Destructiveness of The Treaty of Versailles Essay

The idea and practice that the loser in wars should be severely punished so as to prevent a future recurrence has been in existence since ancient times. After all, it is only a logical extension, to conflicts between nations, of the â€Å"eye for an eye† doctrine of vengeance. When the Greeks avenged Paris stealing of Helen, they burned Troy to the ground. When the Romans defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars, they went one step further – obliterating the city and spreading salt over the site of the city. In Utopia, Sir Thomas More writes that the Utopians’ one aim in wartime is to â€Å"punish the offenders so severely that nobody will ever dare to do such a thing again† (111). However, nothing could have prepared the world for the devastation†¦show more content†¦To find the motives behind the imposition of such a harsh peace as well as to justify its infeasibility, Keynes looks back to the 1870s. Whereas Europe was largely composed of self-subsis ting nations before then, the years after 1870 and leading up to the war were marked bythe simultaneous growth of overseas colonies and the labor supply, allowing agriculture and industry to grow at an â€Å"unstable† pace (9) and leading to increasing returns to scale with respect to food. The abundance of food spawned population growth and further development of industry, and lifted European economies into an unprecedented period of boom. In fact, Keynes admits that â€Å"In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it, most of us were brought up† (10). With this unstable growth, Keynes points out four weaknesses. First, the population was expanding at a sizzling pace. To import food from America and the colonies, the European economies allocated more and more labor into industry to manufacture exports. The food then led to further population growth, need for even more food imports, need for more people devoted to industry, and so forth, in a vicious downward spiral. As Keynes aptly describes, economies like Germany’s â€Å"was like a top which to maintain its equilibrium must spin ever faster and faster† (13). Another weakness was the fragile and precarious organization that held together the economies ofShow MoreRelatedAmericas Decision to Jump into World War II Was Justified Essay1025 Words   |  5 Pagesto the creation of the just war theory. There have been a number of wars in the past and even in today’s world that have been proven to be unjustified by the means of this theory. Any war in my opinion, is hard to justify due to the violence, destructiveness, the nature of humans doing during war, and the impact it has on humans and the world. 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