Lot's of people were reporting this week on the last World War I reparations payments by Germany and several people noted it to me and asked if I was going to blog on it. Well you know what? The last payment didn't actually happen until today, and I was planning on blogging on it but just didn't want to jump the gun like everyone else :)In addition to paying off the reparations saddled on it in Versailles ninety years ago, Germany celebrates the twentieth anniversary of their reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So today we can finally put a terrible peace behind us for good, and we can celebrate a more hopeful, seemingly more robust peace than the one struck at Versailles.
And of course, it's hard to think of German reparations without thinking of John Maynard Keynes - and I would be remiss if I didn't cite him here:.
"This chapter must be one of pessimism. The Treaty includes no provisions for the economic rehabilitation of Europe, - nothing to make the defeated Central Empires into good neighbors, nothing to stabilize the new States of Europe, nothing to reclaim Russia; nor does it promote in any way a compact of economic solidarity amongst the Allies themselves; no arrangement was reached at Paris for restoring the disordered finances of France and Italy, or to adjust the systems of the Old World and the New.
The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues, being preoccupied with others, - Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something which would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right. It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problems of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four. Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from every point of view except that of the economic future of the States whose destiny they were handling...
The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues, being preoccupied with others, - Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something which would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right. It is an extraordinary fact that the fundamental economic problems of a Europe starving and disintegrating before their eyes, was the one question in which it was impossible to arouse the interest of the Four. Reparation was their main excursion into the economic field, and they settled it as a problem of theology, of politics, of electoral chicane, from every point of view except that of the economic future of the States whose destiny they were handling...
...Men will not always die quietly. For starvation, which brings to some lethargy and a helpless despair, drives other temperaments to the nervous instability of hysteria and to a mad despair. And these in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself in their attempts to satisfy desperately the overwhelming needs of the individual. This is the danger against which all our resources and courage and idealism must now co-operate."
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