The End of World War I and the Paris Peace Conference

The end of the war was marked by the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and the U.S. entry into the war.  Faced with the Russian Revolution that seemed ready to proliferate into the rest of the world with the promise of international Communism, the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson launched a plan for a new world order, summarized in a speech he gave in Feb.1918, which included free trade, national boundaries redrawn in Europe and the Near East based on national self-determination, and replacement of big power politics--the plan devised by Metternich at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and perpetuated by Bismarck--with collective security of big and small countries alike.  The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 followed Wilson's plan to some extent--the age of empires was gone: German, Austrian, and Ottoman, replaced by nation-states-- but left many problems unsolved.

American entry into the war

  • German submarine warfare.
  • The "Lusitania" 1915 1,200 die (inc. 118 Americans), and this altered American public opinion.
  • The Zimmerman Telegram
  • America Enters the War 1917

Postwar plans for Europe

Woodrow Wilson’s plan: 14 points.

National self-determination.

Collective security to replace balance of power.

France and Britain:

Revenge and reparations.

The Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty (1919)

Nine new "nation-states":  Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Austria, Hungary.

France - gains Alsace-Lorraine

Germany - loses territory: Alsace-Lorraine; a lot of Prussia to Poland.

Balkans

Yugoslavia - Serbia grows and gains a little empire over Croats, Slovenes. Dalmatians, Macedonians, Bosnians, some Hungarians, and Montenegrins (Problem - Albanians.)

Ottoman Empire

Britain and France divided the Middle East, the former Ottoman Empire, in the name of trustees: 
  • Creation of Palestine: a home for the Jews, in 1918.
  • Creation of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, and putting Faisal, prince from Syria, on the Iraqi throne.

Greece tried to conquer Western Anatolia.

The New Turkey, under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk repulsed the Greeks, and then drove out the Greeks from cities they had lived in for millennia.

Reparations

Germany to pay (later fixed in 1921) $33 billion.

It led to hyperinflation in Germany in 1923.

The League of Nations

This was the most ambitious plan of Woodrow Wilson, who felt that World War I was caused by the dominance of European politics by the big powers, which clashed with small country nationalism.  The way to end it and to make WWI the "war to end all wars" was to come up with a new plan to maintain international security, an organization that included big and small countries alike for not just the security of the big countries, but collective security.  This organization was to be called the League of Nations, and  was the 14th point in his 14 point plan.  When it was finally established, however, U.S. congress vetoed American membership in it.  The socialist USSR and defeated Germany were also excluded from it.

Evaluation of the Versailles Treaty

In many cases tried to implement "national self-determination."

Continued influence of power politics, even in the process of enforcing nationalism (e.g. the creation of Yugoslavia).

British and French takeover of the Middle East continued colonialism in some way.