1. Introduction
The exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries, at their points of contact with other communities.
MarxFootnote 1In the autumn of 1922, some three years after the commencement of the Paris Peace Conference, Fridtjof Nansen left for Istanbul. He went as League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Once settled in the city, then under Allied occupation, he wrote to Eleftherios Venizelos, until recently prime minister of Greece and a leading figure in European diplomatic circles, to propose measures for the resettlement of Greek refugees. Among these proposals was a comprehensive exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, which Nansen described as being ‘within the scope of the mission with which the League of Nations' had entrusted him.Footnote 2 Venizelos replied swiftly, asking the distinguished Norwegian to speak to Turkish officials with a view to laying the groundwork for an exchange.
Nansen was a natural choice for the job. A seasoned diplomat, he would receive the Nobel Peace Prize later in 1922 for his efforts to repatriate and secure asylum for refugees fleeing war in Russia and Asia Minor.Footnote 3 As the League's first High Commissioner for Refugees, he was well positioned to design and supervise an exchange of the sort envisioned by Greek, Turkish, and west European authorities alike. But Nansen left for Istanbul not simply as a decorated representative of the ‘international community’. Having achieved fame for his expeditions to the Arctic, conducted groundbreaking research as a natural scientist, made a name for himself as a monarchist in his native Norway, and subsequently embarked upon a diplomatic career, first as Norwegian envoy to London and then with the League, he was a polymath with formidable organizational talents. He had used these talents to begin assisting Russian, Armenian, and Assyrian refugees after the First World War,Footnote 4 creating a new travel document for displaced persons in the process.Footnote 5 Now he would see to it that the Greek–Turkish War of 1919–22, a conflict that had nearly brought the British Empire to blows with Bolshevik Russia, was resolved peacefully.
Nansen was not entirely comfortable with an exchange. The coercive mechanisms it was bound to call forth ran counter to his identity as a ‘Great Humanitarian’ and ‘Citizen of Mankind’.Footnote 6 Although the causes he deemed worthy of support were not always laudable – he had backed the tsar's attempt to counter the ‘yellow race’ in SiberiaFootnote 7 – he generally preferred the ‘soft power’ of behind-the-scenes bargaining to the ‘hard power’ of state-sanctioned force. While cutting his political teeth in Christiania, for instance, he had lauded Norway and Sweden for dissolving their union with a plebiscite in words that foreshadowed his later involvement in the Near East: ‘The most important event in the history of the two countries’ had ‘been settled without a single drop of blood’ – a possible indication that the world was ‘gradually advancing in culture and civilisation’.Footnote 8 Ultimately, though, Nansen would co-ordinate much of the exchange between Greece and Turkey. Shuttling between cities for months prior to and during the 1922–23 Conference of Lausanne, at which a peace settlement with Turkey would be concluded, he would immerse himself in nearly every facet of the endeavour, from its initial design through to its final implementation.
Nansen's voyage to Istanbul was both symbolically charged and logistically pivotal. But he was no thaumaturge, and what is of interest in his expedition is not its ‘heroism’, or even the influence it enabled him to wield with his personal charisma and professional competence. Rather, it is the fact that it encapsulated, in a kind of precis, a much broader mission to reconstitute Greece and Turkey in accordance with modernist imperatives of order and progress. From Europe's north-westernmost tip to its south-easternmost extremity, Nansen would go to calculate and taxonomize his way into an ‘unmixed’ Near East.Footnote 9 In his train would follow a barrage of others. Humanitarian organizations – some formed to facilitate Nansen's earlier efforts, some with deep roots in Anglo-American missionary movementsFootnote 10 – would be involved. And a new international civil service, centred in the League's Geneva headquarters but with tentacles extending elsewhere, would be tasked with overseeing important facets of the operation. These and others worked with authorities in Greece, as well as a Turkish nationalist elite determined to transform the state apparatus it had inherited from its Ottoman predecessor into a fully ‘modern’ nation-state. Convinced that such a state would be possible only with a significant degree of ethno-national homogeneity, most members of this elite supported the exchange as a means of overcoming Turkey's ‘backwardness’.
Reconstituting nations and states was nothing new. The Ottoman Empire's dismemberment had been long in the making,Footnote 11 and even the notion of a population exchange was not unknown to pre-Versailles lawyers.Footnote 12 To be sure, no exchange had ever been undertaken on anything approaching the level envisioned here. But resettlement programmes were ubiquitous,Footnote 13 and experience had been gained with small-scale transfers and exchanges in the Balkans, one of which would find its way into the Permanent Court of International Justice's docket as the Greco-Bulgarian ‘Communities’ case.Footnote 14 Indeed, as noted by Schmitt – who saw Turkey's ‘radical expulsion of the Greeks’ as evidence that ‘actual democracy’ requires the ‘eradication of heterogeneity’Footnote 15 – manipulation of territory in accordance with principles like cujus regio ejus religio had distinguished the European land order – and the international legal order it threw up – since at least the Reformation.Footnote 16
Yet, here, in Greece and Turkey, in the heart of what nineteenth-century commentators had termed the ‘Eastern Question’, international lawyers would be pushed to new limits. The compulsory exchange was a mechanism whose status under international law was imprecise. Many were sceptical of its legality. Robert Redslob dismissed it as a political, and not a legal, solution to the ‘problème des nationalités’.Footnote 17 Others spoke of it as ‘une régression regrettable dans l'évolution du droit des gens’,Footnote 18 as a ‘brutale mesure’ that fell foul of the ‘principes élémentaires qui sont à la base du droit public des nations civilisées’,Footnote 19 or as contrary to the League Covenant and ‘l'évolution diplomatique, doctrinale et jurisprudentielle du droit des gens’.Footnote 20 Others, however, differed in their assessment, recognizing the compulsory exchange as broadly legal, though not necessarily desirable. Writing for the Permanent Court, Huber explained that the exchange was governed by a binding international treaty and that the issue before the Court therefore concerned a proper ‘question of international law’.Footnote 21 British authorities in mandate-era Palestine were so impressed by the endeavour that they considered implementing an exchange there. In the words of the Peel Commission's final report, whereas, formerly, ‘the Greek and Turkish minorities had been a constant irritant’, the ‘ulcer has been clean cut out’, placing relations between the two states on much firmer footing.Footnote 22
