After the Versailles Treaty

Enforcement, Compliance, Contested Identities

Conan Fischer, Alan Sharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317996293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Designed to secure a lasting peace between the Allies and Germany, the Versailles Settlement soon came apart at the seams. In After The Versailles Treaty an international team of historians examines the almost insuperable challenges facing victors and vanquished alike after the ravages of WW1.

This is not another diplomatic history, instead focusing on the practicalities of treaty enforcement and compliance as western Germany came under Allied occupation and as the reparations bill was presented to the defeated and bankrupt Germans. It covers issues such as:

• How did the Allied occupiers conduct themselves and how did the Germans respond?
• Were reparations really affordable and how did the reparations regime affect ordinary Germans?
• What lessons did post-WW2 policymakers learn from this earlier reparations settlement
• The fraught debates over disarmament as German big business struggled to adjust to the sudden disappearance of arms contracts and efforts were made on the international stage to achieve a measure of global disarmament.
• The price exacted by the redrawing of frontiers on Germany's eastern and western margins, as well as the (gentler) impact of the peace settlement on identity in French Flanders.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Diplomacy and Statecraft

The Enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles, 1919–1923

Alan Sharp

On June 28, 1919 the peace treaty between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany was signed in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, the location itself one more episode in the humiliation and counter-humiliation of Germany by France and vice versa. After six months of intensive inter-allied negotiations the treaty was complete.¹ A British delegation member, James Headlam-Morley, anticipated that “No doubt things will become more orderly, but they will be much duller.”² He was wrong on both counts. Drawing up the treaty represented the easy part, enforcing it would be harder. As always, the devil was in the detail—working out precisely what the wording of the clauses meant when they encountered the real world—not least because, even as they were being drafted, those clauses meant, sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately, different things to the different parties involved. The treaty was the product of compromises seeking to meet as many of the national interests of the main negotiators as possible. It had been drawn up under great pressure occasioned by the complex and interlinked nature of the problems it sought to address and the simultaneous need, in a world struggling to return to “normalcy,” for the leaders to return to tackle pressing domestic concerns in the capitals they had abandoned for the conference. The peace conference’s lack of organisational clarity also meant that maximum demands, intended for subsequent revision after dialogue with the Germans, were often incorporated unaltered when no such negotiation occurred. There were sometimes clashes between the high moral ideals set by the American president, Woodrow Wilson (and, perhaps, also the British premier, David Lloyd George) and the need to reach conclusions—“II faut aboutir” as the formidable French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, was wont to observe.

Where the negotiations had involved three, four, and sometimes more parties, enforcement fell mainly to two, Britain and France. Much of the treaty existed because the United States had significantly influenced the outcomes, often against the wishes of Britain or France, and sometimes both. Now they found themselves enforcing a treaty that they would not necessarily have drafted, increasingly bereft of American counsel, presence and support, and without a common interpretation of what they hoped to achieve. Lloyd George’s attempt in June 1919 to modify the draft treaty terms had, with the major exception of the plebiscite in Upper Silesia, largely failed but many British decision-makers did not accept this as final. On the other hand they were aware that the French too might wish to modify the treaty—but in a different direction.³ Further complications arose from the continuing negotiations to draft treaties with the other defeated powers, at least one of which, the rejuvenated Turkey, refused to lie down. Additionally there was the huge uncertainty represented by the former Tsarist empire of Russia, now rent by secession, foreign intervention and civil war, but increasingly in the grasp of the revolutionary force of bolshevism. It was, however, the central relationship between Britain and France, and their differing perspectives, aims and objectives coupled with their joint and individual relationships with Germany, which dominated the high politics of treaty enforcement.

This paper uses the episode of the March 1920 Kapp Putsch to introduce a number of issues that dominated the early years of enforcement but any such brief and schematic account must oversimplify the complexities. The “real world” was not a vision shared by the major states, nor even by individual representatives from the same country. There were disputes as to what was actually happening, disputes as to how this should be interpreted and disputes about how to deal with the disputed consequences. There were disputes between countries and between conflicting agencies within countries. From this tangle governments were supposed to create coherent policies and order.

