w aging w ar to t ransform the w orld 123Most off ensive to German sensibilities, the Treaty of Versailles fi xed
on Germany the full responsibility for the war and made clear Berlin
would be required to pay reparations for war damages, the amount to
be determined later. German disillusionment was deepened by the
sense that Wilson had promised that German delegates would partic-
ipate in the conference as equals, when instead they were invited only
at the end to accept terms dictated by their enemies. Notwithstanding
contemporary depictions of the treaty as punitive, Margaret MacMillan
observes that the “war guilt” language that so rankled Germans was no
diff erent from that contained in other treaties with defeated Central
Powers, such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that provoked no
similar reaction. Moreover, the reparations terms were not ruinous (and
payments were fi rst delayed and later repudiated when Hitler came to
power). But in politics, perceptions can be everything. German
nationalists used the treaty as fodder for their extremist appeals while
no German leaders would defend its terms.
A number of factors contributed to Wilson’s inability to achieve in
Paris much of what he had promised. As MacMillan points out, wartime
coalitions tend to split once peace arrives; national rivalries over com-
peting interests reassert themselves. Th is certainly held true in 1919,
with participants pursuing their own interests as they saw them, fre-
quently at odds with the president’s agenda. During the war the Allies
had agreed among themselves to various territorial settlements, as I
earlier remarked, and they refused to drop many of their claims at the
peace conference. Often these claims collided with the Wilsonian com-
mitment to self-determination, as when the Italians wanted signifi cant
parts of emerging Yugoslavia, the Greeks and Italians laid claims to
parts of Turkey, or the Japanese wanted the former German holdings in
China. Th e American leader discovered quickly that he had much less
leverage over the Allied powers than he had anticipated.
Allied territorial claims were only one of several reasons Wilson
could not deliver on the promise of “self-determination.” Th e concept
itself was deeply ambiguous and eff ectively unbounded, and every
minority took it as a pledge of political autonomy. Even if limited
to East Central Europe, as the president perhaps intended, his promise
of self-rule failed to take into account the complex intermingling of
different ethno-national groupings that centuries of warfare and