Regardless of where they stood, though, almost all international lawyers recognized that here, in Greece and Turkey, there was no viable alternative to the exchange. In 1906, Westlake had already voiced exasperation: ‘extreme misgovernment in Turkey is a nuisance to the neighbouring European States,’ he wrote, adding that ‘if the Sultan cannot keep order in his own dominions, or if to keep order he has recourse not to civilised means of repression but to massacre, he loses all claim to be regarded as a ruler to whom international law can apply’.Footnote 23 By the time the terms of the Greek–Turkish exchange were concluded in early 1923, it had become obvious that minority protection, as developed by the Concert of Europe during the long nineteenth century and augmented by the Allies after 1919, was not going to be enough to ‘civilize’ Greece and Turkey. A new batch of protective mechanisms would, admittedly, be introduced for minorities. But something else was necessary if the region was to have peace and prosperity. It was no less clear, however, that this ‘something else’ could not take the form of a top-to-bottom reconstitution of whole economies and societies – a reconstitution of the type that had been undertaken throughout the colonial world. The reason for this was simple, but crucially important: while dependent upon the West, Ottoman Turkey had never been colonized sensu stricto, and Turkish nationalists would not countenance anything smacking of out-and-out, externally induced reconstruction. As a via media solution of sorts, the population exchange thus steered a course between two extremes. On the one hand, there was the typical European scenario of minority protection in an equilibrated state system that permitted limited expressions of self-determination but was otherwise underwritten by a background commitment to uti possidetis juris.Footnote 24 On the other hand, there was the standard colonial case of total reconstruction, the sort of case exemplified most grotesquely in the sordid history of the ‘Congo Free State’. Between the two is what occurred in Greece and Turkey, long an unstable region on the semi-periphery of the international legal order and now wracked by the destruction of the pax ottomanica.Footnote 25
As the first legally structured compulsory endeavour of its scale and sophistication, the sheer ambition of the exchange was staggering: over one million Greeks (or those identified as such) were uprooted from Asia Minor and eastern Thrace immediately before and during the formal exchange, which began in 1923 and ran through the remainder of the decade, and something in the vicinity of 350 000 Turks were expelled from Greece's mainland and islands over the same stretch of time.The formal exchange negotiated at Lausanne followed the expulsion of large numbers of Greeks from Asia Minor in 1922, and has therefore sometimes been presented as merely an ex post endorsement of an already existing reality.Footnote 26 This is deeply misleading: not only did the formal exchange call for entirely new movements (nearly all 350 000 Turks and roughly 200 000 of the concerned Greeks), but it lent the full weight of international legal legitimacy to earlier movements, establishing a comprehensive legal regime to organize relief and resettlement efforts. This was an exercise both in producing new forced migrations and in juridifying the dispossession and displacement that had already occurred.
The exchange showcased the pragmatism of the post-1919 order – an increased willingness on the part of lawyers and politicians alike to adapt legal doctrines to local conditions, bringing greater, more sophisticated institutional resources to bear on crafting functionally suitable solutions to pressing problems.Footnote 27 It also signalled the increased palatability of a new mode of non-military nation-building, one premised on the forensic rebuilding of sovereign but politico-economically weak states. The chief aim here was not to organize plebiscites, channel self-determination claims, or install protective mechanisms for underresourced or underrepresented minorities – all important aspects of the Allies’ management of imperial disintegration in Europe. Nor was the aim to restructure all facets of a given economy and society in order to generate an entirely new legal system; this had often been the case with colonialism in Asia and Africa, and would characterize much of the League's system of mandates. Instead, the aim of the Greek–Turkish exchange was to redivide land, reshape national identities, and unleash new processes of capital accumulation with a view to facilitating nation-building through regionally suitable means. If Greece and Turkey were to be refashioned by way of an exchange, this was in no small part due to the semi-peripheral character of the region, which both permitted and demanded reliance on a distinct procedure. This was a unique region – neither European nor non-European, neither at the centre nor at the periphery of the international system. Nothing less than an equally unique response would do.
In this article, I examine the travaux préparatoires of the convention by which the exchange was governed – a convention annexed to the Lausanne Peace Treaty as a key element of the package of instruments that comprised the general peace settlement between Turkey and the Allied Powers after the First World War.Footnote 28 Reading statements from various delegates,Footnote 29 I consider two of the most illuminating, though least closely scrutinized,Footnote 30 aspects of Lausanne's negotiating history: the various delegations’ views on the relation between law and nationalism in the exchange, and the exchange's design as a mechanism geared toward a particular (and particularly demanding) region.
First, I argue that debates regarding the exchange were informed by a profound ambiguity with regard to ethno-nationalism. On the one hand, the exchange was a characteristically technocratic effort to bracket ethno-nationalism, or at least to minimize its attraction by ensuring that the movements already under way were governed by law. On the other hand, it tethered the sovereignty of Greece and Turkey to the ethnicities of their ‘founding peoples’, recruiting – and legitimizing – the very ethno-nationalism that had made the exchange procedure necessary. Second, I argue that the exchange comprised a method of nation-building with a distinct range of spatial application. If some doubted the wisdom of implanting minority protection in central and eastern Europe, room for doubt was that much greater in the case of Greece and Turkey, where the need for a ‘more radical remedy’ to the ‘minorities problem’ was widely felt.Footnote 31 Likewise, while the idea of a mandate had been floated in 1919,Footnote 32 winning support even among some Turks,Footnote 33 establishing a mandate over predominantly Turkish territory had never been more than a remote possibility. Neither with the techniques to which European jurists had become accustomed in Poland nor with those they were working to develop for Palestine would imperial dissolution be managed in Greece and Turkey.
