Hanna Slavina. The Project of the Military-defensive Union presented by the Belarusian People’s Republic in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference

By the end of the First World War, on the western fringes of the former Russian Empire, the people of Poland, Finland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Belarus declared their independence and the establishment of national states. The future fate of these newly proclaimed republics, much like the political map of post-war Europe, was determined at the Paris Peace Conference, attended by the Belarusian delegation as well. Striving for the recognition of their statehood, the participants of the Belarusian delegation aimed to adhere to the rules of a complex diplomatic endeavour set by the leading world powers. Achieving peace based on agreements between countries was a top priority. Belarusians, without a national army, aimed to protect their territory by uniting neighbouring nations under the umbrella of a military-defensive union. The article deals with the 1919 Project Military-defensive Union presented by the Belarusian delegation during the Paris Peace Conference. These uncharted archival documents reveal new aspects of the BNR delegation’s political activity among the countries of the Eastern European region in the period of 1919-1921. In the work on the material, a set of methods and techniques based on archival research with a further application of historical and legal analysis of documents and events was used. The relevance of the topic is conditioned by the study of the significant interwar period in the modern European history. The article shows the possibility of further research of the Military-defensive Union Project by various branches of scientific research.