Sort each statement by whether it belongs to the KEYNESIAN critique of the peace settlement or to the LATER REVISION of that critique.
Groups: Keynesian critique · Later revision
- Germany’s real payment burden was within its capacity
- The settlement imposed an economically ruinous burden
- Non-payment was in significant part a policy choice
- The treaty would destabilise the European economy as a whole
Hints
- One position was published in 1919 and shaped a generation; the other came decades later.
- The revision turns on the bond structure and on what was actually demanded.
Show the answer
Keynesian critique: The settlement imposed an economically ruinous burden, The treaty would destabilise the European economy as a whole
Later revision: Germany’s real payment burden was within its capacity, Non-payment was in significant part a policy choice
Keynes’s book was enormously influential and it made the treaty seem indefensible to a whole generation of British and American opinion, which mattered in the 1930s, when that opinion was reluctant to enforce anything. Whether he was right about the economics and whether his book had political consequences are two separate questions, and the answers differ.
Practise The First World War and the Interwar Collapse
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