VERSAILLES, TREATY OF. The Treaty of Versailles, which formed the core of the peace settlement after World War I, was signed on 28 June 1919. Outside the German delegation, it was signed by two countries of the initial Triple Entente that had gone to war against Germany in August 1914, France and the United Kingdom (the third one, Russia, having already signed a separate treaty at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918), and by a number of nations that had joined them at later stages in the war, the major ones being Italy, Japan, and the United States (1917). This widely different experience of the war explains why unity of purpose was so difficult to achieve among the Allies during the peace conference that opened in Paris on 18 January 1919.
Whereas British and French official policy followed traditional lines of territorial and colonial ambitions, combined with guarantees of military security and reparations from the defeated, American peace aims were expressed in President Woodrow Wilson's ideal of self-determination and his Fourteen Points, first put forward before Congress in January 1918 as the foundation of a just, durable peace. These included the novel concept of "A general association of nations … for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike." The Fourteen Points had been seen by Germany as an honorable way out of the war, and they were therefore central to the Allied negotiations in Paris, which finally led to the treaty as presented to the Germans, who had been excluded from the conference. The American president, who headed the U.S. delegation in person, played a leading role in getting his allies to agree on a common text. He often acted as an arbiter between their rival claims and as a moderator of their territorial and financial demands from Germany and its allies, though the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, maintained that it was he who acted as the conciliator between Wilson, the naive idealist, and French premier Georges Clemenceau, the wily realist. Wilson's greatest personal achievement in this respect was the early acceptance of his association of nations by Britain and France, which had been reluctant to relinquish any parcel of their sovereignty to an international organization, and its elaboration into the Covenant of the League of Nations, which formed Part I of the treaty. An article in it effectively ruled out the possibility of a long war between the signatories, let alone a world war, if the European great powers, Japan, and the United States adhered to it: "Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard of its covenants … it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all Members of the League.…It shall be the duty of the Council in such case to recommend to the several Governments concerned what effective military, naval, or air force the Members of the League shall severally contribute to the armed forces to be used to protect the covenants of the League." The French were still unconvinced that this protected them forever against renewed attack by a demographically and economically stronger Germany, and they insisted on further guarantees of military security from Britain and the United States, which they verbally obtained in April. Since the vexed question of "making Germany pay" was to be decided later by a Reparations Commission, the way was now clear for a settlement ostensibly based on Wilson's conceptions of a "peace between equals." Indeed, contrary to general belief, derived from very effective German propaganda, there was no mention of war guilt as such in the wording (by Americans Norman Davis and John Foster Dulles) of Article 231, which was couched in purely legal terms so as to give a justification to the reparations already provided for in the clauses of the armistice.
The territorial losses in Europe were defined in Part II: Alsace-Lorraine went to France, the Eupen-Malmédy area to Belgium, and western Prussia and the province of Posen (now Pozna[UN]) to Poland, with the creation of a "Polish corridor" to the sea around Danzig (now Gda[UN]sk). Memel (now Klaipe˙da) went to Lithuania, and plebiscites were to be held in North Schleswig, Upper Silesia, and the Saar (whose mines were given to the French as compensation for the flooding of their mines by German troops). The loss of territory amounted to 25,000 square miles with a population of 6 million, but most of the loss had already been envisaged in the Fourteen Points and accepted in the armistice. Overseas possessions (mostly carved up between the British and French empires) were examined in Part IV. Other parts defined German obligations in Europe, including the prohibition of an Anschluss with Austria; the demilitarization of the Rhineland and a band extending fifty kilometers deep on the right bank of the Rhine; a ban on conscription, all air forces, and combat gasses; the severe limitation of the navy, army, and munitions industry; the right of aerial navigation over Germany for the Allies; and international control of German ports, waterways, and railways to guarantee Central European countries unobstructed access to the sea. The financial provisions were defined in Parts VII to X (with the guarantees stipulated in Part XIV): Germany had to pay an immediate sum of $5 billion in cash or in kind before the Reparations Commission published the final amount in 1921. "Voluntary default" by Germany was covered by clauses that gave the Allies power to take measures in Germany and to seize German private property abroad.
The central question remains whether the treaty was "too gentle for the harshness it contained"—in other words, whether it was enforceable as it stood, and if yes, why it was never really enforced. The decisive blow probably came from the U.S. Senate's refusal, on 19 March 1920, to ratify the treaty, a refusal that included rejection of U.S. membership in the League of Nations. The League was bitterly opposed by Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, on the same grounds of sacred national sovereignty as invoked in 1918–1919 by the British and French premiers. The United States signed a separate peace treaty at Berlin on 2 July 1921. Then President Wilson did not push the Treaty of Guarantee to France promised in April 1919 (wherein the United States would declare war on any country that challenged the existing French frontiers), and Britain indicated that its own commitment fell. Collective security guaranteed by the major powers, the outstanding innovation of the treaty, thus remained a pious hope. It was clear that by 1920 Great Britain, France, and the United States had no common German policy left—if they had ever had one—and their increasing disagreements over the amount of reparations and how to get Germany to pay them drew a constant wedge between them, gradually eroding whatever credibility the peace terms might have had in the first place. The exclusion of Soviet Russia from the settlement and the specter of Bolshevik revolution also explain why many moderates believed that nothing should be done to destabilize the German Republic, and with it central and eastern Europe, which was slowly adapting to the postwar order. There is no consensus on the relative weight to be given to these considerations, but the most recent historiography at least agrees on one thing: the popular image of Versailles as a punitive "diktat" leading to the ruin of Germany and the inevitable advent of Hitler rests on manipulation rather than fact.