The treaty’s entry into force required the ratification of Germany and three of the main allies.⁴ The Germans deposited their ratification on July 10. Arthur Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary and chief representative in Paris after the departure of Lloyd George, expected the process would be complete by mid-August,⁵ but only on January 10, 1920 did the treaty enter into force. Some delay was convenient to Britain because, although technically the king could ratify the treaty, it was thought wiser to have an Act of Parliament. This received royal assent on July 31, but now raised a further complication. The Dominions would be affronted if the British parliament was consulted but not theirs, given their growing sense of separate identities.⁶ All had approved by October 3. On October 14, President Poincaré ratified the treaty for France. Like George V, he might have acted without parliamentary approval but did not do so. The treaty underwent the scrutiny of committees of the Chamber and the Senate, both accepted that Clemenceau had achieved the best attainable deal for France and the two houses approved the ratification law. Since the King of Italy had ratified the treaty on October 6, the allies were in a position to let the treaty enter into force but they did not do so.

This was not for the lack of the various bodies and agencies required to enforce the treaty. Germany had already agreed to the allied proposals for an Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission to supervise the government of the Rhineland during the occupation.⁷ In July 1919 the new major allied body replacing the Council of Four, the Heads of Delegation—the representatives of the five major allied powers, Britain, France, Japan, Italy and the United States—had approved a commission to deal with the execution of the treaty with Germany and a pre-Reparations Commission to act until the treaty was in force.⁸ It also agreed the composition of three separate disarmament control commissions for air, sea and land, with appropriate internal sub-divisions.⁹ The French Secretary-General of the conference, Paul Dutasta, drew up a list of the actions required by the treaty, with a note of the time limits and interested countries. This was circulated on July 23.¹⁰ A plan for the Rhine Occupation Army proposed by the French commander-in-chief of the allied armies, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, was approved on July 26.¹¹ Once the peace conference ended it was envisaged that an allied commission would undertake the overall supervision of the execution of the treaty and an outline of what became the Conference of Ambassadors was approved on July 28.¹² The mechanisms were ready.

The allies were not. There were concerns that, once the coercive powers available under the armistice were superseded by the treaty, it might be impossible to enforce unfulfilled armistice conditions or to force German troops to evacuate the Baltic provinces.¹³ The major issues related to German failure to deliver compensation for the June scuttling of the High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow and alleged war criminals (including important figures like Bethmann Hollweg, Hindenburg, Tirpitz and Crown Prince Rupprecht—the Kaiser having already fled to Holland which refused to surrender him).¹⁴ Foch suggested allied occupations of Frankfurt or the Ruhr District unless the Germans agreed to meet the allied conditions. Most allied leaders in Britain and France believed Germany would concede before such drastic action was necessary but there was panic in London when Clemenceau’s draft note of December 6, 1919 threatened “to place Germany in face of a rupture of armistice with all consequences which would follow therefrom” unless Germany agreed to the conditions for final ratification.¹⁵ Lloyd George summoned George Curzon, Balfour, Andrew Bonar Law and Winston Churchill to a late evening meeting at 10 Downing Street which sent Lloyd George’s private secretary, Philip Kerr, to Paris to negotiate an amended draft.¹⁶ This was accomplished, though more on Clemenceau’s terms than Lloyd George’s. The Germans, as expected, backed down and, after some further tinkering, terms were agreed and the treaty entered into force on January 10, 1920.

This increased Lloyd George’s determination to terminate the Paris peace conference and replace it with regular meetings of allied leaders. In early December Clemenceau accepted it would end within a fortnight of the deposit of ratifications. Thereafter “large questions of policy” would be dealt with by direct exchanges between governments and “questions of detail” would be the concern of a Conference of Ambassadors, meeting in Paris but “large questions of policy,” and “questions of detail,” were not defined.¹⁷ The Paris conference thus ended on January 21, 1920, one year and three days after its opening, but Headlam-Morley’s expectation of greater order was still not fulfilled.