I develop this argument eclectically, marshalling a range of material from legal history, historical sociology, and international positive law. And, following Bourdieu, I ground the legal disputes in question in a contextualized account of the Conference of Lausanne as a distinct ‘social space’ – an arena of action that both defined and was defined by competition between different actors in possession of different quantities of material and symbolic capital.Footnote 34 The Greek–Turkish exchange was debated and devised against the background of a number of political and economic struggles, nearly always translated into legal terms and waged within a social arena bounded in part by the conceptual and normative structures of international law. Only a contextualized socio-legal account can explain the exchange's negotiating history in a way that is adequate to its complexity, significance, and ongoing resonance.
2. Bargaining ethno-nationalism
The exchange's relationship to nationalism raised an array of issues that were approached from two distinct angles. The first such angle elided ethno-nationalism in the name of ‘unmixing’ peoples through the most rational means available. Frequently employed by the great powers, but also finding a home in some of Turkey's demands, this was a strategy driven by a preponderantly managerial analysis of the territorial frontiers and demographic compositions of the two states to be reconstructed by the exchange. The argument on its behalf had as its major premise the conjecture that the exchange could be conceived and implemented in abstracto – as a fundamentally self-contained enterprise, fuelled by the ‘constructive and practical idealism’ then being developed by League officials.Footnote 35 This enterprise would, to be sure, bump up against ethno-nationalism. Yet, it would retain an irreducibly ‘scientific’ core of intentional design, strong enough to impede, or at least defer, the international system's disintegration in the face of such nationalism.Footnote 36
Thus, as emphasized by Nansen, who would inaugurate discussion on the exchange, the impetus behind moving hundreds of thousands from one end of the Aegean to the other was a fundamentally pragmatic one: ‘the Great Powers are in favour of’ an exchange ‘because they believe that to unmix the populations of the Near East will tend to secure the true pacification of the Near East’, this being ‘the quickest and most efficacious way of dealing with the grave economic results which must result from the great movement of populations which has already occurred’.Footnote 37 Lord Curzon, chief British delegate and former viceroy of India, would assure the Turks – to whom he was otherwise openly hostileFootnote 38 – that ‘[n]o one wanted to interfere with their independence or sovereignty’.Footnote 39 On the contrary, ‘everyone wanted to build up a sovereign independent Turkish State’,Footnote 40 convinced as they were that the exchange would result in ‘the question of the minorities’ being ‘to a certain extent simplified’.Footnote 41 Such statements rendered the exchange ascetic and unassuming – something of a sterile, mechanical exercise that lay at a considerable distance from the dirty business of attending to conflicting ethno-national aspirations and grievances. The socio-historical context within which the exchange would unfold was to be given short shrift – or at most no more consideration than was required to ensure that the process yielded a successful outcome.
However, most of those present in Lausanne were also wont to see ethno-nationalism as deeply integral to the exchange. The Turkish delegation generally preferred to throw its weight behind the proposition that debates relating to the exchange's legal form could never be disconnected from questions concerning the ethnic composition of the future Turkish state. In Turkish delegates’ eyes, much of the violence accompanying the Ottoman state's dissolution had been linked to Western powers exploiting extraterritorial privileges afforded by consular jurisdiction or exercising treaty-based rights of guardianship over Christian communities.Footnote 42 For İsmet Paşa, the principal delegate, Turkey's support for a compulsory exchange followed from its ‘legitimate desire to prevent minorities . . . becoming weapons in the hands of foreigners’.Footnote 43 So long as it harboured resourceful non-Muslim communities, willing and able to assist Russia or Britain as fifth columnists, Turkey would be as unable to achieve domestic stability as it would to contribute to international order.
Statements from other participants can be read in similar terms – as attempts not to shirk ethno-nationalist politics so much as to harness it to a project of legal nation-building. Curzon ‘deeply regretted’ the exchange,Footnote 44 thought it ‘a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world would pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come’,Footnote 45 and claimed that Western powers ‘had attempted to do no more than to act in the rôle of mediators’, intervening only after it had become unavoidable so as ‘to secure the conclusion of an agreement capable of practical application’.Footnote 46 He also portrayed the exchange as a method of effecting Turkish withdrawal from Europe, suggesting that ‘[i]n Europe the greater part . . . of the Turkish population in Greek territory . . . will cease to be a minority population because they will return to Turkey’.Footnote 47 As the only Turks to whom this comment could apply were natives of the Balkans, the implication was clearly that Turkish presence in Europe remained – after nearly six centuries of Ottoman presence in the Balkans and several centuries of earlier Turkic Völkerwanderungen – an essentially, irredeemably, alien one. After all, even those episodes of apparent interpenetration between the ‘public law of Europe’ and the dār al-Islām spearheaded by the Ottomans, such as Turkey's controversial admission into the European state system in the 1856 Treaty of Paris,Footnote 48 owed more to raison d'état than to any ‘cultural’ or ‘civilizational’ bond, Istanbul having acquired the attendant ‘advantages’ largely to maintain the continental balance of power. Unlike the first approach, then, a managerial, technocratic approach to the exchange, this second approach saw the exchange as a messy, even sinister, affair – something to be broached not only with ‘scientific’ acumen, as though entire nation-states might be created by sheer dint of will, but also, and at least equally, by attending to ethno-nationalism's lure.
