ble--were among the
factors that would prepare demoralized peoples in Europe to embrace
totalitarian promises of relief which they might not otherwise have
contemplated.

Ironically, no matter how harsh were the reparations required of the
defeated, the supposed victors awoke to the appalled realization that
their triumph--and the demand for unconditional surrender that had driven
it--had come at an equally crippling price. Staggering war debts ended
forever the economic dominance which these European nations had acquired
through three centuries of imperialist exploitation of the rest of the
planet. The deaths of millions of young men who would have been urgently
needed to meet the challenges of the coming decades was a loss that could
never be recovered. Indeed, Europe itself--which only four brief years
earlier had represented the apparent summit of civilization and world
influence--lost at one stroke this pre-eminence, and began the inexorable
slide during the following decades toward the status of an auxiliary to a
rising new centre of power in North America.

Initially, it seemed that the vision of the future conceived by Woodrow
Wilson would now be realized. In part, this proved to be the case as
subject peoples throughout Europe gained the freedom to work out their own
destinies through the emergence from the ruin of the former empires of a
series of new nation-states. Further, the president's "Fourteen Points"
briefly endowed his public statements with so great a moral authority in
the minds of millions of Europeans that not even the most recalcitrant of
his fellow leaders among the Allied powers could entirely disregard his
wishes. Despite months of wrangling over colonies, borders, and clauses in
the text of the peace treaty, the Versailles settlement eventually
incorporated an attenuated form of the proposed League of Nations, an
institution which it was hoped could adjust future disputes between
nations and harmonize international affairs.

Shoghi Effendi's commentary on the significance of this historic
initiative commands reflection on the part of every Baha'i who seeks to
understand the events of this turbulent century. Describing two closely
interrelated developments that are associated with the dawn of world
peace, he lays emphasis on the fact that they are "destined to culminate,
in the fullness of time, in a single glorious consummation".(40) The
first, the Guardian describes as associated with the