WWI · EPILOGUE ·
Europe’s new borders after WWI
Chapter 15 of The Great War, 1871–1923: “The New Map of Europe”
Between 1919 and 1923 the treaties with Germany’s allies redrew Europe: Saint-Germain left a small Austrian republic, Trianon gave Transylvania, Slovakia and Croatia to Hungary’s neighbours, and Sèvres divided the Ottoman lands. Where the treaties stopped, armies took over, as Poland’s war with the Red Army in 1920 showed.
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The map above is the world of Europe, July 1923 — The map of 1923.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1920 · Europe in 1920.
Part of IB History: The First World War →
SHORT EXPLANATION
The peacemakers had five treaties, from Versailles with Germany to Sèvres with the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire. They could draw frontiers, but they could not ensure that the states affected would accept them. At Trianon, Hungary lost nearly three-quarters of its kingdom’s land, and some three million Hungarians found themselves in neighboring states. Hungary was too weak to stop the settlement; its governments instead adopted revisionism, the program of overturning the treaty borders. Poland had another way to determine its frontier. Its defeat of the Red Army of communist Soviet Russia outside Warsaw in 1920 helped fix the eastern border by force.
Turkey, too, changed the peace through war. Sèvres assigned parts of Anatolia, the Asian heartland of modern Turkey, to Greece and the Allies, the victors of 1918. Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal defeated the Greek army and obtained a new treaty at Lausanne in 1923. Its accompanying forced exchange sent about 1.6 million Orthodox Christians and Muslims between Turkey and Greece. In the same year the map showed French and Belgian troops in the Ruhr, Germany’s coal-and-steel heartland: Germany had fallen behind on reparations, payments for war damage imposed much as a court awards damages. Britain refused to join the occupation. Germany and Soviet Russia rejected the settlement, while its victors disagreed over defending it. The map looked permanent, but lasted barely fifteen years.
The full story
The victors said that nations should govern themselves. Yet self-determination, a principle rather like independence decided by referendum, competed with their promises to allies and their power to take land from defeated states. The treaties with Germany’s allies show the results. Saint-Germain left Austria a German-speaking republic of about six and a half million people and prohibited union with Germany. At Trianon, Transylvania went from Hungary to Romania, Slovakia to Czechoslovakia, and Croatia and the Vojvodina to the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later called Yugoslavia. Neuilly deprived Bulgaria of its Aegean coast. Sèvres divided lands of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish state ruled by a sultan or emperor, among Britain, France, Italy and Greece.
Each defeated state had to accept the League of Nations, the new organization intended to settle disputes much like the United Nations today. Yet the defeated were initially barred from joining it. A body meant to protect the peace could therefore appear to them as an institution of the victors who had imposed it.
Other frontiers remained in dispute after the diplomats had met. Between 1919 and 1922 armies helped complete the map of eastern Europe. In 1920 Poland’s leader Józef Piłsudski marched on Kiev, hoping to establish a federation that would hold Russia back. The Red Army of communist Soviet Russia counterattacked and by August had reached the outskirts of Warsaw. A Polish counterstroke from the Wieprz river broke the advance. When Poland and Soviet Russia made peace at Riga in 1921, the border lay far east of the Curzon Line, which the Allies, the victors of 1918, had proposed along the edge of Polish settlement.
In Anatolia another war changed an intended settlement. Mustafa Kemal, an Ottoman general who rejected the sultan’s surrender, established a nationalist government in Ankara. His forces stopped the Greeks at the Sakarya river in 1921 and drove them out of Smyrna in 1922. The arrows on the map trace both this war and the Polish–Soviet struggle. In each, the subsequent treaty followed the battle line.
The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 replaced Sèvres and returned Eastern Thrace and the whole of Anatolia to Turkey. It also abolished the capitulations, under which foreigners in the Ottoman Empire had answered only to their own consuls’ courts—an arrangement rather like extending diplomatic immunity to entire merchant communities. A separate convention made the flight of Anatolia’s Christians part of a permanent exchange of populations. The Allies had accepted a frontier Turkish forces could hold, at a considerable human cost.
In western Europe, by contrast, France and Belgium tried to enforce a settlement Germany had not fulfilled. They occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s coal-and-steel heartland, in January 1923 to seize coal and timber owed as reparations for war damage. The German response was passive resistance: a general refusal to work for the occupiers. The government printed money to pay the strikers until the currency collapsed. Britain refused to participate, and the crisis ended only with the Dawes Plan of 1924, an American scheme that reduced German payments and supplied loans. The occupation exposed a division among the victors themselves. The blue belt on the 1923 map was weaker than it looked.
