The legacy of Versailles
From Michael W. Stone
Sir: I might well agree with Christopher Hitchens (Books, 8 April) that wanting state boundaries to coincide with ethnic divisions is ‘madness’, but is there anything particularly German about it?
This notion had been gaining in popularity all through the 19th century and, while German unification may indeed have contributed to it, Italian unification a decade earlier probably did the same. Indeed, by 1919 it seems to have been taken for granted that this was proper, drawing the cynical observation from Professor Toynbee that the adoption of this principle by the political establishments of the day was perhaps the surest sign that it was outmoded.
Unfortunately, the end-result of the Paris ‘peace’ settlements was to leave most frontiers roughly in accord with ethnicity — except for Germany’s, an exception which stuck out like a sore thumb. It didn’t take ESP to figure out that once Germany got off her backside (as sooner or later she was bound to) she would object to being the odd man out in this way. No doubt Hitler would have found other excuses for being the bastard he was, but this inconsistency handed him some quite gratuitous ammunition.
Michael W. Stone Peterborough
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