Why title a book on the Near East Peace Conference in Lausanne with the phrase “When Democracy Died”? Why radically question the quality itself of the “Near East Peace of Lausanne”? This book’s title is a statement. Although Lausanne’s Near East Peace Conference was a highly complex event of global history and a diplomatically successful resettlement, its strongest message proved unambiguous: violence, including genocide, politically paid.

When Democracy Died is an analytical assessment from historical distance. Certainly, many of the diplomats involved had reason to candidly emphasize their achievements after eight months of negotiations. Wisdom of hindsight, however, calls for radical critique of the peace vocabulary used in Lausanne – for example, in the following statement by Joseph Grew, the American observer-delegate at the Conference, shortly before the signature of the Treaty: “A long period of warfare and disturbance affecting the whole of the Near East has been brought to a close …; we can now look forward with confidence to the coming period of reconstruction when the ideals of peace and tolerance which have inspired the deliberations of the conference will receive a long and fruitful application.”Footnote ¹

Ideals of peace and tolerance receiving a long and fruitful application? Grew was so frank a few weeks later as to add several ifs during a talk in Interlaken. He added the caveat that while “a fertile field for financial investment and economic development may well open out to us … for the humanitarian, religious and philanthropic considerations, we can have less optimism.”Footnote ²

After the Lausanne Conference, removal and extermination of populations appeared not only as acceptable politics, but as a precondition for final success of a high-handed nationalism fit for fossil-dependent capitalist investment. The name of Armenia stands evocatively for this fatality built in the Conference outcome. The fact that “violence won” in Lausanne means that methodical violence was enshrined in the architecture of an enduring Middle East settlement. The Lausanne Treaty liquidated any accountability for even extreme violence against civilians – in contrast to what diplomacy had called for in the Conference of Paris-Sèvres, based on principles of the League of Nations. For prominent Western observers before the late 1930s, authoritarianism counted as fit and fashionable for Asian and European countries, including Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Turkey. This entirely changed during the 1940s – but not for Turkey. It is time to face – in a holistic scholarly picture – the darkness of ultranationalist rule and totalitarianism in a “new Turkey” based on the Lausanne Treaty – without denying other facets. Diplomacy too long used a cleansed political language that accommodated Europe and Ankara in 1923.

1 A Peace of Dominant Interests on the Back of “Others”

Why not highlight a thrilling saga, culminating in a showdown in Lausanne, of how Ankara succeeded in establishing a sovereign nation-state in entire Asia Minor? How did this counter-government of revolutionary nationalists arrive to foil claims by other groups and thus frustrate the will of imperialist Great War victors and Geneva’s League of Nations? This would warrant a juicy combination of Kemalist and Bolshevik rhetoric of liberation that indeed was very effective on the eve of the Lausanne Conference.

Or why not foreground the achievements of compromise and realpolitik, not least the striking longevity of a Lausanne settlement that made Turkey lastingly – at least until the mid-2010s – look to the West? In other words, why not feature the complex narrative of a textbook compromise reached in Lausanne in 1923 and nonetheless concede Ankara’s “great diplomatic victory at Lausanne?”Footnote ³ While the new Ankara government imposed itself in the Ottoman core land of Anatolia, Western Europe’s victorious, but exhausted national empires definitively established their temporary dominance in most Arabic parts of the former Ottoman Empire via colony-like mandates.

The Lausanne Conference neither signed off on sovereign democracies in Turkey and the Middle East, nor stole them from there because democracy was by then no longer a real issue.Footnote ⁴ Where there had been democratic seeds in the late-Ottoman world – rooted in the 1908 constitutional revolution – they were gone by late 1922. The deals struck at the Lausanne Conference made certain that this fundamental fact would not change. For a century since 1923, democracy has remained sought after.

Yes, there are many reasons to drily state, “Rational and pragmatic thinking as well as a realistic assessment of the circumstances determined the course of the negotiations and encouraged the two parties towards a gradual rapprochement,” meaning Ankara’s government and the European Powers.Footnote ⁵ But this assessment of Lausanne, if it stands alone, misses the nature and corrosive impact of a settlement and political birth certificate based on methodical mass violence and the blank disregard for millions. The “losers” were made “others,” that is, outsiders of the circles and identity constructions that benefited from the deal. The label of rational pragmatism for the Lausanne Treaty underestimates the lack of democratic foundation for Ankara as well as Britain’s, and generally the West’s, critical loss of an ethical stand internationally.

By 1923, “a moralizing British Empire” had become “a less than legitimate voice of international justice mired in its own imperial struggles.”Footnote ⁶ It could less than ever claim to be a morally sensitive and responsible actor. The Peace of Lausanne – as this study will argue, resuming what a few contemporary legal experts already felt and expressed – was an undemocratic pact of interests brokered on the back of the weakest parties concerned. It is true that in terms of imperial strategy, London did not lose much by abandoning the Sèvres Treaty for the Lausanne settlement. “[The] British suffered a political defeat,” as Turkish historian Sevtap Demirci wrote, “but lost hardly anything of importance. On the whole they were able to protect their interests and retain control over much of the Middle East. In other words, the Turkish success at Lausanne did not defeat the underlying aims of British diplomacy.”Footnote ⁷ As already stated, a narrative of British success hand in hand with Kemalist triumph was plausible after the Lausanne Conference.

