Which WWI peace treaty was harsher?Versailles or Brest-Litovsk?

Which WWI Peace treaty was harsher?Versailles or Brest-Litovsk?

  • The two treaties were equally as harsh as one another

    Votes: 23 10.1%
  • Versailles was harsher

    Votes: 52 22.8%
  • Brest-Litovsk was harsher

    Votes: 153 67.1%

  • Total voters
    228

Deimos

Banned
[...] What I have argued [...] is that most of the people of Alsace-Lorraine were happy to be part of France and unhappy to be part of Germany—hence, for France to take Alsace-Lorraine back from Germany was not taking core German land and was by no means particularly harsh or unreasonable.
I do not consider the pro-French political establishment of Alsace-Lorraine as telling in regards to the loyalty of the voting population - we do concentrate too much on them being pro-French that we forget the rest of their fairly popular political platform and that voting pro-French was also an outlet to protest against being a "Reichsland".
However, you lack the the biggest and most definitive piece of evidence for the entirety of Alsace-Lorraine preferring French rule - a plebiscite.
 

RavenMM

Banned
Brest Litovsk. The entire point was to destroy any chance for the communists to run a viable state. It's telling that it made the Bolsheviks (who came to power on the promise of peace at any price) walk away from the table until it became clear Germany wasn't bluffing about continuing the war even if the Bolsheviks wouldn't fight it anymore.

They didn't want peace at any price. They wanted to wait for the revolution in germany to get better terms (that means, just peace without any wins/losses).
 
Brest Litovsk. The entire point was to destroy any chance for the communists to run a viable state. It's telling that it made the Bolsheviks (who came to power on the promise of peace at any price) walk away from the table until it became clear Germany wasn't bluffing about continuing the war even if the Bolsheviks wouldn't fight it anymore.
And they then continued it anyway inside of nine months.
 
And they then continued it anyway inside of nine months.

I'm hardly a Bolshevik apologist, but it would be hard to imagine how anyone wouldn't, under those circumstances. Brest-Litovsk was a peace so immensely cruel to an already immensely devastated country (Germans at the height of the Great Depression were still far richer and safer than 1917 Russians) that any government which gave a damn about its people would have instantly revoked it as soon as it had the opportunity.

I do not consider the pro-French political establishment of Alsace-Lorraine as telling in regards to the loyalty of the voting population - we do concentrate too much on them being pro-French that we forget the rest of their fairly popular political platform and that voting pro-French was also an outlet to protest against being a "Reichsland".
However, you lack the the biggest and most definitive piece of evidence for the entirety of Alsace-Lorraine preferring French rule - a plebiscite.

True. But the lack of a plebiscite doesn't mean the other evidence is unconvincing, since it is convincing.

The people of Alsace-Lorraine were presented with autonomist candidates and could have voted them out in favour of German nationalist candidates; and yet they didn't. The number of them who voted for German nationalist candidates is tiny. National issues often trump political ones; for instance, the Chinese nationalists didn't cooperate with the Japanese nationalists against the Chinese communists. I find it extremely hard to believe, given the evidence we have available, that they actually wanted to be part of Germany, they just kept voting for people who didn't want to be part of Germany.

The German authorities in Alsace-Lorraine, themselves, were worried about how utterly hostile the population was to them. And if you compare Alsace-Lorraine's voting record as a part of France to its record as a part of Germany, you notice that there distinctly wasn't anything in France analogous to the protest deputies denouncing the annexation that occurred when it was a part of Germany.

I agree that if Germany had actually treated the Alsatians like Germans (as the French treated them like Frenchmen), making Alsace-Lorraine a state instead of a Reichsland and de facto militarily occupied province, then the Alsatians would have been happier to be Germans. But that would have gone against the reason why the Prussian establishment chose to annex Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in the first place, which had little to do with pan-German nationalist solidarity (men like Bismarck had fervently opposed pan-German nationalism when it was a threat to the establishment two decades before) and everything to do with strategic military usefulness and the internal political imperative not to station Prussian troops in the South German states. For Alsace-Lorraine to have been treated more kindly it needed to have been annexed for different reasons and by a Germany governed by liberal pan-Germanists who actually regarded the Alsatians as fellow Germans rather than reactionary Prussian aristocrats who regarded them as a useful military, strategic and political tool, which means a PoD well before the unification of Germany—indeed, before Otto von Bismarck helped the King to beat down the Landtag.
 

