The West’s incredible naivety about Germany

The laxity of geopolitical Keynesianism made us abandon the treaty of Versailles and led to the Second World War. Today, the fragility of our international order is based on this same mistake. We are dealing with the preservation of the Nazi elite and of Germany’s imperial geostrategic culture.

I. The abandonment of the treaty of Versailles, the laxity of geopolitical Keynesianism and the road to the Second World War

I vividly remember a history class in my French high school in Paris, in 2011, where our history teacher explained to us that the exorbitant reparations demanded by France in the Treaty of Versailles led to Germany's humiliation, to its economic problems, and to the Second World War.

Strangely, this view originated in the United Kingdom. In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), John Maynard Keynes explained that Europe could not prosper without a fair economic system, something he believed was made impossible by the Treaty of Versailles.

The exact same year, De Gaulle wrote a completely different text, which is essential for understanding how the post-war security architecture worked and the way Keynes’ ideas destroyed it: “The Franco-Polish Alliance”. De Gaulle considered that Germany should be contained, as well as Russia. For him, the deep geostrategic interests of Germany and Russia led them to be natural allies because they needed each other to dominate the peoples of Central Europe:

"The same causes producing the same effects, we will see Russia resuming its march towards the West and the South-West. From which side will Russia seek support to resume the work of Peter the Great and Catherine II? (…) It is on the side of Germany that she will turn her hopes."

To prevent this alliance and to guarantee the security architecture resulting from the treaty of Versailles, he considered that France should rely on Poland: “Poland will be [our] ally. Every step forward of Germanism towards the West is a threat to her, every Prussian advantage gained towards the East is a danger to us.” This view was shared by the French government and the Treaty of Versailles was further consolidated by the Franco-Polish alliance of 1921.

The United Kingdom and the United States then pressured France to give in to another security architecture, where other states found themselves in a weak position and saw their economic interests harmed: that is, France and Poland.

The security system resulting from the treaty of Versailles started to collapse when France signed the Locarno treaties in 1925, due to its lack of resistance to Anglo-American pressure to normalize its relations with Germany. France abandoned its European security architecture, lost its credibility in Central Europe and consequently abdicated its great power status. We know where this led us. It was not the treaty of Versailles that provoked the Second World War then, because France gave up all the advantages it had obtained (reparations were suspended in 1933). On the other hand, the United Kingdom persisted in appeasing Nazi Germany as long as it could and only acted decisively when it was attacked on its territory. This is how the UK, in its turn, lost its great power status, its empire, and ruined its economy (something Keynes probably did not desire).