Beside the terms “peace” and “violence,” “democracy” looms large in this study that takes the foundation of the Geneva-based League of Nations very seriously. If democratic peace was and still is a decisive issue globally and for the modern Middle East, we cannot help coming critically back to those universal hopes and notions after the Great War, carefully reconsidering them. Lausanne’s spirit of a new realpolitik, as stressed in this book, markedly contrasted with the basically democratic “spirit of Geneva.” The new realpolitik made the Western powers strike deals with post-Ottoman strongmen in Ankara, Riyadh, and later Tehran, all of whom were able enough to play the then-international game. They had violently secured dominance in their national domain; adapted, in time, then-current weapons of diplomatic courtesy besides brute force; and they could offer crucial commodities and geostrategic advantages.

Was this peace? Unsafe futures loomed for Europe and the Middle East after Lausanne and – as humankind has only decades later become more generally aware – catastrophic ecological consequences globally from excessive dependence on fossil fuel. Lausanne definitively let down many existing democratic-minded forces who, though less strong and vocal, sought and believed in internationally supported constitutional rule. In the long term, the Lausanne sort of peace settlement manifestly did not, or only very limitedly, promote viable polities. Antidemocratic practices (destructive of democracy), politics of violence, and recurrent conflicts abounded, together with the art of manipulating, not solving, crises. As a consequence, bereft of functioning social contracts, parts of the population had to leave their post-Ottoman home countries for better futures. Millions voted with their feet, leaving Turkey and other post-Ottoman countries during the decades to come.

Predominantly based on geostrategy, oil, or corporate interests, Lausanne-spirited deals cemented the mutual interdependence of Western national-imperial states with strangers to, or even despisers of, democracy and human rights. The lack of democracy meant that even the good intentions of ruling individuals or professional groups (e.g. lawyers in Kemalist Turkey), were built on sand. In his optimistic outlook right after the Lausanne Treaty, even Grew had to proffer many ifs: “if Turkey is able to live up to the obligation of her sovereignty,” “provided that they [Ankara’s present leaders] can cope with domestic difficulties and opposition,” et cetera. He conjured up good intentions on the part of these leaders and, lacking a factual basis, conceded that “we must take Turkey on trust.”Footnote ⁸ This uncertain language of hope vis-à-vis antidemocracy hardly veiled the knowledge that Ankara’s liberationist affirmation of sovereignty in reality justified discrimination and spoliation, thus finalizing politics of extermination started in 1915. Systematic denaturalization and the prohibition of Armenian return constituted “one of the levers for perpetuating the economic and financial transfer,” started by Ankara’s predecessor regime.Footnote ⁹ In Anatolia, the Lausanne “peace” was concluded on the back of those dissenters, democrats, and Indigenous groups that triumphant Turkish nationalism had made disposable “others.”

In all its vibrancy, drama, and lofty vocabulary, the Lausanne Conference therefore amounted to deal-making between Western Europe’s national imperialists with post-Ottoman potentates, not with representatives of democracy. Lausanne’s wishful thinking, language, and diplomatic convenience however endured, so that the “Kemalist Republic was always misrecognized in the West as ‘democratic’” – as a 94-year-old American historian recently observed.Footnote ¹⁰ In reality, the window of opportunity for more democratic futures, which the League of Nations had recently opened up to include late-Ottoman core lands, definitively closed down in Lausanne. Western actors henceforth involved in the Middle East cared little or not at all about constitutionality. Democracy – including human rights – became a value that again counted, at best, only in their own country for their own voters.

2 A Peace without Peace: Unaddressed Violence, Coercion, and Racism

“They All Made Peace – What Is Peace?” American author Ernest Hemingway poignantly thus titled a poem written during the Lausanne Conference that he briefly attended as a journalist.Footnote ¹¹ Forty years after the Lausanne Treaty, historian Matthew S. Anderson wrote, “With the Lausanne settlement the Eastern Question was no more,” in his classic study of the Eastern Question.Footnote ¹² Was it really no more, and if so, were its underlying issues solved?

Nearly 100 years later, we know that the basic theme of the “Eastern Question” – how to achieve viable futures in the modern Levant? – subsists to this day. In the early twenty-first century, this is more striking than ever, albeit in updated forms, and it comes with massive violence in various places. Containing atavistic elements, violence often brings perpetuated cleavages to the surface, but depends no less on concrete historical situations and developments. The modern politics of violence, which this book addresses, exploited premodern cleavages. At its end, the Ottoman Empire comprised the area of today’s Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and the Arabic peninsula. In this area, in particular, post-Ottoman state-building and statehood has not ceased to be violent.

