Treaty of Lausanne: The Birth Certificate of Republican Turkey in a Post-Ottoman Middle East

A Bibliographical Essay

 

By Hans-Lukas Kieser

 

This short essay focuses on the main sources and a selection of exemplary secondary literature related to the scholarly study of the Treaty of Lausanne. Most books and articles on Lausanne have been published in Turkish, most of them from a predominantly Kemalist perspective. Overall, the Lausanne Conference and Treaty have received little scholarly attention in relation to their importance as an international legal and diplomatic cornerstone for Turkey and its post-Ottoman neighbors. Nevertheless, there has been strong contemporary, including scholarly, interest in the Treaty and its aftermath, particularly with regard to its provisions on minorities and the “population exchange.” Notably, see Stephen P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (New York: Macmillan, 1932), the bi-monthly bulletin Les Minorités Nationales, published by the International Union of Associations for the League of Nations (1926–32). See also, e.g., the studies of exiled Russian lawyer André N. Mandelstam, including his La Société des Nations et les puissances devant le problème arménien (Paris: A. Pedone, 1926). The renewed comprehensive interest in the Lausanne Conference and global-historical “Lausanne moment” is a phenomenon of the last 10-20 years.

 

Sources:

For the full text of the Treaty and all related Conventions in French and English, see Recueil des Traites et des Engagements Internationaux enregistrés par le Secrétariat de la Société des Nations/ Treaty Series: Publication of Treaties and International Engagements registered with the Secretariat of the League of Nations. vol. 28 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1924), 11-285. Besides the Treaty and related Conventions, the Conference’s minutes, proceedings, and draft terms are primary sources for a study of the Lausanne Peace.

Most research done hitherto rests on an incomplete British edition of minutes in one volume that covers the Conference's first half until early February 1923: Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs (1922-1923): Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1923). Prints of the six-volume French edition are rare: Conférence de Lausanne sur les affaires du Proche-Orient (1922-1923): Recueil des actes de la conférence (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1923). This edition needs to be completed by other sources as far as the inauguration speeches, sub-commission discussions and, of course, unofficial meetings are concerned. Diplomatic documents, diaries and memoirs give insights into sub-commission discussions and private meetings, press reports into public events, sideshows and interviews. Secret police sources reveal otherwise undocumented events. For the daily reports of the cantonal police (Canton de Vaud with its capital Lausanne) see the file “Conférence de Lausanne 1922-23,” S 112/95, Archives cantonales vaudoises, Lausanne.

Hundreds of international journalists in Lausanne produced daily news, which makes the contemporary multilingual press a rich source. While the press of involved nations mostly focused on their delegations, themes and interests, Swiss papers reported abundantly from various angles, gave voice to unofficial delegations, and enjoyed privileged access to local sources. See notably the digitally accessible Journal de Genève (via www.letempsarchives.ch) and Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung (www.nzz.ch). For an edition of the insightful reports by daily Akşam correspondent Necmeddin Sadık (Sadak), later a Turkish foreign minister, see Necmeddin Sadık (Sadak) Bey’in Lozan Mektupları, ed. Mustafa Özyürek (Ankara: Gece, 2019). The German press is also of interest. Although Germany had no role in the negotiations, the successful revision of the Treaty of Sèvres in Lausanne was of significant symbolic importance to Germans.

The relevant diplomatic documents can be freely accessed in Western state archives and in the Ottoman State Archive (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi) in Istanbul, whereas Ankara's foreign ministry documents are still hardly accessible in the Republican Archives (Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi). Editions are: British Foreign Office, Further Correspondence Respecting Turkey, October to December 1922, Confidential Print 12330, FO 424/255 (London: FO, n.d.) and analogous following volumes; Documents diplomatiques français 1922 (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2007) and analogous following volumes; Lozan Telgrafları, ed. Bilal Şimşir (Ankara: TTK 1990 and 1994 – these two volumes includes the telegrams between Mustafa Kemal and Ismet Pasha). Among the unofficial delegations, the united Armenian delegation has left particularly rich archives that are accessible in the Nubar Library in Paris, where the parts transferred to the National Archives in Yerevan are accessible on microfilms.

