| During the 1919-1920 Paris Peace Conference, Greece advanced territorial claims to northern Epirus, Thrace, western Anatolia, the Aegean isles, and Cyprus. These irredentist demands were so extensive as to constitute a quest to carve out a Greek empire in the borderlands between southeastern Europe and Asia. This Hellenic empire, the Greek government hoped, would supplant Ottoman Turkey as the dominant regional power and thus establish Greece as a significant force both in the Balkans and in the eastern Mediterranean. By creating a truly Greater Greece, moreover, Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos intended to realize Greece's century-long national mission, the Megale Idea (Great Idea) and, in so doing, secure for his regime, which had seized power in 1917 in the midst of severe domestic turmoil, a considerable triumph. This dissertation, by scrutinizing Greek and British archives and the private papers of Allied diplomats, analyzes the lengthy and tangled Allied deliberations that determined the diplomatic fate of Greece's imperial venture in the Near East.;Only in August, 1920, after nearly two years of hard negotiations, did Greece receive satisfaction to the bulk of its demands. Yet just when diplomatic victory seemed closest, the Greek populace in November, 1920 elections repudiated Venizelos. Without Venizelos in office, British support for Greece, already subject to occasional vacillation, became even more grudging and erratic. Worse still, the new Greek government, anxious to end the Turkish menace and oblivious to the dangers of a military campaign, embarked without firm allies on a land war in Anatolia, suffering in 1922 inglorious defeat and thereby losing the territorial accretions previously gained by diplomacy. Greece's dream of empire, begun with high hopes, consequently ended with despair, disillusionment, and national disaster.;To fulfill Greece's grandiose territorial desiderata, Venizelos involved Greece in financially complicated and militarily risky Allied projects, all as a means of demonstrating Greece's value to the western coalition. Simultaneously, Venizelos adroitly exploited British, French, Italian, and American antagonisms regarding various proposed schemes for dismembering the sprawling Ottoman Empire. More important, Venizelos, an avowed Anglophile, succeeded in inducing British prime minister David Lloyd George, a fervent philhellene, to align Greece and Britain in a tacit entente. Over the course of the conference, there evolved between Greece and Britain a client-patron relationship which, although informal and tenuous, rested on pragmatic considerations whereby Britain aided Greek territorial pretensions and whereby Greece served as Britain's regional commercial anchor and military proxy. This arrangement became for Venizelos the sina qua non of his foreign policy. Together, Venizelos and Lloyd George consistently outmaneuvered their opponents within the Allied camp, managing against endemic strenuous objections from French, Italian, and American diplomats and against, interestingly enough, recurrent bitter dissension from within the British administration, where many powerful individuals doubted the desirability of employing Greece as a British client, in maintaining the Anglo-Greek accommodation and in improving Greece's territorial prospects. Nevertheless, owing to the conference's failure to devise an early Near Eastern settlement and the increasingly stiff resistance that a nascent Turkish nationalist movement mounted against the Greek army of occupation in Anatolia, the status of Greece's aspirations was always in jeopardy. All the while that unsettled conditions prevailed, the perennially weak Greek economy worsened, domestic tensions heightened, and the fragile Anglo-Greek entente encountered new pressures. |