Where does this stem from? One central factor, according to this study, is unaddressed, thus internalized, political violence. The Lausanne settlement of the modern Middle East was preceded by more than a decade of extreme violence and coercion that reshaped the human landscape in the late-Ottoman space. The 1910s saw an ultranationalist and Islamist dictatorship of the Young Turks. Most Kemalists and many Arab politicians were former Young Turks; many of them had been more shaped by the lessons of authoritarianism than by those of democratic constitutionalism. A latecomer, the Peace of Lausanne not only failed to address, but even endorsed, the mass violence in the decade that preceded the Conference. It legalized the results of forcible demographic engineering. It whitewashed the responsible actors who – except top leaders who fled into foreign exile – left the Ottoman capital Istanbul for the new capital Ankara. It built “peace” upon, not critically against, the dark side of the precedent decade.

What the Lausanne Conference remarkably resettled, was Western diplomacy with Turkey: It was henceforth no longer the half exploitative, half supportive relationship with a moribund empire, but based on parity. From 1923, interactions with Ankara thus comprise often strained, but enduring politics of interests with a geostrategically cherished partner, arduously to be appeased time and again. While the Lausanne Peace pacified international relations with Turkey and overcame notorious aspects of the Eastern Question – like the issues of imperial future, legal privileges of Westerners (capitulations), and boundary disputes – it could by no means establish societal peace in the former late-Ottoman core lands. In the long term, these remained areas of civil wars, autocracies, protracted crises, and genocides. Most recent is the genocide of the Yezidis during civil war and the rise of the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria. Less than thirty year earlier, other Iraqi Kurds were targeted for extermination by Saddam Hussein’s forces. The least known post-Ottoman genocide is that of Alevi Kurds in Dersim, a province in Turkey, in the 1930s. The Lausanne Treaty’s pact with Ankara and its – compared to the other treaties of the Paris system – dismantled minority protection shielded Ankara from even the slightest Western reprimands.

Thus, in the perspective of this study, protracted peacelessness in the former Ottoman core lands is built into the Lausanne Treaty. The reason is the deliberate repression of an immediate past marked by trauma, crime, and mass violence. Organized, purposeful violence – “liberationist” in Turkish-nationalist terms – informed the road toward the Conference and enforced the revision of the precedent Treaty of Sèvres. A new, explicitly racial discourse abruptly replaced late-Ottoman Islamism by Ankara’s delegation in Lausanne, creating a religious–secular rift in “new Turkey” right from the start. When Democracy Died tackles racial social Darwinism with particular regard to vice-plenipotentiary Dr. Rıza Nur and Nur’s anti-Armenian “Turanian argument.”

The Conference’s legal formalization of a hitherto unseen compulsory population transfer targeted nearly two million people.Footnote ¹³ It amounted to the completion of a decade of previous demographic policies in Anatolia by removing a remainder of 1.5 million Indigenous Christians. Only a quarter of a million or so remained from more than four million before 1914. During the wars in Anatolia before the Conference, the Kemalists had fiercely defended the demographic achievements of their predecessors, in particular the results of the Armenian genocide, in terms of dispossession and disenfranchisement. In other words, the Western powers bowed in Lausanne to an ultranationalist design that successfully de-Christianized the region by dispossession and extermination. Manifestly, this went far beyond the era’s conceptual trend toward homogenized ethno-national states that the Geneva-based League of Nations would peacefully organize. Without being declared and named as what it really was, Lausanne’s “solution” for ethno-religious conflicts set a shining example for exterminatory nationalisms to come.

The exacerbated Anglo–French contest was among the factors that facilitated Western yielding and correlate politics of forgetting in Lausanne. It centered on Turkey and Germany and culminated during the Conference. The French–British disagreement on reparations and the French occupation of the Ruhr on January 11, 1923, absorbed attention, foregrounding continental European issues closest to Western, especially French, diplomacy that sought security against reemerging German might.Footnote ¹⁴ Post-1923 diplomats and historians of interwar Europe nevertheless were wrong in considering Turkey as “eccentric and relatively secondary”Footnote ¹⁵ – thus ignoring Turkey’s authentic, proactive, and paradigmatic, by no means eccentric or exotic, trajectory. Moreover, by focusing on statesmen and national strongmen as agents of history, they paid more attention to states and international deal-making than to concerned peoples and these peoples’ memories. Humans constitute the “real history” that includes suppressed plights, justice, and causes. These unavoidably reemerge in the historical long term, as do elementary principles of human ethics. All these elements inform the “other history of Lausanne” that When Democracy Died aspires to tell.

Realpolitik, in the original sense of German journalist A. L. von Rochau, meant politics that take into account facts of power and interest, but still strive for a constitutional polity in which might could not trump right. It was about a fortunate liaison between right and might. He coined the term “Realpolitik” after Europe’s failed Völkerfrühling, a revolutionary Springtime of the Peoples in 1848. Rochau then evolved from a radical revolutionary to a supporter of the German Chancellor Bismarck.Footnote ¹⁶ Whereas Rochau’s realpolitik, consequently, accepted the use of force in limited wars or domestically, fifty years later, after the Peace of Lausanne, realpolitik legalized mass coercion and, implicitly, mass violence. Thus, post-Lausanne realpolitik endorsed the results of authoritarian repression, ultranationalism, and genocide that had followed Ottoman Turkey’s failed constitutional revolution. As interwar liberalism condoned the redefinition of realpolitik that the Conference of Lausanne operated, it led itself into an impasse that left room for genocidal fascisms.