Among important ego-documents are the following diaries and memoirs: Joseph C. Grew, Diary, Joseph Clark Grew papers, MS Am 1687, Houghton Library, Harvard University—a day to day source by a member of the observing US delegation on the whole Conference, including the immediate aftermath and the Turkish-American Treaty concluded in Switzerland; Cavid Bey, Meşrutiyet Ruznâmesi (Ankara: TTK, 2015), diary by a Turkish nationalist dissenter that covers the first half of the Conference; Alexandre Khatissian, Eclosion et développement de la République arménienne (Athens: Editions Arméniennes, 1989, in Armenian 1930), a serene analytical memoir with particularly relevant annexes including minutes of private and sub-commission meetings; Rıza Nur, Hayat ve Hatıratım, ed. Abdurrahman Dilipak (Istanbul: İşaret, 1992), vol. 2: Rıza Nur-Inönü kavgası, Lozan ve ötesi—a subjective, at times unreliable, but still instructive memoir by Ankara's vice-plenipotentiary in Lausanne who fell out with the Kemalists in 1926; Ismet İnönü, İsmet İnönü’nün hatıraları: Büyük zaferden sonra Mudanya Mütarekesi ve Lozan Antlaşması (Istanbul: Yenigün, 1998), the memoirs of Ankara's plenipotentiary in Lausanne, Atatürk's close collaborator and later president of Turkey. A sui generis source documenting the ultranationalist political-historical thought of the senior diplomat in the Ankara delegation is Rıza Nur's Ermeni Tarihi, a manuscript completed during the conference but not published until 2024 (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Ms. Orient Quart 1394).

The chapter on Lausanne in the memoirs of Andrew Ryan, British delegate and specialist for minority issues, a former dragoman in Istanbul, combines nostalgia, remorse and indictment (The Last of the Dragomans. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952, 174-98). Harold G. Nicolson, “Lausanne: The Final Triumph,” in idem, Curzon: The Last Phase. Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919–1925: A Study in Post-War Diplomacy (London: Constable, 1934), 314-350, is not a memoir, but a rich and astute analysis by an insider who is fascinated by his chief Curzon’s personality, intellectual capacity and diplomatic skills. Nicolson had acted as Curzon's private secretary both in Paris and in Lausanne. Semyon Aralov, Moscow’s ambassador in Ankara before the Lausanne Treaty, is instructive for how the Conference impacted on the hitherto special Turkish-Soviet relations: Bir Sovyet Diplomatının Anıları 1922-23 (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası, 2010, first Russian publication 1960).

 

Secondary Literature:

 After important interwar debates and scholarly research, broad international interest in the Lausanne Conference and Treaty did not revive until end of the 20^th century. This was due to the end of the Cold War and, especially, the topicality of population exchange, ethnic cleansing and minority protection during the crises in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The new scholarly approaches resulted notably in Renée Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey (New York: Berghahn, 2008), Onur Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement. Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations (New York: Routledge, 2012 – a study of the Turkish side of the implementation of the exchange), Martin Scheuermann, Minderheitenschutz contra Konfliktverhütung? Die Minderheitenpolitik des Völkerbundes in den zwanziger Jahren (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2000), Baskın Oran, Türkiye'de azınlıklar: kavramlar, teori, Lozan, iç mevzuat, içtihat, uygulama (Istanbul: İlestişim, 2004 – an analysis of often-neglected minority rights), Umut Özsu, Formalizing Displacement. International Law and Population Transfers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), and Arno Barth,“Störfaktoren entfernen?” Minderheitenpolitik als Risikoabwägung im Langen Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt: Campus, 2021).

The renewed interest in the Lausanne Conference since the late 20^th century has been part of a general reappraisal of the end of the Ottoman Empire in international scholarship and among Muslims of the Middle East, especially Turkey. A provocative and influential work in this context is Kadir Mısıroğlu’s Lozan: Zafer mi, hezimet mi? (Istanbul: Sebil, 1992). As the first editor of Nur's memoirs in the 1960s, Mısıroğlu offered an anti-Kemalist Islamist, ultimately “neo-Ottoman” critique of the Lausanne Treaty, arguing that Jewish-British conspiracy, to which Kemalism succumbed in Lausanne, damaged the cause of a Greater Turkey and the Caliphate. In contrast, a scholarly study of the caliphate issue in the context of the Conference is Nurullah Ardıc̦, “Abolition of the Caliphate,” in idem, Islam and the Politics of Secularism: The Caliphate and Middle Eastern Modernization in the Early 20th Century (London: Routledge, 2012, 241-309).

