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What Wilson and Lloyd George failed to see was that the terms of peace which they were hammering out against the dogged resistance of Clemenceau and Foch, while seemingly severe enough, left Germany in the long run relatively stronger than before. Except for the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in the west and the loss of some valuable industrialized frontier districts to the Poles, form whom the Germans had taken them originally, Germany remained virtually intact, greater in population and industrial capacity than France could ever be, and moreover with her cities, farms, and factories undamaged by the war, which had been fought in enemy lands. In terms of relative power in Europe, Germany's position was actually better in 1919 than in 1914, or would be as soon as the Allied victors carried out their promise to reduce their armaments to the level of the defeated. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had not been the catastrophe for Germany that Bismarck had feared, because there was no Russian empire to take advantage of it. Russia, beset by revolution and civil war, was for the present, and perhaps would be for years to come, impotent. In the place of this powerful country on her eastern border Germany now had small, unstable states which could not seriously threaten her and which one day might easily be made to return former German territory and even made to disappear from the map. (en) |
