The Treaty of Versailles: A Captivating Guide to the Peace Treaty That Ended World War 1 and Its Impact on Germany and the Rise of Adolf Hitler by Captivating History

Author:Captivating History [History, Captivating]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2020-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6 – The Scrambled Map and People of Europe

If you’re European, what follows will likely be common knowledge, but for many Americans not familiar with the map and people of Europe, it might come as a surprise to learn that within many of the nations of Europe, there are many minorities with different cultures, backgrounds, and languages.

For example, take Belgium. Belgium itself is made up primarily of two ethnic groups, the Flemish, who live mainly in the north of the country and who speak Dutch, and the Walloons, who live in the south and speak French. Even since World War II, there have been times where large portions of each of these populations have wanted their own nation. Adding to that, in the southeastern part of the country, which encompasses the Ardennes Forest of World War II fame, many of the people speak German, and laws have recently been passed allowing schools in that part of the country to teach in German.

In Scandinavia, the border areas of Sweden and Finland have mixed populations. In some areas of Sweden, many people speak Finnish, and vice versa. Throughout Scandinavia, the Sámi people (formerly known to many as “Lapps”) are a completely distinct group of people with a unique language and who, until very recently, made their living from reindeer herding.

When you get to Eastern Europe and the western part of Russia and Ukraine, the situation gets even more confusing. Because of wars, politics, economies, cultures, geography, and much else, the ethnic groups of Eastern Europe were (and to some extent still are) all mixed together.

In Ukraine today, a war is being fought between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians over the eastern part of that country. In the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and especially Estonia, Russians are a sizable minority, and many of them feel persecuted. Czechoslovakia, which was formed after World War I, split in 1993 because of disagreements between the Czechs and the Slovaks. In northern Spain and southern France, the Basque people, who many geneticists believe to be the first distinct European people, are minorities, and until recently, they participated in a low-level guerrilla struggle for more autonomy and independence, especially in Spain. The Catalans of Spain recently protested for more autonomy, with the protests being put down. And this just describes Europe today. Imagine what it was like in 1918, 1919, and 1920 after World War I and the Russian Revolution. Imagine how bloody and violent it was, especially since values at the time were a bit different and news media was much more primitive, restricting information and images.

One of the new nations to come out of World War I was Poland. Since the mid/late 1700s, what we know as Poland (albeit with different borders) was divided between Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. At one point before that, Poland was a large empire. In concert with then-powerful Lithuania, it controlled the Baltic states and much of western Russia and Ukraine. Within that area alone, ethnic rivalries (a polite way of saying “hatred”) were strong, as each group had a history of oppressing the other.

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