FULL EXPLANATION
Five treaties, one method
Versailles was only one of five treaties, and the comparison tells us what the peacemakers tried to do across the settlement. Each opened with the Covenant of the League of Nations, assigned the loser responsibility for war damage, reduced its army and demanded reparations. Each also drew new frontiers using nationality, adjusted for strategy, economics and the victors’ wartime promises. These aims could pull a border in different directions. Alan Sharp argues that the method failed most where ethnic populations were most entangled. Hungary’s new borders left about three million Hungarians outside the country, many in compact districts immediately across the frontier, because railways, rivers and the claims of Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia took priority over the ethnic line. Bulgarians called Neuilly their second national catastrophe in five years. Sèvres alone never took effect: putting it into practice would have required a war in Anatolia that the victors would not fight. Zara Steiner regards the settlement as a reasonable attempt to manage an impossible situation, but finds its decisive weakness in the absence of a power ready to uphold it.
The war that did not end in 1918
Robert Gerwarth argues that November 1918 was not the end of the First World War for much of central and eastern Europe. The collapse of empires left struggles over authority and territory that continued for five years. Revolutions, civil wars and border wars killed about four million people, more than the combined war dead of Britain, France and the United States. The Polish–Soviet war made a frontier on the battlefield, but, as Norman Davies stresses, both sides sought more than territory. Lenin hoped the Red Army would carry revolution into Germany. In July 1920 its western-front commander, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, told his troops that over the corpse of White Poland lay the road to world conflagration. Turkey’s nationalist victory likewise depended on more than Turkish strength alone. Erik-Jan Zürcher shows how divisions among the Allies helped Mustafa Kemal: Italy and France made separate deals with Ankara in 1921, while Soviet Russia sent gold and weapons. In both wars a power defeated or excluded by the peacemakers recovered by force what they had denied it; the later settlement reflected the result.
The Ruhr and the problem of enforcement
The occupation of the Ruhr tests the argument that the peace failed because it lacked enforcement. France did act in 1923, and the attempt carried costs of its own. Sally Marks showed that the reparations bill fixed in London in 1921 was not quite what its headline figure suggested. Its nominal 132 billion gold marks included a large block of bonds the Allies never expected Germany to pay; the real liability was closer to 50 billion, arguably within Germany’s capacity. Germany nevertheless fell behind on deliveries of timber and coal. French prime minister Raymond Poincaré sent troops to take coal at its source. Conan Fischer’s study describes the consequences: passive resistance and French reprisals deepened German hatred of the treaty, while money printed to pay the strikers destroyed middle-class savings. France obtained the Dawes Plan of 1924, with a more realistic schedule backed by American loans, but lost British goodwill and its own appetite for acting alone. No French government again tried to enforce the treaty by force, leaving Germany to set the pace of revision.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The method Versailles set. Versailles settled Germany’s frontiers in Chapter 14 and supplied a method for the other treaties: a Covenant, or founding charter, for the League of Nations, reparations and new borders. Applying it farther east presented a different problem. The defeated states were smaller and weaker, ethnic populations were more tangled, and the victors had promised their allies territory that belonged to the losers.
Empires that collapsed into a vacuum. The peacemakers arrived after political authority had already collapsed across much of Europe. Three empires fell in twenty months, from the Tsar’s abdication in March 1917 to the collapse of Austria-Hungary and Germany in November 1918; the Ottoman Empire, a fourth, was being dismembered. At the armistice nobody controlled the lands between Germany and Russia. National councils proclaimed new states in Prague, Zagreb, Warsaw and the Baltic capitals before the conference met. Rival claims did not wait for its decision: Poland and Lithuania, for example, contested Vilnius, and armies decided. The conference often ratified facts established on the ground.
Promises made in wartime. The victors had made territorial promises to attract allies during the war. Under the Treaty of London of 1915, Italy was offered South Tyrol, Istria and much of Dalmatia; Romania was promised Transylvania in 1916. Britain had promised Arab independence, a Jewish national home in Palestine and a division of the Middle East with France. These commitments could conflict when peace came. The strongest claimant usually prevailed, leaving disappointed Italian nationalists and Arab leaders, as well as defeated states, to resent the settlement.
