The Balkan Pact was a treaty signed by Greece, Turkey, Romania and Yugoslavia on February 9, 1934 in Athens, aimed at maintaining the geopolitical status quo in the region following World War I. The signatories agreed to suspend all disputed territorial claims against each other and their immediate neighbors following the aftermath of the war and a rise in various regional ethnic minority tensions. Other nations in the region that had been involved in related diplomacy refused to sign the document, including Italy, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. Nonsignatories were mostly those governments with territorial expansion in mind. The pact became effective on the day it was signed. It was registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on October 1, 1934.
The Balkan Pact helped to ensure peace between Turkey and the independent countries in southeastern Europe that had been part of the Ottoman Empire, most importantly Greece, but failed to stem regional intrigue that encouraged military intervention by Germany, Britain, and the Soviet Union during the Second World War.
Famous quotes containing the words balkan and/or pact:
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)