What should the allies have done at Versailles (and in otehr 1919 treaties)

Wendell

Atlantic Friend said:
Maybe, but color me unconvinced. Russia can,and did, play the Panslavism card without needing to create a Polish entity. St Petersburg carving up Russia for propaganda's sake after four years of conflict sounds rather unlikely to me as well. It would be a bit like France setting up an autonomous Alsace Lorraine in 1918 and giving it Belfort to its new client state.
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They are not really carving up Russia, but rather letting Poland have the appearance of independence mostly at German and Austrian expense.
 

Typo

Banned
Wendell said:
It means that the French cannot be victims if their response to wartime debts is to take on unecessary expenditures. Their cocern was not debt, but national aggrandizement, a desire for which the Entente claimed started the war.
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I have no idea where I claimed the French were victims
 

Maur

Banned
Atlantic Friend said:
Here's in a quick-and-dirty way why I think a Czarist Russia at Versailles would have brought : the Allies would have been unable to play the 'nationality' card, nor would they have needed to carve up new allies from the territory of the vanquished nations.

A recovering Russia means no Poland nor, I think, a Czechoslovakia. It opens the possibility that A-H either survives in another form or at least dies more peacefully. Germany's postwar eastern borders, as well as the map of Eastern Europe, would have been much different.

There would still have been heavy reparations slapped on Triple Alliance nations (just as there were heavy reparations slapped on France after 1870 to cripple its economy on top of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine), but the need to 'defang' Germany would have been lesser because of the presence of an allied Russia.
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Yeah, it seems that Germans didn't thought out very well the whole Lenin train idea, after all :D
 

Typo

Banned
Wendell said:
If not victims, why is there a need for reparations or compensation from the defeated Germany?
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Because the cost of war was ruinous to -both- sides and -both- sides planned on making the losers pay for it. The whole war guilt clause thing was an attempt to morally justify the matter even though every side deserved blame for starting the war. Arguably the French deserved some sort of reparation for Ludendorff's effort to destroy French coal mines before the Germans retreated but broadly the reparations were about the cost of the war.
 

Wendell

Typo said:
Because the cost of war was ruinous to -both- sides and -both- sides planned on making the losers pay for it. The whole war guilt clause thing was an attempt to morally justify the matter even though every side deserved blame for starting the war. Arguably the French deserved some sort of reparation for Ludendorff's effort to destroy French coal mines before the Germans retreated but broadly the reparations were about the cost of the war.
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So if the cost of the was ruinous-which it was-then why would the allies want to take on colonies which would all but certain ruin them further?
 
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