Kerry Brown

Hundredth Anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles:
Meanings and Implications*
Kerry Brown**
Abstract
The year 2019 marks the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in Paris. The
First World War, which the Treaty arose from, does not present a palatable and easily
digested set of issues. Despite this, it is worth attending to what the Versailles Treaty
meant, and what lessons might even today be drawn from it. One of the often neglected
aspects of the First World War was that it did involve Asian partners. Japanʼs involvement inthe Versailles Treaty discussions may not have been prominent, but that it was there at all
showed a shift in geopolitical forces. It showed that Japan and Asia had an irrevocable rolein European affairs, rather than it simply being the other way around. The second issue toreflect on when one looks at the meaning of Versailles in the present is how to assess andunderstand alliances, and their advantages and disadvantages. The complex mishmashof different alliances and treaty obligations across the continent in 1913 has been one of
the issues frequently blamed for what unravelled in 1914. It was probably to this issue
that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe referred when he spoke in 2014 of the dangers of Asia
today duplicating the situation of Europe almost a century before. The Treaty, moreover,addressed issues which continue to have importance today―migration is one such issue,
and that of values is another. In the 21st century, reflecting on the Versailles Treaty signed
a hundred years ago finally allows us to reflect on the journey over the period between thenand now that globalisation has taken. The legacy of Versailles is alive and well.

The year 2019 marks the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in Paris.
It will be a low-key event in Europe. The Treaty is associated with a complex periodof history which is still not properly understood. Whereas the moral and geopoliticalissues that arose from the Second World War a generation later have been more
widely and easily assimilated into public consciousness, the First World War, which the Treaty
arose from, presents a far less palatable and easily digested set of issues. Its origins such as
historian Christopher Clark and others have shown in recent years, were multifarious and hard
to explain in an easily comprehended way.1 We understand better the causes of the European
1939 war. For the 1914–1918 war, the widespread carnage, the often static quality of the conflict,and the ways in which it rose from an intricate and hard to unpick set of alliances and thecommitments they involved make for a far less neat account of history.
Despite this, it is worth attending to what the Versailles Treaty meant, and what lessons might*This article is based on a presentation made by the author at the symposium “Asia and Europe from theVesuilles Treaty to Present: The Legacies of Post War-Endings and Peace-making between Custrainte
and Forward Looking” held by JIIA and FRS (Foundtion for Strategic Research) on January 28, 2019.

** Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies, and Director of the Lau China Institute at Kingʼs College,London, and Associate Fellow at Chatham House.
1Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

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Hundredth Anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles: Meanings and Implications

even today be drawn from it. At the time, participants like the economist John Maynard Keynes
were rightly critical and sceptical of the sustainability of the Treaty.2 And yet, the settlement had
been entered in good faith, and it gave rise to the era of multilateralism which was, painfully andslowly, to emerge in the following decades, and which lies at the heart of the world we still live in.
One of the often neglected aspects of the First World War was that it did involve Asianpartners. Japan after all was an ally of the British through the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902. Itwas also one of the key participants of the Versailles meeting itself. The symbolic importanceof this, whatever its actual practical meaning (Japanʼs inheritance of the formerly German
concessions in China was to prove short-lived in their enjoyment, and created a legacy for
Sino-Japanese bilateral relations which stretched over the following decades), is what is worth
attending to today. The peripheral nature of Asia in Western intellectual and cultural life at thetime was striking. Japan had only started to figure as a country to understand and know betteron its own terms after the 1860sʼ Meiji Restoration. It started to matter more as a geopoliticalplayer with the military victories over China in 1895 and Russia a decade later. These events
showed the ways in which Japan had progressed as an industrial, modernising country, and onethat represented a new phenomenon̶Asian modernity. It also illustrated the ways, particularly
through the victory against Russia, that this was able to impact directly on European interestsand had visibility in their worlds.
Japanʼs involvement in the Versailles Treaty discussions may not have been prominent.
But that it was there at all showed a shift in geopolitical forces. An Asian nation was no longer
viewed as passive, and relegated to the sidelines. It was able to take an active part in international
diplomatic discussions. The ways in which Asia had figured almost as a place which existed
simply to passively receive Western attention, be it commercial or political, which had been thecase since the first waves of colonial attention in the 16th and 17th century, were disrupted by
the existence of a Japan which was able to exercise more active agency. And it showed that Japanand Asia had an irrevocable role in European affairs, rather than it simply being the other wayaround.
The second issue to reflect on when one looks at the meaning of Versailles in the present is
how to assess and understand alliances, and their advantages and disadvantages. It was probably
to this issue that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe referred when he spoke in 2014 of the dangers ofAsia today duplicating the situation of Europe almost a century before.3 The complex mishmash
of different alliances and treaty obligations across the continent in 1913 has been one of theissues frequently blamed for what unravelled in 1914. Small events, because of the architecture ofobligations and commitments around them, escalated quickly. It is probably for this reason that ahundred years later the region now looks at two very different major powers̶that of the US andthe Peopleʼs Republic of China̶with radically different views of alliances. America, at least until
recently, maintained a strong commitment to perhaps the most extensive set of security and tradealliances across the Asia Pacific but also globally. It enjoys treaty-based arrangements with Japan,South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand. The predictability this gives is, ofcourse, balanced by the ways in which it ties Washington into obligations that sometimes restrictor curtail its options. It is perhaps for this reason that the presidency of Donald Trump has been
keen to start working outside the framework these provide.
For the Peopleʼs Republic of China, the situation is the opposite. It has only one current
treaty̶that with North Korea, signed in the early 1960s. Otherwise, it operates on a level of2John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe,
1920).