It is worth underscoring the complexity of the diplomatic context within which these approaches were articulated. The exchange was negotiated on the basis of a variety of legal struggles pitting Turkey against the Allies – and this despite the fact that most delegates at Lausanne were career diplomats rather than trained lawyers. Curzon secured the position of the conference's president and, wielding enormous symbolic power, would direct most discussions as primus inter pares. He had, as he himself put it, ‘the art of getting on with Orientals’,Footnote 49 and this ‘art’ was bolstered by the work of British code-breakers supplying him with a constant stream of intercepted telegrams.Footnote 50 France had largely broken ranks with Britain, adhering to those portions of the Sykes–Picot Agreement that had dealt with the partition of predominantly Arab territories but otherwise supporting Turkey.Footnote 51 Italy had to drop its earlier demands for territorial compensation due to Anglo-French indifference and Mustafa Kemal's growing strength,Footnote 52 though Mussolini's personal presence at the conference assured Italian control over the Dodecanese.Footnote 53
The Ottoman state had been Britain's cordon sanitaire on the road to India.Footnote 54 Now that it had collapsed, the responsibility of shielding the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ had been shifted to Greece, which had received British support during the Greek–Turkish War.Footnote 55 But this was a gamble, and not one to which the Foreign Office had committed itself blindly. Any number of reasons can be cited for this: among others, a desire to maintain nominally cordial relations with the French, insufficient domestic support for another costly adventure, divided opinion on the merits of the Treaty of Sèvres, the short-lived peace treaty that the Ottoman government signed after the Great War but that Kemal's nationalists repudiated.Footnote 56 Above all, though, it was a calculated assessment of the risks involved in the Greek occupation of western Anatolia. Protracted conflict in Turkey could lead to full-blown rebellion in India, where support for Kemal, generally careful to portray himself as engaged in a jihād to save the caliphate, was strong.Footnote 57
All of this strengthened Turkey's hand. Rather than arriving in Lausanne as representatives of a defeated Central Power, the Turks postured as the commanding force on most issues. State sovereignty, they maintained, was inviolable, an absolute point of reference conditioned solely by the need to conserve the structural integrity of the international system. In espousing this strong interpretation of sovereign equality – which has always attracted charges of positivismFootnote 58 – the Turks received support from the Bolsheviks, who had signed a ‘treaty of friendship’ with Ankara the year beforeFootnote 59 and who backed many of the Kemalists’ substantive claims.Footnote 60 Owing much to the Soviets’ desire to shore up their southern flank,Footnote 61 the alliance supplied the Kemalists with additional leverage and irked delegates from other parties,Footnote 62 perhaps none more so than Curzon, who had previously chaired a British governmental committee formed to combat Bolshevism in Asia.Footnote 63 Indeed, it allowed them to treat the negotiations as a prolongation of war by other means. A large Greek army was, after all, positioned to march on Istanbul,Footnote 64 and İsmet, a general during the Greek–Turkish War, likened the conference to a military struggle ‘which the Turkish delegation mobilized for and worked 24 hours around the clock’.Footnote 65
Consider the proceedings themselves. Nansen was invited to address the conference on 1 December 1922 on the grounds that he ‘had for some time been in negotiation with both Turkey and Greece on the subject’.Footnote 66 He took the opportunity to recount his experiences and press for the immediate implementation of a total exchange, ‘of real importance to the peace and economic stability of the Near East’.Footnote 67 He stressed that the exchange had won support among elites in Greece and Turkey, as well as from the great powers. Unlike the Mandate System, it would not be a more or less exclusive outgrowth of Western diplomacy, but would involve all concerned actors.Footnote 68 Turkey was not a member of the League, but Nansen felt comfortable suggesting to his ‘Turkish friends that they could confide their interests in this matter to the Council of the League with absolute confidence’.Footnote 69
At root, what was of greatest importance for Nansen was that all of the state parties should get on with the business of organizing the exchange. On the table was not ethno-nationalism in extremis, but a ‘matter’,Footnote 70 a ‘question’ that demanded ‘quick and efficient’ resolution ‘with a minimum of delay’.Footnote 71 Moreover, it was ‘the economic aspect of the matter’Footnote 72 that was of paramount importance:
Such an exchange will provide Turkey immediately and in the best possible conditions with the population necessary to continue the exploitation of the cultivated lands which the departed Greek populations have abandoned. The departure from Greece of its Moslem citizens would create the possibility of rendering self-supporting a great proportion of the refugees now concentrated in the towns and in different parts of Greece.Footnote 73
The associated ‘difficulties’ were ‘immense’.Footnote 74 Among other things, ‘the displacement of populations of many more than 1,000,000 people’ necessitated:
uprooting these people from their homes, transferring them to a strange new country, . . . registering, valuing and liquidating their individual property which they abandon, and . . . securing to them the payment of their just claims to the value of this property.Footnote 75
But these were ‘technical difficulties’, and certainly ‘not insuperable’.Footnote 76 The commission responsible for overseeing the 1919 Greek–Bulgarian exchange had assured him of as much.Footnote 77 The treaty that had governed this earlier exchange could, in fact, ‘be taken as a model’.Footnote 78
It is striking that Nansen, anything but reticent on the exchange's ‘machinery’,Footnote 79 had little to say about the fact that it would involve the legalization and legitimation of a large-scale reconfiguration of the Near East's ethno-confessional make-up. Obviously, any exchange would need to be a product of methodical calculation and, in highlighting the need for such caution, Nansen was reiterating a point around which a rough-and-ready consensus had already formed. But the exchange would also need to wrestle with – and to enlist – a considerable measure of völkisch romanticism. This rendered it far less cut-and-dried an affair than the rather arid procedures on which Nansen pinned his hopes.Footnote 80
None of this was lost on İsmet. Although Turkey, not yet having joined the League, could attach no more than a ‘personal character’ to Nansen's remarks,Footnote 81 it agreed that progress needed to be made on the exchange. However, from Ankara's vantage point, the exchange recruited a much wider range of issues than Nansen suggested, and its terms could not be negotiated in the abstract. Indeed, İsmet maintained, the problem of determining the form of the exchange could not be decoupled from ‘the question of minorities in Turkey’ even slightly.Footnote 82
It quickly became apparent that this attempt to link the issue of the exchange tightly to that of minorities had serious implications for Turkey's view of nationalism. İsmet had argued already, on 1 December, that any exchange would need to include Greeks resident in Izmir and Istanbul – both cosmopolitan centres of vital importance to eastern Mediterranean commerce, and both linchpins of the Megali Idea of achieving a ‘greater Greece’.Footnote 83 In a long statement that he read on 12 December,Footnote 84 he went further. He ran the gamut from Mehmed II's grant of privileges to non-Muslims after the conquest of Constantinople to the high-water mark of secessionist nationalism in the late nineteenth century and finally to ‘the lamentable Armenian question’.Footnote 85 Studded with passages from VoltaireFootnote 86 and a litany of legal treatises,Footnote 87 the statement was intended to establish that ‘[i]ntervention in the name of the Christian religion’ had marked Turkey's relations with the West for centuries.Footnote 88 While the Ottomans had ‘never failed to acknowledge the rights of the non-Moslem elements so long as the latter did not abuse the generosity of the country in which they lived in comfort’ (a claim purportedly evidenced by the fact that Jews had only seldom complained of Turkish rule),Footnote 89 they had been forced to quell uprisings among subject nationalities collaborating with Russia and other powers when the empire went into decline.
