People forget Imperialism died at the bargaining table.
While I know you're saying it's not gone, just laughing off the after effects of Versailles in the world at large is kind of dismissive to history and its monumental importance.
Imperialism did not die at the bargaining table, and it certainly did not die due to the treaties of Versailles.
The immediate result of Versailles was a vast expansion in the directly controlled territories of the colonial empires of France, Britain, and Japan, with a minor expansion for that of Belgium. All powers concerned gained a great deal of soft imperial power as well, with Japan in particular in the lead: it imposed severe treaty restrictions on China in 1915 that were mostly upheld in 1919, and it gained most of the formerly German concessions in the Shandong province. Old empires certainly died, but new ones replaced them and carried their banners even further. Some lands that had
not belonged to European Great Powers before 1914 were firmly in European hands in 1919, as the Ottoman Empire was carved up and divided between French, British, Italian, and Greek control.
All of these events followed firmly on battlefield results. The Ottoman Empire was not destroyed by bargaining, but by the power of the Royal Navy and the victories of the British imperial military and the Russian army. Germany's empire fell to a similar combination. Even after the treaties, Japan continued military action to secure an empire in eastern Siberia and northeastern China; Greece, France, and Britain did the same in the Middle East, with good results for France and Britain and bad results for Greece.
In fact, the notion of retreating from empire was barely even contemplated by any of the participants at Versailles. The Americans briefly raised the issue but backed off: it was flatly unacceptable to Britain and France and more than a little hypocritical given the American empire in the Pacific and Caribbean. Some indigenous groups attempted to raise the issue of autonomy, most famously the Vietnamese and Syrians. Neither attempt got off the ground. Both were in fact attempts to create empires of their own by ignoring other local constituencies, as most ethnic-national constructs are; Greater Syria was not a popular idea in the Jabal Druze, Lebanon, or Palestine, and Vietnamese autonomy was feared by the Degar peoples.
One might try to argue that the seeds of later decolonization were sown in 1919, but that is nonsense. Causation simply isn't there. Hew Strachan memorably demolished the idea in his history of the Great War in Africa, pointing out that nationalism simply did not exist in most places in the form it would take in the 1950s and 1960s. What resistance to European colonialism there was in Africa was tribal and traditional, short-lived, and easily squashed by European forces. Chilembwe and Makombe did not become rallying cries for later freedom fighters. The only mass national disturbance from the time to seep into historical memory during the independence era was the massacre at Amritsar in India in 1919, which was as tangential to the Great War as it is possible to get.
Instead, most academics locate the seeds of decolonization in later events. For some, it was the Japanese invasions of 1931-45 that drove decolonization, by fatally weakening European colonial powers, pointing up the cost of trying to hold a far-flung empire, and impressing indigenous people with the conviction that European powers could, after all, be beaten. For others, it was the Cold War itself that spurred the drawn-out withdrawal from empire. Some British historians locate the genesis of British decolonization with the creation of the postwar-consensus welfare state in that country, saying that Britain could not pay for both at the same time.
And while, for the most part, explicit
de iure colonies no longer exist, informal imperialism is as alive as ever - in the form of military bases, economic deals, foreign aid, and corporate privileges. France maintains a quite formal imperial organization in West Africa, but that country is only the most egregious imperialist power. Britain does something similar with the Commonwealth; Russia, China, and the Americans all have a variety of imperialist projects going on at any given time.
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Now, some people here seem to be under the misapprehension that there are no consequences for trying to enact reforms "too quickly". Fortunately, there are some historical case studies that might be helpful. So: an example and cautionary tale, from Ottoman history.
Selim III reigned over the Ottoman Empire from 1789 to 1807. He was, among other things, enthralled by the European Enlightenment, and by the power of the European states. During his reign alone, he watched as France's ancient monarchy crumbled and was replaced first by the fractious Republic and then by a powerful military dictatorship. He chafed at the military force enjoyed by the Great Powers France, Austria, and Russia, and wished to end decades of Ottoman humiliation at their armies' hands by improving his own military forces.
The Ottoman armies were not, strictly speaking, 'backwards'. They employed firearms and artillery, for the most part. But they were not particularly well trained. The bulk of the sultan's armies was composed of roughly a hundred thousand
yeniçeri soldiers. The infamous "janissaries" - the name literally means "New Corps", which was accurate in 1400 and hilariously ironic in 1800 - had once been slave-soldiers, and after that they were conscripted converted Christians. But a century and a half before, the corps was converted to purely Muslim recruitment. It had turned into a militia: indifferently organized, poorly trained. Its drill was the same that had been employed four hundred years prior. On the parade ground and on the battlefield,
yeniçeri formations were a muddle, difficult to organize and order around. Compared to the glittering lockstep legions of Prussia or Britain, they cut a poor figure indeed. In addition, the Ottoman treasury was paying for a vastly larger number of soldiers than actually served: warrants were "sold", partially as tax relief/debt forgiveness, partially as royal gift, and mostly as graft.
