Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
Revisionist sentiment against the Paris Peace Treaties erupted even before the ink was dry. The victorious wartime coalition quickly unraveled, starting with Keynes's vicious attacks and America's defection, France's insistent demands for enforcement and Britain's vacillations, Italy and Japan's dissatisfaction and dissociation, and the small East European client states' factiousness and rivalries. The defeated Reich used all means at its disposal to protest the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles; it applied diplomacy and propaganda to widen breaches among the Allies, appeal to the sympathy of the neutral nations, and, while warning of the menace of bolshevism, explore a future Berlin-Moscow entente to counterbalance the Allies' domination of Europe. Lenin's Russia and the organs of the new Communist International militated against a peace settlement that had ringed Moscow with hostile regimes. The former wartime neutrals - the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and Switzerland - blamed the postwar inflation and economic contraction on a peace settlement that had disrupted traditional commercial, manufacturing, transport, and communications systems and erected onerous barriers. The specter of huge Allied war debts and enemy reparations payments, of heavy military expenditures and mounting reconstruction costs, of high taxes and tariffs, and of growing restiveness in the colonial world, all dampened the prospects of European economic recovery.
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