WesWorld

I do not wish to appear as to be beating a dead horse, but there are some questions regarding the matter of Great War reparations that cannot be easily dismissed. While I could, unilaterally, decide what would have been 'fair' for Yugoslavia, I believe that there are assumptions involved that require a consensus of the players. I would like to raise these here.

The United States remained neutral in the Great War - this is a given. This means that the GW belligerents would not owe the US for OTL war loans, postwar relief loans, or the so'called 'Liberation Debt'. Would Atlantis have inherited the role of the US and thus be owned such? Or would the debt burden on the victorious European participants be significantly less?

WW history presumes that the world was able to escape the consequences of the Great Depression of the 1930s. This suggests the following regarding the reparations situation in the post-GW period:

1 - The overall reparations burden upon Germany was less than OTL
2 - Because of the lower overall burden, Germany was able to pay more of what it owed, and avoid the intervention of the Dawes and Young plans
3 - Germany was better able to resist the extreme postwar hyper-inflation of the mark.

I appears that sometime in the 1920s WW France unilaterally forgave much of the reparations owed to it. This has implications for the rest of the GW participants. Did they too forego what was owed to them? Or did Germany continue to pay reparations to the remaining victorious powers? The latter would imply that Germany might still be paying reparations to some current WW nations; that does not, it would seem, to be the case in game.

These questions may appear unnecessarily esoteric, but they have importance to Yugoslavia as Great War reparations would have represented important infusions of capital to its postwar reconstruction and to its economic condition at this point in the sim. I would prefer to avoid unilateral assumptions unless the other interested national players really don't care.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this matter.

I've never even seen any decisive account of what countries fought in the Great War. People have implied that Nordmark and the SAE fought as Allies, and I've made the case before that Bulgaria could have been a neutral. Others have even stated that Greece didn't fight (though their position is only explainable if they did) which is patently ridiculous.

TheCanadian and I have previously discussed an alternate history for the Balkans which (we believe) addresses all of our mutual concerns, but it's never been precisely solidified...

The only way to explain Greece if they didnt fight is that the were extremely successful in the Balkan Wars

Quoted

Originally posted by Brockpaine
I've never even seen any decisive account of what countries fought in the Great War. People have implied that Nordmark and the SAE fought as Allies, and I've made the case before that Bulgaria could have been a neutral. Others have even stated that Greece didn't fight (though their position is only explainable if they did) which is patently ridiculous.

TheCanadian and I have previously discussed an alternate history for the Balkans which (we believe) addresses all of our mutual concerns, but it's never been precisely solidified...

My earlier question on Yugoslav history clearly indicates that Serbia was a participant in the Great War, and Yugoslavia's current borders conditioned, in large part, by the 1915 Treaty of London; while I don't like the outcome, I am forced to accept the result. Yugoslavia therefore as a stake in the reparations question. I agree that for other states in the Balkans, the issue is less clear-cut.

I am trying to avoid possible recriminations over my assumptions by asking first, rather than arguing second.

Before laying out my detailed view on the reparations question, I'd like to ask the more general one:

What was Germany's reparation burden in WW?

The Great War, I understand, ended in 1917. Perhaps there was less damage done to all participants; perhaps they were less vindictive, or more reasonable.

In the OTL, the gross reparations burden on Germany was fixed at 132 billion gold marks. What gross figure would be acceptable in the WW environment?

Thoughts?

There being no discussion to this point, I will take the question to the next step and suggest a value of reparations payments.

In framing the question of the applicability of the reparations settlement of the Great War to the Wesworld environment, I will begin by citing the source for the data noted below.

War Debts and World Prosperity, by Harold G. Moulton and Leo Pasvolsky, published in 1932 by the Brookings Institution, Washington DC

It contains numerous data tables on the payment liabilities, payment schedules and payment receipts of both debtor nations paying reparations and creditor countries receiving reparations. As the prosecution of the Great War in Wesworld [WW] developed widely from that of the Original Time Line [OTL], I have taken a somewhat simplified approach to the inter-locking nature of reparations and war debts. At some point in WW the prevailing reparations scheme was dismantled, as France appears to have made the unilateral decision to forgive any remaining reparations due from Germany; as the principal creditor nation, this would have had profound impact on the entire reparations scheme. For the sake of simplicity I have taken this cut-off date to be mid-1930, as it coincides with the collapse of the Dawes and Young Schemes to fund German reparations and the payments made prior to that date can be assumed to conform to the reparations received by the victors of the Great War.