In his world of political sciences and diplomacy after the mid-twentieth century, historian Matthew S. Anderson could not feel but right saying that the Lausanne settlement “was given permanence and solidity by one overmastering virtue: it faced facts.” It was realistic in a post-1945 American understanding of political realism, as by Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Georges Kennan, and Henry Kissinger. As a circumspect scholar, Anderson mentioned the Lausanne Treaty’s “serious defects” that had notably affected Armenian, Kurdish, and Greek “human beings.” He underlined that the Armenian “fate remains the greatest tragedy in the history of the modern Near East.”Footnote ¹⁷ Anderson and many of his contemporaries took, however, this outcome not only as a tragic fatality, but also as the price necessarily to be paid for international stability in terms of “realpolitik.” For them, Lausanne’s decisions were “brutal, but effective.”Footnote ¹⁸ Still conceptually bound to Lausanne realpolitik, they did not holistically join the dots with the recent experience of Nazism. Thus, they recoiled from naming the signature scandal peculiar to their own era – what international lawyer André Mandelstam had called, in 1925, “the implicit recognition [by the Lausanne Conference] of a general right for all peoples to consolidate their existence through the destruction or violent assimilation of other nations.”Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, they did not really face contemporary history and analyze a central precondition of their era’s Holocaust.

Contemporaries do not enjoy the privilege of hindsight: They must do without a comprehensive, “dewarped” retrospect. Francis P. Walters, the deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations, rightly insisted in his 1952 retrospective, “The fifteen-month period from the Assembly of [October] 1922 to the end of the year 1923 was disastrous to the moral and material recovery of Europe.” He particularly emphasized the victory of “essentially nationalist and militarist” Fascism and of Mussolini’s “personal dictatorship” in Italy, where constitutional rule was destroyed. He did not, however, note how important the synchronous Lausanne Conference was for the zeitgeist’s turn to dictatorial party rule, with Turkey becoming the Nazis’ paragon. A fine diplomat, but Western post-Lausanne mainstream, Walters ignored the dark side of Turkey’s refoundation as a nation-state, including the fact that Ankara rested on Young Turk policies in Anatolia. He praised Atatürk as the architect of Turkey’s post-1918 “military rebirth” and – a common trope among post-Lausanne diplomats and academics – “unique amongst dictators.”Footnote ²⁰ Alas, post-Lausanne Turkey was less promising, less “independent, orderly, and self-confident” than Walters presented it. It was not until well after the Conference of Lausanne that Atatürk began to be seen as a non-populist leader. For his rise to undisputed power in 1923, he toured the country and made use of populist rhetoric in Islamic and Turkist/Turanian terms.

Since the 2010s, the mainstream that praised Turkey’s and the Lausanne Treaty’s stability for the Middle East, has fallen silent. However, internally and externally, peace and stability hardly existed throughout the twentieth century. For a majority, Europe’s crises, the Second World War, and the Cold War represented the measure for almost all things contemporary. Holistic assessments comprising the post-Ottoman space were rare. By considering the Republic of Turkey as “by far the most stable political unit in the Near East,”Footnote ²¹ or as “a rare and on the whole unusually successful example of a nationalism at once intransigent, enlightened, and reasonable,”Footnote ²² a formative generation of Western scholars and diplomats almost entirely overlooked hard facts of trauma, genocide, and forestalled democracy. Many of them well perceived Turkey as illiberal and “highly nationalistic.” But they cared little about antidemocracy and continued internal repression there, including the Dersim genocide that the League of Nations entirely and deliberately ignored in the late 1930s.

In their post-1945 retrospect, many knowledgeable contemporaries clearly saw and warned of the rise of continental Europe’s fascism. But they did not – or did not want to – recognize the lines and twisted roads leading from Turkish ultranationalism, via Lausanne, to European fascisms, and from the Armenian Genocide and further genocides to the Holocaust. Many of them, nevertheless, had well understood that “Turkish nationalism meant the savage suppression of other national groups.”Footnote ²³ Simply stating this and truly pondering it historically, were however two different things. Those willing to understand the long-term consequences in terms of peace, stability, and rule of law stood outside the mainstream – like decades-long-jailed Turkish sociologist Ismail Beşikçi, the pioneer of Dersim genocide studies.Footnote ²⁴ Most political and academic opinion leaders in the West did not expect the rapid expiry date of Lausanne’s Kemalists in the late twentieth century.

