Secret treaties did more than anticipate the division of territory. They made the futures of other societies into obligations between powerful states—obligations that could survive disclosure, changes of government and the objections of the people expected to live with them.
On 29 January 1918, members of the British House of Commons tried to establish whether their government still considered itself bound by a secret treaty whose contents had already escaped into public view. The agreement was the Treaty of London, concluded in 1915 to bring Italy into the war. Lord Robert Cecil, answering for the government, declined to discuss a document described as secret. When Arthur Ponsonby pressed him on whether the commitment to Italy remained binding, Cecil supplied an answer of impeccable diplomatic respectability: “Any treaty that we enter into, of course, is binding upon us.” Exposure had produced parliamentary questions; it had not, in the government’s account, extinguished the obligation.
There was an unsettling distribution of moral authority in that answer. A government could invoke its honour to defend an undertaking that other people would have to inhabit. The interests of an ally had acquired the standing of a promise; the political wishes of communities whose territories had been promised still had to compete for recognition. Once an agreement existed, the argument could move from whether the bargain should have been made to whether a respectable state could possibly break its word.
This was one of the consequential achievements of secret territorial diplomacy. It allowed governments to negotiate claims over other societies before those societies could contest the terms, then defend the resulting commitments as obligations to one another. The documents did not themselves conquer territory or create an uncontested legal title to it. Their power lay in organising cooperation, establishing expectations and raising the diplomatic cost of a different settlement. Between the promise and the border stood armies, resistance, further negotiations and choices that remained open longer than a finished map suggests.
The Price of an Ally
The Treaty of London was signed on 26 April 1915 by representatives of Italy, Britain, France and Russia. In return for Italian military participation, the bargain promised territorial gains including the Trentino, South Tyrol up to the Brenner frontier, Trieste, Istria and parts of Dalmatia. It also addressed Italian ambitions in Albania and, conditionally, Ottoman territory and colonial compensation in Africa. Britain undertook to facilitate a loan of at least £50 million. Article 16 required the agreement to remain secret. The future settlement was being used to purchase assistance in a war whose outcome was still uncertain.
For the Entente, these were promises against a hoped-for victory. For Italy’s government, they were prospective gains that could justify the costs of intervention. Neither side needed to possess every territory under discussion in order to trade commitments about it. This gave the transaction a peculiar reach: the immediate benefit was a partner’s military contribution, while much of the eventual price would be paid through changes in the political status of people outside the negotiation.
Secrecy also operated within the states making the bargain. The Italian government concluded the agreement without involving Parliament, where a substantial neutralist opposition remained. The Chamber of Deputies voted extraordinary powers to the government on 20 May, more than three weeks after the signing. Decisions about the price and purposes of entry into war thus preceded the legislature’s decisive encounter with the consequences. Domestic constitutional procedures and public mobilisation still mattered, but they operated in the presence of an external commitment the executive had already undertaken.
The territories covered by the treaty were marked by competing national attachments, strategic interests and economic connections. These could not be reduced to a single principle that would satisfy every claimant. Yet the difficulty of drawing a just frontier does not explain why an alliance bargain should enjoy priority over those claims. Strategic necessity was the argument by which a government demanded territory; it was also the language through which the inhabitants could disappear from the calculation as political actors.
At the Paris Peace Conference in April 1919, Georges Clemenceau made the continuing force of the earlier bargain explicit. Britain and France, he said, were “bound in advance”. He had not signed the treaty himself, but France had. He also challenged Italy’s demand for Fiume, which the 1915 agreement had not promised to Italy. The document could support one claim and obstruct another; it was an instrument of negotiation rather than a script automatically performed. President Woodrow Wilson, representing a state that had not joined the bargain, contested the basis of the Italian demands.
The significance of the treaty therefore extends beyond the territories eventually obtained or withheld. It gave negotiators a prior undertaking to place alongside the arguments advanced after the war. People arguing for a different future now confronted a second controversy: their preferred settlement might require an ally to surrender what another government had already promised. A claim about how a place should be governed had become entangled with the credibility of an alliance.
Independence with Terms Attached
The agreement usually called Sykes–Picot, negotiated by Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot and formalised between the British and French governments in May 1916, carried that practice into the anticipated dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Its familiar coloured map can obscure the different kinds of power its authors intended to distribute. Some areas were designated for direct or indirect British or French administration. Others were envisaged as an independent Arab state or confederation, with separate British and French spheres of preference. Much of Palestine was assigned to a projected international administration.
