PARIS PEACE SETTLEMENTS (1918–1923)

post–world war i treaties and agreements that reconfigured the middle east.

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 led to its dissolution. In the long term the victorious Allies' partition of the Ottoman territories was less important than their introduction of a new system of political organization based on the European model of the nation-state. The modern Middle East was shaped physically and politically by the peace agreements. At the initial Paris Peace Conference in 1919 Britain and France, the victorious allies, were more concerned with adjusting their differences and harmonizing their territorial appetites than with a just and durable final settlement. Hence they agreed at the San Remo Conference in April 1920 to divide the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire along the lines of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, with some minor modifications. France received the mandates for Syria and Lebanon, which the League of Nations confirmed in 1922. France waived its claims to Mosul in Iraq in exchange for shares in the Turkish Petroleum Company (later the Iraq Petroleum Company). Britain obtained mandates for Iraq, Transjordan (which it created in 1920), and Palestine. The Zionists succeeded at the Paris conference in convincing Britain to incorporate the Balfour Declaration into the preamble of the Palestine mandate.

To the Arab nationalists, the Paris conference was a political disaster; it sowed the seeds of future conflicts in the region. The victorious Allies initially tried to enforce a similar settlement on the defeated Ottoman government in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which was designed to partition Turkey into very small, unviable segments. But unlike their Arab counterparts, the Turkish nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), successfully challenged the clauses of the Sèvres settlement related to Anatolia and Thrace, forcing the Allies, after a long, debilitating military campaign, to renegotiate a new settlement at Lausanne in July 1923. The Treaty of Lausanne confirmed Turkish sovereignty over the whole of Anatolia; the Sèvres clauses calling for an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan were forgotten.

see also atatürk, mustafa kemal; sèvres, treaty of (1920); sykes–picot agreement (1916).

Bibliography

Hurewitz, J. C., ed. The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, Vol. 2: British-French Supremacy, 1914–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.

Sachar, Howard M. The Emergence of the Middle East, 1914–1924. New York: Knopf, 1969.

fawaz a. gerges
updated by eric hooglund