Selim's plan was to form new organizations of troops that could be trained and drilled by the European norms. These
nizam-ı Cedit, or "New Order" soldiers, would form the core of a wider reorganization of Ottoman society. In order to pay for the New Order army, Selim shifted the bill to the provincial governments, which would help to subordinate them to central authority and reduce the extent to which the provinces had spun off as nearly independent powers over the previous century. Furthermore, regularizing the conduct of war through the employment of professional regular infantry could also lead to regularizing the conduct of peace: the Ottoman Empire might join the European community of nations as an equal partner instead of an eternal foe fighting a forever war punctuated by brief truces. And at home, the European style of drill was increasingly associated with a European style of schooling, both for Christians and, increasingly, for Muslims.
One would think that at bottom, the reform of the army would be a fairly popular idea in the Ottoman Empire of the time. Nobody likes losing, and the Turks had just got done with the most disastrous war in their history up to that point, the 1768-74 war with Russia. The
yeniçeri "armies" at this point were clear losers, nearly useless at the conduct of war. By comparison, Selim's
nizam-ı Cedit army looked better and better all the time. In 1799, he dispatched a small force of them to assist his British allies in evicting Napoleon's French from Egypt, and the New Order soldiers did sterling work. Conversely, in 1806-07 a fresh Russian war broke out and in the initial rounds the
yeniçeri forces did quite poorly, sparking fears of a Russian drive on the capital.
Yet there were more groups opposed to Selim than he knew. First of all, there were the
yeniçeri soldiers themselves, angry at being bypassed and outraged by the threatened loss of imperial patronage and favor. They frequently rioted to try to force the sultan onto a different path, and it was virtually impossible to get them out of the capital with their vast entrenched patronage networks backing them up. But there were also the provincial leaders, incensed at being forced to pay into the New Order treasury to maintain the sultan's toy army, seeing this as a severe infringement upon their prerogatives. Provincial disturbances associated with the New Order also led to national uprisings, like the Serbian revolt of Karađorđe Petrović. Those in turn sparked fears of broader Christian rebellions, which many people blamed on the foolish New Order reforms.
So in 1807, Selim tried to expand the New Order army once again, to meet with the Russian crisis. To go along with this, he tried to normalize the New Order European-style uniform by wearing it in public, and he suggested that the
yeniçeri troops of the Bosphorus garrison do the same. They weren't interested in this, and shot most of the officers sent to give the order; then they rioted in the streets of the capital and attracted even more
yeniçeri malcontents to their cause. Ottoman sultans had tried to reform the corps many times before, and by 1807 there was even a ritual for the opposition:
yeniçeri troops came out into the squares and overturned their cookpots in defiance. Most of the New Order troops that might have crushed the rising were out on campaign, and clerical disapproval prevented what was left from being used in a futile effort to calm the situation down. And too many people had turned against the reforms for Selim to find much support anymore. As more
yeniçeri marched on the Hippodrome, Selim panicked and reversed all his reforms, disbanding the New Order army, but it was too late: the next day, the rebels demanded his abdication in favor of his cousin Mustafa, and he complied.
Selim's reforms moved too quickly for Ottoman tastes - too quickly for a peaceful solution, and arguably too quickly for a violent one as well. The
yeniçeri were not crushed until Sultan Mahmud II massacred them in 1826, the so-called Auspicious Incident. Where Selim sent his army off to war and was unable to use it against the rebels, Mahmud was willing to lose the war (a Greek rebellion) to get rid of the
yeniçeri and his other political opponents in the empire. Had he waited until so many people had turned against his enemies that they could be done away with without fighting, it undoubtedly would have taken much longer.
On the surface, the reforms would appear to have been something quite palatable to most parties in the empire, and they seemed to only affect minor considerations like military drill and uniforms. But even small decisions have big ripples in empires such as that, and even the smallest reforms come with a great cost. Now imagine the effect of a much more sweeping set of reforms that would utterly change the core of the largest organization in Thedas. How could those not come with severe costs, and who would bear those costs when the bill came due?
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Thought maybe you were referring to them keeping it secret or something, I dunno, lol.
