26 - A Comment

Summary

A “last word” on anything may only repeat the first word ever said about it. . . .

-A. P. Thornton, Minneapolis, 1977

“A “last word” on anything may only repeat the first word ever said about it. . . .” A. P. Thornton, Minneapolis, 1977 / Before the ink had dried on the Treaty of Versailles, the movement to tinker with its terms, to renegotiate its most controversial provisions or to destroy it altogether had begun. This was hardly a novel phenomenon: those who had “lost” at Frankfurt am Main in 1871, at Paris in 1856, at Vienna in 1815, had immediately contrived to place renegotiation or revision of the peace terms at the top of the diplomatic agenda. The “winners,” the Metternichs, the Palmerstons, and the Bismarcks, would have been surprised had it been otherwise; they began to make their plans for how they would uphold the postwar political system even as they were creating it. This posture was mimicked by Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau: they did not expect the Germans to submit without complaint to the imposition of the new order and would have been astonished had they done so. The Big Three thought they had created new rules, new techniques, new mechanisms that would uphold the integrity of the system that they had designed. It might be argued that the leaders of the Entente constituted the first wave of revisionists: those who believed that once the Germans had been disciplined and democratized that they would become a part of the system, and, becoming a part of it, could mend it to match their new morality.