For İsmet, the exchange guaranteed development, curbing external interference and securing internal order. Ankara believed that ‘the amelioration of the lot of the minorities in Turkey’ depended ‘above all on the exclusion of every kind of foreign intervention and of the possibility of provocation coming from outside’.Footnote 90 This could be achieved most effectively with an exchange, and ‘the best guarantees for the security and development of the minorities remaining’ after the exchange ‘would be those supplied both by the laws of the country and by the liberal policy of Turkey with regard to all communities whose members have not deviated from their duty as Turkish citizens’.Footnote 91 An exchange would also be useful as a response to violence in the Balkans; ‘there were’, in any event, ‘over a million Turks without food or shelter in countries in which neither Europe nor America took nor was willing to take any interest’.Footnote 92
In sum, Lausanne's travaux reveal a striking degree of vacillation in regard to the nature and purpose of ethno-nationalism in the exchange's design and implementation. Whether the exchange was to be understood as a technocratic response to a potentially overwhelming security and economic crisis, or instead as a submission to the ethno-nationalist movements that had led to en masse migration and expulsion – at Lausanne, this was not a question to be answered so much as an ambiguity to be formalized.
3. An enterprise neither European nor non-European
That the exchange marked a significant departure from more standard European practices of nation-building, and ‘would have been impossible in Central-Europe’,Footnote 93 was brought to the fore in two closely related positions that İsmet adopted during the Lausanne negotiations. The first stemmed from the belief – common among Turkish nationalists after Sèvres – that minority protection would not be up to the task of ensuring peace in the Near East. The League's protective mechanisms aimed to shield minorities in situ, ensuring a modicum of security without uprooting peoples from their ‘ancestral homes’.Footnote 94 While the Turkish delegation saw the question of the exchange as linked tightly to that of minorities, and while it conceded that some protective instruments would need to be installed, it was adamant on restricting their application to non-Muslims. In line with the Ottoman millet system, which afforded non-Muslim communities a measure of internal sovereignty as ‘nations’ in return for their loyalty to Istanbul,Footnote 95 protection was to be extended solely to Turkey's non-Muslim citizens; non-Turkish Muslims simply would not be recognized as members of minorities. Further, whatever protective instruments would ultimately be introduced would be diluted by the fact that the number of non-Muslims in Turkey had fallen sharply during the decade beginning with the Balkan Wars and closing with the Greek–Turkish War, and was fated to fall even further with the impending formal exchange.
The second position concerned the ambit of Turkey's sovereignty – or, more precisely, the felt need to eradicate all forms of extraterritoriality so as to acquire and safeguard ‘the same rights as every nation that was sovereign, independent and master of its destinies’.Footnote 96 In addition to according administrative autonomy to its non-Muslim minorities through the millet system, the Ottomans had granted wide-ranging immunities to subjects of non-Muslim states resident on Ottoman territory via an elaborate system of capitulations.Footnote 97 International lawyers had long pointed to the capitulations when discussing the Ottoman state's anomalous status under international law,Footnote 98 and a formal termination of the extraterritorial jurisdiction they made possible was now required. This, in turn, was an objective that stood a much greater chance of being achieved with the exchange. For, once the latter had been finalized, most of the material conditions that had justified the conservation of the capitulatory regime would have evaporated: because the commercial ‘colonies’Footnote 99 set up by European merchants and maintained partly by local non-Muslims would have disappeared, the capitulations would quite literally have come to be stripped of their institutional foundations.