An up-to-date historical analysis can no longer do without joining the dots. The answer to the question at the beginning of this Part I is therefore straightforward and far-reaching: Although it successfully remade international relations with the West, the Treaty of Lausanne could not lay the foundation for a balanced and lasting domestic peace in the core lands of the defunct late-Ottoman Empire. Not only do current developments in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and the South Caucasus prompt this conclusion in retrospect of a century, but, even more, a sober historical inquiry into the genesis, making, and immediate aftermath of the Peace of Lausanne itself sheds light on the conditions of an international peace that right from the start remained domestically peaceless.

An analysis that goes back to the Lausanne Peace’s main roots (“radices” in Latin; i.e. a “radical analysis”) is in place and motivates this study. A retrospective per se is intriguing in scholarly terms, but the quest for radical insight and clarification of root causes while looking forward toward Middle Eastern futures is an even stronger motivation. This inquiry into history asks for clear-sightedness for alternative, more peaceful futures, and for critical appreciation of roads not taken – but without nostalgia or the illusion that one could turn back the clock. When Democracy Died is therefore, above all, about taking stock of what was the case in terms of peace-making. The Conference of Lausanne rightly attempted, in a spirit of realism, to face facts created by violent power, but it went too far by endorsing and historically whitewashing them. Due to the terms and decisions imposed by the Conference, the word “peace” itself was violated in the minds of millions of sidelined or badly coerced people. Those targeted by Lausanne’s legally formalized compulsory population transfer were only the most visible tip of the iceberg. Lausanne is thus a case in point for the fact that a lofty term like “peace” can endure historic abuse at a price that later generations have to pay.

***

The Conference of Lausanne rubber-stamped wide-ranging political, societal, and genocidal violence in the late-Ottoman core area. It accomplished former ethno-religious cleansing by an official, compulsory, so-called population exchange. At the same time, it buried previous attempts to come to terms with a coercive, violent past and to build up constitutional, accountable polities.

The Conference thus rewarded and perpetuated an underlaying rationale of violence-prone policies in nascent post-Ottoman polities. This was disadvantageous to peaceful efforts based on democratic contracts, not primarily on revolutionist might and ultra-ideologemes.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, it made domestic politics of violence attractive for fascist admirers and emulators in contemporary Europe who vocally sought a revision of their respective Paris peace treaties. The Treaty of Lausanne belatedly concluded the Paris treaty system whose first cornerstone had been the 1919 Treaty of Paris–Versailles for Germany. Closely followed by international press and radio, the Conference of Lausanne revised the August 1920 Paris–Sèvres Treaty, the hitherto last treaty of the Paris system.

This treaty for the Ottoman world, which was the longest in the making in Paris, collapsed within two years under prompt and concerted reaction of Bolsheviks and Kemalists in Anatolia and the Caucasus. Beside this main blow, to which we will come back in greater detail in Part II, important flaws and fissures in this Paris–Geneva peace for the Middle East were already manifest in the year of its conclusion. In a breach of the Sèvres Treaty, Paris began to compromise with the nationalists in Ankara in 1921, and ceded Cilicia to them. It did this in favor of its Syrian mandate, which it could only implement if it concentrated its limited forces and early countered the attempts of the Syrian National Congress to establish a constitutional federal monarchy under King Faisal over Greater Syria (i.e. including Palestine and Lebanon).Footnote ²⁶ Faisal was the son of Hussein bin Ali, the ally of the Entente during the Great War. As the sharif of Mecca, Hussein led the Mecca emirate.Footnote ²⁷ Hussein’s relations with the British soured when they realized the warrior qualities and diplomatic skills employed by Hussein’s successfully raiding tribal rival, the Wahhabi leader Ibn Saud (alias Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman). Internal British positions conflicted, but, all in all, they sought to compromise with both leaders, not to clearly stand with their tarnished ally. This stood in contrast to what most Arabs outside the peninsula had expected at the end of the Great War: loyalty to the former ally.Footnote ²⁸

Part of the Paris negotiation process, the April 1920 San Remo Resolution provisionally attributed post-Ottoman mandates to France and Britain. Although depending on the final peace treaty and the endorsement by the League of Nations, this resolution smelled of the spirit of the notorious secret 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement; that is, decision-making over the heads of concerned peoples outside Europe. The League certainly made a difference. Still, for Syrians, there was limited consolation in the fact that ex-Ottoman territories were to be so-called A Mandates, for which the League Covenant applied a lofty developmentalist language:

The predominant wishes of Syrians for an American or otherwise a British (but not French) mandate were not considered in San Remo or ultimately in Lausanne.