3See, Abe comments surprise Chinese at Davos, January 23rd 2014, Financial Times, at
https://www.ft.com/video/1d28bc50-ea9f-3b83-b41b-3c001d6c093d

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Kerry Brown

informality, disliking the impositions and restrictions placed on it by obligations spelt out intreaties. That does give it great flexibility in the way in which it arranges diplomatic space aroundit, setting up abstract ideas like “strategic partnership.” But it also lays it open to complaints thatit is not a full stakeholder, that it is parasitical on a rules-based system put in place by others, andthat it operates as a free loader. As the worldʼs second largest economy, these are obviously notgood characteristics, and its future as a treaty-averse power has to be questionable.
The Versailles Treaty addressed issues which continue to have importance today, and meanthat it is easier to relate to and understand the world in which this agreement grew. Migrationis one such issue, something that carries the same potency in the domestic affairs of Europe,and now increasingly in Asia. This relates to the ways in which the Treaty reinforced the notionof what it is to be a nation state, and what belonging to such an entity actually meant, in ageographical area where the conceptual history and understanding of this term were not deep.
While an island nation such as Japan understands well the importance of boundaries and had
a stronger and clearer identity, this was less so for a collection of states which were to emerge
through the rest of the century, many of them working off the influence of colonisation and otherforms of external influence. Political scientist, the late Benedict Anderson captured this process
in his term “imagined communities.”4 Unlike in Europe, where from the 1648 Westphalian Treaty,
there had been a stronger sense of what a nation was, and what its political and economic identity
might be, the concept at the heart of this, “sovereignty,” was not one that had properly existed in
Asia, and in particular North East Asia, where the notion of vassal states and tributary relations
flowing from the dominance of imperial Chinese entities had prevailed. Versailles can be seen asa key moment when China at least, or the Republican version of it that existed in 1919, started towrestle with this issue. The emergence of a Chinese version of nationalism through the May 4th
Movement which occurred just after the Versailles Treaty as a reaction to some of its stipulations
and of what China was as a modern nation state has been an unfolding story since this era. It has
also reordered the political geography of the region, embedding a more bounded sense of what
the powers, and responsibilities, of nation states are, and what it is to be a member of these.
The other issue that Versailles allows us to contemplate is that of values. It was, after all, atreaty which was meant to exemplify the victory of one set of values over another̶the facing
down by a free market, laissez-faire set of alliances around Great Britain and its allies against
German militarism and statism. That the Treaty was an attempt to embed these values ininternational practices, whatever its shortcomings, is an important thing to recognise. That
process of how to accommodate very different legal and civil society values in the international
community also continues to this day. With the rise of China it has perhaps grown even moreurgent. Versailles wrestled with an emerging sense of multilateralism, giving birth to the Leagueof Nations which is often seen as the precursor to the United Nations in the 1940s. It also marked
the emergence of the US after the Second World War as a global player again after its years of“splendid isolation.” The one clear lesson one can draw about this whole area from Versailles isthat the issue of values is one of immense complexity, but it cannot be ignored. In 2019, with theUS and China now involved in an increasingly fractious trade war, and the underlying strategiccompetition between the two based on different views of the world order and the principles that
underlie it, the contentiousness about which values in the end prevail, and how very different
visions can co-exist beside each other without conflict has come back with vengeance.
The forces and processes of globalisation and the painful and often tragic route that the global
order today emerged from, involve taking Versaillesʼs contribution into account. Liberal order,
after all, was what the Treaty was meant to defend and embed in a young global system. Over
4Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London :Verso, 1983).

