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Europe Since 1918

Chapter 3: EUROPE SINCE 1918
By Herbert Adams Gibbons
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History - Modern (1750+)

About This Book

A wide-ranging survey traces Europe's political geography and diplomatic struggles after 1918, beginning with the armistice and the Paris peace negotiations. It analyzes how wartime ideals such as self-determination were used as instruments of policy and how rivalries among the victors—vanity, greed, and revenge—undermined durable settlement. The narrative summarizes key treaties and border adjustments and chronicles the creation or reshaping of states across Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, including the Baltic republics, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Greater Romania, Austria, and Hungary. It examines the collapse of the Ottoman order, the Turkish nationalist response, and the Straits question, assesses developments in Soviet Russia, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Belgium, and concludes that enforcement failures and competing national interests left Europe unsettled and limited the League's effectiveness.

EUROPE SINCE 1918

The great World War, which has just closed, was born of the feeling on the part of the Germans that they had not been given their share of the world’s loot. So far as it is possible to see, the struggle has taught us nothing, and we are to go on sowing dragons’ teeth.

Melville E. Stone.
General Manager of The Associated Press,
in “Collier’s Weekly,” March 26, 1921.

The war was not a deliberate crime. It was something that flowed out of the conditions of European life. The Treaty of Versailles was a voluntary destruction of civilization. French civilization depends upon European civilization, and there will be no civilization in Europe until the Treaty of Versailles is revised.

Anatole France.

Undoubtedly we shall from this time forward have a much more adequate conception of the essential unity of the whole story of mankind, and a keener realization of the fact that all its factors must be weighed and appraised if any of them are to be accurately estimated and understood. I feel strongly that such a broader view of history, if it can be planted in the community’s mind through the efforts of educators and writers, will contribute greatly to uphold the hands and strengthen the efforts of those who have to deal with the great problems of human destiny, particularly with those of preserving peace and outlawing war.

Warren G. Harding.