A European Betrayal of the Weimar Republic and Europe Today

1,800 words

If a politician or social scientist were to put up a Versailles analogy between the events or developments of 1919 and the present peacemaking, one may first of all think of a German. Well over a hundred years later, this peacemaking may finally terminate eleven years of a United States proxy war against the Russian Federation. In July 2018, however, the argument of a mild Versailles was used by British historian Timothy Garton Ash. When his country was stuck in a four-year-long process of terminating its membership in the European Union, Garton Ash focused on the conflict between Brussels and Britain to ground his threatening thought.1  Though the historical facts did not provide sufficient ground to sustain it, let alone further analogies such as a Weimar Britain.

As a matter of fact, the newest warning of a second Versailles was voiced by a few Germans. The most known among them is Sigmar Gabriel, a German social democrat and Rheinmetall board member. Give it a chance, a businessman using a frightening analogy on the most contented episode of the world-war era. Does the German's warning make more sense than Garton Ash'es? In this essay, reflections on actuality, memory and history take turns.

In 1918, the input of the American Expeditionary Forces would tip the balance in favour of Germany's enemies. United States President Woodrow Wilson rolled out his Fourteen-Point programme for peace, which became the ground for the Armistice agreement, signed on November 11. Two months into the extended ceasefire period, the British Delegation surprised its allies and the United States (Associated Power) with a colonial coup. A sudden prioritisation of the colonial question, which meant a strain on the first-ever stay of a US president in Europe as well as a considerable postponement of Europe's internal affairs, was combined with the appearance of a British Imperial Delegation under the lead of colonial hero Jan Christiaan Smuts. Under the huge pressure of this British double delegation, Wilson caved in. Even when he eventually signed the commonly dictated Treaty of Versailles, David Lloyd George and Smuts fathered the principal authorship for the diktat on the newly established German Republic. In the manifold violations of the Armistice-based points, first and foremost point five (colonies) and fourteen (league), a majority of American senators found a convincing argument to call off the president, which has remained a unique fact until today. Thus, ratification of the presidential Treaty and the 'League of Versailles' was denied on November 19, 1919 and again on March 19, 1920. Not the Americans, who signed a mutually acceptable peace treaty with President Friedrich Ebert's Germany under President Warren Harding, but the West Europeans, joined by Britain's sub-imperialist colonists, created as well as sustained the premises for another world war.

Somewhat more than a century following Great Britain's exercise in self-delusion and the tragic display of its perfidious DIVIDE ET IMPERA, US President Donald Trump presented a 28-point proposal for peace that the warring Russian Federation and the USA would implement on Ukraine. In numbers, it exceeds his famous predecessor's West Europeanly compromised and colonised fourteen-point programme by a hundred percent.

Being confronted with the Russo-American move toward ending the killing, a Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor wrote a dismissive comment called Der Versailler Vertrag lässt grüßen.2  It may well be interpreted as support for Gabriel. In one of Berlin's newspapers, the former foreign minister warned of a 'second Versailles' (ein zweites Versailles).3  The same day, it was published by a regional online newspaper (Brunswick).4  A few days later, a political science journalist took over by investigating Gabriel's warning originating from the board of the heavy weaponry producing industry.5  Jan Kixmüller interviewed Germany's establishment historian Herfried Münkler, according to whom 'this analogy is certainly not false.' Further on, Münkler states that the Treaty of Versailles 'in bestimmten Kreisen in Deutschland ganz eindeutig ein Revisionsbedürfnis geweckt hat.' There are plenty of sources that justify a considerably wider sense of revisionism. For one of them, the Hamburg/Berlin colleagues of Auf den Tag genau offered a five-minute quotation of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung at the centenary of the Treaties of Locarno, an inclusive follow-up to the exclusivist Versailles.6  In an insertion, Münkler's argument is being refered to the realm of fables: 'Der Vertrag wurde von der deutschen Bevölkerung als ungerecht und demütigend empfunden.' Further on, the professor does not assume Ukraine signing the current peace proposal, 'Especially since Ukraine is not defeated, unlike Germany in 1918.'

In none of these German commentaries are the dynamics of great power politics being considered. In general, small-sized powers differ from great powers. It is highly questionable if it makes sense to compare Germany, at the time of the Urkatastrophe, andUkraine, which is certainly not among the ranks of Russia, China and the United States.

Two more Potsdam and Berlin professors were consulted. In Martin Sabrow's opinion, the USA Senate's refusal of the Treaty and the 'Bund von Versailles' should be assessed as suspect, if not incorrect. It seems of no importance that, instead, Ebert and Harding concluded the only mutually acceptable peace treaty on August 25, 1921, two years into the West-European and British colonists' Versailles regime. According to him, the end of the First World War initiated America's withdrawal from Europe. This is nonsense. Neither the Armistice nor its formal termination, seven months later in Versailles, led to US isolation. Britain's imperialist and sub-imperialist coup of the peace conference and appropriate seizure of the international organisation concept caused US senators to vote against ratification.

