The Paris Peace Conference. Role of the Treaty of Versailles.

The Paris Peace Conference was the meeting of the Allied victors following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers following the armistices of 1918. It took place in Paris in 1919 and involved diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities. They met, discussed various options and developed a series of treaties ("Paris Peace Treaties") for the post-war world. These treaties reshaped the map of Europe with new borders and countries, and imposed war guilt and stiff financial penalties on Germany. The defeated Central Powers' colonial empires in Africa, southwest Asia, and the Pacific, would be parceled between and mandated to the victorious colonial empires, based on the different levels of previous development and the creation of the League of Nations.

At the center of the proceedings were the leaders of the four "Great Powers": President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Great Britain, George Clemenceau of France, and, of least importance, Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando; Orlando eventually had pulled out of the conference and did not play a role in constructing the final draft of the Treaty of Versailles. Germany and Communist Russia were not invited to attend, but numerous other nations did send delegations, each with a different agenda. Kings, prime ministers and foreign ministers with their crowds of advisers rubbed shoulders with journalists and lobbyists for a hundred causes, ranging from independence for the countries of the South Caucasus to racial equality.

For six months Paris was effectively the center of a world government, as the peacemakers wound up bankrupt empires and created new countries. The most contentious results included a punitive peace treaty that declared Germany guilty, weakened its military, and required it to pay all the costs of the war to the winners. This was known as the war-guilt clause that was included in the final Treaty of Versailles. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had ceased to exist as its disparate peoples created new states. Unsatisfied with these results and conflicted with their Constitution, the United States never ratified the Treaty of Versailles, never joined the League of Nations, and signed separate peace treaties with the three countries it had declared war against. Historians debate whether or not the terms imposed on Germany helped the rise of Nazi Germany and were thus a cause of World War II, and whether the terms were the best that could be expected, given the mood of the victors.

The conference opened on 18 January 1919.^[1] The opening date was deliberately chosen by the French so as to ensure the conference would commence on the anniversary of the Unification of Germany which had been proclaimed at Versailles 48 years earlier. ^[2] The conference came to an end on 21 January 1920 with the inaugural General Assembly of the League of Nations.

The following treaties were prepared at the Paris Peace Conference (with, in parentheses, the affected countries):

· the Treaty of Versailles, 1919, 28 June 1919, (the German Empire in Weimar Republic form)

· the Treaty of Saint-Germain, 10 September 1919, (Austria)

· the Treaty of Neuilly, 27 November 1919, (Bulgaria)

· the Treaty of Trianon, 4 June 1920, (Hungary)

· the Treaty of Sèvres, 10 August 1920; subsequently revised by the Treaty of Lausanne, 24 June 1923, (Ottoman Empire).

The so-called "Paris Peace Treaties", together with the accords of the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922, laid the foundations for the so-called Versailles-Washington system of international relations. Eric Hobsbawm, a historian, has claimed that "no equally systematic attempt has been made before or since, in Europe or anywhere else, to redraw the political map on national lines.... The logical implication of trying create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states each inhabited by separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities. Such was and is the reductio ad absurdum of nationalism in its territorial version, although this was not fully demonstrated until the 1940s."^[3] The remaking of the world map at these conferences gave birth to a number of critical conflict-prone international contradictions, which would become one of the causes of World War II.^[4]

The decision to create the League of Nations and the approval of its charter both took place during the conference.

The "Big Four" were the dominant diplomatic figures at the conference. The conclusions of their talks were imposed on the defeated countries.

The Treaty of Versailles (French: le Traité de Versailles) was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war betweenGermany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The otherCentral Powers on the German side of World War I were dealt with in separate treaties.^[1] Although the armistice signed on 11 November 1918, ended the actual fighting, it took six months of negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. The treaty was registered by the Secretariat of the League of Nations on 21 October 1919, and was printed in The League of Nations Treaty Series.

Of the many provisions in the treaty, one of the most important and controversial required Germany to accept responsibility for causing the war (along with Austria and Hungary, according to the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Treaty of Trianon, respectively) and, under the terms of articles231–248 (later known as the War Guilt clauses), to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay heavy reparations to certain countries that had formed the Entente powers. In 1921 the total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion Marks (then $31.4 billion or £6.6 billion, roughly equivalent to US $442 billion or UK £284 billion in 2012), a sum that many economists at the time, notably John Maynard Keynes, deemed to be excessive and counterproductive. The argument by Keynes that the terms were too harsh—too "Carthaginian"—convinced many British and American leaders, but left the French unmoved.^[2]

The result of these competing and sometimes conflicting goals among the victors was compromise that left none contented: Germany was notpacified or conciliated, nor permanently weakened. This would prove to be a factor leading to World War II.

Negotiations between the Allied powers started on 18 January in the Salle de l'Horloge at the French Foreign Ministry, on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris. Initially, 70 delegates of 27 nations participated in the negotiations.^[3] Having been defeated, Germany, Austria, and Hungary were excluded from the negotiations. Russia was also excluded because it had negotiated a separate peace with Germany in 1918^{[ citation needed ]}, in which Germany gained a large fraction of Russia's land and resources. The treaty′s terms were extremely harsh, as the negotiators at Versailles later pointed out.

Until March 1919, the most important role for negotiating the extremely complex and difficult terms of the peace fell to the regular meetings of the "Council of Ten", which comprised the heads of government and foreign ministers of the five major victors (the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Italy, and Japan). As this unusual body proved too unwieldy and formal for effective decision-making, Japan and—for most of the remaining conference—the foreign ministers left the main meetings, so that only the "Big Four" remained.^[4] After his territorial claims to Fiume (today Rijeka) were rejected, Italian Prime Minister, Vittorio Orlando left the negotiations and only returned to sign in June.

The final conditions were determined by the leaders of the "Big Three" nations: British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and American President Woodrow Wilson. Even with this smaller group it was difficult to decide on a common position because their aims conflicted with one another. The result has been called the "unhappy compromise".^[5]

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