The Peacemakers

Once in a while, Europe gets the chance to remake itself. The Peace of Westphalia, marking the end of the wars of religion, and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 are the settlements held in popular historical memory to have resolved more problems than they caused.

The Paris Conference of 1919, convened by the victors of the First World War, has had a far more critical appraisal. The Treaty of Versailles is widely regarded as the one that didn't work - leaving the real business of sealing the peace (albeit an uneasy one) to the carve-up of Western and Soviet spheres of influence at Potsdam and Yalta at the end of the Second World War.

It was doomed to ignominy from the start by the eloquent opposition of one of the dominant intellectual figures of the 20th century. John Maynard Keynes's polemic against the Treaty, Economic Consequences of the Peace, buried the reputation of the peacemakers. For Keynes, all that was achieved at Versailles was a completion of the economic destruction wrought by the war and the driving to desperation of the German people.

The "peace of shame" as an embittered German press instantly dubbed the settlement, was henceforth seen as the precondition of German extremism. But Versailles was also the foundation for the modern geopolitical Europe and its attempts to satisfy national rights for self-determination and minorities in such mosaic creations as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and the rebirth of Poland. The events of the past few years in the Balkans, let alone the precariousness of the Russian periphery, are a reminder that balance of national self-determination and stability remains an elusive goal.

Macmillan, a Canadian whose great, great grandfather was Lloyd George, the British representative at the conference, is hostile to the Eurocentric emphasis of many existing accounts, giving equal significance to its impact on the Middle East, Japan and China.

Her Versailles is a giant, chattering market place of causes and interests, prejudices and obsessions, bringing together not only the leaders of the three great powers - the US, Britain and France - but a cast of characters from Ho Chi Minh to TE Lawrence. This must surely have been the greatest concentration of large egos in one place in the history of international relations.

That is one of the reasons why Versailles needs an explainer of Macmillan's calibre - as well as a defender. She is a fluent narrator of the small worlds of great men (and a very few women), their envies, flirtations and vanities alongside the grand affairs.

The task of peacemaking was so daunting as to cause even Woodrow Wilson, the US President renowned for his cold arrogance, to have an attack of butterflies when he arrived. "I am wondering," he remarked to his propaganda chief (as they called spin doctors back then), "whether you have not unconsciously spun a net for me from which there is no escape."

His fears were justified. Still regarded as a hero in those countries which fought for freedom from the heel of the 19th century empires "Wilsonianism" is more widely regarded as a curse by those who consider liberal interventionists to do more harm than good when they involve themselves in other people's strife. Versailles was brilliantly exploited for its propaganda value by Hitler with his harping on a Germany "bled dry" by victors. Germany never did pay anything like the headline amount. But the myth was unstoppable. It is less often noticed - and Macmillan is regrettably slight in her account of the reception of the Treaty in Germany - that it was equally useful to postwar Germany in explaining away the horrors of Hitler as being, in part, attributable to external causation. If Versailles could be held responsible for unleashing the Second World War, how responsible were the Germans?

Her grasp of the predicament of France - a country occupied and ravaged - is far more intuitive. "Please understand," said the minister of the liberated French regions arguing for reparations and security against its neighbour, "it is a desert, it is desolation, it is death." Reading that, one understands perhaps a little better the driven, desperately friendly nature of the Franco-German alliance in the European Union today.