Since Russian and Armenian socialists had cooperated for decades in the Second Socialist International, many contemporaries were surprised to see revolutionaries from the far left and from an ultranationalist right in Ankara start to ally in summer 1920. At the same time, these new allies began to decry the League of Nations, the internationalist pillar of the Paris treaty system.Footnote ³⁰ Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin actually upgraded the Turkish nationalists as fighters in a common anti-Western struggle, although, until 1920, Russian socialists had rejected Young Turks as chauvinistic imperialists. Until then, they endorsed Armenian causes not only within the Socialist International, but also in the aftermath of the Bolshevik October Revolution and during the early phase of the Russian Civil War.Footnote ³¹

In the month of August 1920, when the Treaty of Sèvres was signed, Poland defeated the Red Army before Warsaw. Lenin’s revolutionary dogma since his exile in Switzerland (i.e. immediate violent world revolution spreading from Europe, supported by the advancing Red Army) suffered a heavy setback. In consequence, the Bolsheviks turned to the “peoples of the East” and convoked the Baku Congress. They judged anti-Western nationalism and jihadism of critical importance for their own survival, considering Ankara an ideal partner. In a first step of their cooperation, Ankara and Moscow divided the South Caucasus among them, thus putting an end to the young independent republics there in 1920–1.Footnote ³²

In retrospect, we see a powerful anti-liberal road beginning at the end of the Great War. It started most forcefully with the Kemalists’ and Bolshevists’ denigration, rejection, and division of Armenia, while simultaneously showing up in early mandate-related deals and the rise of Ibn Saud. From the triumphalist revision of the Sèvres Treaty in Lausanne, where the Armenians were definitively sidelined by the West as well, this fatal road finally led to the revilement of Poland as an “ugly, grotesque bastard of the Versailles Treaty” (Russian Foreign Minister Molotov)Footnote ³³ by National Socialists and Soviets during the interwar period – in particular after the common invasion in September 1939. Anti-imperialist revolutionist violence from the right and the left served as a social-Darwinist crushing of what they regarded as weak nations in the way of their more grandiose political designs. For them, Armenia was a weak and contemptible project engendered by the victors in Paris, backed only by the Geneva-based League of Nations, a militarily impotent internationalist institution.

Allied to the Bolsheviks during the war for Anatolia, Ankara pioneered a “third way” after the Great War. This third way was, like the Bolshevik “second way,” tantamount to an illiberal dictatorship. But it resulted from a revolution from the right; that is, an ultranationalist fight in the name of Islam and Turkishness that had begun by the Young Turk regime in 1913. Heirs of the Young Turks, the Kemalists managed, in Lausanne, to compromise with the “first way” of a liberal-capitalist West, the main pillar of the Paris–Geneva settlement. Successfully obstructing minority rights and without domestic liberties, it could henceforth (in contrast to the Soviet Union) participate in the capitalist world, take loans, and cooperate in the internationalism led by the League of Nations. To the League itself, in breach of the promise given in Lausanne, Ankara adhered only belatedly (i.e. in 1932), after confirming that the Western powers and the League would by no means impede the dictatorial party-state established in the meanwhile.

Like the other treaties of the Paris system, the Sèvres Treaty displayed clear flaws of victors’ justice and imperial bias. Nevertheless, it had earnestly sought the implementation of rights for minorities and small nations, accountability for mass violence against civilians, and repair for crimes against humanity. As a pact among victors that now included the sharply anti-liberal victors of the war for Anatolia, the Lausanne Treaty made entire Indigenous groups in Anatolia victims and losers of unitary politics, given no or only very weak rights. For a century, these people restlessly sought denied truth and justice. Blessed in Lausanne, the regime in Ankara, in contrast, emerged by the mid-1920s as a leader-led single-party dictatorship.Footnote ³⁴ In spite of its growingly totalitarian nature and its use of extremely violent repression against dissenters and non-Turkish groups considered non-assimilable, it continued to enjoy Western appeasement and to reap the fruits of its endorsement in Lausanne.

***

The previous paragraphs have made clear why this study of the Lausanne Conference emphasizes the issue of force, violence, and coercion. Despite the straightforward answer to the question asked at the beginning, the analysis and argument in this book prove complex and – a disclaimer right at the start – far from any easy-going blame game.

Successful violence paid off in Lausanne. It deployed precedential force and transformed the League of Nations. Other radical nationalists came to see “contemporary Turkey, with its radical expulsion of the Greeks and its reckless Turkish nationalization of the country” as a role model.Footnote ³⁵ Ankara proved to other would-be revisionists in Europe and Asia how to triumphantly defy the Paris–Geneva settlement – and gain recognition. It demonstrated how to deal with Western parliamentary democracies. It gave an example of how to get one’s own way with, and benefit from, liberal-capitalist leaders on an autocratic path into the future.

What caused a fundamentally appeasing Western attitude in Turkey’s case, and enabled Ankara’s third way by 1923, were the military success in Anatolia; the vulnerability of the mandates in Turkey’s southern neighborhood; and the area’s general geopolitical weight, notably in international conflicts with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan. In short, international relations made the difference – not domestic key elements of fascism and ultranationalism. In this study, ultranationalism means an illiberal social-Darwinist current of essentialist nationalism that, if politically successful, leads to rightist autocracy and the risk of genocide against minorities.Footnote ³⁶ Genocide in the twentieth century has proven the “nuclear option” of autocracies that saw themselves faced with what they believed to be otherwise superior domestic and foreign enemy power.