The language of Arab independence makes the remaining provisions particularly revealing. In the respective spheres, France and Britain would enjoy priority in enterprise and local loans, and each would be the exclusive supplier of advisers or foreign officials when requested by the Arab authorities. The text reserved a railway right for Britain that included perpetual troop transport. The existing Ottoman customs tariff was to remain for twenty years across the specified zones; increases required agreement between the two powers. These were decisions about the practical resources of government, written into the arrangements surrounding the promised state.
Loans influence which projects a government can undertake and the conditions on which it undertakes them. Advisers can shape the machinery through which decisions become policy. Transport rights determine how commercial and military power moves through a territory. Customs duties affect revenue and the relationship between domestic production and foreign trade. Read through these provisions, Sykes–Picot becomes an agreement about the capacities an Arab government would possess and the external privileges with which it would begin. Its authors could accommodate the name of independence while reserving substantial advantages for themselves.
This was an imperial bargain in its own wording. Britain and France presumed the authority to negotiate the terms of other peoples’ political and economic futures with one another. The criticism does not require a belief that every community wanted the same state, that Ottoman government had been free of domination, or that a single unproblematic national frontier awaited discovery. It rests on a more concrete exclusion: the powers bargaining over the region treated their agreement as a basis on which its inhabitants’ political possibilities could be arranged.
Those inhabitants were not wholly absent from the document’s imagined future. It contemplated further dealings with Arab representatives, including consultation over the international zone. Such provisions gave local actors a prospective role inside a framework whose principal allocations Britain and France had negotiated. Consultation could concern the operation of an arrangement without conferring equal authority over its premises. The distinction was especially consequential when a territory’s future government was being discussed before that government existed.
Britain was meanwhile corresponding with Sharif Hussein of Mecca about Arab independence. The territorial scope of those assurances, particularly their application to Palestine, became fiercely disputed. In her reconstruction of the diplomacy, the legal historian Megan Donaldson shows how the channels of negotiation overlapped while knowledge of the commitments circulated unevenly, including within European governments. This was no single omniscient committee administering a perfectly coherent plan. Separate bargains could reinforce one another, create contradictions or leave officials room to offer different expectations to different interlocutors.
The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 added a public commitment to a Jewish national home in Palestine. Its wording recognised the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities, while giving explicit recognition to a Jewish national project. The Arab majority appeared through a description of what it was not, without equivalent recognition of its own national political claims. This declaration was public, and it was not a secret treaty. It nevertheless demonstrates that an unequal distribution of political standing could survive the passage from confidential diplomacy to announced policy.
Where the Map Had to Be Made Real
Sykes–Picot did not draw the Middle East’s eventual borders in one definitive act. Its international scheme for Palestine did not become the later British mandate, and the division of influence was revised as war and subsequent bargaining changed the position of the powers. Donaldson’s account identifies both the absence of a direct transfer from the 1916 scheme to the later map and a broader continuity of foreign rule. That combination is essential to understanding the agreement’s importance: arrangements could change substantially while the inhabitants’ authority over the settlement remained subordinate.
The language used to justify the postwar order also changed. In November 1918, Britain and France publicly declared their intention to establish governments deriving their authority “from the initiative and free will of the people themselves”. They disclaimed a wish to impose particular institutions. The promise supplied contemporary opponents of imperial control with a standard against which to judge the victors. A demand for political consent could now be advanced in the terms the powers themselves had announced.
The League of Nations Covenant carried a related tension into Article 22. It provisionally recognised certain former Ottoman communities as independent nations while subjecting them to administrative advice and assistance until they could stand alone. Their wishes were to be a principal consideration in selecting a mandatory power. The same provision thus acknowledged political claims and placed their fulfilment within a hierarchy of supposedly more and less advanced peoples. Assistance was to be delivered through a system in which outside powers assessed the readiness of those receiving it.
At San Remo in April 1920, the Allied powers allocated the mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia to Britain and for Syria and Lebanon to France. A subsequent Anglo-French convention of December 1920 specified boundaries and provided for a four-member boundary commission. Two members would be British and French nominees; the other two would be nominated by the local governments, with the consent of the respective mandatory power. Local participation was possible, but even the selection of its participants required the approval of the external authority.
There is a difference between having a place in a procedure and possessing authority over the settlement that created it. The commission’s provisions make that difference visible in administrative detail. Local governments could help trace a boundary within terms negotiated by Britain and France, with their nominees subject to mandatory consent. Such arrangements were more complicated than a line drawn in a closed room, but complexity did not make the underlying relationship equal. It distributed opportunities to participate while preserving supervision over who could participate and on what basis.
Correcting the mythology of a single, all-determining agreement therefore enlarges the field of responsibility. Later governments had to negotiate, institutionalise and enforce a political order; they were not merely executing an unavoidable instruction inherited from 1916. Every revision reopened choices about whose interests would count and whose authority would be recognised. The enduring criticism concerns those repeated decisions as well as the original bargain.
