A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today

by David A. Andelman, Sir Harold Evans (Foreword by)

Overview

How the Treaty of Versailles is still influencing current events—with a new Foreword by Sir Harold Evans and a new Introduction by the author

For more than half a century, it has been widely recognized that the Treaty of Versailles created the circumstances that led inevitably to World War II. Less acknowledged and understood is the treaty’s profound impact on many other parts of the world—an impact that echoes to this day in the Middle East, the Far East, the Balkans, and, yes, in Iraq. In A Shattered Peace, veteran foreign correspondent David A. Andelman takes a fresh new look at the Treaty of Versailles as the point of origin for many of today’s most critical international issues. 

In this revealing history, Andelman turns the spotlight on the many errors committed by the peacemakers that led to crises and bloodshed from Kosovo to Iraq, wars from Israel to Vietnam. Focusing on the small nations and minor players at the negotiations, including figures such as Ho Chi Minh and Charles de Gaulle who would later become boldfaced names, he traces the outcome of the deliberations through the history of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Andelman also paints a vivid picture of the glittering and often chaotic social whirl that accompanied the negotiations. Elsa Maxwell threw her first party; young Franklin Delano Roosevelt flirted with Parisian widows to the humiliation of his wife, Eleanor; princesses and young gentlemen in formal attire danced gaily to the hot new sound of American jazz—all this as prime ministers Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George ogled huge maps, dividing up territories and cementing their nations’ positions as leading world powers for decades to come. 

Complete with a new foreword by Sir Harold Evans, a new introduction from the author, and a never-before-published chapter on establishing a global economy, as well as insightful quotations from the diaries and correspondence of participants and previously unpublished photographs of the proceedings and their surroundings, A Shattered Peace will change the way you think about twentieth-century history, its influence on current events, and where we should go from here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620459911
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	11/24/2014
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	388
Sales rank:	711,995
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

DAVID A. ANDELMAN, Editor & Publisher of World Policy Journal, has reported from more than eighty countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News. He has also served as Washington correspondent for CNBC, senior editor of Bloomberg News, and as an executive editor of Forbes. President-emeritus of the Overseas Press Club of America, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Century Association. He lives in New York and Paris with his wife, Pamela Title.

SIR HAROLD EVANS, currently Editor-at-Large at Reuters, edited The Sunday Times of London (1967–1981) and The Times (1981–1982). An MA of Durham Universityin the United Kingdom, he was Harkness Fellow at the universities of Stanford and Chicago, where he wrote a thesis on the Suez crisis of 1956–7. He is a Fellow of UniversityCollege, Durham. His books include The American Century and My Paper Chase.

Read an Excerpt

ALLEN DULLES WAS LATE FOR A TENNIS GAME IN THE SWISS capital of Bern. The twenty-four-year-old who would one day become America’s master spy, the patriarch of the Central Intelligence Agency, had just arrived by train from the U.S. mission in Vienna to take up his new post, and he’d run into an old friend from his school days—a buxom Swiss lass who played quite a passable game of tennis. Now he was at the U.S. legation in the Hirschengraben seeing to his luggage and was just closing up the office when the phone rang. The caller identified himself as a Russian revolutionary who needed to speak immediately with someone at the legation. Dulles insisted it was quite impossible and to ring back on Monday. The caller insisted, urgency in his voice. Dulles refused, hung up abruptly, and went off to his tennis match. The next night, the Russian was sealed into a Swiss train with his comrades for the trip across Germany to the Finland Station in the Russian capital of Petrograd. The caller was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

How different might the world have been had he answered the call of the revolutionary rather than the call of the blonde, Dulles wondered barely two years later as he began packing his bags again, this time for Paris and the peace talks that were to mark his true debut on the world stage. Though Dulles never learned what was on Lenin’s mind—he may simply have hoped to open a dialogue with the West—it’s entirely possible such an overture might have led to the young American staying in Switzerland. 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

1 Onward to Paris

2 Le Début

3 Le Mistral

4 The State of the Jews

5 A Wicked Wind from the East

6 A Pair of Princes

7 All Aboard the Orient Express

8 Into the Balkan Soup

9 Greater Asian Insecurity

10 Where Did They All Go?

Maps

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

The Versailles peace conference, held between the Allied victorious powers and Germany following World War I, attempted to create a lasting peace-and parcel out the world. The great powers felt that they should inherit much of it; inhabitants of the countries to be parceled out felt otherwise. The shortsightedness of the conferees produced a world that fragmented in unexpected ways and arguably generated a century of continuous conflict. With chapters on some of those present, such as the young Ho Chi Min, on the shared goals of Emir Feisal and Chaim Weizmann, and on the abortive stab at making peace in revolutionary Russia, Andelman (executive editor, Forbes.com) casts a bitter light on the rest of the 20th century. The author's constant theme is that the failures of the Versailles conference laid the groundwork for World War II, the iron curtain, the Vietnam War, the various Middle East conflicts, and the Balkan wars. Andelman's sprightly view of the peace process, the major and minor players, and the decades-later outcomes is an excellent read that will enhance most history collections. Recommended for most subject collections.
—Edwin B. Burgess

Library Journal

The failures of Versailles cast a long shadow. David A. Andelman provides a thoughtful assessment of the dilemmas of the Great War’s victors, and Woodrow Wilson’s noble and ill-fated quest to design a new international order.” —Henry A. Kissinger “The peace settlements that followed World War I have recently come back into focus as one of the dominant factors shaping the modern world. The Balkans, the Middle East, Iraq, Turkey, and parts of Africa all owe their present-day problems, in part, to these negotiations. David Andelman brings it all back to life—the lofty ideals, the ugly compromises, the larger-than-life personalities who came to Paris in 1919. And he links that far-away diplomatic dance to present-day problems to illuminate our troubled times. A tremendous addition to this vitally important subject.” —Ambassador Richard Holbrooke “The peace conference in Paris at the end of World War I was the first and last moment of pure hope for peace in the history of world affairs. Our president Woodrow Wilson was the sorcerer for this hope, and he kindled great expectations in people everywhere. David Andelman, a classic reporter and storyteller, tells this fascinating tale of hope falling finally and forever on the shoals of naivete and hard-headed cynicism.” —Leslie H. Gelb, former columnist for the New York Times and President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations “The failed peace settlement following the Great War of 1914–1918 has been the subject of many fine books. In many respects, David Andelman’s A Shattered Peace is the best of these. It is compact and compellingly written. Moreover, it explains more clearly than any other work how the failure of peacemaking in 1919 shaped later history and, indeed, shapes our own era.” —Ernest R. May, Charles Warren Professor of American History, Harvard University “It is the power and fascination of David Andelman’s new book, A Shattered Peace, that he shows us—with the clarity of a first-rate reporter and the drama and detail at the command of a first-rate novelist—that we are all still enmeshed in the loose ends of the Treaty of Versailles. Andelman brings us to Korea, to Vietnam, to the Persian Gulf, and to Iraq in our own vexed era. His story is alive with color, conflict, and interesting people. We could not find a better guide to this time.” —Richard Snow, Editor in Chief, American Heritage

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