After the Versailles Treaty

Book excerpt: 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