London Foreign Ministers Conference (1945)

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The London Conference of Foreign Ministers in the autumn of 1945 was the first meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the victorious powers of World War II, decided upon during the Potsdam Conference , and therefore the members of the UN Security Council: USA, Soviet Union, Great Britain, National China and France, which was added later . They sent James F. Byrnes (USA), Vyacheslav Molotov (USSR), Ernest Bevin (GB), Georges Bidault (France) and Chen-Shieh Wang (China). They met from September 11th to October 2nd. Agreement was reached on Eastern Europe, but not on other important issues. One therefore parted from one another without having made any fundamental decisions.

The explorations carried out here prepared the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 and the treaties concluded with Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland on Feb. 10, 1947. Representatives of these countries formerly allied with Germany had been invited.

Preparatory work for peace treaties

On the question of Germany , the Soviet Union demanded a four-power control of the Ruhr area out of security concerns . Byrnes offered a 25-year demilitarization of Germany. England and France had approved this American proposal of April 1946.

When voting on the drafts of individual peace treaties, the regulations for Finland were discussed first. The US, France and China abstained from voting.

The USA demanded the approval of freely elected governments in the states of Eastern Europe for the peace treaties that the Soviet Union presented as a draft. The very similar bills for Bulgaria and Romania were also adopted, with France and China abstaining. After objection by the Soviet Union, no agreement could initially be reached on the draft on Hungary.

It was not until the third meeting of foreign ministers in New York in October 1946 that existing difficulties were resolved.

Italian decolonization

The main point of the deliberations was the decolonization of areas under Italian administration, especially in Africa. The Soviet Union accepted that Western interests should have priority in the reorganization of Italy . The resolutions were incorporated into the Allied peace treaty with Italy.

Italian colonies until 1943

Italy, which was only politically united in 1871, as a European middle power, was only able to gain control of some areas late.

As early as 1870, private interests had acquired the city of Assab , which was taken over by the state in 1882. In the Horn of Africa, three wars were waged against the Ethiopian Empire, namely the Eritrea War ( 1886–1889) followed by the Italo-Ethiopian War (1895–1896) . The colony colony of Eritrea was created . The Abyssinian War led to the acquisition of this adjacent territory in 1935/6.

Italian Somaliland ( Italian : Somalia Italiana ) as a whole was established in 1905. As early as December 1888, the Italians signed a protectorate treaty with the Sultan of Hobyo . In April 1889 a protection treaty with the Sultan of Bargaal . The Sultan of Zanzibar first leased and then bought the cities of Merka , Warsheikh and Baraawe in 1893 and Mogadishu in 1905, when the state took over the administration of the area by the Benadir Society . The southern tip of Oltre Giuba (Jubaland) was taken over from the British in 1924.

Regions of the UN Trust Area Libya 1947–51; essentially congruent with the Italian colonial era.

As a result of the war in 1911/2 against the Ottoman Empire , the two colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica , which today form Libya, were acquired . In addition, after the First World War in the Aegean Sea, the islands of the Dodecanese . Strictly speaking, these were not a colony.

Since Italy left the Axis until the betrayal of Pietro Badoglio on July 25th and the armistice of September 3rd, 1943 , it was an enemy nation for the British. During the East Africa campaign, the Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa were occupied between June 1940 and November 1941. In Ethiopia, the emperor Haile Selassi , who had been living in exile in England since 1936 , was reinstated, but kept on a short leash.
The under the leadership of the German General Erwin Rommel standing African campaign ended in victory for the British in March 1943, which is now controlled with advancing Americans throughout North Africa. The colonies came under British military administration, only the inner-Libyan Fezzan was taken over by the French.

Negotiations at the London Conference

The conference that took place in London in September and October - strictly speaking, the first meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers decided upon at the Potsdam Conference - had different starting positions with regard to the future of the Italian colonies.

Winston Churchill declared on Sept. 21 that these areas were "irretrievably lost" for Italy. Libya in particular should by no means become Italian again. The Eritrean district of Keren should be added to Sudan. A "Greater Somaliland" from the British and Italian colonies together with the Ogaden should remain British.
France, which wanted to see the Fezzan incorporated into Algeria, supported the Italian proposals to set up a mandate administration (“trusteeship”). The US and the Soviet Union followed this idea, but proposed different modalities. The Americans wanted administration under international commissions within the framework of the UN, which at that time was still a pure representation of the war opponents of the Axis powers. This should last ten years for Libya and Eritrea, and unlimited for Somaliland. The Soviets considered this impractical and argued for the takeover of one area each by one of the victorious powers. For themselves they wanted Libya, a rather tactical negotiation proposal that, together with the expansion of Trieste into Yugoslavia, aimed directly at the lifeline of the British Empire and was therefore unacceptable.

As mentioned, no final agreements were reached. At the follow-up conferences, a short term of office was set for Libya, which ended in 1951 with independence, under strong British influence. With regard to the Aegean islands, it was quickly agreed that these should be ceded to Greece, which took place in 1947.
Eritrea first became a British mandate and soon afterwards was reunited with Ethiopia.
The Italian Trusteeship Territory of Somalia existed after the end of the British military administration in 1950 until the independence of united Somalia in 1960.

See also

literature

  • Sprenger, Franz; Dissolution of the colonial empires; Munich 4 1981 (dtv), pp. 122-30
  • Gaido, Daniel; Big Five at London ; Fourth International, Vol. 6, No. November 11, 1945, pp. 333-336
  • Herkommer, Julius; Libya - colonized by Italy: a contribution to the exemplary colonial policy of Italy in North Africa; Freiburg i. B. 1941 (Bielefeld), [Diss.]
  • Hughes, John; Attitudes of the Great Powers on Disposition of Italy's Colonies after World War II; June 1950 (University of California); [Diss .; UMI EP59894]
  • Knight, Jonathan; Russia's Search for Peace: The London Council of Foreign Ministers, 1945; Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13 (January 1978), pp. 137-163
  • Morone, Antonio M .; The ultima colonia: come l'Italia è tornata in Africa 1950-1960; Roma 2011
  • Nadel, Siegfried Frederick; British Military Administration, Eritrea: Races and tribes of Eritrea; Asmara 1943
  • Pankhurst, Estelle S .; Pankhurst, Richard [1927-2017]; Ethiopia and Eritrea: the last phase of the reunion struggle, 1941-1952; Essex 1953 (Lalibela House)
  • Srivastava, Neelam Francesca Rashmi; Italian colonialism and resistances to Empire, 1930-1970; London 2018 (Palgrave Macmillan); ISBN 978-1-137-46584-9

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Berlin (Potsdam). Conference, July 17-August 2, 1945 (a) Protocol of the Proceedings, August 1, 1945
  2. ^ Jost Dülffer : Europe in the East-West Conflict 1945–1990 , Munich 2004, ISBN 3-486-49105-9 , p. 14 f.
  3. according to the fantasy of history - DER SPIEGEL 12/1958
  4. China no longer took part in the following foreign ministerial conferences, but made bilateral agreements with the Soviet Union on East Asia. After the end of World War II, the conflict between communists and nationalists flared up again in China. In 1949, the teams liberated Mao Zedong from mainland China. The nationalists fled to Taiwan ; the People's Republic of China was founded on the mainland .

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