The Bolshevik challenge. The settlement also reflected fear of revolution. Soviet Russia was excluded from the peace conference and treated as a danger to contain, while Lenin expected revolution to spread westward. Short-lived Soviet republics in Hungary and Bavaria made the danger seem immediate in 1919. The victors backed strong new states on Russia’s border, accepted Romania’s annexation of Bessarabia and tolerated Poland’s expansion eastward. They were trying to contain Moscow as well as Berlin; Moscow saw the resulting map as a hostile wall.
THE TURNING POINT
Lausanne, 24 July 1923. İsmet Pasha, Turkey’s delegate at Lausanne, refused to sign a treaty retaining the capitulations, foreign financial control or reparations. The conference dragged on for eight months before the Allies gave way. Signed on 24 July 1923, the treaty recognized the frontier Turkish armies actually held. It required no outside power to enforce that line, which has largely lasted to this day. Yet the accompanying population exchange showed what making peoples fit borders could cost. The other treaties had instead tried to protect minorities through guarantees. Lausanne’s durability exposed a weakness in the wider settlement, while its exchange revealed the human price of one way to secure a frontier.
What it changed
Guardians and revisionists. The new map gave governments different interests in its survival. France allied with Poland in 1921 and later signed treaties with the Little Entente—Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia—to support the settlement. Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria wanted revision, and Fascist Italy, a disappointed victor, increasingly joined them. Most guardians of the settlement were new, small states with divisions of their own; among the revisionists was the strongest economy on the continent. The balance favored those seeking to redraw the map.
Minorities as pretexts. Some 25 to 30 million Europeans lived in another nation’s state. Treaties supervised by the League promised them equality before the law and schools in their own language, but a promise needed a means of enforcement. League procedures were slow, many complaints were set aside, and governments in Warsaw, Bucharest and Belgrade pressed assimilation. In the 1930s Nazi Germany used German minorities’ grievances in Czechoslovakia and Poland as pretexts to break up the settlement. Minority protection had become a weapon against the states that had undertaken it.
Hyperinflation and the radical right. By November 1923, after the Ruhr crisis drove German inflation out of control, a lifetime’s savings could not buy a loaf of bread. That month Adolf Hitler, the leader of a small Munich party, believed the republic was about to fall. He attempted to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch, an armed coup launched from a Munich beer hall. It failed, and he went to prison. For millions of Germans, however, occupation and hyperinflation left the treaty, the republic and ruin linked in a single memory.
From Lausanne to the next war. The wars of 1919–1922 hardened the belief that stable frontiers required nations of a single people. The Lausanne exchange gave that belief international approval. In 1944 Winston Churchill cited it when defending the expulsion of Germans from lands Poland would gain; the policy was carried out in 1945, after Nazi Germany’s war of conquest and occupation. The next war had begun in 1939 over Danzig, the German port made a Free City by the peace, and the Polish Corridor, which cut East Prussia off from Germany. The settlement had drawn those fault lines years earlier.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — “In 1919–1923 armies drew the map of Europe, and treaties only signed it.” How far do you agree?
Armies mattered most clearly in the east and south-east. Poland’s eastern frontier followed the battle line of 1920, Vilnius and Memel were seized by force, and Lausanne recognized the frontier won by Kemal’s army. Here treaties recorded results that soldiers had made possible. The claim fits the center and west less well. Versailles, Saint-Germain and Trianon drew frontiers that no army fought over in 1919, and the defeated states were too weak to resist. Diplomats did not make every decision alone there either. Plebiscites, votes in which local people chose their state much like referendums, settled Schleswig and Upper Silesia; new states had already been proclaimed in Prague and Zagreb. Drawing a border and keeping it were separate problems. Lines could be placed on paper, but those that lasted had force behind them or the consent of people living along them. The 1923 map was unstable because its borders outran the willingness to defend them—a gap governments of every era should consider before signing.
An interesting fact
Polish commanders at Warsaw had help from people listening to the enemy’s radio traffic. From 1919 a small Polish radio-intelligence unit read large numbers of Red Army messages; a young lieutenant, Jan Kowalewski, played the leading part. By August 1920 the commanders knew the positions and orders of Tukhachevsky’s armies, including the thinly held southern flank. According to one operator, a Warsaw radio station also jammed Soviet transmissions at the decisive moment by broadcasting passages from the Bible. The same Polish cipher service broke the German Enigma machine in 1932 and passed its methods to Britain and France in July 1939, five weeks before the next war began.
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