How successfully did the Treaty of Versailles achieve a lasting peace in Europe after the First World War? Explain your answer. [40]

This question asks you to evaluate how far the Treaty of Versailles succeeded in its aim of creating lasting peace. A strong answer requires a balanced assessment, weighing the treaty's failures against its achievements and the broader context in which it operated.

The case that the Treaty failed to achieve lasting peace:

• The most obvious evidence of failure is that Europe was engulfed in another world war only twenty years later, in 1939.
• The war guilt clause (Article 231) forced Germany to accept sole responsibility for causing the war. This humiliated the German people and fuelled nationalist resentment that extremist politicians, including Hitler, later exploited.
• Reparations of 132 billion gold marks placed an enormous financial burden on Germany. This contributed to the hyperinflation crisis of 1923, which wiped out the savings of the German middle class and deepened bitterness towards the treaty.
• Territorial losses created lasting grievances. The Polish Corridor separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany, and Danzig was made a Free City under League of Nations supervision. The prohibition of Anschluss (union with Austria) left millions of ethnic Germans outside Germany's borders.
• Disarmament was applied only to Germany (limited to 100,000 troops, no air force, no submarines, only six battleships), while the Allied powers did not disarm equivalently. Germans regarded this as hypocritical, and restrictions were progressively violated during the 1930s.
• The treaty created a cycle of grievance: harsh terms bred resentment, resentment fuelled extremism, and extremism led to aggression.

The case that the Treaty had some success or was not solely to blame:

• The peacemakers at Paris faced enormous pressure. Public opinion in Britain and France demanded that Germany be punished. Clemenceau needed security guarantees for France, which had lost 1.4 million soldiers and seen its northern industrial regions devastated.
• President Wilson's Fourteen Points and the creation of the League of Nations represented genuine attempts to build a new, more cooperative international order based on collective security and open diplomacy.
• The treaty did achieve positive outcomes. New nation-states were created on the principle of self-determination, including Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, fulfilling the aspirations of peoples who had lived under imperial rule.
• The period 1924-1929 saw real progress towards reconciliation. The Dawes Plan (1924) restructured reparations, the Locarno Treaties (1925) saw Germany voluntarily accept its western borders, and Germany was admitted to the League of Nations in 1926. This "Locarno honeymoon" suggests the treaty was not inevitably doomed.
• The ultimate failure of peace owed much to factors beyond the treaty itself: the Wall Street Crash and global depression after 1929, the policy of appeasement in the 1930s, the weakness of enforcement by Britain and France, and the isolationism of the United States.

How this question is marked (Paper 4, 40 marks):

• Level 5 (33-40): A balanced, well-supported argument that addresses both sides with specific evidence and reaches a sustained, reasoned judgement. The answer evaluates the relative importance of the treaty's flaws versus other factors.
• Level 4 (25-32): Both sides are addressed with supporting detail, but the evaluation may be less developed or the judgement less clearly sustained.
• Level 3 (17-24): One-sided argument with detail, or a balanced argument with limited supporting evidence.
• Level 2 (9-16): Relevant factors are identified but explanations are limited or undeveloped.
• Level 1 (1-8): General statements with little specific or relevant detail.

Examination approach: The word "how successfully" requires you to weigh evidence on both sides. Avoid simply listing the treaty's terms. Instead, assess each term's impact on peace. A strong conclusion might argue that the treaty was largely unsuccessful in achieving lasting peace, but that its failure resulted from a combination of the treaty's own flaws and subsequent political and economic developments that the peacemakers of 1919 could not have foreseen.