All negotiators had their points in Lausanne; but not all were equally valid. Understandably, the main powers wanted to achieve a war-ending compromise in 1922, after years of blood-shed, diplomatic collapse, protracted peace negotiations in Paris, and follow-ups that all failed to pacify Anatolia and Mesopotamia. There France and Britain were involved as mandatory powers. This situation badly obstructed early interwar reconstruction all around. Early and lasting integration into a Western international architecture in Lausanne in 1923, distinguish Turkey’s pioneering way from that of later continental Europe’s fascists. Compared to Europe’s fascists, Turkey had perpetrated major genocides and crimes against humanity two decades earlier.

Egalitarian democracy has also preserved attractivity and futurity in the twenty-first century. Democracy with intact civil liberties has kept being a central benchmark for any good polity. On a global scale, people continue to vote with their feet, seeking safer and better lives in more democratic and often more prosperous polities. For devoted insiders of the League of Nations and active members of League associations in many countries – including Switzerland, the League’s host – their project meant much more than the affix or fig leaf of a liberal-capitalist West.Footnote ³⁷

A thriving element in a proficient system of semi-direct democracy, Geneva itself, the League’s geographical and institutional heart, stood for a centuries-old republic and center of asylum far from empire. It was part of a federal state composed by different populations with faith in an agreed common democratic social contract. Cadres in the League, Swiss and foreign, carried the legacy of Protestant internationalism of which Geneva had been a crucial hub since the sixteenth century. From the mid-1800s, Geneva’s highly international university attracted hundreds of students from autocratic empires, including Russia and Ottoman Turkey. Spreading a new global internationalism, the League was more than a product of its main pillar in terms of power (i.e. the British Empire in its final decades).Footnote ³⁸

3 Ultranationalism Appeased? The Paris–Geneva–Lausanne Constellation

As the last post–Great War treaty, the Near East Peace Treaty of Lausanne invalidated the 1920 Treaty of Paris–Sèvres that had included the Covenant of the League of Nations. Belated and radically revisionist, it redefined the Paris treaty system and its political principles. It early on contributed to undermining them.

This book’s theoretical framework is therefore the “Paris–Geneva–Lausanne” peace construct, with its built-in Lausanne (new realpolitik) versus Geneva (League) tension. It underlines the interplay between political realities ultimately negotiated in Lausanne in 1922–3, on the one hand, and the principles that underpinned the Geneva-based League of Nations, a central pillar of the Paris treaty system, on the other. As we will see, the regulations of the Lausanne Treaty were in many ways intertwined with the offices and services of the League of Nations. Consequently, the Lausanne Treaty contributed to transform the League, and thus also the Paris treaty system. Thus, a new Paris–Geneva–Lausanne system of interwar realpolitik emerged in 1923.Footnote ³⁹

The Paris treaty system’s principles had initially rested on the League of Nations. This new internationalist cornerstone had to check, balance, develop, and, where necessary, revise the victor-dominated decisions in Paris, including the treaties themselves. For its mentors, founders, and most committed insiders, the League rested on a democratic credo – in President Wilson’s famous words: “No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed.”Footnote ⁴⁰ As this study will detail, the Conference of Lausanne endorsed the definitive sacrifice of the League’s initial legal and democratic credo. Certainly, this credo had previously already heavily suffered with the imposition, notably, of France’s mandate in Syria and with the abandonment of Armenia.

Against its declared will, in 1920, the first year of its existence, the League proved incapable of protecting Armenians in Anatolia and the Caucasus or of implementing justice, as it could not find a mandatory power for the projected Armenia. In Lausanne, Armenians, Assyrians, and Syrians had to give up their last hope of any form of League-supported democratic self-determination in their native land. Despite a similar disappointment in Lausanne, for the Arabs in Iraq and Syria, there was at least hope of a foreseeable end of the mandates. The disillusionment over a temporary quasi-colonial mandate cannot be equated with the ultimate abandonment of victims of genocide not only in political terms (i.e. democratic self-determination), but also in terms of basic justice and historical truth. The latter amounted to a symbolic annihilation in public history.

Concluded in or next to Paris in 1919–20, the Paris system comprised the 1919–20 Treaties of Versailles, St.-Germain, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Trianon and Sèvres. These treaties were to integrate the new postimperial, republican states of Germany, Austria, and Hungary – imperial senior allies of Ottoman Turkey during the First World War – as well as a strongly curtailed, but still imperial-dynastic Ottoman Turkey into the new order, to be based on the new League of which the losers of the First World War were considering becoming members. Victory of Ankara’s armed forces in its wars in Asia Minor was the main reason in 1922 for the revision of the Sèvres Treaty and with this the redefinition of the Paris-Geneva peace architecture that the Lausanne Conference carried out. Moreover, in contrast to Paris, a Soviet delegation participated in Lausanne, although only for specific meetings.

