It was a favourite phrase of Max Warburg's that Germany in the 1920s was ‘an object, not a subject’; that is to say, its fate depended more on external forces than on the decisions of German policy makers. In particular, domestic politics were circumscribed by the burdens of the armistice and peace treaty imposed on the new Republic by the victorious Western Allies. For many years, historians influenced by such contemporary criticisms of the peace treaty echoed this view. Versailles had seen Wilsonian ideals and economic rationality sacrificed to traditional power politics and chauvinism; the price paid was the failure of democracy in Germany and a second European war. However, since the 1970s, such arguments have fallen into disuse. New research in the French, British and American archives has led to substantial reappraisals of those countries' policies. French policy is now seen by a number of authors as a series of more or less rational strategems designed to increase France's leverage over her eastern neighbour, ranging from consensual proposals for economic cooperation to confrontational bids for control over the Rhineland and Ruhr. American policy is portrayed as an attempt to achieve economic recovery in Europe (and arguably to arrest the spread of Bolshevism) by means of large-scale, though privately organised, capital export. British policy is seen principally as an unrealistic effort to return to pre-war economic conditions and to abandon the ‘continental commitment’ in favour of a remoulded Empire.