Reactions to the Treaty and the Wider Settlement
Three Audiences, Three Reactions
When the Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919, three groups had to live with the result: the Allied powers themselves, defeated Germany, and the patchwork of new states drawn out of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. Each was disappointed, although for very different reasons. The four other peace treaties of 1919-1920 — Saint-Germain with Austria, Trianon with Hungary, Neuilly with Bulgaria and Sèvres with the Ottoman Empire — together formed the wider settlement that redrew the political map of Europe.
Versailles was only one of five treaties: Saint-Germain (1919, Austria), Trianon (1920, Hungary), Neuilly (1919, Bulgaria) and Sèvres (1920, Ottoman Empire). Together they dismantled four empires and created or recognised states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Austria.
Allied Reactions
Each of the victorious powers found something to dislike. In the United States, the Senate, controlled by Republicans hostile to international entanglement, twice refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, in November 1919 and March 1920. The USA never joined the League of Nations — depriving Wilson’s creation of the country whose president had designed it. Italy felt cheated. Wartime promises from Britain, France and Russia (the secret 1915 Treaty of London) had drawn Italy into the war with offers of Adriatic territory. At Paris, Italy was denied parts of the Dalmatian coast and the city of Fiume, leading to nationalist outrage and the slogan ‘mutilated victory’.
France felt the treaty had not gone far enough. Marshal Foch wanted the Rhine as the western frontier and feared Germany would simply rebuild. Britain, by contrast, was already worrying that the terms were too harsh; Lloyd George privately predicted another war within a generation. Japan, the only non-European great power at Paris, was offended when its proposed clause on racial equality was rejected, although it gained former German Pacific islands as mandates.
German Objections
For Germany, the treaty was a national humiliation. The most explosive idea to emerge was the ‘stab-in-the-back myth’ (Dolchstosslegende). Promoted by right-wing politicians and former generals, it claimed that the German army had not been defeated in the field; it had been betrayed by socialists, communists and Jews on the home front. The civilian politicians who signed the armistice and the treaty — the ‘November Criminals’ — were branded traitors. This narrative would poison the new Weimar Republic from its birth and provide ready material for Hitler’s rise.
Specific objections were sharp. Article 231 was rejected as morally false. Reparations were rejected as unpayable. The army cap left Germany unable to defend its borders. Territorial losses cut roughly six million Germans off into other countries — in violation, Germans argued, of Wilson’s own principle of self-determination. The ban on Anschluss with Austria struck many as proof that self-determination was applied selectively.
The peacemakers tried to apply self-determination to central Europe but found it impossible to draw clean ethnic borders. Czechoslovakia contained roughly three million Germans in the Sudetenland, plus Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles and Ruthenians. Yugoslavia bound together Serbs, Croats and Slovenes — communities with different religions, scripts and recent histories. Poland was reborn after 123 years and immediately faced disputes with Germany, Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine.
These successor states were small, surrounded by larger neighbours, and contained sizeable ethnic minorities who often resented being citizens of the wrong country. Treaties tried to protect minority rights through the League, but enforcement was weak. Hungary, which had lost two-thirds of its pre-war territory under Trianon, became the most revisionist state in Europe — and the disputed Sudetenland would later become Hitler’s lever for cracking the post-war order.
Strengths of the Settlement
It is easy to dwell on the failures, but the settlement also had genuine strengths. It kept the great powers of Europe out of war with one another for over a decade. It applied self-determination to Poland, the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia and Finland after generations of imperial rule. It dismantled four authoritarian empires and replaced them with mostly democratic governments. It created the League of Nations — for all its later weaknesses, the first international organisation devoted to preventing war. The 1925 Locarno treaties and Germany’s admission to the League in 1926 suggested the system could evolve.
The settlement was undermined from the start by three structural problems. First, the United States, the strongest power, walked away. Second, Russia, ravaged by civil war and ideologically opposed, was excluded. Third, Germany was treated as a defeated outlaw rather than a future partner. The League was therefore born without three of the world’s most important countries. The settlement also relied on small new states defending themselves against future German or Russian recovery — an unrealistic burden, as 1939 would prove.
The wider settlement’s greatest strength was applying self-determination to many peoples for the first time. Its greatest weakness was the absence of the USA, the exclusion of Russia, and the alienation of Germany. The League of Nations was therefore born missing three of the world’s most important powers.