RICERCA ITALIANA     

At the origins of the national states "system" in central-eastern Europe: the first world war and the Versailles Peace Treaties.

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"

Abstract

The end of the first world war, the dissolution of the great multinational Empires (Ottoman, Hasburg) and the transformation of the tsarist Empire in a new political and institutional system inspired by Marxist theories based on the suppression of private property and of market economy – Union of Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) – open new and unexpected sceneries.
The winner powers try, with the Versailles Peace Conference, to create a new European and international order with the goal to create a new system of international relations in order to respond to the hope that people had during the hard times of the war.
The dissolution of the great multinational Empires – "the prisons of the people"- according to the evolution of political thought in the XIX century, should open a new age characterized by the presence of the free nations now able to create their own national State, sovereign and independent.
The 1815 Congress of Wien, the Holy Alliance and the "Restoration" after the Napoleon era, represent moments of the reactionary contrattacco finalized to to make useless
the modernization represented by the French revolution, the end of the social system dominated by the nobility and the growth of the bourgeoisie as a social strength able to carry on an epochal
changing. The ideological tension inside the various European societies produces different effects opening a period characterized instability that lasts for twenty years.
The 1917 Russian revolution, the myth of a social rebirth and of a social ransom of the oppressed classes becomes a myth able to hide the clear signals of an ideological, political and economical totalitarian regime absolutely new and that is difficult to understand using to the western categories of the authoritarianism and of totalitarianism: Soviet Union is something very different and more complex. It is a system where we can find traces of the theocratic, religious culture of the tsarist system as the models of the Asian absolutism. <<<

Principal Investigator

Antonello Folco BIAGINI Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza"

Research Objectives

The goal of the research regards the wide phantom of consequences that the international historical events of the First World War and the peace of Versailles had on the inner equilibriums of the central-eastern Europe and Balkan countries.
The fundamental importance of these thematic emerges in all its dramatic dimension in the re-start of confrontation and ethnic clashes exploded in the period between the two world wars and that recently, after the end of the Cold War, emerged again with all their violence.
In the Danubian and Balkan area, however, the goal of a, sovereign, free and independent national State, that constituted one of the scopes of the first world war pursued through fights and suffering long all century XIX, it seems to be reached, even if with different degrees of success (are interesting the Romanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian cases, very different the one from the other).
The great multinational Empires - the Austro-Hungarian and that Ottoman - have been dissolved, the czarist Empire do not exist more in consequence of the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. The new Soviet political system succeeds but to maintain the geopolitical Euro-Asiatic configuration of the old Empire substantially intact while the ideology of the revolution of October, founded on myths like the social equality and the end of the "bourgeois exploitation" of the workers, ends in order to influence European politics of the Twenties. In the period between the two world wars, it is particularly important to study the dynamics and of the foreign polcies of the Mediterranean Countries of the Balkans, like Albania, Yugoslavia and Greece.
The western part of the Balkans turns out in fact to be a geographic continuum and at the same time a zone in which it is possible to find extremely common features in the attitude towards the international policy, that depend by the particular situation created in the first years after the first world war. It is also true that Belgrade, Tirana and Athens reacted to impulses, like those of the defence of the territory as established by the treaties, more than to considerations of other kind.
The attitude of distrust turned towards the numerous minorities inside each Country went of equal step to the use of the alliances with the greater European powers to reach the goals. There is no that the study of the documentation of the archives of the eastern Europe, Danube and Balkan - Countries with the documentation available in those mainly involved in the area, as Italy and France - allows the reconstruction of important phases of relations between European countries.
In the eastern Mediterranean the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire completed that one of the other multinational empires, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire, contributing to the formation of the national states from the mar Black Sea until Afghanistan.
The first phase, in which on ashes of the three multiethnic and multiconfessional states a myriad of states was formed on ethnic or confessional base, is of extreme interest: also with the due differences, emerged Caucasus states - like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, "the mountain" republic fine inguscezio-Chechen-daghestan until the states of Asia centres - and Balkan and Danubian states. The interethnic conflicts that plagued the states heirs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Asia Minor and the Caucasus became policies of ethnic cleaning: the people who obtained an effective independence on ashes of the Ottoman Empire, but, were the Turkish people.
To the margin of this area were the Arabic people that saw the Ottoman domination replaced by that Anglo-French one, however the fight for independence of all these people had deeply various outcomes. The Arabic people did not see recognized their formal independence if not after the Second World War.
In this historical context it is our first goal a deep study of the various outcomes that carried to the neutrality of Turkey in the course of the Second World War and to the British-soviet occupation of the Iran while the powers of the Axis reached Cecenia and Alexandria of Egypt. Of other side he is fundamental to analyze the transformations that the political Soviet power, after the revolution of 1917, induced on the multiethnic structure of the czarist empire, that it passed from the co-existence between people and from autocratic political systems, to their subordination to the supranational power of the soviet, not more single administrative point of reference but political-ideological guide in the common evolution towards the Socialism.
The search, beyond touching one of the topics centres of the Russian history, the multiethnic composition of its population, will face, in the same time, also the character assumed in the two various historical moments, the czarism and the Soviet State, from the Empire, meant like political expression of government.
For the collection of the documentary material and the development of the search it is important to examine national archives of the States of all the area - Istanbul, Tirana, Athens, Belgrade, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, Moscow, Saint Petersburg - beyond to those of western countries involved in the area- Italian, French, English and Americans – that allow us to have a confirm for the interpretation of the specific lines of search. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

