The Paris peace settlement in Central and Eastern Europe
The Treaty of Versailles, of course, preoccupied the Big Three — Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George — but the Paris peace settlement entailed more than the German problem. ‘All the races of Central Europe and the Balkans’, wrote one American delegate, ‘are actually fighting or about to fight with one another...
the Great War seems to have split up into a lot of little wars.’ The peacemakers knew that stamping out these little wars and preventing the spread of Lenin’s revolution (which at moments threatened to take hold in Berlin, Vienna, Munich and, especially, in Budapest, under the Bolshevik Bela Kun) was essential to peace. During the war, all the belligerents had courted subject nationalities with promises of greater post-war autonomy in order to destabilize the opposing camp. The collapse of the three eastern empires propelled the nation-founding process forward in 1918, as the Allies quickly adjusted their policies to the new map. The Americans and the British, after all, had supported the principle of selfdetermination, while the French looked to the new Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia as future allies in the containment of Germany and as a cordon sanitaire against Soviet Russia.see Map 2.1
Consequently, the Poles, Czechs and the Entente Allies — Serbia, Romania and Greece — were all beneficiaries; the losers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria. Four treaties modelled on Versailles, including similar clauses on disarmament, reparations and ‘war guilt’, confirmed the new territorial arrangement: the Treaty of Saint-Germain with Austria (10 September 1919), the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary (4 June 1920), the Treaty of Neuilly with Bulgaria (27 November 1919) and the Treaty of Sevres with Turkey (10 August 1920). Significantly, in contrast to Versailles, each of these lesser treaties included provisions for the protection of ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities.
The Treaty of Saint-Germain also prohibited the union (Anschluss) of Austria and Germany. In Poland's case, its western frontier was drawn at Germany's expense, and then, after defeating the Red Army in 1920, it agreed its eastern border with Russia in the 1921 Treaty of Riga. Czechoslovakia, which like Poland benefited from astute lobbying and well-placed sympathizers among the peacemakers, declared its independence in October 1918. To make the Czech-dominated union with the Slovaks economically and strategically viable, the Sudetenland (the border area between the historic kingdom of Bohemia and Germany, which included three million German-speaking inhabitants) was incorporated into it. Yugoslavia emerged as a voluntary amalgamation of former Austro-Hungarian territories around the pre-war Serbia. Romania more than doubled its territory and population, taking Russian Bessarabia and Austrian Bukovina. Greece obtained Eastern Thrace from Turkey and, in April 1920, Western Thrace from Bulgaria. Soviet Russia, free of Brest-Litovsk, now lost control over much of what it had turned over to the Central Powers in 1918, including Poland, the Baltic States and Finland.Despite reducing by half the number of people living under alien rule, selfdetermination, as put into practice by the Paris Peace Conference, generated yet more ethnic strife and national conflict — but it is impossible to see how this might have been otherwise. No matter how sharp the pencil or small scale the map, the peacemakers' careful lines cut across the ethnographic patchwork of Eastern Europe, leaving about thirty million people on the wrong side of contestable frontiers. Even natural status quo allies such as Poland and Czechoslovakia fell out over their mutual borders. Rather than seeing it as a tool for peaceful national integration, the small Powers regarded minority protection arbitrated by the League of Nations as a Great Power imposition on their newly won national sovereignty.
In the German case, self-determination had to give way to strategic considerations: the victors could not reinforce their one-time enemy by permitting an Anschluss, nor would they enfeeble Poland by denying the small state ‘secure access to the sea' or cripple Czechoslovakia by withholding the Sudetenland. At the same time, because they conflicted with self-determination, some of the promises made to Italy in 1915 went unfulfilled. Thus, while Italy absorbed part of the frontier with Austria (South Tyrol), Wilson stubbornly resisted Orlando's claim to territory along the coast of the Adriatic. The Italian premier stormed out of the Council of Four to force concessions from his fellow peacemakers, but caved in upon his humiliating return. Even so, the small Adriatic port of Fiume remained a source of tension between Italians and Yugoslavs, and Rome sulked about what many Italians regarded as their ‘mutilated peace'.Anschluss
The political union of Germany and Austria. Anschluss was specifically prohibited under the Versailles Treaty, but was carried out by Hitler in March 1938 without any resistance from the victors of the First World War.
Sudetenland
The geographical area in Bohemia mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. In 1919 it was placed on the Czech side of the German-Czech border and in 1938 led to an international crisis ending in the infamous Munich Agreement.