The Paris Peace Conference set out with the highest ambitions possible: to achieve eternal peace. Obviously it failed, but what can future peacemakers learn from the failures of 1919?
Thank you very much for the correction. Not only did it improve the article it also made me question my choice of proofreader. The current one (Tove K) does not seem to be fully up to the task.
Interesting and insightful. One quibble, though: Greece did invade Turkey after the war, more or less. They were given the area around Smyrna in the talks, due to the large Greek population there (but not in the surrounding countryside), but they had not taken Smyrna in the war and had to invade to secure it. Big disaster; the Turks won.
You are absolutely right and I see now that it is not very clearly written in the article itself.
The Greek prime minister Venizelos played a masterful diplomatic game at the Paris peace conference in which he secured much larger gains for Greece than had ever been envisaged before or during the war (much of this was due to internal squabbling among the major powers, the Greeks were given substantial parts of Anatolia to snub Italy, who was also interested in the same areas). The problem with this diplomatic success, as you point out, was that Greece had very limited military abilities and were never really able to control the vast Turkish areas they had been granted. I guess you could say that they "did a Putin" and tried to bite off more than they could chew. The result was truly disastrous. Not only did Greece not gain any territory from the peace conference, tens of thousands of Greek soldiers lost their lives and hundreds of thousands of Anatolian Greeks lost their homes.
"Arguably the peace process was fatally doomed already in December 2018."
Should be 1918, though I do tend to agree with the statement as worded.
Thank you very much for the correction. Not only did it improve the article it also made me question my choice of proofreader. The current one (Tove K) does not seem to be fully up to the task.
Are you sure? Little errors like that are like Easter eggs; commenters love being first to find them!
Interesting and insightful. One quibble, though: Greece did invade Turkey after the war, more or less. They were given the area around Smyrna in the talks, due to the large Greek population there (but not in the surrounding countryside), but they had not taken Smyrna in the war and had to invade to secure it. Big disaster; the Turks won.
You are absolutely right and I see now that it is not very clearly written in the article itself.
The Greek prime minister Venizelos played a masterful diplomatic game at the Paris peace conference in which he secured much larger gains for Greece than had ever been envisaged before or during the war (much of this was due to internal squabbling among the major powers, the Greeks were given substantial parts of Anatolia to snub Italy, who was also interested in the same areas). The problem with this diplomatic success, as you point out, was that Greece had very limited military abilities and were never really able to control the vast Turkish areas they had been granted. I guess you could say that they "did a Putin" and tried to bite off more than they could chew. The result was truly disastrous. Not only did Greece not gain any territory from the peace conference, tens of thousands of Greek soldiers lost their lives and hundreds of thousands of Anatolian Greeks lost their homes.