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The Catastrophe in Asia Minor
Venizelos went to the Paris peace talks
armed with the assurances he had received from the Allies during the
war and focused exclusively on territorial aggrandizement for Greece.
The peace that emerged seemed to promise full realization of the
Megali Idea. In the event, shifts in domestic and international
politics led to a disastrous conflict with the successors of the
Ottoman Empire.
Venizelos showed all of his
considerable diplomatic skills at the peace talks. He wooed the United
States president, Woodrow Wilson, and Britain's Prime Minister David
Lloyd George. Venizelos quickly offered the services of the Greek
military as policing agents and as peacekeepers in occupied territory.
Foreign leaders were indebted to the wily Venizelos for this
assistance, but the offer fostered domestic discontent. The Greek
armed forces had been mobilized almost continuously since 1912, and
the nation was becoming war weary. Also, Venizelos neglected urgent
domestic issues as he put all of his energies into winning the peace
talks. He would eventually pay for this neglect.
After two years of intense
negotiations, Greece stood on the verge of fulfilling the Megali Idea.
The 1919 Treaty of Neuilly had awarded Bulgarian territory in western
Thrace and Macedonia to Greece. The Treaty of Sèvres, signed with
Turkey on August 10, 1920, gave Greece the Aegean Islands, hence
command of the Dardanelles, and the eastern half of Thrace except for
Constantinople. The Treaty of Sèvres also established a new territory
around the city of Smyrna (called Izmir by the Turks) on the west
coast of Asia Minor--a region long coveted by Greek nationalists. In
accordance with the principle of national selfdetermination , all
Greeks in Asia Minor were encouraged to move there. The Smyrna
protectorate was to be administered by Greece but remain under the
aegis of Turkey. After five years, a plebiscite would determine which
country would have sovereignty. The outcome of such a vote had already
been decided in 1919 by the stationing of Greek troops at Smyrna to
solidify Greek control.
When Venizelos announced in triumph
that Greece now occupied two continents and touched on five seas, the
irredentist dream seemed to be coming true. The dream soon turned into
a nightmare, however. As he prepared to return to Greece from the
talks in France, Venizelos was shot by monarchist assassins. He
survived, but he was already out of touch with events in Greece, and
his extended convalescence isolated him even more from the domestic
scene. Two months after the attack on Venizelos, King Alexander died,
leaving the exiled Constantine as the only claimant to the throne. A
war-weary electorate then expressed its dissatisfaction with the
heavy-handed Liberal government by resoundingly vanquishing the
Liberals in the elections of November 1920.
Repudiated by the nation at the moment
of his greatest triumph, Venizelos went into self-imposed exile. A
broad anti-Venizelist coalition took power and immediately scheduled a
plebiscite on the restoration of Constantine. Following a landslide
approval that was clearly rigged, Constantine returned to the throne
amid popular rejoicing in December 1920.
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