Erik Goldstein - The First World War Peace Settlements, 1919-1925

SEMINAR STUDIES IN HISTORY

Erik Goldstein

First published 2002 by Pearson Education Limited

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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-31145-9 (pbk)

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an inspired and inspiring teacher

We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

after map in The Near East Since the First World War , published by Longman, reprinted by permission of Pearson Education Ltd (Yapp, M. E. 1996).

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In January 1919 leaders, diplomats, soldiers and government officials intent on building a peace settlement after the carnage of the First World War converged upon Paris. One young British diplomat voiced his hope, not merely to liquidate the war, but to found a new order in Europe. We were preparing not Peace only, but Eternal Peace. The Paris Peace Conference would be the largest diplomatic gathering the world had ever known. The victors of the Great War, as the First World War was then called, had come to Paris to shape the postwar order. Although successful in the conflict that had raged for four years, they faced a world of uncertainty. The delegates assembling at Paris could not recall a war such as had just ended in the sheer scale of the devastation and human losses. Between August 1914 and November 1918 sixty million people around the world had been at war, and at the end thirty million lay dead, missing, or wounded. It was a toll that exceeded all previous experience.

The war had finally ended in November 1918 when, in a clearing in the forest near the French city of Compigne, the German Empire agreed to an armistice. This came into effect at 11 am on 11 November; the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The reasons countries had entered the conflict now looked insignificant in comparison to the final impact upon them. France had entered the war with the hope of regaining the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to Germany in 1871, though by November 1918 France had lost more lives than the entire population of AlsaceLorraine. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had gone to war hoping to quash the nationalist threat posed by Serbia but by the wars end this empire had collapsed and fragmented into several states. Political turmoil was widespread. The war had seen the fall of many of the dynasties that had dominated Europe for centuries. By November 1918 the monarchs of Germany, AustriaHungary, and Bulgaria had all fled into exile. Russia had been convulsed by revolution brought on by the turmoil of the war, the Russian tsar deposed and murdered, and the country was now in a state of civil war. Out of this chaos numerous aspiring states had emerged, often with conflicting territorial aspirations and frequently with conflicting would-be governments.