Une guerre sourde
Seen from Paris, the Treaty of Riga brought a welcome end to the Soviet-Polish war and completed the drawing of Europe’s new borders. However, there remained no guarantee of stability in Eastern Europe. From 1918, successive French governments supported a ‘strong Poland’ to further their strategic aims in Europe. But both French and Polish diplomatic archives reveal the crux of the problem: the Treaty of Riga could sow the seeds of future con-icts with Russia (still considered a European power). Moreover, the events of the early 1920s jeopardized the relationship between Poland and Lithuania. For these reasons France remained unwilling to guarantee the boundaries that issued from the Treaty of Riga and was similarly reluctant to support Warsaw’s regional plans.
Abstract
Following World War I, the Great Powers gathered in Paris to negotiate a series of treaties under the watchword “national self-determination.” By the beginning of the 20th century national homogeneity had become the ideal attribute of a nation-state, and in practice this is what the Great Powers saw as national self-determination. Only in very few instances did a population actually self-determine its future. In addition, the Great Powers took other considerations into account
in redrawing borders in Eastern Europe, resulting in the inclusion of large minorities, which prompted the imposition of treaties protecting those minorities. If the new borders resulted in a change of an individual’s nationality, one could self-determine one’s nationality by “opting” for another nationality, but with the obligation to “transfer” one’s residence to the country of that nationality, the equivalent of forced migration and illustrating the primacy of national homogeneity over self-determination. The Treaties of Neuilly and Sèvres went further by obligating Bulgaria and Turkey to reduce their minority population. e failure of the latter Treaty led to a conference in Lausanne, at which the Great Powers in the resulting Treaty legitimized the expulsion of Greeks and Turks, providing an international sanction for forced migration. In the following decades, statesmen and others repeatedly invoked the Treaty of Lausanne by name as a successful model for dealing with minority-majority conflicts, supposedly by promoting national homogeneity, which culminated in massive forced migrations following World War II.
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