The First World War
Senior 3 · History and Citizenship
The First World War
Lesson 3 of 4
25 min
Ten months before the fighting stopped, the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, told Congress what kind of peace he wanted. His programme had fourteen points. Here are three of them.
1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.
14. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.
Source A. Woodrow Wilson, address to the United States Congress, 8 January 1918 (the "Fourteen Points").
Analysing the source. Point 1 attacks the secret alliances that had helped cause the war. Point 14 proposes what became the League of Nations. Point 5 is the most interesting for Africa: it says colonised peoples' interests must have "equal weight" with the claims of governments, but it does not say they should decide their own future. As you will see, that gap shaped what happened to Rwanda.
Definition
Peace treaty: a formal agreement that ends a war and sets the terms of peace.
Reparations: payments made by a defeated country to compensate the winners for war damage.
Self-determination: the right of a people to choose its own government and state.
Collective security: the idea that all members of an organisation act together against any state that attacks another.
Mandate: a former German or Ottoman territory that the League of Nations placed under another power to govern on its behalf.
The Paris Peace Conference opened on 18 January 1919. Germany was not invited to negotiate. Three leaders dominated it, and they wanted different things.
| Leader | Country | Main aim |
|---|---|---|
| Georges Clemenceau | France | Security and revenge: France had been invaded twice in fifty years, and much of the fighting had happened on its soil. Germany must be kept weak and pay. |
| David Lloyd George | Britain | Punish Germany, as British voters demanded, but not so hard that it could not trade again or would turn to revolution. |
| Woodrow Wilson | United States | A fair peace based on the Fourteen Points, self-determination for the peoples of Europe, and a League of Nations. |
Germany signed the treaty in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the murder in Sarajevo. Its terms are easiest to remember as LAMB.
Figure 1. The terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Article 231. The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.
Source B. Treaty of Versailles (1919), Article 231.
Germans called the treaty a Diktat, a dictated peace, because they had no say in it. Many believed their army had not really been beaten, since no enemy soldier stood on German soil in November 1918. This resentment would be used by Hitler, as the next unit shows. Separate treaties dealt with Germany's allies: Austria (Saint-Germain, 1919), Bulgaria (Neuilly, 1919), Hungary (Trianon, 1920) and the Ottoman Empire (Sèvres, 1920). New states appeared on the map, among them Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
The Covenant, or rules, of the League of Nations formed the first part of the Treaty of Versailles. The League began work in January 1920, with its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Its members promised to settle disputes by discussion and arbitration, to reduce armaments, and to act together against an aggressor (collective security). It could condemn an aggressor, impose economic sanctions (a ban on trade), or, in the last resort, ask members to send troops, because it had no army of its own.
Figure 2. How the League was organised.
| Strengths and successes | Weaknesses |
|---|---|
| Settled smaller disputes in the 1920s, such as the Åland Islands between Sweden and Finland (1921) and a border clash between Greece and Bulgaria (1925). | The United States never joined, because its Senate rejected the treaty. Germany joined only in 1926 and the Soviet Union in 1934. |
| Helped hundreds of thousands of refugees and prisoners of war return home, and fought diseases such as leprosy and malaria. | It had no army, and sanctions only worked if the great powers applied them. |
| Its International Labour Organization worked to improve working conditions; its commissions campaigned against slavery. | Most decisions needed every member of the Council or Assembly to agree, so it was slow. |
Germany lost all its colonies. German East Africa was divided: Britain took Tanganyika, and Belgium, which had occupied Rwanda and Burundi in 1916, received them as the mandate of Ruanda-Urundi, confirmed by the League on 20 July 1922. The rule for mandates was set in Article 22 of the Covenant:
To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation …
Source C. Covenant of the League of Nations (1919), Article 22.
Analysing the source. The article promised that the mandatory power would govern for "the well-being and development" of the people. But it described Africans as "not yet able to stand by themselves", a colonial prejudice, and no one asked Rwandans what they wanted. In practice, as you learned in Senior 2, Belgium ruled Rwanda as a colony and its policies deepened division. The mandate shows the limits of Wilson's promise of self-determination: it applied to Europeans, not to Africans.
Worked example: was the treaty fair?
Question: "The Treaty of Versailles was too harsh on Germany." How far do you agree? (8 marks)
Agree. Germany lost about 13% of its European land, all its colonies and much of its army, and had to accept sole blame in Article 231 without being allowed to negotiate. Reparations of 132 billion gold marks were a heavy burden, and the resentment helped extremists later.
Disagree. Germany had invaded Belgium and France and fought mostly on their soil; France wanted security after two invasions. Germany kept most of its industry and remained the most populous country in Europe west of Russia, and in 1918 it had imposed a far harsher treaty on Russia at Brest-Litovsk.
Judgement. The treaty was harsh enough to anger Germans but not harsh enough to stop Germany becoming strong again: the worst of both worlds. So it was "too harsh" in how it was made and in the war-guilt clause, less so in its actual terms.
Tip
LAMB for Versailles: Land, Army, Money, Blame. For the League, remember "no USA, no army, no speed": its three great weaknesses.
Warning
Keep three things apart. The armistice (11 November 1918) stopped the fighting. The Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) was the peace with Germany. The League of Nations (from 1920) was the organisation to keep the peace. And don't confuse the League with the United Nations, which replaced it in 1945.
Article 22 called the mandates "a sacred trust of civilisation". Using what you learned in Senior 2 about Belgian rule in Rwanda, did Belgium keep that trust? What would a fair mandate have looked like?
Practice
Sources and credits
