This book brings together the proceedings of an international conference on the Treaty of Versailles. The 1919 peace treaty left an enduring mark on twentieth-century historiography. Even now, the reason for the ultimate collapse of the Versailles system remains disputed. A detailed examination of the motives and making of the treaty, as undertaken here, goes a long way toward explaining whether that failure stemmed from inherent weaknesses of the treaty or from postwar revisionism and economic instability. There exists a solid basis for this reevaluation: multiarchival studies that have appeared in the past twenty-five years have minimized national bias, although most have treated a specific national problem or taken a particular national perspective. Furthermore, no effort has been made to produce an international research oriented synthesis.

A group of German and American historians concluded in 1992 that a reassessment of the peace settlement from an international perspective after seventy-five years would therefore be particularly timely. In May 1994 experts from France, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, and the United States gathered to reconstruct the making of the treaty by discussing the latest archival evidence and the extant literature. The conference took place under the auspices of the Center for German and European Studies of the University of California at Berkeley and the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.