The most comprehensive historiographical revision and interrogation to date took place on the occasion of the centenary of the treaty. However, it began to take shape at the end of the twentieth century in the context of the intensifying reappraisal of the late Ottoman Empire, the First World War, and the peace-making that followed that seminal catastrophe. This went hand in hand with serious work on the history of violence and genocide as well as the rise of Kurdish studies and the study of other stateless indigenous groups. Several innovative monographs and volumes of collected essays, as well as articles, websites and exhibitions about the Conference of Lausanne mark this period. Ali Othman, “The Kurds and the Lausanne Peace Negotiations, 1922-1922”, Middle Eastern Studies 33 (1997), no. 3, 521-534, signals the Kurds’ unbroken concern and interest for the Lausanne Treaty and its legacy. Like Othman’s article, Sevtap Demirci, The Lausanne Conference: The Evolution of Turkish and British Strategies, 1922-1923 (London School of Economics and Political Science: PhD Thesis, 1997, in Turkish: Belgelerle Lozan, Istanbul: Alfa, 2011) has preceded the recent achievements in research. Nevertheless, based mostly on British sources, this study offers a fine analysis of Lausanne’s main players and ultimate winners.

Hans-Lukas Kieser, “Macro et micro histoire autour de la Conférence sur le Proche-Orient tenue à Lausanne en 1922–23,” Mémoire vive: Pages d’histoire lausannoise 13 (2004), 42–48, is an early brief attempt at a revisionist understanding of Lausanne as a post-Ottoman “pact” between ex-CUP ultranationalists and imperialist mandate-holders, taking into account war, genocide and ethnic cleansing that preceded the Conference as well as the mindset of some of the Turkish delegates, who were well-known from earlier nationalist agitation at the Lake of Geneva. Roland Banken, Die Verträge von Sèvres 1920 und Lausanne 1923: Eine völkerrechtliche Untersuchung zur Beendigung des Ersten Weltkrieges und zur Auflösung der sogenannten ‘Orientalischen Frage’ (Berlin: LIT, 2014) is an approach from the perspective of international law. In line with post-1945 political science, it positively acknowledges the longevity of the treaty and sees it as the result of “real negotiations” between the partners, in contrast to the previous negotiations in Paris – without considering the exclusion of indigenous representatives in Lausanne except for Ankara's nationalists. Marcus M. Payk, Frieden durch Recht: Der Aufstieg des modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Gruyter, 2018) is a more comprehensive examination of the failure of the originally intended peacemaking based on law, including in the case of the Ottoman world.

Considering the state of the art in late Ottoman, World War I, genocide, interwar European, and early post-Ottoman studies, several most recent works on the Lausanne Conference and Treaty offer a thorough critique of the “Lausanne moment,” which they see as crucial for Middle Eastern and European history, including for Germany. The collected essays in Jonathan Conlin and Ozan Ozavci (eds.) They All Made Peace: What Is Peace?: The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the New Imperial Order (London: Gingko, 2023) represent the breadth and depth of the new research. Conlin, Ozavci and their team also run The Lausanne Project website (https://thelausanneproject.com), which addresses issues related to the Lausanne moment in the broadest sense.

Three monographs commemorate the Treaty’s centenary. Jay Winter, The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923: The Civilianization of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) tells the multilateral genesis of the Treaty, emphasizing how “peace” came before justice at Lausanne and how it set in motion forces that led to Nazism and the Second World War. Hans-Lukas Kieser, When Democracy Did: The Middle East’s Enduring Peace of Lausanne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) recounts how the eight dramatic months of the Conference ended a decade of war and genocide in the late Ottoman Empire and ushered in a new era marked by the enduring pact of imperialist Western mandate-holders with ultra-nationalists in Ankara and soon other non-democratic, but geo-strategically or resource-wise attractive regimes in the Middle East. Michelle Tusan, The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) places the Allied victory over Germany in 1918 in relief against the unrelenting war, ethnic cleansing and forced migration in the East. The League of Nations’ and related organizations’ humanitarianism could not repair the damage done to the civilian populations by the Lausanne Treaty or endorsed by it.

Despite the recent progress, there are still many opportunities for more meaningful research related to the Lausanne Treaty and its aftermath: the intertwining of the Kurdish question with Lausanne; the important legal aftermath of the Lausanne Treaty during the League of Nations period and beyond, especially for Turkey's legal system; the impact of the “Lausanne paradigm of conflict resolution” on contemporary and later leaders, policies and movements, including Zionism: to name just a few. Today, in the 2020s, we live in a world that is losing faith in liberal democracy. Therefore, the common liberal-critical scholarly spirit of the above-mentioned new monographs cannot hide the still existing and, in some cases – especially Turkey – deepening divisions in the field regarding Lausanne, preceding genocides, the formation of a unitary Republic, the criterion of post-Ottoman democracy, and the question of stateless “nations.”