19 - Versailles and International Diplomacy

Summary

Shortly after receiving an invitation from the German Historical Institute to attend the stimulating meeting that later transpired in Berkeley in the spring of 1994, I happened to be lecturing on the Paris Peace Conference in my undergraduate course on the history of international relations. After the class, a student sauntered into my office and put to me a question that coincidentally pertained directly to the subject of the essay for that meeting that I was just beginning to compose in my mind: Had Woodrow Wilson been able to withstand the pressures from what the student called the “vindictive” European statesmen in 1919 to impose what he characterized as a “Carthaginian” peace on defeated Germany, did I not think that the world would have been spared the agony of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust?

As is my custom, I replied with a question of my own. Where had he learned the term “Carthaginian”? To my surprise he reeled off a thoroughly competent summary of the peace settlement after the Third Punic War. (It turned out that he had taken a survey course in ancient history.) But when I probed his knowledge of the more recent, metaphorical connotation of the word, the conversation took a distinctly more nebulous turn. Had he read Keynes? No. Ray Stannard Baker? Who? In the end it proved impossible to identify the specific source of this evocative adjective that had somehow found its way into the young man's mind. He had simply picked it up somewhere in the general historiographical literature. It somehow seemed to be the natural modifier for the noun “peace” with reference to the Treaty of Versailles.