The First World War ended with a series of peace treaties, most notably the one signed with Germany in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles. In imposing these treaties, the victorious Allies aimed both to punish the defeated powers and to ensure a stable postwar world.
The most obvious failure of the Treaty of Versailles was that it did not prevent the outbreak of the next war two decades later. Even in 1919 the economist John Maynard Keynes, who attended the peace conference, predicted that the harshness of the treaty would lead to financial collapse in Germany and further chaos. Equally sceptical was Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the French supreme commander of Allied forces in the war, who complained in May 1919: ‘This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.’
The pace of events put pressure on the peacemakers. The war had ended in 1918 with the fall of the Austrian and German governments and the defeat of the Turks. Nationalists in Eastern Europe and in the collapsed Turkish empire now demanded new states. The peacemakers responded by separating Hungary from Austria (its once great empire shrunk to around its present size) and by acknowledging Poland and Czechoslovakia as independent nation-states. Romania expanded. Serbia became the basis of the new state of Yugoslavia.
Germany did not lose territory on the Austrian scale, but it did lose land to Poland, and was forced to return the conquests made from France in 1871. It also had to demobilize and disarm, and to pay reparations: compensation for the damage its armed forces caused. This damaged the German economy and antagonized its people, to the advantage of extremists like Adolf Hitler. The Nazis exploited it as a way to discredit the Weimar Republic, the democratic government formed in Germany in 1919 to replace the imperial system.
The destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire left simmering grievances. In Hungary anger persists to this day about areas with Hungarian majorities that were transferred to Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia (now Slovakia, Romania and Croatia). Turkey lost many possessions in 1920, in particular the Arab provinces conferred on France (Syria and Lebanon) or Britain (Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan). When the Allies carved the Middle East into artificial nation-states, bounded by arbitrary straight lines, they created at least three long-term problems. They thwarted Arab nationalist ambitions, glossed over sectarian divisions (especially between Shia and Sunni Muslims), and ignored the rights of local non-Arab peoples such as the Kurds.
Prompted by the US president, Woodrow Wilson, the Versailles settlement set up a new international body to oversee the global system and to keep the peace, a ‘League of Nations’. But America was a land largely settled by Europeans fleeing persecution or war in their own countries. Long averse to ‘foreign entanglements’, it reverted to its usual isolationism: the US Senate refused to support the League and America did not join it. Add to this the exclusion of communist Russia and the defeated Germany, and the League’s global reach was shackled from the start (see here ).