Analyse the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Versailles Settlement.

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Analyse the Strengths and Weaknesses of the Versailles Settlement.

Chronological transportation doesn’t allow us the ability to look at thoughts of an individual or group conciousness. We project ourselves into the Hall of Mirrors, catch a glimpse into the static eyes of the delegates there. In areas of Germany historical evidence shows that democracy was embraced: J W Hiden relays the parliament was full of ‘responsible and meticulous discussion’. It is fair to believe these new Western notions had reached German eyes and ears long before Woodrow Wilson arrived on the scene. Ruth Henig backs up the viewpoint and provides a more optimistic element of closure to the relationship between Germany and co-advocates of self-determination through the character of Lloyd George and what is known of his beliefs. (That Germany would help rebuild, contain itself and act constructively in the post-war years). However, Hiden does go on to mention the suspect manoeuvring of Weimar President Friedrich Ebert when the enlisting of the Friekorps through his Ministry of Defence quelled a Spartacist mutiny. The final morturary numbers, were in four figures from that incident, including Luxemburg and Liebknecht who at the time maintained strong moral and political connections. (At the time of their deaths they had ties with the Social Democrats. The Spartacists and Communist Party had formed pre-war on an anti-war basis, and post-war, both had openly stated a disinterest in violent revolution.) Ebert’s error was a terrible stain on the child Republic that no doubt would have biased the attitudes of the visiting ambassadors.

 The organisation of the treaty and following settlement appears to have been written on a foundation of vindictiveness and misinformation. Weaknesses of the Versailles settlement include the indisputable fact that prior to the June meetings many of the problems which had led up to The World War had already been resolved. The Czarist Empire of Russia had already been transformed, and the Hapsburg Empire too collapsed. The German Empire became the Weimar Republic, a constitutional monarchy through the necessity-activated movements of the Socialists. Lees states that Paris as a venue for the Peace Conference seemed solely designed to heighten Anti-German sympathies. On May 18 of 1919  though, George, Clemenceau, Wilson and Orlando began to deal the cards with Germany not so much as the stake but rather at the stake. Both Georges had attained their leader-roles halfway through the war, while knowledge of their military efficiency as an area of expertise was public knowledge. Perhaps these were not the ideal chaps to be handling the transmutation of war into peace. Henig states that Wilson’s lack of communication with the Allies in the German armistice ‘did not augur well with the peace process’. She goes onto represent the poor trait of Wilson’s in his failure to convince his American colleagues that the Versailles programme was worth spending time and resources on. Other-hand, there were probably very few listeners in France at that time. By holding the treaty signings in France, there was a certain element of the settlement’s design that hoped to bring out the guilt of Germany, the birthplace of it’s empire. Craters, barbed wire, trenches, corpses and grief were stacked high over France’s farmlands and towns.

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The British and Americans sought lofty, abstract goals such as ‘freedom’, ‘the righting of injustice’ : not as easy to achieve as the purity of aspiration to fulfillment. France’s demands and requirements, at least moved initially in the direction of physical form, territorial invasion, and achievement by means of the blood of a pen. That the Germans later claimed this was a ‘dictated peace’, was a criticism levelled at the attempt to set conditions of life for more than two billion people. Expectation that plebiscites, the right to national self-determination and access to the means of production would be adequately ...

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