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Hundredth Anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles: Meanings and Implications

the ensuing decades, of course, there were many setbacks to that process. But that does notinvalidate the mission that the conference tried to achieve. The language of multilateralism, of
self-determination and of what a liberal order means remains with us.
In many ways it is the legacy of this order that China now stands accused of disrupting. Often
figured as a contester of the status quo, issues are perhaps not so straightfor ward. One canbroadly categorise state actors in their relationship to the global set of largely US-led norms asnorms observers, norms contesters, or norms entrepreneurs. The US and its allies have, at least
until recently, sat in the first group. Russia in recent years, and of course an outside player like
North Korea occupy the second. But for the Peopleʼs Republic things are evidently more complex.
In the years since under President Hu Jintao in the 2000s it was a norms observer through its
successful desire to join multilateral forum like the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which it
became part of after a 14-year-long epic of negotiation in 2001. It also remained an importantmember of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank. But with the onsetof the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 eroding some of the prowess and prestige of the global
rules-based system in Chinaʼs eyes, it started to move towards a more distinctive posture. In theera of Xi Jinping since 2012 it has been more proactive in trying to create what some have seen as
a parallel order̶a kind of shadow international system, around the Belt and Road Initiative andorganisations it has proactively set up such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
These have served to carve out a world away from the US, where China has more strategic space
and autonomy, and we can see what an order based on Chinese values might look like.
Chinaʼs attitude as a norms entrepreneur shows a pragmatic acceptance that the ability of it torelate to others with its unique political system, and its distinctive geopolitical space and stance,
is not straightforward. Versailles can be seen in some ways as an act of public diplomacy̶anattempt to rectify and address core international issues that had arisen from the First World
War. It occurs in the narrative of attempts to create a liberal, multilateral order. Chinaʼs rise
now contests that̶seeming to usher in an era after the high tide of multilateralism when theglobal situation is more complex, and a countr y is emerging that does not sit easily into thestructures that already exist. In the categories of soft and hard power too, China does not slot
easily. Its attempt to address this issue of how to communicate its values to the wider world as
it has become more prominent and a more important player has led to the need to talk of a newconcept̶“sharp” power. This falls somewhere between the already extant categories, something
falling short of overt use of military power, but definitely not soft, persuasive and reassuring
because of the ease with which it is willing to use covert and overt threats and pressure points to
those outside on issues that matter to it, like the South and East China Sea, and Taiwan.
In the 21st century, reflecting on the Versailles Treaty signed a hundred years ago finallyallows us to reflect on the journey over the period between then and now that globalisation hastaken. It has not been an easy path. The narrative of globalisation, however, continues, as muchby necessity as desire. This is something that places restraints and parameters on China too.
Like it or not, the options for its future are to be dominant in a contested global order where it
finds itself exposed, unable to convince partners around it of the attractiveness of its visions fororder and progress, or through inner transformation and a change of attitude in the world around
it able somehow to occupy a more stable, and accepted place. The history for the reasons why
Versailles happened, and what its impact on history was are therefore ones that the PRC needs toreflect on. The fact that the Treaty was also occurring in the year in which the May 4th Movementin China occurred, with its student-led call to promote Mr Science and Mr Democracy, with theunease that this creates in the contemporary country stands as an issue rich in symbolism. In
that respect, at least, the legacy of Versailles is alive and well. It should be better understood andcontextualised, certainly, but it is still there.

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