The Peace Treaty of Versailles: The Role of Maps in Reshaping the Balkans in the Aftermath of WWI

Abstract

The Paris Peace Conference was a turning point in European history, but also a milestone in the way maps were used in the reshaping of territory and in the forming of new states. Political, administrative, historical, linguistic, and ethnographic maps served as one of the basic sources of information in that process. The American Geographic Society Library (AGS) at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee holds maps that were actually sent to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and based on which decisions were made about the new states and their borders. These maps were used by President Woodrow Wilson and the American delegation in the creation of new states. That makes them some of the most important maps of the early twentieth century, giving to cartography a completely new dimension regarding diplomatic activities and foreign affairs. One of the most complex negotiation processes was certainly the creation of the state of the South Slavs—the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed Yugoslavia), which until then had never existed. In this paper we will present the maps used by the American delegation for shaping Yugoslavia’s borders.