Fourteen ways of looking back at the Treaty of Versailles†

Abstract

This article examines the idea of the Treaty of Versailles as a readily quantifiable corpus of provisions as set down in a readily identifiable document that was signed at the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919. It does so by recalling the pre-history to that peace that stretches as far back as US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918, for the German Government accepted these Fourteen Points as well as subsequent pronouncements of President Wilson as the basis for the peace that ended the Great War. Through a close engagement with diplomatic correspondence from October and November 1918, the article considers how impressions came to form that a ‘contract’ had been made with the enemy (John Maynard Keynes) by the time of the Armistice of Compiègne of November 1918—an apparent ‘charter for our future activity’ (Harold Nicolson) or a localized lex pacificatoria for its time. The article explores the amenability of each of the Fourteen Points to international normativity and, in its final section, it provides a broader account of how this set of positions shaped Germany’s official response to the draft treaty (‘Observations of the German Delegation on the Conditions of Peace’) that was released in May 1919.