Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920)

Dominated by the leaders of Britain, France, the United States and Italy, the conference resulted in five treaties that rearranged the maps of Europe and parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands, and also imposed financial penalties.

US President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 commissioned a group of about 150 academics to research topics likely to arise in diplomatic talks on the European stage, and to develop a set of principles to be used for the peace negotiations in order to end World War I.

"[3] The entire process is often referred to as the "Versailles Conference", although only the signing of the first treaty took place in the historic palace; the negotiations occurred at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris.

There was an indecision among British decision makers over defanging and demobilizing the Ottoman army, the fate to be assigned to leading Committee of Union and Progress members, and the future of the Turkish straits.

Lloyd George eventually relented and persuaded the reluctant Americans to accept the presence of delegations from Canada, India, Australia, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa, and that those countries receive their seats in the League of Nations.

"[32] Massigli told the Germans that the French thought of the "Anglo-Saxon powers" (the United States and the British Empire) as the major threat to France in the post-war world.

In 1915, it joined the Allies to gain the territories promised by the Triple Entente in the secret Treaty of London: Trentino, the Tyrol as far as Brenner, Trieste, Istria, most of the Dalmatian Coast (except Fiume), Valona, a protectorate over Albania, Antalya (in Turkey), and possibly colonies in Africa.

Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando tried to obtain full implementation of the Treaty of London, as agreed by France and Britain before the war.

[34] Orlando, unable to speak English, conducted negotiations jointly with his Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, a Protestant of British origins who spoke the language.

[35] Orlando obtained other results, such as the permanent membership of Italy in the League of Nations and the promise by the Allies to transfer British Jubaland and the French Aozou strip to Italian colonies.

Protectorates over Albania and Antalya were also recognized, but nationalists considered the war to be a mutilated victory, and Orlando was ultimately forced to abandon the conference and to resign.

Though the proposal itself was compatible with Britain's stance of nominal equality for all British subjects as a principle for maintaining imperial unity, there were significant deviations in the stated interests of its dominions, notably Australia and South Africa.

[38][39] Meanwhile, though Wilson was indifferent to the clause, there was fierce resistance to it from the American public, and he ruled as Conference chairman that a unanimous vote was required for the Japanese proposal to pass.

[42] Wilson's 1918 Fourteen Points had helped win many hearts and minds as the war ended, not only in America but all over Europe, including Germany, as well as its allies in and the former subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

The idea, first accepted by Great Britain and France, was later rejected, but became the purely-American King–Crane Commission which toured all Syria and Palestine during the summer of 1919 taking statements and sampling opinion.

[53] Venizelos proposed Greek expansion in Thrace and Asia Minor, which had been part of the defeated Kingdom of Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire; Northern Epirus, Imvros; and Tenedos for the realization of the Megali Idea.

[59] At a meeting of the Big Five on 16 January, Lloyd George called Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura an adventurer and dismissed Ukraine as an anti-Bolshevik stronghold.

[60] A delegation of the Belarusian Democratic Republic, under Prime Minister Anton Łuckievič, also participated in the conference, and attempted to gain international recognition of the independence of Belarus.

The new country pledged to assure "full and complete protection of life and liberty to all individuals... without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race, or religion."

Their attempts to gain protection from threats posed by the ongoing Russian Civil War largely failed since none of the major powers was interested in taking a mandate over the Caucasian territories.

After a series of delays, the three South Caucasian countries ultimately gained de facto recognition from the Supreme Council of the Allied powers but only after all European troops had been withdrawn from the Caucasus, except for a British contingent in Batumi.

The Azerbaijani mission was headed by Alimardan bey Topchubashov and included Mammad Hasan Hajinski, Akbar agha Sheykhulislamov, Ahmet Ağaoğlu and Mahammad Amin Rasulzade, first president of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.

Several top Chinese leaders at the time, including Sun Yat-sen, told US diplomats that the conference should take up the question of Korean independence.

The February 1919 statement included the following main points: recognition of Jewish "title" over the land, a declaration of the borders (significantly larger than in the prior Sykes-Picot agreement), and League of Nations sovereignty under British mandate.

[76] The British historian Eric Hobsbawm claimed: [N]o equally systematic attempt has been made before or since, in Europe or anywhere else, to redraw the political map on national lines....

The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into coherent territorial states each inhabited by separate ethnically and linguistically homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination of minorities.

[77] Hobsbawm and other left-wing historians have argued that Wilson's Fourteen Points, particularly the principle of self-determination, were measures that were primarily against the Bolsheviks and designed, by playing the nationalist card, to tame the revolutionary fever that was sweeping across Europe in the wake of the October Revolution and the end of the war: [T]he first Western reaction to the Bolsheviks' appeal to the peoples to make peace – and their publication of the secret treaties in which the Allies had carved up Europe among themselves – had been President Wilson's Fourteen Points, which played the nationalist card against Lenin's international appeal.

[78]The right-wing historian John Lewis Gaddis agreed: "When Woodrow Wilson made the principle of self-determination one of his Fourteen Points his intent had been to undercut the appeal of Bolshevism.

The British historian Antony Lentin viewed Lloyd George's role in Paris as a major success:Unrivaled as a negotiator, he had powerful combative instincts and indomitable determinism, and succeeded through charm, insight, resourcefulness, and simple pugnacity.

Although sympathetic to France's desires to keep Germany under control, he did much to prevent the French from gaining power, attempted to extract Britain from the Anglo-French entente, inserted the war-guilt clause, and maintained a liberal and realist view of the postwar world.