On March 13, 1920, there was an attempted coup in Germany, nominally led by Wolfgang Kapp, a civil servant. Such elements of the German army that were not actively supporting Kapp’s Putsch refused to help the government, which fled to Stuttgart and then re-established its authority by calling a general strike, paralyzing Kapp’s regime. This led to the first major confrontation of treaty enforcement and it revealed a series of issues, themes and attitudes that encapsulated the essence of the problems involved and which would be a constant presence throughout the execution of the treaty. These included: the questions of what mechanisms existed to enforce the treaty; how the different agencies interacted and the nature of authority within and between them; the sanctions available to the victorious governments to enforce their will; the position and problems of the German government; the extent to which there was a single will or vision amongst the allies about the role, intentions and good faith of the Germans and their government; the relationship and suspicions existing between Britain and France and the differing aims, ambitions and approaches of the major participants.

The aftermath of the putsch caused more problems than the event itself. A mixture of a real and imagined communist threat in the Ruhr led both the legitimate and insurrectionary governments to request permission for extra troops to be allowed into the demilitarised zone to restore order. This revealed confusions in the allied ranks about authority and control. Although Kapp’s request was ignored that of the legitimate government received contradictory answers from two allied meetings, each believing it had the overall authority. In Paris the Ambassadors’ Conference heard Foch oppose the German request and suggest an allied occupation of the Ruhr. It decided to refuse the German request. In London the now peripatetic Supreme Council was simultaneously meeting to discuss the treaty with Turkey. It agreed to recommend approval of the request.¹⁸ Curzon was anxious to maintain the authority of the Supreme Council, but in Paris the French premier, Alexandre Millerand, argued vigorously (though unsuccessfully) that the ambassadors had the power and duty to act for the allies.¹⁹ Curzon commented acidly, “M.Millerand not only regards the Peace Conference as sitting in Paris, but as I have before remarked, he regards himself as the Peace Conference.”²⁰

The veteran French ambassador in London, Paul Cambon, wrote on March 29 to his brother Jules in Paris, encapsulating this confusion. “There has never been such a shambles of a conference. Here we have the supreme council which thinks it is the Peace Conference. Then there is the Council of Ministers and Ambassadors that Curzon chairs.²¹ Finally we consider that the Peace Conference still remains in Paris. Its existence is entirely imaginary, it is a phantom, but we cling to it as if it were reality. In addition there is the Ambassadors’ Conference, chaired by yourself or sometimes by Millerand. I’m not sure what its powers are. I just see that it undertakes the same business as we do and that the two bodies often have contradictory opinions. I don’t understand any of this, and I’m not asking you to explain what’s what. It’s inexplicable.”²² There was thus chaos at the highest level about the overall control of peace enforcement, contributing, in this instance, to isolated action by the French, who occupied five German towns, Frankfurt, Darmstadt, Hanau, Homburg and Dieburg on April 5/6, 1920.

This confusion was ominous because the crisis revealed that the British and French governments intended to keep matters of treaty enforcement in their own hands. Lord Robert Cecil, one of the main architects of the League of Nations and a passionate believer in the new body, argued that the German troops in the forbidden area represented a threat of war that should be, according to the treaty, referred to the League. The Foreign Office admitted the strength of his case but brushed it aside—such matters were for the allied governments to settle, not the League.²³ The League might be useful for finessing the issue of self-determination when it was felt necessary to provide France with the coal of the Saar and Poland with the use of Danzig as a port without awarding either state sovereignty over the respective inhabitants. It was convenient to brush responsibility f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The Enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles, 1919–1923
• 2. The British Zone of Occupation in the Rhineland
• 3. “Hut ab,” “Promenade with Kamerade for Schokolade,” and the Flying Dutchman: British Soldiers in the Rhineland, 1918–1929
• 4. French Policy in the Rhineland 1919–1924
• 5. The Reparations Debate
• 6. The Human Price of Reparations
• 7. Reparations in the Long Run: Studying the Lessons of History
• 8. Disarmament and Big Business: The Case of Krupp, 1918–1925
• 9. Making Disarmament Work: The Implementation of the International Disarmament Provisions in the League of Nations Covenant, 1919–1925
• 10. From Lothringen to Lorraine: Expulsion and Voluntary Repatriation
• 11. The Versailles Settlement and Identity in French Flanders
• 12. “The Sore That Would Never Heal”: The Genesis of the Polish Corridor
• Conclusion
• Index