Versailles and Peacemaking

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• 1. The American liberal peace programme
• 2. Challenges to Wilson
• 3. Negotiations begin
• 4. Germany incensed
• 5. A stab in the back
• 6. Find out more
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The American liberal peace programme

The peace settlement was drawn up at the end of a long and gruelling war which cost over eight million lives and, according to one estimate, around 260 billion dollars - or to put it another way, over six times the sum of all the national debt accumulated in the entire world from the end of the 18th century to 1914.

'When press reports about Wilson's Fourteen Points first reached Germany, the American peace programme was indignantly dismissed...'

The expectation of both the Allies and the Central Powers was that the costs of the war would largely be recouped from the losers. Furthermore, both sides planned to exploit their victory by inflicting territorial losses and military limitations on the enemy, and confiscating a sizeable chunk of their economic and industrial resources.

However, such ambitions did not accord well with the peace programme being drawn up in the United States in the course of 1918. The Fourteen Points, delivered by the President of the United States to the American congress in January 1918, and his subsequent addresses represented an ambitious and idealistic bid by Woodrow Wilson to seize the initiative on behalf of the United States and to offer moral leadership to the world in the ensuing peace negotiations.

When press reports about Wilson's Fourteen Points first reached Germany, the American peace programme was indignantly dismissed by conservatives as being a 'front for imperialistic conquest' and striking a note of victory which was 'hardly appropriate to Germany's unprecedentedly promising military situation' in early 1918. In stark contrast to Wilson's peace proposals, the Germans concluded an extremely harsh treaty with Russia at Brest Litovsk in March 1918, and turned their attention to a final, all-out push to break the Allied lines on the Western Front.

But victory did not materialise. Instead, by August of 1918 the German High Command were facing defeat. Now Wilson's peace proposals looked very attractive, compared to the terms likely to be put forward by French or British leaders. The High Command hastily summoned political leaders from the German Reichstag to put their weight behind a new civilian government under Prince Max von Baden, and to agree to pursue peace negotiations with Wilson based on the Fourteen Points. The cynical calculation was that a new civilian government would secure a more lenient peace than would be offered to German military leaders.

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Published: 2002-02-01