Chapter 8 Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty and Reparations: The Reparation Commission as a Place for Dispute Settlement?

Abstract

It is more inspiring to speak about a success story in international law than about a failure. It is more exciting to study a completely new subject in legal history than to try to elbow one’s way into a rich literature about a well-known matter. The issues of Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty and of Reparations present concurrently the two less desired positions. It is widely known that the process of reparations was abandoned after ten years of successive attempts to adapt it to the economic and political context of the period between 1921 and 1931, leading from the end of World War I to the Great Depression. Concerning Germany, the reparations process gave rise to the payment of less than twenty-two billion gold marks, which amounts to one sixth of the foreseen sum of the 1921 Bill and Schedule of Payments.1 While the Allied powers, especially the successive governments of France, were dramatically disappointed by this low score, the German people were upset by Article 231 and the debt linked with this reparations process, one of the main elements of Nazi propaganda. Furthermore, this fiasco has been broadly analyzed by jurists and economists of the interwar period, as well as by historians. Concerning France, it is noteworthy that several doctoral theses in law (at a time when economics was taught inside the Law Faculties) were devoted to reparations issues, even if they are not so interesting from the perspective of international law.2 The contrast is strong between this relatively poor literaChapter 8