7 times when great powers negotiated the future of countries without consulting their people

1. The partition of Africa
In the winter of 1884-1885, German leader Otto von Bismarck invited the powers of Europe to Berlin for a conference in which the division among them of the entire African continent would be formalized.

Not a single African was present at the conference that would come to be known as "The Partition of Africa."

Among other things, the conference led to the creation of the Congo Free State under Belgian control, the site of terrible colonial atrocities and millions of deaths.

Germany also established the colony of German South West Africa (now Namibia), where the first genocide of the 20th century was later perpetrated against colonized peoples.
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2. The Tripartite Convention
It was not only Africa that was divided in this way. In 1899, Germany and the United States held a conference and forced the Samoans to agree to divide their islands between the two powers.

This occurred despite the Samoans expressing a desire for self-government or a confederation of Pacific States with Hawaii.

As "compensation" for not gaining Samoa, Britain was given control of Tonga.

German Samoa came under New Zealand rule after World War I and remained so until 1962. American Samoa (along with several other Pacific islands) remains a U.S. territory to this day.

3. The Sykes-Picot Agreement
As World War I was in full swing, British and French representatives sat down to agree on how they would divide the Ottoman Empire once the conflict was over.

As an enemy power, the Ottomans were not invited to the talks.

Together, Englishman Mark Sykes and Frenchman François Georges-Picot redrawn the borders of the Middle East based on the interests of their respective nations.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement contradicted commitments made in a series of letters known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. In these letters, Britain promised to support Arab independence from Turkish rule.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement also contradicted promises Britain made in the Balfour Declaration to support Zionists who wanted to build a new Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine.

The agreement became the source of decades of conflict and colonial mismanagement in the Middle East, the consequences of which are still felt today.

4. The Munich Agreement
In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier met with Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and German Adolf Hitler to sign what would become known as the Munich Agreement.

The leaders attempted to prevent the spread of war across Europe after Hitler's Nazis fomented an uprising and began attacking German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland. They did so under the pretext of protecting German minorities. No Czechoslovakians were invited to the meeting.

Many still regard the meeting as the "Munich betrayal," a classic example of a failed attempt to appease a belligerent power in the false hope of avoiding war.

5. The Évian Conference
In 1938, 32 countries met in Évian-les-Bains, France, to decide what to do with Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany.

Before the conference began, Britain and the United States had agreed not to pressure each other to raise the quota of Jews they would accept on American soil or in British Palestine.

Although Golda Meir (the future Israeli leader) attended the conference as an observer, neither she nor any other representative of the Jewish people was allowed to participate in the negotiations.

The attendees largely failed to reach an agreement on the acceptance of Jewish refugees, with the exception of the Dominican Republic. And most Jews in Germany were not allowed to leave before Nazism began with the Holocaust.

6. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
As Hitler planned his invasion of Eastern Europe, it became clear that his main obstacle was the Soviet Union. His response was to sign an implausible non-aggression treaty with the USSR.

The treaty, named after Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop (the Soviet and German foreign ministers), guaranteed that the Soviet Union would not respond when Hitler invaded Poland.

It also divided Europe into Nazi and Soviet spheres. This allowed the Soviets to expand into Romania and the Baltic states, attack Finland, and take their own share of Polish territory.

It is no wonder that some in Eastern Europe see the current US-Russian talks over the future of Ukraine as the revival of this kind of secret diplomacy that divided Europe's smaller nations between the great powers in World War II.

7. The Yalta Conference
With the imminent defeat of Nazi Germany, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt met in 1945 to decide the fate of post-war Europe.

This meeting came to be known as the Yalta Conference.

Together with the Potsdam Conference several months later, Yalta created the political architecture that would lead to the division of Cold War Europe.

At Yalta, the “big three” decided on the division of Germany, while Stalin was also offered a sphere of interest in Eastern Europe.

This took the form of a series of politically controlled buffer states in Eastern Europe, a model that some believe Putin aims to emulate today.

With the imminent defeat of Nazi Germany, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt met in 1945 to decide the fate of postwar Europe