External links
- Contributions to the Foreign Policy Research Institute
- 'What Historians Get Wrong About World War I', Time (1 August 2014)
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Stephen A. Schuker | |
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| Born | Stephen Alan Schuker 1939 (age 84–85) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Cornell University (BA) Harvard University (MA, PhD) |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Awards | George Louis Beer Prize (1977) |
Stephen Alan Schuker (born 1939) is an American historian who is currently William W. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia. [1]
He was educated at Cornell University, where he gained a BA in 1959. [1] In 1958 Cornell awarded him a $500 prize for being their outstanding history student. [2] He was awarded an MA and a PhD by Harvard University in 1962 and 1969, respectively. [1] According to Walter A. McDougall, Schuker's book The End of French Predominance in Europe is the definitive work on the circumstances leading to the adoption of the 1924 Dawes Plan on German reparations. [3] The book was awarded the Gilbert Chinard Prize (in 1976) and the George Louis Beer Prize (in 1977). [4]
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Following their defeat in World War I, the Central Powers agreed to pay war reparations to the Allied Powers. Each defeated power was required to make payments in either cash or kind. Because of the financial situation in Austria, Hungary, and Turkey after the war, few to no reparations were paid and the requirements for reparations were cancelled. Bulgaria, having paid only a fraction of what was required, saw its reparation figure reduced and then cancelled. Historians have recognized the German requirement to pay reparations as the "chief battleground of the post-war era" and "the focus of the power struggle between France and Germany over whether the Versailles Treaty was to be enforced or revised."
Charles Gates Dawes was an American diplomat and Republican politician who was the 30th vice president of the United States from 1925 to 1929 under Calvin Coolidge. He was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 for his work on the Dawes Plan for World War I reparations.
Gustav Ernst Stresemann was a German statesman who served as chancellor of Germany from August to November 1923, and as foreign minister from 1923 to 1929. His most notable achievement was the reconciliation between Germany and France, for which he and French Prime Minister Aristide Briand received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926. During a period of political instability and fragile, short-lived governments, Stresemann was the most influential politician in most of the Weimar Republic's existence.
The Locarno Treaties were seven agreements negotiated in Locarno, Switzerland, from 5 to 16 October 1925 and formally signed in London on 1 December, in which the First World War Western European Allied powers and the new states of Central and Eastern Europe sought to secure the post-war territorial settlement, in return for normalizing relations with the defeated German Reich. It also stated that Germany would never go to war with the other countries. Locarno divided borders in Europe into two categories: western, which were guaranteed by the Locarno Treaties, and eastern borders of Germany with Poland, which were open for revision.
War reparations are compensation payments made after a war by one side to the other. They are intended to cover damage or injury inflicted during a war. War reparations can take the form of hard currency, precious metals, natural resources, industrial assets, or intellectual properties. Loss of territory in a peace settlement is usually considered to be distinct from war reparations.
The Dawes Plan temporarily resolved the issue of the reparations that Germany owed to the Allies of World War I. Enacted in 1924, it ended the crisis in European diplomacy that occurred after French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in response to Germany's failure to meet its reparations obligations.
The Young Plan was a 1929 attempt to settle issues surrounding the World War I reparations obligations that Germany owed under the terms of Treaty of Versailles. Developed to replace the 1924 Dawes Plan, the Young Plan was negotiated in Paris from February to June 1929 by a committee of international financial experts under the leadership of American businessman and economist Owen D. Young. Representatives of the affected governments then finalised and approved the plan at The Hague conference of 1929/30. Reparations were set at 36 billion Reichsmarks payable through 1988. Including interest, the total came to 112 billion Reichsmarks. The average annual payment was approximately two billion Reichsmarks. The plan came into effect on 17 May 1930, retroactive to 1 September 1929.
The Occupation of the Ruhr was the period from 11 January 1923 to 25 August 1925 when French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr region of Weimar Republic Germany.
The Economic and Financial Conference was a formal conclave of representatives from 34 European countries held in the ancient Palazzo San Giorgio of Genoa, Italy, from 10 April to 19 May 1922.
The Lausanne Conference of 1932, held from 16 June to 9 July 1932 in Lausanne, Switzerland, was a meeting of representatives from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Belgium, Japan and Germany that resulted in an agreement to lower Germany's World War I reparations obligations as imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and the 1929 Young Plan. The reduction of approximately 90 per cent was made as a result of the difficult economic circumstances during the Great Depression. The Lausanne Treaty never came into effect because it was dependent on an agreement with the United States on the repayment of the loans it had made to the Allied powers during World War I, and that agreement was never reached. The Lausanne Conference marked the de facto end of Germany's reparations payments until after World War II.
Étienne Mantoux was a French economist, born in Paris. He was the son of Paul Mantoux. He is probably best known for his book The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes published two years after it was completed and one year after his death. In it, he sought to demonstrate that much of John Maynard Keynes' beliefs about the consequences of the Treaty of Versailles for Germany as expressed in The Economic Consequences of the Peace were wrong.
Arthur Rosenberg was a German Marxist historian and writer.
Hyperinflation affected the German Papiermark, the currency of the Weimar Republic, between 1921 and 1923, primarily in 1923. The German currency had seen significant inflation during the First World War due to the way in which the German government funded its war effort through borrowing, with debts of 156 billion marks by 1918. This national debt was substantially increased by 50 billion marks of reparations payable in cash and in-kind under the May 1921 London Schedule of Payments agreed after the Versailles treaty.
Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. He teaches European and international history at Harvard.
The George Louis Beer Prize is an award given by the American Historical Association for the best book in European international history from 1895 to the present written by a United States citizen or permanent resident. The prize was created in 1923 to honor the memory of George Beer, a prominent historian, member of the U.S. delegation at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and senior League of Nations official. Described by Jeffrey Herf, the 1998 laureate, as "the Academy Award" of book prizes for modern European historians, it is one of the most prestigious American prizes for book-length history. The Beer Prize is usually awarded to senior scholars in the profession; the American Historical Association restricts its other distinguished European history award, the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, to young authors publishing their first substantial work.
Charles Louis Auguste Jacques Seydoux (1870–1929) was a French diplomat, economist and Director of Commercial Relations at the French Foreign Ministry.
The following events occurred in April 1924:
Carl Bergmann was a German banker and diplomat.
International relations (1919–1939) covers the main interactions shaping world history in this era, known as the interwar period, with emphasis on diplomacy and economic relations. The coverage here follows the diplomatic history of World War I and precedes the diplomatic history of World War II. The important stages of interwar diplomacy and international relations included resolutions of wartime issues, such as reparations owed by Germany and boundaries; American involvement in European finances and disarmament projects; the expectations and failures of the League of Nations; the relationships of the new countries to the old; the distrustful relations between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world; peace and disarmament efforts; responses to the Great Depression starting in 1929; the collapse of world trade; the collapse of democratic regimes one by one; the growth of economic autarky; Japanese aggressiveness toward China; fascist diplomacy, including the aggressive moves by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; the Spanish Civil War; the appeasement of Germany's expansionist moves toward the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and the last, desperate stages of rearmament as another world war increasingly loomed.
The Reparation Commission, also Inter-Allied Reparation Commission, was established by the Treaty of Versailles to determine the level of World War I reparations which Germany should pay the victorious Allies. Its remit was soon broadened to reparations by other central powers, namely Austria, Bulgaria, and Hungary.