The People Had a Programme
The societies whose futures were under discussion generated political projects of their own. In 1919, the American King–Crane Commission received 1,863 petitions during its inquiry in Syria, understood in the report as a region broader than the present state. Its tables recorded 988 petitions protesting against secret treaties, especially agreements dividing Syria. These figures count petitions, not a representative sample of inhabitants: the report acknowledged uneven geographical coverage, organised campaigns and other limitations. Even with those qualifications, the material records articulated objections to a settlement being prepared elsewhere.
The report preserved competing programmes. Supporters of Syrian unity and independence faced advocates of a separate Greater Lebanon under France, as well as other proposals for Lebanon’s status. Different communities and political organisations sought different futures. This diversity placed a serious obligation on anyone claiming to speak for the whole region. It also exposed the inadequacy of a settlement in which a foreign government’s strategic claims could outrank the contest among local projects. Disagreement made representative politics necessary; it did not supply outsiders with a mandate to decide.
In March 1920, the Syrian Arab Congress proclaimed independence and made Faisal king. Its members debated representative government, civil equality and the relationship between the monarch and the legislature. The historian Elizabeth F. Thompson has reconstructed negotiations among Islamic reformers, secular nationalists and other participants who sought to define this order. The constitution remained an unfinished project and was never implemented. Its historical importance lies in the political possibilities being developed, with all their tensions, rather than any certainty that a secure democracy would have followed.
One disagreement recovered in Thompson’s research returns us to the supposedly technical provisions of Sykes–Picot. In January 1920, Rashid Rida warned Faisal against allowing French advisers to acquire administrative authority or control the police and military. A government could formally exist while losing the capacity to protect political independence. Rida was identifying the problem from inside the negotiations over Syria’s future: the status of advisers mattered because security powers could be used against those who challenged French policy.
This was a dispute about the substance of sovereignty, conducted by people often reduced in later accounts to inhabitants on an imperial map. They were considering how a ruler could be restrained, how foreign assistance could be limited and how political disagreement could remain possible. Their answers were contested, but the questions themselves defeat the suggestion that Europeans were simply filling an institutional vacuum. There were political alternatives to be negotiated, supported, defeated or suppressed.
French force helped determine which alternatives survived. Faisal dissolved Congress in July as the confrontation with France came to a head; on 24 July, French troops defeated Syrian forces at Maysalun. The fall of the Damascus government ended the experiment. France destroyed an existing attempt to construct an independent political order. The consequences of that decision can be identified without assigning it responsibility for every later dictatorship or conflict: an unfinished constitutional struggle was brought to an end by military intervention and the imposition of foreign rule.
A Public Pact, a Secret Partition
In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union combined a public non-aggression pact with a secret additional protocol defining spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. The circumstances, regimes and subsequent violence differed profoundly from the wartime bargains of 1915 and 1916. The comparison concerns a particular practice: two governments agreeing on the future treatment of territories whose states and populations were excluded from that agreement. Here the method was directed at already independent states, including Poland, whose continued existence became a matter for negotiation between its neighbours.
The protocol, signed by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov on 23 August, envisaged an approximate division of Polish territory along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers in the event of a territorial and political rearrangement. It left the desirability of retaining an independent Polish state to subsequent developments and the interests of the two parties. Poland’s independence was being discussed as an option its neighbours might preserve or discard. The text’s conditional language did not soften that presumption; it described the contingencies within which the signatories intended to exercise it.
The pact helped Hitler proceed against Poland without Soviet opposition. Germany invaded on 1 September; the Soviet Union invaded from the east on 17 September. In the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union occupied and incorporated Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The secret understanding had helped organise relations between the powers undertaking expansion, reducing the danger that their immediate ambitions would collide. The invasions and occupations supplied the coercion that the document itself could not supply.
The arrangement was revised even as it was being enforced. A supplementary protocol of 28 September shifted Lithuania into the Soviet sphere, subject to a territorial reservation for Germany, while shifting Polish territory into the German sphere. These changes reveal an active negotiation over the distribution of gains. They also caution against treating the August document as a complete description of everything that followed. An agreement could organise aggression and still be revised by the aggressors as their circumstances and preferences changed.
Finland demonstrates another limit to the apparent finality of a diplomatic map. Assigned to the Soviet sphere, it was attacked by the Soviet Union in November 1939. The Winter War ended in March 1940 with severe territorial losses, but Finland retained its independence. Resistance did not erase the injury, and the existence of resistance does not excuse the prior bargain. It establishes that the fate of a society continued to depend on capacities and decisions the signatories could neither possess nor fully predict.