RousseauX

Donor
One thing not mentioned yet, B-L was a Treaty were both sides NEGOTIATED, so had some say over the outcome. Versailles was not! It was a dictat. So yes harsher.

Brest-Litvosky was never negotiated, the Bolsheviks basically signed it without even reading what the treaty said.

The idea was to create a treaty so illegitimate it had to be overturned at some point, and it kinda worked.
 

RousseauX

Donor
I do not consider the pro-French political establishment of Alsace-Lorraine as telling in regards to the loyalty of the voting population - we do concentrate too much on them being pro-French that we forget the rest of their fairly popular political platform and that voting pro-French was also an outlet to protest against being a "Reichsland".
However, you lack the the biggest and most definitive piece of evidence for the entirety of Alsace-Lorraine preferring French rule - a plebiscite.

Why does it matter whether 51% of the people voted Germany or France?

Germany lost the war, losing relatively small contested pieces of territory was standard for countries which lost wars. If Germany didn't want to lose Alsace-Lorraine, then it shouldn't have invaded France in the first place.
 

RousseauX

Donor
ITT: the train started by Keynes of "Versailles was totally unfair" continues to run even in 2015, where people keep saying Versailles was unfair despite unable to point out exact how it was unfair.
 
ITT: the train started by Keynes of "Versailles was totally unfair" continues to run even in 2015, where people keep saying Versailles was unfair despite unable to point out exact how it was unfair.

Plus how the Germans didn't actually pay, while the Boldheviks did. According to the guy who wrote the Gulag Archipelago and the Day in the Life of whoever said a person was arrested for sabotaging the national treasure that was Russian trains in order to prevent their continuous shipping of gold to the Germans. Of course that man may have been exaggerating things, given he may have been slightly White. As for the German payments.... Yah, US loans gave double that, while th federal government pressured the French and British to pay every penny back while giving the Germans breaks.
 
Brest-Litvosky was never negotiated, the Bolsheviks basically signed it without even reading what the treaty said.

The idea was to create a treaty so illegitimate it had to be overturned at some point, and it kinda worked.

Trotsky had been insisting on peace with no land transfers. The Germans got fed up with it and invaded Ukrain and Belarus, then increasing their demands,
 

Deimos

Banned
[...]
True. But the lack of a plebiscite doesn't mean the other evidence is unconvincing, since it is convincing.

The people of Alsace-Lorraine were presented with autonomist candidates and could have voted them out in favour of German nationalist candidates; and yet they didn't. The number of them who voted for German nationalist candidates is tiny. [...]

And if you compare Alsace-Lorraine's voting record as a part of France to its record as a part of Germany, you notice that there distinctly wasn't anything in France analogous to the protest deputies denouncing the annexation that occurred when it was a part of Germany.

[...]
I hope you do not mind that I find your assessment not as convincing.

Why did the populace of Alsace-Lorraine keep continuing to vote for people who have no legal framework with which to exercise their supposedly utmost desire? The answer is protest and the other facets you are conveniently neglecting (general political platform, possibly better public speakers, more ability to drum up local support, better ability to finance campaigns et cetera).

The argument that there was no pro-German movement in Alsace-Lorraine post-1918 strikes me as disingenuous. Wanting to join France 1871-1914 meant joining a relatively stable great power. Wanting to join Germany post-1918 meant joining a defeated nation plagued by economic woes and political strife. You cannot just equate different decades with one another as they operate with different political realities.

Why does it matter whether 51% of the people voted Germany or France?

Germany lost the war, losing relatively small contested pieces of territory was standard for countries which lost wars. If Germany didn't want to lose Alsace-Lorraine, then it shouldn't have invaded France in the first place.
If you are from the "might makes right" school of international relationships that is a valid stance to take and I have no problems with that on an intellectual level.

As soon as someone is claiming that the people in question wanted to be annexed, he has to show proof - a plebiscite would be most conclusive in that regard otherwise the proof relies too much on conjecture.
 

RousseauX

Donor
If you are from the "might makes right" school of international relationships that is a valid stance to take and I have no problems with that on an intellectual level.