Consider the first position. İsmet was not opposed to minority protection, at least so long as it did not entail ‘exceptional treatment more rigorous than that applied to other countries’Footnote 100 and Turkish authorities remained free to adapt the relevant ‘provisions to the local needs and special position of the minorities in Turkey’.Footnote 101 But he emphasized that Turkey could not grant minority status to its non-Turkish Muslims. There simply ‘were no Moslem minorities in Turkey’, as ‘no distinction’ of any kind ‘was made either in theory or in practice between the various elements of the Moslem population’.Footnote 102 Moreover, İsmet was convinced that minority protection would never be enough to keep Muslims and Christians from ‘tear[ing] themselves to pieces for nothing but the advantage of political interests’.Footnote 103 If the Allies insisted on minority protection alone, post-Ottoman Turkey would find itself in much the same situation as its imperial predecessor: just as the Sultan's court had tried to fend off attempts to splinter the empire, so too would Ankara need to counter efforts on the part of Western powers or League authorities to exploit the issue for less-than-altruistic ends. The Turks had come to Lausanne prepared to give some ground on minority protection but committed above all to the exchange. İsmet's delegation was, in fact, under orders that the exchange was to be its ‘main objective’ with regard to minorities.Footnote 104
It is revealing that, in staking out this position, İsmet took note of the letter that Georges Clemenceau had sent to Warsaw along with the Polish Minority Treaty in 1919.Footnote 105 İsmet pointed in particular to Clemenceau's assurance that the League would take greater care than the Concert of Europe had to adhere to the principle of non-intervention.Footnote 106 He stressed that Clemenceau's approach, though popular,Footnote 107 was predicated on the view that minority protection was applicable to some, but not all, states.Footnote 108 And he voiced dissatisfaction with the promise of impartial monitoring: ‘The present organisation of the League of Nations does not, in spite of the opinion of the French statesman, appear to be such as to avoid this serious defect.’Footnote 109 This much had become clear, he added sharply, from ‘the aggressive designs of Greece on Turkish Asia Minor’, an exemplary ‘campaign of devastation and carnage intermingled with all kinds of abominable crimes’.Footnote 110 The only way forward, then, was to take concrete steps to render ‘certain minorities inaccessible to provocations from outside’Footnote 111 – that is, to implement a total population exchange, ‘the most radical and humane remedy’ of all.Footnote 112 Once an exchange had been completed, neither foreign powers nor the League would be able to undermine ‘the unity and indivisibility of Turkey’.Footnote 113 If all ‘rights, duties, advantages and obligations’ were now ‘to be shared by all Turkish citizens alike’, this was so because the situation on the ground was to be altered with a view to ‘bringing about perfect understanding between all Turkish citizens’.Footnote 114
Though they too supported an exchange, Allied delegates often tried to persuade İsmet that Turkey should align itself more closely with minority protection. Curzon recounted the various privileges that the millet system had extended to the Ottoman Empire's non-Muslims. He argued that, even when the empire launched its first modernization programmes in the early nineteenth century, it did not strip non-Muslims of these privileges but instead confirmed and reinforced them. That these privileges be enshrined anew – and that any Turkish laws following therefrom be placed under League supervision – ought to be mandated at Lausanne.Footnote 115 A particularly interesting variation on this theme came from a Balkan delegate. İsmet had foregrounded external pressures when sketching the dissolution of Ottoman authority in south-east Europe, playing up Russia's role and marginalizing nationalist forces endogenous to the region itself. In response, the new Serb–Croat–Slovene state's representative turned İsmet's argument on its head by insisting that he had ignored a ‘second factor’, namely ‘the feeling of the Christian nationalities in the Balkans, who were unable to forget their national ideals’.Footnote 116 It was this ‘national feeling’ that had ‘played a decisive rôle in the creation of all modern States’, and that now drove ‘the present birth of a new, Kemalist, national Turkey’.Footnote 117 The implications were obvious: just as minority protection had been introduced into central and eastern Europe, so Turkey would now have to submit to the ‘practical system’ that had ‘been adopted by all civilised nations’.Footnote 118 There had been an ‘evolution’ in ‘the legal ideas and institutions of Europe as regards the international problem of minorities’ and ‘[t]he days of individual or collective intervention’ were ‘over’.Footnote 119 So long as ‘she really desire[d] to take her place among modern States’, Turkey could not ‘exclude herself from’ this ‘new régime of universal international law’.Footnote 120
Comfortable though he was with reform, İsmet rejected the claim that Turkey should conform, without reservation or equivocation, to this ‘new régime’. It was the exchange, and not minority protection, that would do the hard work of curbing violence. Physical segregation of Greeks and Turks would yield functional stability; minority protection would serve as an ancillary mechanism, minimizing whatever tensions might still remain after the exchange.
In addition to this first position, İsmet also maintained that international law permitted Turkey to abrogate the capitulations. For one thing, a careful analysis of the documentary record supported the decades-old Turkish argument that the capitulations were ‘essentially unilateral acts’.Footnote 121 Some European jurists may have understood them, anomalous though they were, to be international treaties, but, in truth, they could not be characterized as such, at least if ‘treaty’ meant an instrument imposing legally binding obligations on all signatories. The capitulations were decree-like grants of privileges by the Sultan, of a limited and revocable nature. That Turkey was now exercising its right to revoke them could not, therefore, be held against it.Footnote 122 Further, even if the capitulations were characterized as treaties, the circumstances that had given rise to them had been subject to fundamental change. Hence, rebus sic stantibus trumped the otherwise general rule of pacta sunt servanda, enabling Turkey to break with the capitulations without breaching international public law.Footnote 123 Both lines of reasoning, particularly the latter, were supported by a third, more sweeping argument: once the capitulations were situated within their historical contexts, approached as legal artefacts intelligible only within the specific temporal and spatial circumstances that had produced them, it became obvious, İsmet argued, that they were informed by a conception of personal law that had long since become ‘an anomaly and an anachronism’.Footnote 124 Since ‘modern legal conceptions’ mandated that ‘each State, in order to be considered as an independent State, must enjoy, within the limits of its frontiers, a complete and full independence’, Ankara could ‘in no wise agree to the re-establishment of the Capitulations’.Footnote 125 Once again, İsmet was on direct orders from Ankara to stand his ground on the issue – and to walk out of the talks should this prove necessary.Footnote 126
In railing against the capitulations, İsmet took note that ‘no such régime exists in any of the other European countries, not even in Greece and the other Balkan States’.Footnote 127 For İsmet, the war to which an end was to be put had been ‘carried on contrary to all rules’; time after time, ‘the Turkish nation had been completely disarmed and deprived of the resources which international law placed at the disposal of nations desirous of peace’.Footnote 128 As ‘the Turkish people, like all other peoples, was . . . obliged to be extremely jealous in all that concerned its existence, independence and rights’,Footnote 129 it now sought to make full use of modern international law in order to bolster its sovereign power. The Young Turks had moved to abrogate the capitulations in 1914,Footnote 130 at a time when Turkish-Muslim publicists regularly touted Weltpolitik and denounced international law.Footnote 131 But this had fallen on deaf ears, securing recognition from no Western capitals save Berlin and Vienna.Footnote 132 Now the capitulations were to be eliminated once and for all.
