Thinking Small

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Authors: Andrea Hiott
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Germany was so rich in industry, the Allies now wanted to cut that
     potency down. There were grumblings that it had been German hubris that had started the war in the first place, and this perception only added to the punitive mood in 1919 as the Allies came together in Paris to work out the Treaty of Versailles.
    Throughout the war, the rallying call of the United States under President Woodrow Wilson had been the mission to “make the world safe for democracy.” It was the main reason given to the American people for the eventual U.S. involvement in the war, and it was the cause that many young Americans had enlisted, fought, and died for. In that spirit, Wilson had proposed the Fourteen Points Program for the Peace of the World, and the Allies had eventually
     embraced his plan.
    Millions in Europe saw Wilson as a man who had come to save them with his plan for unification under the League of Nations. But while he sincerely believed in his ideals, they would prove hard to live up to once the war ended; at that point, the Allies were no longer united under one goal, and each leader had to look to the well-being of his own country. The United States was still young and unsure, and all that energy that had gone into “making the world safe
     for democracy” suddenly felt less urgent when the war finished, especially to the American people, who were removed from the reality of Europe, and who did not truly understand what was at stake. Wilson was left in a difficult gray area where he had promises to keep but lacked the people’s support, and was all but abandoned by much of the U.S. Congress.
    In the negotiations in Paris, Wilson found himself compromising much more than the people of Europe had expected he would, giving in to the demands of more determined men like France’s Clemenceau. By the end, penalty upon penalty had been heaped upon Germany; they were charged 269 billion gold marks (about $32 billion), an impossible sum at the time for them to pay. Land was taken away. Poland became a nation of its own. France got the German
     colonies in Africa; Japan got the ones in the South Pacific. And in addition to claiming full moral and emotional responsibility for the war, the Germans were ordered to cut their army down to 100,000, give up their entire air force, and destroy all their tanks. In effect, Germany was psychologically and economically debilitated. But the Allies were not trying to be cruel; the war had been horrendous, violence on a scale unknown before, and every European country was now in dire need
     of money and resources, scrambling and lost in a sense of lack and fear.
    As economist John Maynard Keynes later said of the postwar conference,“Paris was a nightmare, and everyone there was morbid.” 6 No one seemed able to think clearly. No one seemed ready to accept responsibility for what had taken place. And no one seemed to know how to marshal the ideals and slogans of democracy into a workable plan. In
     response, the German delegation claimed their burgeoning postwar democracy was being annihilated “by the very persons who 7 throughout the war never tired of maintaining that they sought to bring democracy to us.” But that too was unfair. The Germans had no alternative to offer, and no rationale for the trouble they’d caused. Nevertheless, Keynes would
     warn the Allies that their economies were“deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds,” 8 saying that the only way to avoid a worse situation in the future was to take the path of magnanimity now, for“the perils of the future lay not in frontiers or sovereignties but in food,
     coal, and transport.” 9 Keynes might have been right, but it was hard to get anyone to listen to such words at the time: In the heat of the moment, most nationsfelt desperate to take as much as they could for themselves, unable to see that by hurting one another they might also be hurting themselves. Still,

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