At the end of the recent First World War anniversaries, I published a German-language title on the fifth and final year of the war. My daily interest was to watch them from Australia to Ireland respectively to contribute in social networks. By two of Germany's largest newspapers, the centenary of Versailles was ignored. In contrast to the Armistice's inclusive commemoration in Paris, seven months earlier, the state made zero efforts to commemorate the formal end of the war. Between the Urkatastrophe and Germany's exemplary process of coming to terms with the war crimes under Adolf Hitler and the memory of the Urkatastrophe, a huge contrast can be discerned. Obviously, the academic record makes a better impression. At the same time, German historian Markus Payk criticised that 'the conclusion of the Versailles Treaty received hardly any new interpretations.'7  Concerning this amnesia, the question is whether a geschichtsvergessenes public, probably including Gabriel at the time, can be expected to try to get to the bottom of his bold analogy.

A few arguments on history and actuality may add up to this cultural void. The Treaty of Versailles, including the foundation of a Germany-excluding (in contrast to Austria!) organisation in its introductory articles, was dictated by 27 nations and five British colonies. On the other side, there was no other recipient than Germany, followed by a similar thirty respectively forty-something versus one constellation for Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey. When Trump's USA were to dictate the Europeans, what the armoured industry representative Gabriel maintains, Britain and the majority of EU member states would stand considerably stronger than the dispersed scapegoats of 1919 and 1920.

Another novelty of 1919 can stand the test of time. Gabriel's predecessors, id est the SPD-leadership of the newly established republic, reacted with the proclamation of a week-long national morning as a consequence of the initial treaty draft. This week in May 1919 has remained a unique phenomenon in the reunified Germany. If the successors of Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann, supervisor of the black week, had a tenable argument on another Versailles, it would not make a bad impression to set up some re-enactment. Again, it is interesting to watch the developments of Germany's Erinnerungskultur. In May 1919, the centenary of this unprecedented event passed in total silence. Actual web research is telling. A newspaper article featuring the protest appeared in May 2024, a random five years following the first of two world-war centenaries.8  Rather than a national follow-up, the idea of a British and Union's edition of a week of morning may suit the traumatic history recalling West Germans with FAZ and Rheinmetall.

Another argument against their historical parallel is that the West and Central Europeans, particularly Brussels, voluntarily gave up sovereignties from the traditional national to the EU's presumably collective one. Over the past decades, they left vital security-policy responsibilities to the Washington headquarters.9  In the beginning, the Clinton administration started to militarily challenge an obviously weakened and transforming Russia. The post-Soviet hegemon appeared ready to ignore or exploit this transformative weakness as well as to copy the first post-war period Britain's divide and rule. Recalling from the hundred-year-old history a scarcely abating series of Entente incursions on the yet curbed sovereignty of Ebert's and then Paul von Hindenburg's Germany, it actually needs a lot more of Russo-American-made constraints, indemnities, assignments of guilt (colonial guilt as well as war guilt) and deprivations of all kinds to justify any analogy with the infamous 1919 diktat.

Within this limited study, a selection of secondary and principal arguments came to the fore. My three-decade-old research results contain a more or less complete survey. In one of the two editorials in Vice Versa Versailles, the planned Aufa100 anthology, I take up the Weimar/Russia debate, which I participated in from the beginning at the end of the previous century. It took me two-thirds of these almost three decades to distinguish the unilateral approach of debaters from the West. Thus, it was about time to put forward an extended thesis of a second Versailles. It opens the space for the inevitability of a dialectical approach.

Peter de Bourgraaf

Footnotes

1.  Timothy Garton Ash, A humiliating Brexit deal risks a descent into Weimar Britain, The Guardian, 27 July 2018.

2.  Berthold Kohler, Der Versailler Vertrag lässt grüßen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 November 2025.

3.  Daniel Sturm, Trumps 28-Punkte-Plan. Gabriel warnt vor einem „zweiten Versailles“, Der Tagesspiegel, 23 November 2025.

4.  Gabriel warnt vor „zweitem Versailles“, regionalHeute.de, 23 November 2025.

5.  Jan Kixmüller, Ein Aggressor wie Putin ist schwer zu saturieren: Ist der Ukraine-Plan für Europa so gefährlich wie der Versailler Vertrag?, Tagesspiegel, 25 November 2025.

6.  Auf den Tag genau, podcast, 20 November 2025. Katja Iken, Interview with Gerd Krumeich, Der Krieg in den Köpfen ging weiter, Der Spiegel, 26 June 2019.

7.  Klaus Richter, review of: Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des Modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, by Markus M. Payk, HSozKult, June 27, 2019.

8.  Frank Hethey, "Zeigt unseren Feinden, dass wir ein einiges Volk sind", Weser Kurier, 4 May 2024.

9.  Paul Schreyer, Wie die Nato nach Osten aufbrach, Multipolar, 24 November 2025.