Did armies or treaties draw Europe’s borders after WWI?

The short answer

• 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.

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.