As soon as someone is claiming that the people in question wanted to be annexed, he has to show proof - a plebiscite would be most conclusive in that regard otherwise the proof relies too much on conjecture.

But territory getting passed around regardless of the opinions of the people living there was pretty par-course for peace treaties pre-1945 in Europe.

Why does that make Versailles a particularly harsh treaty?
 

Deimos

Banned
But territory getting passed around regardless of the opinions of the people living there was pretty par-course for peace treaties pre-1945 in Europe.

Why does that make Versailles a particularly harsh treaty?

I never said what treaty I consider harsher, nor what I consider harsh. I only engaged a particular argument I see as flawed.

Anti-French sentiments, perhaps?

I must protest this insinuation as it presupposes national bigotry for anyone arguing a certain point without actually engaging the argument. Keeping the relatively strict rules on this site in mind regarding bigotry we would not be allowed this discussion thread were your quote to be considered true.
 
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I'm hardly a Bolshevik apologist, but it would be hard to imagine how anyone wouldn't, under those circumstances. Brest-Litovsk was a peace so immensely cruel to an already immensely devastated country (Germans at the height of the Great Depression were still far richer and safer than 1917 Russians) that any government which gave a damn about its people would have instantly revoked it as soon as it had the opportunity.

Who would you say were "the people" of Lenin's Russian Bolshevik government? What areas did Brest-Litovsk strip from Russia that wanted to be "Russian" under Bolshevik rule?

I think these are important questions when we think about how fair or unfair Brest-Litovsk was. The Russians surely felt they were entitled to rule over Finland, the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine. The locals in these areas of course often felt differently. I know for a fact that in Finland, for example, most of the people who had considered the Russian Tsar as the righful ruler of the Finnish Grand Duchy did not think that the Bolsheviks had any right to Finland. The Empire had fallen, and now all its subject peoples should be free to forge their own destinies. Vladimir Lenin himself supported this stance - officially.

Now we can well judge the German side as acting unfairly at Brest-Litovsk. But given the weakness of Russia in early 1918, Lenin's government would have faced a lot of problems and a multitude of enemies inside the borders of what used to be the Russian Empire. We could well posit a scenario where imperial Germany offers Russia a reasonably lenient peace in 1918 - and Russia still loses everything it lost after Brest-Litovsk, at least in the next decade's timeframe, through internal turmoil and secessionism.

What I am trying to get to here is that we should not look at Brest-Litovsk in isolation, just comparing pre-war borders and post-BL borders. There was a lot more going on in Russia and Eastern Europe than just "evil Germans mutilating and dismembering Russia", even at the same time as we might be saying that the German demands were greedy, cynical and punitively heavy for Russia - Russia as a great power, Russia as led by the Tsars, Russia as a traditional multinational empire.

But then again, was that concept of Russia relevant after the revolutions of 1917, the collapse of the Tsarist state and the various new nations cropping up in its former domains? Asking this question is, I think, tied to how fair or unfair the outcome of WWI was to Russia as a state or the Russians, as a people, as well as the other former subject peoples of the Russian Empire.

As you know, I am not a big supporter of the concept of treating Russia as an "eternal great power" without looking at the objective facts on the ground. And in 1918, the Russian Empire was breaking apart on its own.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
If by the letter of the treaty Versailles was harsh, then presumably by the letter of the London treaty Belgium is inviolate?

I think that was a major part of the logic behind Versailles. Germany had "shown" itself unwilling to obey treaties if they felt too strong to be contained, so the approach taken was to remove that option.
 
I never said what treaty I consider harsher, nor what I consider harsh. I only engaged a particular argument I see as flawed.



I must protest this insinuation as it presupposes national bigotry for anyone arguing a certain point without actually engaging the argument. Keeping the relatively strict rules on this site in mind regarding bigotry we would not be allowed this discussion thread were your quote to be considered true.

Very well. Just wondered if it would be possible given the somewhat dated books I sometimes read form libraries which put some blame on the French for sabotaging things and that the Germans were somehow the victims. I am not saying that it is true, but that due to national interests and the very few countries in Western Europe, that many countries in the region would find themselves opposite France in terms of national interests. Just putting down such a one liner as I did though was unsubstantiated though. I withdraw it and shall check over the rules again to make sure anything else I say is more in lines with how a debate should be handled.
 
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