ZAP //
Ukraine is increasingly left out of peace agreements in its own country. The story has several examples like this… and everyone ended up badly.
Ukraine was not invited to an important meeting between American and Russian employees in Saudi Arabia this week to decide what peace will look like in the country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine will “never accept” any decisions in conversations without its participation to end the three -year war that Russia is crashing into the country.
The decision to negotiate the sovereignty of the Ukrainians without their participation – as well as the flagrant attempt by US President Donald Trump to complain half of the price for continuous US support – reveals a lot about how Trump sees Ukraine and Europe.
But this is not the first time the great powers have been conceived to negotiate new borders or spheres of influence without the contribution of the people who live in them.
This policy of arbitrary power rarely ends well for those affected, as these seven historical examples show.
1. The struggle for Africa
In the winter of 1884-85, German leader Otto Von Bismarck invited Europe’s powers to move to Berlin to a conference to formalize the division of the entire African continent between them. Not a single African was present at the conference that would be known as “the struggle for Africa.”
The conference led, among other things, to the creation of Congo’s free state under Belgian control, the scene of colonial atrocities that killed millions of people.
Germany also created the colony of the German African Southwest (present -day Namibia), where the first genocide of the twentieth century was later perpetrated against the colonized peoples.
2. The tripartite convention
It was not only Africa that was divided this way. In 1899, Germany and the United States held a conference and forced the samoanos to divide your islands between the two powers.
This decision was made, although the Samoans expressed the desire to be autonomous or to create a confederation of Pacific states with Hawaii.
As a “compensation” because it was left out in Samoa, Britain received the unconscious primacy over tonga.
The German Samoa was under the domain of New Zealand after World War I and remained as territory until 1962. The American Samoa (in addition to several other Pacific Islands) remains US territory to this day.
3. The Sykes-Picot Agreement
When World War I was taking place, British and French representatives gathered to agree on how to divide the Ottoman Empire after the end of the war. As enemy power, the Ottoman were not invited to the conversations.
Together, Mark Sykes, from England, and François Georges-Picot of France, redesigned the borders of the Middle East according to the interests of their nations.
O Sykes-Picot Agreement contradicted the commitments made in a series of letters known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. In these letters, Britain promised to support Arab independence from the Turkish domain.
The Sykes-Picot agreement also contradicted Britain’s promises to support the Zionists who wanted to build a new Jewish homeland in the Ottoman Palestine.
The agreement has become the source of decades of conflict and colonial misfortune in the Middle East, whose consequences are still felt today.
4. The Munich Agreement
In September 1938British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier met with Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and German dictator Adolf Hitler to sign what became known as the.
The leaders sought Avoid spreading war throughout EuropeAfter Hitler’s Nazis fostered a revolt and began to attack Czechoslovakia’s German language zones, known as the Sudetes. They did it under the pretext of protecting the German minorities. No Czechoslovacos was invited to the meeting.
The meeting continues to be seen by many as the “Munich betrayal” – a classic example of a belligerent power in the false hope of avoiding war.
5. The Conference of Évian
In 1938, 32 countries gathered in Via-Les-Bains, France, to decide how to deal with Jewish refugees who fled the persecution in Nazi Germany.
Before the conference began, Britain and the United States had agreed not to exert mutual pressure to increase the share of Jews they would accept in American or British Palestine.
Although Golda Meir (future Israeli leader) participated in the conference as an observer, neither she nor any other representative of the Jewish people were allowed to participate in the negotiations.
Participants reach an agreement on the acceptance of Jewish refugees, except for the Dominican Republic. And most Jews in Germany failed to leave before Nazism reaches its highest point of genocide in the Holocaust.
6.
When Hitler planned his invasion from eastern Europe, it became clear that his greatest obstacle was the Soviet Union. Your answer was to sign a False treaty of non -aggression with the USSR.
The Treaty, named Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop (the Soviet and German Foreign Ministers), guarantee that the Soviet Union would not respond when Hitler invaded Poland. It also divided Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. This allowed the Soviets to expand to Romania and the Baltic States, to attack Finland and to take their part of the Polish territory.
It is not surprising that some people in Eastern Europe see current conversations between the US and Russia about the future of Ukraine as a revive of this kind of secret diplomacy that has divided the smallest nations in Europe among great powers in World War II.
7. The Ialta Conference
On the verge of the defeat of Germany Nazi, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt gathered in 1945 to decide the fate of postwar Europe. This meeting became known as a.
Together with POTSDAM Conferenceheld a few months later, Ialta created the political architecture that would lead to the division of Europe during the Cold War.
In Yalta, the “three great” decided the division of Germany, having offered to Staline a sphere of interest in Eastern Europe.
This division has taken the form of a series of politically controlled stand states in eastern Europe, a model that, according to somePutin intends to imitate currently in Eastern and Southeast Europe.