Neither İsmet nor his interlocutors sought explicitly to link the question of the capitulations to that of the population exchange. Nevertheless, it was evident that the exchange, once concluded, would alter the distribution of powers and peoples in the Near East so totally and irreversibly as to render impossible the continuation of the capitulations. The ‘colonies’ that European nationals had operated with the help of local protégés had diminished dramatically, both in size and in strength, during the preceding years. Even the Jews, a British delegate noted with alarm, ‘members of a non-Moslem community of which the Turkish delegation themselves admit that Turkey has never had reason to complain, are liquidating their property and leaving Smyrna’.Footnote 133 As a result, the putative rationale for the capitulations had lost much of its bite: there were far fewer European merchants in the empire, far fewer local non-Muslims to assist them, and so far less need for a capitulatory regime.
The Allies were willing to recognize the formal abrogation of the capitulations, if only grudgingly. In return for this recognition, though, they insisted that Turkey launch a series of reforms designed to shield non-Muslims. Among other things, the Allies demanded that Turkey staff courts presiding over civil and criminal suits involving foreigners with foreign judges ‘recommended to the Turkish Government by the Permanent International Tribunal [sic] of The Hague’.Footnote 134 Since its ‘machinery of justice’ was fundamentally ‘defective’,Footnote 135 Turkey needed to provide ‘such guarantees as regards legislation and the administration of justice’ as would ‘inspire confidence’ in those ‘obliged to have recourse thereto’.Footnote 136
Incremental reductions in extraterritorial jurisdiction in states where capitulatory and unequal treaty regimes were operative had generally been conditioned on the ability and willingness of local elites to ensure that contracts were enforced, property rights respected, and pro-Western reforms undertaken. If Turkey were permitted to do away with the capitulations for good, it would need to bind itself to similar commitments, putting at ease those who had ‘established themselves in Turkey and built up important enterprises there in reliance on the guarantees offered to them by the [capitulatory] treaties’.Footnote 137 It had taken some time for comparable programmes to reach maturity in Japan,Footnote 138 and a similar ‘transitory period’Footnote 139 was needed for Turkey to suppress Kadijustiz, promulgate new codes, and cultivate a well-trained judiciary not beholden to Sharī‘a.Footnote 140 Any attempt to nationalize its economy in one fell swoop would undermine investor confidence and generate unprecedented capital flight, doing irreparable damage to the ‘[g]reat business houses’ of Istanbul and Izmir and reducing Turkey ‘to the condition, not of a great and prosperous nation, but of a little country lost in the wastes of Asia’.Footnote 141
The Turkish delegation feared that these demands were ruses with which to preserve, or even buttress, the capitulations’ substance while doing away with their form.Footnote 142 Turkey had ‘been at work on reorganisation and reform for half a century’,Footnote 143 and under no circumstances could it accept ‘outside interference’ with ‘the drafting of Turkish internal legislation’.Footnote 144 İsmet was willing to make certain concessions, such as obligating Turkish authorities to draw on the expertise of European legal advisers and agreeing to allow certain issues of personal status involving Allied nationals to be decided by courts of Allied states.Footnote 145 But he insisted on the capitulations’ formal abolition. In the words of another delegate, the exchange would make it possible for ‘Turkey to have a judicial system’ that would ‘be one and the same for all people in her territory – foreign and Turkish alike’.Footnote 146
In combination, both of these positions – the one concerned with minority protection, the other with the capitulations – situated the exchange at a considerable distance from the more familiar European practices of the time. Given İsmet's firmness in the face of complaints that he was ‘highly sensitive respecting questions of supervision’,Footnote 147 it is not surprising that Turkey should have succeeded in resisting Western pressure. What is surprising is that it was with a largely untested mechanism, one whose legal status had not been fixed, whose application was limited to the Near East, and whose precedential force under international law was ambiguous,Footnote 148 that Turkey should have made the transition from empire to republic.
4. Two tensions enshrined
The package of international legal instruments ultimately produced by the Conference of Lausanne would reflect the two tensions that pervaded the negotiations – that concerning the place of ethno-nationalism in the exchange and that relating to its regionally specific character. Concluded in January as a prerequisite to a lasting peace, the Convention concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations (and a related agreement on the restitution of interned civilians and exchange of prisoners of war) would be annexed to the Peace Treaty when it and 14 other instruments were finally signed in July 1923.
