Map of the agreement, signed by Balfour in August 1917. The dotted green line in the Aegean Sea notes the Italian Islands of the Aegean, already under Italian control.
The 19 April meeting was attended by British and French Prime Ministers, David Lloyd George Alexandre Ribot, and the Italian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Paolo Boselli and Sidney Sonnino. It was intended as a tentative agreement to settle the Italian Middle Eastern interest - specifically article 9 of the Treaty of London (1915).
The agreement was needed by the allies to secure the position of Italian forces in the Middle East. The goal was to balance the military power drops at the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I as Russian (Tsarist) forces were pulling out of the Caucasus Campaign, even though they were replaced with what would be named as Democratic Republic of Armenian forces. Russia was not represented in this agreement as the Tsarist regime was in a state of collapse. However, the lack of Russian consent to the Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne agreement was used by the British at the 1919 Paris Peace conference to invalidate it, a position that greatly incensed the Italian government.
The representatives of Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy met in London in 1915 to sign an agreement providing for Italy’s entrance to the First World War. Italy’s part in the Middle East was left unsettled; the agreement stated that if the Ottoman Empire was partitioned, Italy should receive a "just share" in the Antalya district. The borders of this occupation were to be decided at a later time.
The 19 April meeting discussed the concept of Italian influence after the war. It was clear to the Italians that the area allotted to them may not be easily given up by the Turkish Empire, such that the British Prime Minister proposed a vague formula for post-war adjustment should the actual post-war allocation not appear to be balanced. The minutes of the meeting are below:
The British and French governments added a number of conditions to the proposed Italian sphere of influence which had not been discussed between the prime ministers at the 19 April conference. The Italian Foreign Minister Sonnino protested that the Sykes Picot agreement did not include such conditions.[7] These discussions continued until a series of discussions in early August and a final meeting of the prime ministers on 7 August.
The full chronology of events in the summer of 1917 is not clear to historians.
Under its terms France would be allotted the Adana region, while Italy would receive the remainder of southwestern Anatolia, including İzmir (Smyrna). In 1919, the Greek prime minister, Eleuthérios Venizélos, by obtaining the permission of the Paris Peace Conference for Greece to occupy İzmir, overrode the provisions of the agreement despite Italian opposition.
[1] Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne (French pronunciation: is a commune in the Savoie department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in south-eastern France.
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