Key points

• Europe's long-term instability can be traced back to the creation of a unified Germany in the 1870s, which disrupted the balance of power.

• The European powers clashed over imperial issues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Germany sought colonies and markets.

• A number of European dynasties were in a state of collapse, leaving open the question of what territorial and constitutional arrangements would replace these empires when they finally disintigrated.

• At the same time, nationalism was growing, par­ticularly in the Balkans and Central Europe, with nationalist movements asserting their claims to statehood in the decaying Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires.

• A combination of imperial, nationalist, and eco­nomic tension ultimately resulted in the First World War.

Peace-making, 1919: the Versailles settlement Post-war problems

When the war finally ended, the peacemakers who gathered at Versailles in 1919 confronted a daunting set of problems. The war left millions of individual casualties, either through death, injury or the loss of homes and livelihoods. The teetering Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were also victims of the war, while a Bolshevik revolution had over­thrown the Tsarist regime in Russia. Had anyone really won the war? Certainly the victors' econ­omies, no less than those of the vanquished, were depleted by the strain of four years of Total War. On all sides, the combatants had sought to pursue this war until their enemies were utterly defeated. Total War demanded Total Victory, but the cost of totally defeating an enemy was near ruination of one's own state. The domestic rain facing France in particular, on whose soil much of the fighting had occurred, added a punitive dimension to the peacemakers' agenda: how could reparations (money, goods, or raw materials) be extracted from Germany to finance domestic reconstruction? How, most critically, could the peacemakers ensure that Germany did not seek to dominate Europe ever again?

It should come as no surprise, given both the intractability of Europe's problems and the diversity of the victorious coalition, that the peacemakers failed to agree amongst themselves on the shape of the post-war order. The principal European victors, Britain and France, concurred over German responsibility for the war, which justified a harsh settlement, but they differed over its terms. However, the guiding force at Versailles was not one (or more) of the European powers, but the President of the United States.

President Wilson's 'Fourteen Points'

America had joined the war in its latter stages, and its President provided a set of principles which he intended should shape the subsequent peace. How was war to be avoided? Woodrow Wilson's 'Fourteen Points' called for a new approach to international diplomacy: 'open covenants, openly arrived at', would replace the old-style secret diplomacy which produced various private inter-state deals over who would gain what territory after the First World War. Wilson also believed that the avoidance of war could be furthered by creating an international organiza­tion, based on the principle of 'collective security' (see Ch. 12). His scheme for a League of Nations was premised on the 'peace-loving' member states regarding any threat to the international peace—any violation of the sovereignty of one member by another state—as an act of aggression which ultim­ately threatened them all, and therefore had to be responded to collectively. Ideally, however, the very existence of the League would serve to ensure that aggressive states desisted from expansionist actions. The League was thus one of the distinctive features of the post-1919 world: the first formalized attempt to create an international body designed to mediate disputes with permanent structures and a codified Charter. Despite its ignominious failure to take assertive action against Japanese, Italian, and Ger­man aggression in the 1930s, the League provided a model for the United Nations Organization in 1945.