IB History Resources: Treaty of Versailles

National Bestseller New York Times Editors' Choice Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award For six months in 1919, after the end of "the war to end all wars," the Big Three--President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau--met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities--Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them--born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.

Signed on June 28, 1919 between Germany and the principal Allied powers, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I. Problematic from the very beginning, even its contemporaries saw the treaty as a mediocre compromise, creating a precarious order in Europe and abroad and destined tofall short of ensuring lasting peace. At the time, observers read the treaty through competing lenses: a desire for peace after five years of disastrous war, demands for vengeance against Germany, the uncertain future of colonialism, and, most alarmingly, the emerging threat of Bolshevism. A centuryafter its signing, we can look back at how those developments evolved through the twentieth century, evaluating the treaty and its consequences with unprecedented depth of perspective.The author of several award-winning books, Michael S. Neiberg provides a lucid and authoritative account of the Treaty of Versailles, explaining the enormous challenges facing those who tried to put the world back together after the global destruction of the World War I. Rather than assessingwinners and losers, this compelling book analyzes the many subtle factors that influenced the treaty and the dominant, at times ambiguous role of the "Big Four" leaders?Woodrow Wilson of the United States, David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy, and GeorgesClemenceau of France.The Treaty of Versailles was not solely responsible for the catastrophic war that crippled Europe and the world just two decades later, but it played a critical role. As Neiberg reminds us, to understand decolonization, World War II, the Cold War, and even the complex world we inhabit today, thereis no better place to begin than with World War I and the treaty that tried, and perhaps failed, to end it.

Sally Marks provides a compelling analysis of European diplomacy between the First World War and Hitler's advent. She explores in clear and lively prose the reasons why successive efforts failed to create a lasting peace in the interwar era. Building on the theories of the first edition - many of which have become widely accepted since its publication in 1976 - Marks reassesses Europe's leaders of the period, and the policies of the powers between 1918 and 1933, and beyond. Strongly interpretative and archivally based, The Illusion of Peace examines the emotional, ethnic, and economic factors responsible for international instability, as well as the distortion of the balance of power, the abnormal position of the Soviet Union, the weakness of France and the uncertainty of her relationship with Britain, and the inadequacy of the League of Nations. In so doing, the study clarifies the complex topics of reparations and war debts and challenges traditional assumptions, concluding that widespread western devotion to disarmament and dedication to peace were two of several reasons why democratic statesmen could not respond decisively to Hitler's threat. In this new edition Marks also argues that the Allied failure to bring defeat home to the German people in 1918-19 generated a resentment which contributed to interwar instability and Hitler's rise. This highly successful study has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect the latest scholarship. Now in its second edition, it remains the essential introduction to the tense political and diplomatic situation in Europe during the interwar years.

For more than half a century, it has been widely recognized that the Treaty of Versailles, founded on retribution against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, created the circumstances that led inevitably to World War II. Less acknowledged and understood is the treaty's profound impact on many other parts of the world--an impact that echoes to this day across Asia, the Balkans, and throughout the Middle East.In A Shattered Peace, veteran foreign correspondent David A. Andelman takes a fresh new look at the Treaty of Versailles as the point of origin for many of today's most critical international issues. This revealing history exposes the powerful lessons that a six-month period in a long ago era has for us today.Andelman turns the spotlight on the many errors committed by the peacemakers that directly led to crises and bloodshed from Algeria to Kosovo and wars from Israel to Vietnam. Focusing on the small nations and minor players at the negotiations, including figures such as Ho Chi Minh and Charles de Gaulle who would later become major names, he traces the outcome of the deliberations through the history of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His conclusion is ominous: not only did the paternalism, ignorance, and self-serving approach of the Great Powers who sculpted the treaty lead to disastrous consequences that were predicted at the time, but current policies of the world's developed nations continue to repeat and reaffirm these same mistakes.Andelman also paints a vivid picture of the glittering and often chaotic social whirl that accompanied the negotiations. Elsa Maxwell threw her first party; young Franklin Delano Roosevelt flirted with Parisian widows to the humiliation of his wife, Eleanor; princesses and young gentlemen in formal attire danced gaily to the hot new sound of American jazz--all this as prime ministers Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George ogled huge maps, dividing up territories and cementing their nations' positions as leading world powers for decades to come.Complete with a new preface by Sir Harold Evans, a new introduction from the author, and a never-before-published chapter on establishing a global economy, as well as insightful quotations from the diaries and correspondence of participants and previously unpublished photographs of the proceedings and their surroundings, A Shattered Peace will change the way you think about twentieth-century history, its influence on current events, and where we should go from here.