Secrecy in 1939 also had a particular relationship to the public text. A declared undertaking not to attack one another coexisted with an undisclosed understanding about third countries. The public could read a promise of restraint between Germany and the Soviet Union without being shown the territorial bargain accompanying it. Confidentiality helped separate the reassuring diplomatic form from the predatory arrangement. The subjects excluded from the agreement included governments whose independence the two signatories were privately treating as negotiable.
The Soviet role carries an additional historical irony. The Bolsheviks had exposed their predecessors’ secret diplomacy in 1917; under Stalin, the Soviet government used a secret protocol to bargain over neighbouring countries. Regime change and an anti-imperialist vocabulary provided no lasting guarantee against the practice. Governments with radically different public justifications could find the same procedural advantage in making reciprocal commitments about people who had no authority over the bargain.
What Secret Treaties Protected
Confidential negotiation can serve defensible purposes. Governments seeking an armistice, testing concessions or arranging an exchange of prisoners may need protection from premature publicity. Publishing every tentative position can make compromise harder and expose participants to immediate retaliation. A useful criticism of secret diplomacy must therefore identify what is concealed, from whom, and until which decisions have been made. Privacy during an exploratory conversation differs from a concealed commitment that governments subsequently invoke to restrict the political choices of outsiders.
In the Treaty of London, the Sykes–Picot agreement and the German–Soviet protocol, secrecy accompanied bargains whose territorial consequences extended beyond the parties. Its audiences varied. Executives could withhold details from their own legislatures, preserve room to manage other allies or prevent affected societies from challenging commitments before these became settled negotiating positions. The documents alone cannot establish how decisive concealment was in every subsequent event. They do establish the terms over which the parties coordinated, and the political futures they presumed entitled to place within that coordination.
Nor does a signature confer ownership of everything described beneath it. A treaty can regulate what its parties promise to do without granting them legitimate authority to dispose of a third society. Keeping those questions separate is essential to reading these documents. Their importance lies partly in the way statesmen could slide between them: fidelity to an undertaking between governments became an argument for enforcing arrangements over people whose assent the undertaking had never secured.
Popular consent, meanwhile, cannot be recovered simply by replacing foreign diplomats with a self-appointed local spokesman. National movements can suppress minorities, monarchs can mistake dynastic ambition for a people’s will, and organised petitions can coexist with intimidation or exclusion. Those risks strengthen the case for institutions through which competing claims can be expressed and rulers challenged. They offer no general justification for transferring the decision to foreign powers whose own commitments place territorial gain, military access or commercial advantage at its centre.
After the Secret
The publication of imperial Russia’s diplomatic documents after the Bolshevik Revolution helped make secret treaties an object of international scandal. Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918 opened with a demand for “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”. His programme nevertheless stopped well short of recognising an unrestricted right to independence for every colonised population: its treatment of colonial claims balanced the interests of inhabitants against the claims of governments whose titles were being considered. A challenge to diplomatic secrecy could coexist with a restricted conception of who was entitled to decide.
The League Covenant’s Article 18 required future treaties and international engagements made by its members to be registered and published, declaring them non-binding until registration. That was a significant effort to constrain concealed commitments, rather than merely appeal to diplomatic virtue. Its prospective rule did not retroactively annul the bargains of 1915 and 1916. More fundamentally, registration addressed the visibility and status of an agreement between its parties; it supplied no general procedure through which every affected population could approve or reject its terms.
Exposure could still change the contest. It gave opponents evidence, allowed legislators to question ministers and made it harder to deny what had been promised. A published undertaking could be compared with other assurances and challenged in public. These were real gains. But a person could learn precisely how a foreign power proposed to limit their country’s future while remaining unable to choose its government, remove an occupying army or compel the negotiators to reopen the bargain.
The distinction also changes what it means to reckon with inherited borders. Communities can build political lives within boundaries established through coercion, and later generations can acquire attachments their original authors neither intended nor foresaw. An unjust origin does not confer an unlimited licence on new powers to redraw the map. Repeating the original exclusion under the language of historical correction would preserve its governing presumption: that someone elsewhere is entitled to settle the future of those who live there.
Cecil’s assurance to Parliament in 1918 can thus be read as the beginning of a question his answer did not resolve. The trustworthiness of governments towards one another matters; a world in which no undertaking could be relied upon would expose weaker societies to dangers of its own. Yet the duty to honour a promise cannot settle the prior issue of who had the authority to make it. For the people whose homes appeared in the bargain, the argument began before the signatures and continued after the secret was out.
