A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The End of the War 967

and military supplies to support the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Civil War
in Russia.
Even among the victorious powers, the treaty generated some apprehen­
sion. It seemed a precarious peace. Keynes recalled, “Paris was a night­
mare, and every one there was morbid. A sense of impending catastrophe
overhung the frivolous scene; the futility and smallness of man before the
great events confronting him; the mingled significance and unreality of
the decisions.” When Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France read the treaty,
he exclaimed, “This isn’t a peace, it’s a twenty year truce!” He was right.

Settlements in Eastern Europe

A series of individual treaties, each named after a suburb of Paris, sought

to recognize the claims of ethnic minorities of each country, in some cases

redrawing national boundaries (see Map 24.1). But each also left the

defeated country feeling aggrieved. “Revisionist” or “irredentist” states

wanted the revision of the agreements in order to regain territory they

believed should be theirs.

Bulgaria, allied in the war with Germany and Austria-Hungary, lost terri­

tory on the Aegean coast, ceded to Greece by virtue of the Treaty of Neuilly

(November 1919), as well as small pieces of land to Romania and parts of

Thrace that had been won in the Balkan Wars. By the Treaty of Saint­

Germain (which specifically forbade Austrian union with Germany), Vienna

was reduced to being the oversized capital of a small country, Austria. By

the Treaty of Trianon (June 1920), Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory,

60 percent of its total population, and 25 percent of its ethnic Hungarians.

Romania received more Hungarian territory than was left to Hungary, and

one-third of its population now consisted of Hungarians, Germans, Ukraini­

ans, and Jews. The treaty left 3.4 million Hungarians living beyond the bor­

ders of Hungary, hardly Wilsonianism in action. The Hungarian response

to the treaty that ended the war is best summed up by the contemporary

slogan “No, no, never.” Moreover, 1 million Bulgarians—16 percent of the

population—now lived outside of Bulgaria.

The Treaty of Sevres (August 1920), the most harsh of the treaties with

Germany’s wartime allies, dismembered the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Britain, France, Italy, and Greece all coveted—as had the Russian and Hab­

sburg empires in previous centuries—parts of the old Ottoman Empire that

had stretched through much of the Middle East. Now the treaty awarded

Smyrna, the region around present-day Izmir on the Anatolian peninsula,

and much of Thrace to Greece; the island of Rhodes to Italy; Syria (then

including Lebanon) to France, under a mandate from the League of

Nations; Iraq and Palestine to Britain, also under mandate from the League

of Nations; and Saudi Arabia to Britain as a protectorate (see Map 24.3).

Italian troops occupied Turkish territory even as the peace conference was

proceeding; Greek forces moved into Smyrna and into Thrace.