«The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.»: this is what the British Foreign Minister Edward Grey told the night in which his country started the war against Germany. In this sentence, full of catastrophic feelings, was contained the idea that a certain world was near the end and that, at the end of the war, it would have change for ever. The human beings survived, ma the XIX century system felt down, while a new era, the so called “Short Century”, was opening.
For over a Century conflicts were not so long and few people were directly involved in the wars; the new conflict, changed definitely that reality and the societies who were involved in it.
The end of the war had really those effects that many expected; not considering the consequences that the war experience had on the society and the individuals, there were important effects on the geopolitical level because the world after the Peace Treaties of Versailles was completely different from the one before: two great multinational empires, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman, felt down and they were replaced from many new national states; the czarist empire, endured the effects of the communist revolution, thanks to the course of the hostilities, and it was replaced by the Bolshevik state, that took his inheritance also if on different ideological bases.
Also the German Reich endured the effects of the military defeat, and its place was taken from the Weimar Republic. The other European powers, even though did not lose territorial parts after the war, paid the war experience losing their real political role in international field, yielding the role of powers in favor of new actors like the United States and Japan.
With the peace accords imposed by the victorious powers, known with the improper name of Versailles Peace Treaties, these powers tried to constitute directly a new international system that held account of the hopes and the waits matured in the populations until then directly or indirectly submitted to the Central Empires during the war years.
The powers who won the war were worried for many reasons, in particular because they wanted to contain the double danger of the resumption of the German expansionism and the widespread of the Bolshevik revolution, so they created a new system very unstable.
The geopolitical order of Europe was redesigned, therefore, holding account of these two priorities, and the empty ones left by the fall of the three great multinational empires were occupied by several new Countries in which nationalistic movements, that were often in conflict, became very strong and had the support of the powers at least until when they maintained an anti-Bolshevik political conduct.
The fundamental principle in the redefinition of the European political order was that one of the creation of national states on ethnic and linguistic bases, following the right of the people to the self-determination.
This attempt was revealed very soon disastrous, with problems that have been they consequences until today, like it’s showed by a series of national conflicts that happened in different European areas (the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the secession of Slovakia and the consequent died of one of the sons of those deals, Czechoslovakia, and of the Baltic republics from the former Soviet Union, the contrasts between Romanian and Hungarians in Transylvania) and extra-European (the rearrangement of the Middle Eastern area followed, in fact, the traditional lines of imperialistic division between France and Great Britain, with the important exception of Palestine, incautious and ambiguously promised by the British to the Hebrew like hearth of their future native land, and carried, in the years after the Second World War, until the explosion of the Arab-Israeli conflict and to one series of inner contrasts in the Arabic world).
On the other hand, redesign the map of Europe and protect the world from the bolscevick danger were two priorities that overlapped itself.
The more direct way in order to face revolutionary Russia, in the eventuality that this new state could survive - in 1919 it was not so sure - was to isolate it through the creation of a "sanitary cord" constituted from anti-communist states in the area of central-eastern Europe.
The hostility of these states toward the Soviet Union was assured from the fact that their borders had been marked on the base of immense portions of territory previously belonged to the defunct czarist empire.
On this base, some already existing Countries at the moment of the explosion of the war, like Rumania, increased their territory, others, like the Poland and Hungary, came reconstituted after centuries of absence from the European geopolitical maps, other were created ex-novo without to hold account of historical events, like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
The result of this politics was the creation of a several States, born on territories belonged to multinational empires as the czarist and the Austro-Hungarian one, that were equally multiethnic and multinational as the empires that had replaced.
Another goal of the winner powers, by the peace treaties was, to avoid that a conflict as important and extended as the first world war was could burst newly.
An attempt to avoid that was the creation of the Society of Nations that, proposed and supported from the American president Wilson, was not ratified by the United States itself and became very soon an instrument of the international policy without effective power.
The goal of the Society of Nations was that one of control the international controversies with pacific and democratic methods, before that these conflict could explode, but the reservoirs of the European powers toward the Society, as the absence of an important power like the United States, made it useless, even though it succeeded at first to solve some smaller crises, revealed its uselessness very soon (an example of that is given by the impossibility to apply endorsements against Italy for its aggression to Ethiopia in 1935).
It is not, therefore, necessary to remember the details of the European history of the interwar period in order to understand that the Treaty of Versailles could not constitute the foundation of one long-lasting peace. The international equilibrium appeared impossible to maintain since the beginning and therefore another war was really probably.
Another error made by the powers that won the first world war was the decision to not make the defeated power part - in particular Germany and Soviet Union - of the international Community on one equal base.
On this base, and considering also the repercussions that the war had on the civil society and on the political life - democratization of the last one, with the universal spread of male suffrage, but also the brutalization of the same one, with the extension of the methods learned in the course of the war in the political life - it appears obvious that the explosion of a new generalized conflict, called " total war ", was nearly impossible to avoid.
It could be achieved this result, but the errors made in the predisposition of the clauses of the treaty of peace and the perseverance in repeating them, dragged Europe and the entire world in a new conflict, that involved the civil populations to a level until then impossible to imagine and that would have modified again the international equilibriums assuring half century of stability (defined "equilibrium of the terror"), paid with the risk of a conflagration that would have meant the complete destruction of the planet.
The contemporary historiography has studied these themes over cited in an exhausting way and deeply, lacking but an analysis the effects that the war and the peace of Versailles had on the equilibriums inside the countries of central-eastern Europe and of the Balkans, the study of which is of fundamental importance in order to comprise the ethnic clashes that exploded in the years between the two wars in the region and that recently, after the end of the Cold War, reappeared with all their violence. <<<