President Wilson became physically ill at the beginning of the Paris Peace Conference, giving way to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau to advance demands substantially different from Wilson's Fourteen Points. Clemenceau viewed Germany as having unfairly attained an economic victory over France, due to the heavy damage German forces dealt to France's industries even during the German retreat, and expressed dissatisfaction with France's allies at the peace conference.
Notably, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which would become known as the War Guilt Clause, assigned full responsibility for the war and its damages to Germany. The allies would initially assess 269 billion German gold marks in reparations, the equivalent of nearly 100,000 metric tonnes of gold. Germany's ability and willingness to pay that sum continue to be a topic of debate among historians.
Germany was also denied an air force, and the German army was not to exceed 100,000 men.
The text of the Fourteen Points had been widely distributed in Germany as propaganda prior to the end of the war, and was well known by the Germans. The differences between this document and the final Treaty of Versailles fueled great anger in Germany. German outrage over reparations and the War Guilt Clause is viewed as a likely contributing factor to the rise of national socialism.
At the end of World War I, only two foreign armies had entered Germany, and both advances had been brief and ultimately trivial - the advance of Russian troops into the Eastern border of Prussia, and French troops occupying Mühlhausen/Moulhouse for a few days, both at the outbreak of the war. Otherwise no foreign army entered the German 1918 borders during the War. This made the peace seem unfairly punitive to many, particularly Germans.
Nobel Peace Prize
Wilson was awarded the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, for his peace-making efforts. He also inspired independence movements around the world including the March 1st Movement in Korea.
81) Formation of the Labour Party in England, and its political and ideological platform.
Founding of the party
The Labour Party is a centre-left political party in the United Kingdom, and one of the two main British political parties along with the Conservative Party. The Labour Party was founded in 1900 and overtook the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929–1931.
The Labour Party's origins lie in the late 19th century, around which time it became apparent that there was a need for a new political party to represent the interests and needs of the urban proletariat, a demographic which had increased in number and had recently been given franchise. Some members of the trades union movement became interested in moving into the political field, and after further extensions of the voting franchise in 1867 and 1885, the Liberal Party endorsed some trade-union sponsored candidates. In addition, several small socialist groups had formed around this time, with the intention of linking the movement to political policies. Among these were the Independent Labour Party, the intellectual and largely middle-class Fabian Society, the marxist Social Democratic Federation and the Scottish Labour Party.
In the 1895 general election, the Independent Labour Party put up 28 candidates but won only 44,325 votes. Keir Hardie, the leader of the party, believed that to obtain success in parliamentary elections, it would be necessary to join with other left-wing groups. Hardie's roots as a Methodist lay preacher contributed to an ethos in the party which led to the comment by 1950s General Secretary Morgan Phillips that "Socialism in Britain owed more to Methodism than Marx".
The Labour Party was initially formed as a left-wing political party, but has moved further to the centre since then.[2][3][4] Officially, it has maintained the stance of being a socialist party ever since its inception, part of the social democratic ideological trend that rose among sections of the working classes across Europe at the end of the 19th Century.[6] The party currently describes itself as a "democratic socialist party".[7][8] The most influential branch of socialism within the Labour Party, other than democratic socialism, has been ethical socialism, promoted most recently by Tony Blair.[9][10][11] The party has been described as a broad church, containing a diversity of ideological trends from strongly socialist, to more moderately social democratic.[12]
Historically the party was broadly in favour of democratic socialism, as set out in Clause Four of the original party constitution, and advocated socialist policies such as public ownership of key industries, government intervention in the economy, redistribution of wealth, increased rights for workers, the welfare state, publicly funded healthcare and education. Throughout its early history, from the participation of the Social Democratic Federation in its founding to the expulsion of Militant Tendency in the 1980s, there were radical Marxist trends in the Party. In 1947, the Labour Party published a reprint of the Communist Manifesto with an introduction by Harold Laski.[13] Beginning in the late-1980s continuing to the current day,[14] the party has adopted free marketpolicies, leading many observers to describe the Labour Party as social democratic[15][16][17][18] or Third Way, rather than democratic socialist.[16][17][19][20][21] Other commentators go further and argue that traditional social democratic parties across Europe, including the British Labour Party, have been so deeply transformed in recent years by prevailing economic and social neoliberalismthat it is no longer possible to describe them ideologically as 'social democratic',[22] and claim that this ideological shift has put new strains on the party's traditional relationship with the trade unions.
Party electoral manifestos have not contained the term socialism since 1992, and in 1995 the original Clause Four was abolished. The new version, although still affirming a commitment to democratic socialism, drops mention of public ownership of industry:
The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.
The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after which it formed amajority government under Clement Attlee. Labour was also in government from 1964 to 1970 under Harold Wilson and from 1974 to 1979, first under Wilson and then James Callaghan.
The Labour Party was last in national government between 1997 and 2010 under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, beginning with a majority of 179, reduced to 167 in 2001 and 66 in 2005. Having won 258 seats in the 2010 general election, the party currently forms the Official Opposition in theParliament of the United Kingdom. Labour has a minority government in the Welsh Assembly, is the main opposition party in the Scottish Parliament and has 13 MEPs in the European Parliament, sitting in the Socialists and Democrats group. The Labour Party is a member of theSocialist International and Party of European Socialists. The current leader of the party is Ed Miliband MP.
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