David A. Andelman
In some cases, the Allies were seeking secure trade routes, linking their far-flung colonial empires that were already on the brink of dissolution. In other cases, their goal was to create nations that would serve as trip-wires or barricades, protecting their own nations from future wars.
So in the Balkans, Yugoslavia threw together Serbs and Croats, Bosnians and Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians -- two alphabets, three religions, a wellspring of deep ancestral hatreds dating back centuries -- that would form a stewpot of a nation to serve, at least for the moment, as the anchor of a cordon sanitaire against any move westward by the revolutionary leaders of newly communist Russia. In the Middle East, the peacemakers assembled Iraq from a host of migratory tribes of Mesopotamia. Seeking purely to guarantee safe passage across Arabia to their colonies in India and Southeast Asia, the peacemakers of Versailles had no sense of the vast, visceral, often lethal differences that divided Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds dating back to the time of the Prophet. All of these tribal groups were thrown together in a single, meta-stable nation. In Palestine, the peacemakers created a homeland for the Jews, as Lord Balfour had pledged during the war to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann -- again with little understanding of the lethal dynamicsthat they were setting in motion and that would dominate the rest of the 20th century. When it came to Europe, where the perceived stakes were the highest, the victorious Allies had two priorities:to make certain that Germany never again was in a financial or military position to wage war on France or England and to prevent the Bolsheviks, the "terrorists" of the early 20th century, from making good on Lenin's pledge to sweep across Europe, replacing capitalism with communism. In impoverishing Germany with a set of impossible reparation payments designed to last for generations, the Allies set in motion a catastrophic series of economic forces in Europe that would lead, first to a deep depression
, then to the rise of a dictator named Hitler, finally to a war that the Treaty of Versailles made inevitable.
My goal in writing A Shattered Peace was to uncover the mistakes of the past and suggest a roadmap for the future that involves undoing much of what the peacemakers of Versailles created nearly a century ago.
Just as the single benighted nation of Yugoslavia has become seven micro-states, so Iraq needs to return to its origins of Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish republics. So often, undoing the mistakes of the past may come only at a cost of enormous bloodshed and conflict. But the results can be stability, peace and prosperity for the nations and people involved.
If there is one investible lesson today to be learned from the sad consequences of Versailles, it is simply this: nations who manage -- ultimately -- to win the freedom to which they were so long entitled and so brutally denied, have turned out to be the most profitable for the modern investor. China, Russia and many of the nations of Central Europe -- Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, in particular -- have become most rewarding as they are finally able to make their way into the international equity market system and the economies of which they are so integral a part.
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