Razing Babel and the Problems of Constructing Peace

NEAR Verdun, French Premier Georges Clemenceau gave a speech in July 1919 in which he paid rude homage to the passage from one era to another. As he put it, ‘it is easier to make war than peace’.1 Like most of the participants in the drafting of the Versailles Treaty, and historians afterwards, Clemenceau maintained that the problems and irenic possibilities of the 1920s really began with their birth at the peace negotiations, rather than their gestation, or conception, during the war.2 This article will argue that the international history of the European peace needs fully to integrate the immense and often fissiparous changes that the ‘total war’ of 1914–18 wrought on participants in the conflict. It will study one example of how the experience of war weighed heavily in the international politics of the decade that followed: the conflicting assessments of the balance of power, specifically Anglo-French assessments of air power.3

Balance (ability · Economic history · Negotiation · Peace treaty · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Spanish Civil War · Total war · Treaty · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact

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