resentment of the ‘injustice’ of Versailles would be a potent political force for the group fortunate enough to be able to mobilize it. The post-Versailles geopolitical situation could not have been more propitious for those Germans who wanted to complete the unfinished business of 1918. The power vacuum to the east was filled with the weak states of Austria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and what would eventually become Yugoslavia. They constituted little barrier against the day when an expansionist German government might begin to flex its muscles. It was an area that, in the eyes of the western powers, was fertile territory for Bolshevism. Accordingly, there would always be a covert sympathy for any German move to the east. In this sense, Germany was potentially stronger in 1919 than she had been in 1914.
In her first trial of strength with France, Germany won. The issue was German failure to meet the reparation clauses of the Versailles settlement, which were intended to pay for the deliberate destruction of the French infrastructure during the war. The French responded to German failure to pay by seizing mines and factories in the Ruhr. Encouraged by a German government ploy to print masses of paper money to prove that Germany could not pay, there was a massive inflation. Eventually, fear of total collapse in Germany impelled the British and the Americans to press the French to withdraw. The so-called Dawes Plan reduced German reparations to a level acceptable to Berlin. The
French humiliation was consolidated by the Treaty of Locarno in October 1925 whereby France, Germany, and Belgium agreed to respect their mutual frontiers, which effectively prevented French freedom of action against German transgressions of the Versailles settlement.
World History
