Alcohol, punishment and new enemies: how peace was negotiated in Münster, Versailles and Dayton

A good peace treaty creates peace, a bad peace treaty creates war. The Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended the First World War in 1919, is considered by many to be the ultimate example of such a bad peace treaty. The merciless treatment of the losers sowed so much resentment in Germany that the countdown to World War II actually started as soon as the delegations left Paris.

As Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the European Union discuss ending the war in Ukraine, the question is what lessons can be learned from the history of international peace negotiations. When did a treaty work and when did it not? A quick dive into the past shows that it is useful not to humiliate the loser of a war. A new common enemy can also help.

The oldest peace treaty whose text we know is an agreement between Egypt and the Hittite kingdom (in modern-day Turkey) from 1259 BC. The United Nations sees this agreement as the birth of international diplomacy and has therefore hung a copy of it next to the Security Council chamber. The original text was written on silver tablets, but these have been lost.

In two surviving versions, on an Egyptian temple and a Hittite clay tablet, you can read what Pharaoh Ramses II and King Ḫattušili III agreed upon. They vowed to no longer fight over Syria, but rather to come to each other’s aid if another country threatened one of them. The treaty concluded with a terrible curse for those who broke it: “A thousand gods of the land of Hatti, together with a thousand gods of the land of Egypt, will destroy his house, land, and servants.”

This curse had its effect, because both empires did not fight each other again after this. Crucially, according to historians, the agreement was not only a peace treaty, but also an alliance to fight together against new enemies. (That detail may have escaped the UN.)

Butter to the tree

Classical Antiquity had numerous peace treaties that were actually nothing more than a diktat from the victor after a devastating war. The statement about the Romans by the Scottish chief Calgacus, quoted by the historian Tacitus, is well known: “ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”“they make a waste, and call it peace.” However, the Romans did not always win the day. When Marcus Licinius Crassus violated a treaty with the Parthians in 53 BC, they defeated him and executed the wealthy senator by pouring liquid gold down his throat.

The first modern peace treaty, which scholars see as the birth certificate of international law, was the Peace of Westphalia (better known in the Netherlands as the Peace of Münster) of 1648. This agreement, negotiated for five years, ended the Eighty Years’ War (between the Netherlands and Spain) and the Thirty Years’ War (between the Holy Roman Empire and its German allies on the one hand and Spain and Sweden and theirs on the other).

The first modern peace treaty, which scholars view as the birth certificate of international law, was the Peace of Westphalia

From a study by pamphlets that appeared during this periodit appears that in the Republic of the United Netherlands, enthusiasm for peace with Spain grew rapidly in the last two years of negotiations, because the population now became more concerned about France’s territorial ambitions. There was also a great deal of war fatigue throughout Europe – in some parts of Germany a third of the population had died.

Neerlandica Lotte Jensen quotes in her book Celebrating peace (2016) poet Joost van den Vondel, who rejoiced after the Treaty of Münster: “The cows give milk and cream. It’s butter all the way through. [Er breekt een tijd van grote welvaart aan.] People are already singing PAIS and VRE.” However, Jensen also concludes that there was constant fighting during the peace, albeit on paper in political pamphlets and literature. The next wars – against England and France – were not far away.

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Historians and lawyers consider the treaties of 1648 as the beginning of the ‘System of Westphalia’, where it was established for the first time that a state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. This impetus for modern international law was not stated in so many words in the texts, but was the practical outcome of the balance of power that the parties involved strived for.

Of course, there was no eternal peace in Europe after this. For example, after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, a new international system had to be set up at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In her book Against Terror (2021), historian Beatrice de Graaf writes that this was “a first experiment of joint and institutionalized security management”, which “laid the foundation for the later European system of collective security as we know it today”.

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Here too, a shared enemy – the forces of unrest, rebellion and terror – lay at the basis of a successful peace treaty. After Vienna, things remained relatively quiet in Europe for half a century, partly because loser France was brought into the fold of the new system in 1815.

Good neighbors

The inclusion of the loser of the war emphatically did not happen in Versailles. British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace that the agreement was a “Carthaginian peace,” a reference to the economically ruinous treaty that defeated Carthage had to conclude with the Roman Republic in 201 BC. Keynes spoke harshly about French government leader Georges Clemenceau. He was of the opinion that there was a permanent war between the great powers in Europe, with a new round every so often. A “magnanimous peace” would only lead, the prime minister said, to Germany being able to report to the French border earlier. So the enemy had to be punished.

Keynes disagreed. According to him, the peace treaty contained nothing that would make Germany and the other Central Powers “good neighbors.” He predicted that the draconian reparations would plunge the Germans into an inflation-induced economic crisis. The population would suffer until it could no longer endure. Then the German would “listen to what sounds of hope, illusion and revenge would reach him across the sky.” Indeed, from the mid-1920s onwards, Adolf Hitler successfully capitalized on German dissatisfaction with what he called the Dictate of Versailles.

Keynes’ views have not gone unchallenged. Margaret MacMillan, for example, wrote in Peacemakers (2001) that the outbreak of the next world fire cannot be blamed on the diplomats in Versailles. For Hitler, the peace provisions were nothing more than a useful propaganda tool that he used to start the war he wanted, according to the Canadian historian. She was more concerned about the fact that the victorious European powers threw populations that did not fit together into states such as Iraq and Yugoslavia. As a result, little came of the “right of self-determination” of these peoples, a term introduced by American President Woodrow Wilson.

Plum brandy

American diplomat Richard Holbrooke wrote in a foreword Peacemakers that the legacy of Versailles was always on his mind when he negotiated in Dayton in 1995 with Alija Izetbegović, Franjo Tuđman and Slobodan Milošević to end the civil war in Bosnia, one of the states into which Yugoslavia had splintered after the fall of communism. His work in Dayton was, according to Holbrooke, “to bury part of Versailles.”

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His connection with the Serbian leader Milošević, who was later convicted of war crimes, fueled Holbrooke with large quantities of whisky, wine and plum brandy. The most difficult moments, however, were when the Americans tried to make the Bosnian government understand that it had to choose between complete justice – which meant no peace – or some small concessions in exchange for peace, Holbrooke said in a 1996 interview with NRC Handelsblad. “Your moral sympathy lay with the Bosnian Muslims, but objectively speaking they had already achieved ninety percent of what they wanted. So they had to choose between ninety percent and nothing.”

Things are still a long way off for the Ukrainians. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a big drinker, this part of Holbrooke’s approach cannot be part of an American or European strategy to achieve a successful peace treaty.

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