If there was a peace settlement after World War I, it was not forged in 1919. The Paris Peace Conference did not, and could not, lay the foundations for a stable and peaceful international order, certainly not in Europe. It could not even achieve what alone was in the realm of the possible so shortly after the unprecedented catastrophe of 1914–18: to establish a basic framework for postwar security, political stabilisation and economic reconstruction in a shattered Old World. It appears more illuminating to interpret the Versailles settlement as the first yet by no means the most balanced or far-reaching attempt to cope with the legacy of the Great War – and to establish a stable and legitimate peace system for the emerging Euro-Atlantic world of the ‘short twentieth century’.

The peacemakers of Versailles were not only unable to come to terms with the most critical problems and core structural challenges of the postwar era – notably the lack of international security – but effectively exacerbated them. This crystallised in the unresolved German question – the question of what shape and what place the vanquished power was to have in the postwar international system. It could only be addressed after an extended period of post-Versailles crisis, and on different premises, when – from 1923 – concrete lessons were drawn from the deficiencies of what had been decided in 1919.