In keeping with Ottoman tradition, the Peace Treaty contained no stipulation that Turkey recognize Kurds, Arabs, or any of its other non-Turkish Muslim communities as national minorities. Nor did it make allowance for Kurdish autonomy or an Armenian ‘national home’, as had the Treaty of Sèvres.Footnote 149 The Turks had remained firm in the face of half-hearted demands of this sort, meeting ‘all the questions put to them’ on these matters ‘with an absolute and clear refusal’.Footnote 150 Reflecting this, the Peace Treaty restricted minority status to those non-Muslim groups that had commanded dominant positions within the millet system but that had recently seen their numbers reduced drastically: the Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities.Footnote 151 Article 39 was the touchstone here, requiring that Turkey supply its non-Muslim citizens – a reference understood to be limited to these three communities – with the same civil and political entitlements as its Muslim citizens. This and other issue-specific provisions – Articles 37 through 44Footnote 152 – fixed the parameters within which Turkey would henceforth address minority protection: to preclude violation of the general right to equality enshrined in Article 39, it was provided that non-Muslims could practise their religion freely (Art. 38), make full use of their native languages in private and in public (Art. 39), maintain educational and charitable foundations without undue state interference (Art. 40), and so on.Footnote 153 Minority protection was thus introduced into Turkey. But it came in an attenuated and problematic form. Not only was its application restricted to demographically negligible groups of non-Muslims, thereby underscoring the primacy of a specifically Turkish-Muslim ethnos, but this restricted application followed directly from the population exchange, which made it factually impossible and normatively implausible for a genuinely robust minority-protection regime to be put into effect.Footnote 154 The Lausanne agreement, one jurist wrote, presupposed ‘a completely different way’ of resolving ethno-national conflict from that which minority protection did.Footnote 155
Some aspects of the Lausanne settlement, such as the apportionment of the Ottoman public debt,Footnote 156 the limitation of tariffs and related measures for a number of years,Footnote 157 and the temporary posting of ‘European legal counsellors’ to Izmir and Istanbul,Footnote 158 betrayed the ongoing influence of the capitulations.Footnote 159 Yet, their most visible features were eliminated by Article 28 of the Peace Treaty, which formalized ‘the complete abolition of the Capitulations in Turkey in every respect’.Footnote 160 If enacting and enforcing legislation is ‘one of the most obvious forms of the exercise of sovereign power’,Footnote 161 the capitulations’ formal abolition marked a key moment in the augmentation of Turkey's capacity to exercise such power over the length and breadth of its territory.
The text of the Exchange Convention is equally revealing. Its first two articles called for the institution of a compulsory exchange between ‘Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion’ and ‘Greek nationals of the Moslem religion’, but also allowed exceptions for Greeks in Istanbul and Muslims in western Thrace.Footnote 162 On any account, this was a rather murky attempt to align ethnicity with territory: it was often unclear which of the two states had been assigned control over a given community,Footnote 163 and the exceptions created dangerously vulnerable enclaves, with the Greeks of Istanbul (les établis) becoming a bone of contention before long.Footnote 164 Article 7 explained that those subject to the exchange would be stripped of their previous citizenship and transformed into nationals of the state to which they had been transferred.Footnote 165 This was to be a process of automatic renationalization, and, as such, a far cry from other ways of dealing with problems of state succession. No plebiscites – a mechanism of limited application even in EuropeFootnote 166 – were organized. And the ‘right of option’, namely the right of people inhabiting territories transferred from one sovereign to another to choose between retaining their existing nationalities (in which case they would be expected to move) and becoming nationals of the new sovereign (in which case they would remain where they were), had little traction.Footnote 167 Finally, the entire process was to be co-ordinated by a mixed commission, staffed by international civil servants wielding control over a small army of technical specialists – lawyers, naturally, but also architects, agronomists, cartographers, and others.Footnote 168
5. Conclusion
Though it had its roots in the Near East, an archetypically semi-peripheral region, the population-transfer mechanism travelled to other jurisdictions with remarkable rapidity, experiencing something of a successive ‘globalization’ in the process. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Nazi diplomats concluded numerous transfer and exchange treaties, asserting Germany's ‘protective right’ over its ethnic kin. Shortly thereafter, the Allies made heavy use of compulsory transfer to remove ethnic Germans from central and eastern Europe. The partition of British India in 1947 was followed by the expulsion of south Asians from Uganda in 1972. This, in turn, was followed by the ex post juridification of forced migration in Cyprus in 1974 and in Bosnia in the early 1990s. In most cases, the Greek–Turkish exchange was cited as a critical precedent.Footnote 169 What was initially a distinctly semi-peripheral mechanism, reinforced by the support of burgeoning international organizations, not the least ambitious of which was the League of Nations, developed in leaps and bounds into a ‘global legal commodity’Footnote 170 – one among a number of conflict-resolution methods that circulates even today on the conceit of being able to deliver regional security and inter-state co-ordination.
Today, it is generally agreed that compulsory transfers and exchanges are illegal under international humanitarian law and international human rights law. Express prohibitions or language with similar effect can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,Footnote 171 the Fourth Geneva Convention,Footnote 172 the 1951 Refugee Convention,Footnote 173 and other instruments.Footnote 174 Yet, transfers and analogous forms of mass expulsion remain popular, with legal legitimacy nearly always being sought for such exercises, particularly when couched in ‘voluntary’ terms. If a member of the Institut de droit international could argue in 1952 that ‘[d]u point de vue du droit international, il existe, en cette matière, liberté d'action absolue des Etats pourvu que les lois sur l'humanité ne soient pas violées’,Footnote 175 so too could a UN rapporteur (and current judge of the International Court of Justice) suggest as late as 1997 that, in certain contexts, ‘population transfers are lawful if they are non-discriminatory and are based upon the will of the people’.Footnote 176
If we are to understand the enduring allure of population transfer, we must come to grips with its origins in a semi-peripheral region with distinct traditions and institutions. Regardless of where this or that group of interwar jurists and policy makers may have stood on the legality of the exchange, the feeling that ethno-national conflict in Greece and Turkey called for measures stronger than minority protection but not as heavy-handed as mandatory rule was widely shared. Efforts to reconstruct the Near East through means believed to be commensurate with its semi-peripheral character were supported and facilitated by regional actors, great powers, League of Nations agencies, and philanthropic organizations alike. That the mechanism that was crafted and refined in this process should retain a place in our own legal and political imaginations is, perhaps, all the more distinctive and disconcerting on that account. Indeed, if the late Ottoman Empire comprised ‘an interesting laboratory for the study of the dynamic changes in international law’, such that it was in this, ‘perhaps better than in any other single area’, that one could observe at close hand ‘the terrific forces which make for international change’,Footnote 177 it should come as no surprise that Europe's south-eastern margins continue to serve as a ‘laboratory’ for state-building and humanitarian intervention.Footnote 178
