Britain George
David lloyd george…why was the treaty good for great britain?
I have to write something for school but i forgot why it was good for great britain? The versallies treaty…why was it good for great britain?
Thanks (:
Well, to begin with it depends on what you mean by “good for Britain”. Twenty years later another war broke out and this was bad for Britain and for everybody else. Ultimately the Versailles Treaty failed to achieve its most important objective: long-term peace.
Having said that, it is true that Lloyd George acheived most of his diplomatic objectives at Versailles. What did the British want in 1919? Well, one thing the British people wanted was revenge. They had just fought a long and bloody war against the Germans, so obviously they wanted to make Germany pay for all their suffering.
Lloyd George was very much aware of this: he was a very clever politician who knew how to make himself popular. The Versailles Treaty was of course harsh on the Germans. They had to lose territory, their army and navy were restricted, they had to accept responsiblity for the war and pay reparations. All this was obviously popular in Britain. However, many people in Britain thought the Treaty was not harsh enough.
Britain was a great naval power which had been threatened by the German navy, so it was particularly important that the German navy was restricted in size by the Treaty. For example, the Germans were only allowed six small battleships, and no submarines.
But at the same time, Lloyd George wanted to be less harsh on the Germans than the French did (remember, the French had been invaded by the Germans and suffered the most). Lloyd George recognized that if Germany was completely destroyed, then this would be bad for Europe’s economy. Ultimately that would be bad for Britain too, because Britain depended on trade with Europe, and with Germany in particular.
The French wanted the Versailles Treaty to be even more harsh. They wanted to take away even more territory from the Germans, by confiscating the territory called the Rhineland in western Germany. Lloyd George succeeded in opposing this idea. So here too Lloyd George’s diplomacy was a success.
The other big disagreement among the Allies concerned German reparations for war damages. The problem was that the war had been fought in France, so most of the damaged factories, towns and villages were also in France. The British didn’t think it was fair that the French should get all the reparations. After all, they had also fought in the war and a lot of soldiers had been killed. Lloyd George argued that the Germans should also have to pay for the indirect costs of the war: including all the pensions that had to be paid to war widows and injured soldiers. This idea was accepted in the Versailles Treaty, so that was another success for Lloyd George.
In the end, though, the Germans hardly paid any reparations. Soon their economy was in deep trouble. Eventually they stopped paying reparations altogether. So in the end Britain didn’t benefit that much from Lloyd George’s success.
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