Comments on sourcefrog: The Economic Consequences of the Peace

@Mary, Keynes seems to support the idea that Franc...

2009-04-20T00:33:43.654-07:00

@Mary, Keynes seems to support the idea that France aimed to strip-mine Germany, without seriously expecting to recover the whole amount. His point is that Europe is so integrated that the economic recovery of the victors and the future stability of Europe depends on Germany becoming productive again, so the policy was self-destructive, as it eventually proved to be.

He states that in France's defeat in the 1870s it was required to pay about $1bn to Germany, a much smaller amount relative to their economies at the time. So it might not have been uniquely harsh in history but it was unusually harsh.

I don't have a source for this unfortunately, but ...

2009-04-19T14:19:00.000-07:00

I don't have a source for this unfortunately, but we were told in university history that reparation treaties were always expected to be broken in some form eventually, and were usually monumentally harsh as part of this expectation: essentially strip-mining the loser while you could. They didn't seem committed to that view, it was just a point-of-view they raised when they talked about the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles in the 30s and 40s, that perhaps it had not been uniquely harsh among reparation treaties. (Even if one accepted this, and I don't have the information to do so, it does not imply that the terms of the Treaty were not implicated in the continuing war in the 30s and 40s.)

Well, the price that Germany had been asked to pay...

2009-04-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

Well, the price that Germany had been asked to pay was high for sure, but it unfortunately wasn't unrealistic. The damages to the economy and infrastructures of northern France were estimated to be about a thousand billion francs, and of course noone could never pay back for those damages. I don't blame anyone for that, if the French had won the war, they'd probably have dealt similar damages on the German part of the battlefield.

What i want to point out is that war has a cost, an astouding cost. Not the one of the sophisticated weapons used for slaughtering civilians, but the one for the children of the children of the citizens of the former battlefields : the price to build a whole country upon the ruins that were left.

Unfortunately, there still are people who are so blinded by their own irrational hate that they feel comfortable with making people have to pay this very same price, nowadays.