Welby is wrong to draw comparisons with Weimar

In a thoughtful column in this paper, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, reflected on how to secure an “ethical and wise” outcome after the war in Ukraine and build “peace and reconciliation”. One comment he makes in passing, however, is in danger of being misunderstood: he urges that Russia after the war must “not end up like Weimar after 1919”.

The idea that Germany was treated unjustly after the First World War, and that this led to the Second, is now conventional wisdom. The leading exponent of this view was the former Treasury official and Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes, in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace which appeared in December 1919. It became an international bestseller.

Keynes’s assertions fed the current of appeasement, divided the Allies, and helped to dissuade the United States from joining the new League of Nations. He did not mince words: the Treaty of Versailles was “one of the most outrageous acts of a cruel victor in civilised history”. Its imposition of financial reparations “reduced Germany to servitude” and would be “the death sentence of millions of German men, women and children”.

Historians today do not generally endorse this view. Germany was indeed required to make economic reparation. It had done enormous damage to occupied territories in Belgium, France and Eastern Europe, looting whole industries, imposing forced labour, and carrying out systematic sabotage when its armies retreated. Modern analysis of the economics of reparations suggests that Germany could have paid them. It has even been suggested that Germany actually profited from reparations.

The sympathy towards Germany among progressive opinion on the Allied side may seem unlikely in the case of Russia today. The German government pleaded that it had been fighting in its own defence, and although Putin makes the same claim, to most people Russia’s aggression is indisputable. But most people outside liberal circles thought the same of Germany in 1918: there were even calls to “hang the Kaiser”, and to try military commanders for war crimes.

What if – let us be optimistic – Putin is replaced by a shaky democratic government, as in Weimar Germany? Then we would be facing the very problem that faced the Allies in 1918: how to foster German democracy while restraining German power.

The Weimar Republic was better than the alternatives, but it was not blameless. It evaded the treaty limitations on rearmament, training tank units secretly in Russia and building civilian aircraft that could be used for war. The disarmament clauses were something the divided former Allies did not seriously enforce. Would it be any more feasible to impose arms limitations on a post-war Russia?

The best hope for peace was that the Weimar Republic, warts and all, would survive. But that was wrecked by the Great Depression. Hitler began massive rearmament, and that left deterrence as the only hope. But deterrence was hampered by cost and by domestic opposition to spending on defence. Most dangerous of all was the refusal of many Germans to believe that they had really been defeated in 1918: nationalists insisted they had been tricked by the Allies into an armistice and betrayed by socialists and Jews at home. It is all too easy to imagine this in a post-war Russia.

History rarely provides simple answers, but in this case it raises worrying questions. How do you deal with a state that, though defeated, remains powerful and unrepentant? There may not be a complete answer, but we ought to have learnt something: contest false narratives; remain vigilant; stay united; encourage democracy, peace and reconciliation but without giving way to wishful thinking. Easy to say.

History rarely provides simple answers, and the Archbishop betrays a simplistic grasp of the First World War and its aftermath