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Discuss the first article reposted from Sarah Zama at the Old Shelter here.
It can never be emphasized enough that the sort of reparations imposed on Germany after WW1 were not out of the ordinary by the harsh standards of late 19th and early 20th international conflict resolution. On the contrary, the abnormal part of the whole affair was Germany's unwillingness to pay up, mostly on the reasoning that "We would have won if we hadn't lost".They hated the Treaty for forcing impossible war reparations on them and the Allies for their intransigency.
Britain had minimal damage on home soil.
It had suffered extensive damage to its merchant fleet. Which was why it demanded a substantial part of the reparations (fair) and because Lloyd George was in campaign mode, set the bar for those reparations quite high, then was fine with them being lowered a lot during further negotiations and then in the various times in the 1920s while still insisting on the same percentage of the reparations (er...). I tend to think the UK missed a serious oppportunity in not accepting Clemenceau's offer of a more long-standing alliance and not recognizing that between devastation to its territory and still sluggish demography, France would not and could not become a European hegemon and could be worked with much closer than was the case OTL in the interwar period.
Similarly I sometimes wonder what the Belgian view of WW1 is. The British, Australian, Canadian, and American view is of this terrible pointless war we shouldn't have gone to and German actions were exaggerated for propaganda, but I bet you don't have that view if your country was invaded as a way of reaching another country and you weren't involved in the power politics of the time and you had slaves taken.
"It worked so well the first time around, let's do it again!"My understanding is that in the 1920s and 1930s, the Belgian political scene was divided between those who argued "absolute neutrality means absolutely not getting blitzed again" (e.g. Leopold III)
Absolutely agreed on this point, if not mistaken the very harsh reparations demanded by France were seen also as a way to cripple Germany in the absence of a system of collective security organised around France-UK-US, or definitely, that's how Clemenceau saw it, as a second/third-best scenario, given the economic and demographic damage France incurred.