Effects of Treaty of Versailles in other countries besides Germany?

by [deleted]

[deleted]

kaisermatias

By Treaty of Versailles, I'm guessing you mean to include the entire Paris Peace Conference, and thus the treaties of Treaty of Saint-Germain (for Austria), Neuilly (Bulgaria), Treaty of Trianon (Hungary), and the Treaty of Sèvres (Ottoman Empire; see below for this one), as they were all separate treaties.

Obviously the most effected were the defeated powers, in that they lost territory, people, industry, and whatever else. However except for Turkey (which I'll briefly note at the end), I'm going to focus on one of the non-defeated powers, Poland.

Poland was heavily effected by the treaties, especially Versailles. It had its border with Germany demarcated through it (and notably, Poland's eastern border was not finalised, as the Polish-Soviet War as ongoing, and would determine the final outcome of Poland), and most importantly (I would argue), created the Free City of Danzig, outside of both Polish and German control, and the resultant Polish Corridor that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany.

This would strain Polish-German affairs for the entire interwar period. Every German government strove to incorporate Danzig into Germany and reconnect East Prussia, while the Poles faced the prospect of German agitation as a result. This hindered Poland, as they had to constantly be cognizant of potential German aggression. Arguably, the 1926 Polish coup d'état that saw the return to power of Józef Piłsudski was the result of German-Polish relations deteriorating, and the subsequent authoritarian Polish regime that lasted until 1939 could trace itself to this. This indirectly came from the Treaty of Locarno of 1925, which normalised relations between Germany and the major states of Europe, but in the words of Józef Beck (who supported Piłsudski and was later the Polish foreign minister): "Germany was officially asked to attack the east, in return for peace in the west."

And my note on Turkey, which I'll keep short because I'm not an expert on Turkey:

It was signed in 1920 and called for Ottoman Turkey to effectively be partitioned up (see a map of the proposal here). However it was not popular in Turkey, and a faction led by Mustafa Kemal (later named Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey), launched the Turkish War of Independence as a result, which saw the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. This new state would eventually sign the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which while it forced the state to give up claims to a significant amount of territory (mainly the Middle East), it did not fully dismember the country.