I note that the OTL data has significant reference to the United States and acknowledge that in WW, the United States was neutral in the Great War. That role was obviously filled by other nations.

The historical data quoted below, unless stated otherwise, is valued in gold marks, convertible in the US dollar of the period at the rate of 1 gold mark = $0.2382.

I would propose that the value of Germany’s reparations payments made prior to the abandonment of the reparations scheme in the WW late 1920s be fixed at 18,323,600,000 gold marks. This is based upon the actual payments made by Germany in the period 1919-1930, as detailed below.

German Reparations Payments Prior to Adoption of the Dawes Scheme

Category 1919 - 1924
Cash - 2,345,000,000
Reparations Recovery Levies - 373,000,000
Coal, coke and byproducts - 927,000,000
Dyestuffs and pharmaceutical products - 107,000,000
Livestock - 147,000,000
Railway materials - 1,103,000,000
Motor trucks - 32,000,000
Agricultural machinery - 21,000,000
Ocean shipping - 711,000,000
Inland water craft - 50,000,000
Cables - 53,000,000
Abandoned non-military materials - 140,000,000
Other deliveries in kind and miscellaneous - 399,000,000
Ruhr payments in kind - 504,000,000
Ceded properties of the Reich, states etc. - 2,312,000,000
Shares of public debt - 24,000,000
Armies of Occupation - 779,000,000
Total Payments Recognized by Reparations Commission - 10,027,000,000

Distribution of these payments to the creditor nations is not separately cited, and it cannot be assumed that all nations received equal shares of the assets transferred. For example, the category of ceded properties undoubtedly benefited France, Belgium and Great Britain to a greater extent than Italy, Portugal or the United States.

German Reparations Payments under the Dawes and Young Plans

Creditor Nation - 1924 - 1930
To France - 4,382,200,000
To Great Britain - 1,758,000,000
To Italy - 622,000,000
To Belgium - 610,200,000
To Yugoslavia - 350,300,000
To Romania - 67,800,000
To Portugal - 52,200,000
To Japan - 50,100,000
To Greece - 24,400,000
To Poland - 2,000,000
To The United States - 377,400,000
Payments Made under the Dawes/Young Plans - 8,296,600,000

Is this an acceptable estimate of the pool of reparations available for distribution to the WW victors? Should it be larger or smaller?

WW German-French reparations payments ended MUCH sooner than that: see these threads: - http://wesworld.jk-clan.de/thread.php?threadid=1082&sid= & http://wesworld.jk-clan.de/thread.php?threadid=1065&sid=. Also, here in WW, some of the US loans to Germany in the early 1920s were replaced by loans from India.

It was interesting that the renunciation was between France and Germany; the fate of claims of the other nations to not appear to have been addressed.

Nevertheless, the question remains - what would be a valid upper limit? If we were to limit our calculations to the period before 1924, would 10-11 billion gold marks be sufficient?

And secondly, did the rest of the world accept the determination between France and Germany as a fait accompli and not demand continued reparations from Germany? I would infer that is the case, but it is not explicit.

Quoted

Originally posted by BruceDuncan
It was interesting that the renunciation was between France and Germany; the fate of claims of the other nations to not appear to have been addressed.

Nevertheless, the question remains - what would be a valid upper limit? If we were to limit our calculations to the period before 1924, would 10-11 billion gold marks be sufficient?

I'd guess so.

Quoted

And secondly, did the rest of the world accept the determination between France and Germany as a fait accompli and not demand continued reparations from Germany? I would infer that is the case, but it is not explicit.

It was not explicit, agreed, but I'd expect that it was taken as such.