The reason the Baltics became independent in the first place is Brest-Litowsk. Thank God the Entente did not overturn Brest-Litowsk on that issue. Can you imagine independent Baltics if Germany had agreed to status quo ante bellum and/or outright lost on the eastern front??
How? Brest-Litovsk didn't create Estonia and Latvia, it destroyed them (temporarily). The Baltic nations managed to establish their independence only because the Entente victory forced Germany to abandon the Duchy and retreat from the region.
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I thought we were talking WWI, not WWII. It does not seem very reasonable to claim that Nazi atrocities are supposed to be forseeable when the Sowjets' aren't. After all, the Sowjet regime was already installed while Hitler little more than a street bum.
This may be a misunderstanding - we
are talking about WWI. The Estonian historian in question is talking about German occupation during the
First World War. This occupation was not a Nazi-style one, but it was still worse than Tsarist rule and the few months of Bolshevik rule that the Baltics had experienced before Brest-Litovsk. In short, highly oppressive.
And being conquered by the Sowjets - in that case, not many years later - was BETTER ???
No, I imagine being conquered by the Soviets was much worse (though again, we can't really say what methods the Hetmanate and its backers would have used to stay in power).
But that brings us back - which had better chances of survival: the popular and legitimate Ukrainian republic or the Hetmanate which was hated by like 90% of the population?
I didn't say they should preserve the Baltic governments, let alone by force. I said that they should preserve the borders - which they did.
So if I understood this correctly, Germany should have been allowed to intervene in the east, not to prop up its spheres of influence but to help the new states preserve their independence?
Sounds fine in theory, but it raises some questions:
-Why should the new states trust Germany and let its troops in? After the German Empire's activities in 1917-1918 there, they would have every right not to.
-Why would Berlin agree to it?
-And whose army? The German public and soldiers would have every right to ask why they are still being made to fight, for something that has no clear benefit to themselves or Germany, when the war is over and they're supposed to be coming back home? At this point Germany was experiencing some revolutionary turbulence itself.
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Look at the borders of Brest-Litowsk and compare it to today's self determined borders.
To avoid misunderstandings: I'm not defending Brest-Litowsk as a desirable outcome, I'm just objecting against declaring it a devil-incarnate which it simply wasn't. My guess is that Brest-Litowsk would start at the level of independenceof the Warsaw pact, and improve when Germany liberalises internally.
Self-determination is more than lines on a map; the content of those lines is just as important. And who was given self-determination by Brest-Litovsk?
Estonia and Lithuania don't exist.
There's
something that calls itself Ukraine but has basically just killed Ukraine and is wearing its skin.
Lithuania? I guess that's better than nothing. (although even the Lithuanians didn't get a normal-shaped country, but a mega-Lithuania lording over millions of Poles and Belarusians)
And there is the ever-present question of Poland's borders.
We can talk about a scenario where none of this happens and Germany really cooperates with the eastern nations, but that would mean we are no longer talking about Brest-Litovsk; but some other, hypothetical solution.
The Devil incarnate? Maybe not, but still pretty awful. I believe Brest-Litovsk should be judged on its own merits - on what it
was, not on what it
might have looked like under a radically different German leadership.
As for the liberalization of the German Empire, and its consequences - not sure what to think of that. It's not inevitable, and the relatively high levels of internal liberty enjoyed by, say, Britain or Belgium didn't stop them from having colonial empires.