The Lausanne Treaty was of a markedly different character than the other treaties of the Paris system. Let us recall that, in contrast to treaties concluded in Paris in 1919 and 1920, the Covenant of the League of Nations does not figure on the first pages of the Lausanne Treaty. This means that by then, in high diplomacy, the League was no longer considered or believed to be the central pillar for peace, but rather an international institution adjoint, and largely subordinate, to the makers of realpolitik. The Ankara government would not have accepted insertion into a superordinate system, as it insisted on unrestricted national sovereignty and feared foreign control. Principled forces within, and associated to, the League showed continued, but ultimately failing, resistance to such downgrading of the League. In the end, they realized that their commitment was an exemplary historic “experiment” at best, not a fulfilment.Footnote ⁴¹

From late 1922, the League of Nations had to serve and supervise a new constellation under a revised political philosophy, including the compulsory transfer of populations between Turkey and Greece and an eroding minority regime in the newly founded Republic of Turkey. In line with the League’s lack of power regarding Armenia in 1920, the new perspectives, roles, and tasks imposed to, and endorsed by, the League at the Conference of Lausanne vis-à-vis authoritarian Ankara amounted to a definitive game change by 1923. Further events and factors indicated a disenchanted League by late 1922, notably fascism’s victory in Italy and the contempt of Benito Mussolini – a photogenic new leader of Italy at the Conference – for Geneva during the Italian occupation of Corfu in fall 1923. The latter crisis was solved by a conference of ambassadors in the style of traditional Great Powers politics, not the League, in ways that were unfair for Greece, the weaker part.Footnote ⁴²

In other words, the League’s principles, philosophy, and hope of a nascent constitutional global federation of democratizing states – with its telling headquarters in the centuries-old republic of Geneva, the internationalist “Protestant Rome” – lost its initial central role and credibility most clearly with the Lausanne Conference. From then, a new type of interwar realpolitik openly prevailed. In the text of the Lausanne Treaty itself, rule of law, human and minority rights, accountability, and democracy, if they were not simply erased, became secondary to the constraints of realpolitik. What prevailed, was the post-Ottoman pact between Europe’s ageing national empires and Ankara’s young nationalists on their way to a unitary party state. In 1913, their immediate predecessors, the committee of the Young Turks, had pioneered a dictatorial single-party rule inspired by a new imperial nationalism, namely (pan-)Turkism.Footnote ⁴³

All delegates at Lausanne’s main negotiation table in 1922–3 desired to forget the former decade of late-Ottoman wars, extermination, and ethnic cleansing, although they did so for different reasons. Extreme internal, state-orchestrated or state-condoned violence had concerned Anatolia and Mesopotamia from 1914. There, the party-state of the Young Turks – an elite almost identical with their Kemalist successor except for the top leaders – had committed genocide: dispossession, removal, and killing of Armenians had stood at the center of the Young Turks’ comprehensive policy of Islamizing and Turkifying that great area during the First World War. The main driver toward an attitude of active forgetting in Lausanne was, for the allies, to leave behind a dark and disputed chapter of wars, mass violence, and endangered post-war reconstruction in the Levant (an older name for almost the same area designated by the twentieth-century term Middle East). Domestic and intra-European challenges commanded full attention in the early 1920s.

As for the government in Ankara, foremost it feared the Armenian question, that is, that the Conference would come back to demands of justice for crimes against humanity, as detailed in the Sèvres Treaty. In its successful attempt to prevent the Conference from rediscussing extermination and expropriation of Ottoman Christians, Ankara’s delegation exclusively stressed destructive acts by defeated Greece during the war for Anatolia. This and similar blame games have gone on in diplomacy until the present.Footnote ⁴⁴ Immediately preceding the Conference, the Turkish counteroffensive had ended in the carnage and arson of Izmir in September 1922. There are strong arguments to put the issue of violence in all its aspects – including its successes, denial, internalization, memory, trauma, and frustrated justice – at the center of a study on the war-ending, deal-striking Conference of Lausanne.

A second disclaimer: This focus and the related fundamental critique of the Lausanne Treaty in this monograph do not per se involve the call for a revision of the Treaty, in particular not of then-determined state borders. In this regard, I maintain an old position: Steps notably toward a solution of the Kurdish question have to start from “partial autonomies within existing state borders in order to avoid border disputes with unforeseeable consequences.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This wisdom, however, from the ending twentieth century may lose its validity, if, disregarding the Lausanne Treaty, state actors violate borders by acts of aggression and expansion. Tellingly, figures around Turkish President Erdogan – or even Erdogan himself, a partisan of expansive Islamist “neo-Ottomanism”Footnote ⁴⁶ – are the most prominent recent proponents of revised Lausanne borders.Footnote ⁴⁷

Notorious since the second half of the twentieth century, the dissatisfaction of Turkey’s Islamists with what they decry as a measly outcome at Lausanne stands in stark contrast with how Gazi – meaning a leading Islamic war hero – Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s interwar leader, interpreted the Treaty. In his seminal 1927 speech, Nutuk – which in its printed version became the Kemalist bible of contemporary history – this former Young Turk general called the Lausanne Treaty “a political victory unprecedented in the history of the Ottoman era!” For him, “The questions brought forward at Lausanne’s peace table did not exclusively concern the new regime [in Ankara], which was only three years old, but centuries-old [Ottoman] accounts were settled.”Footnote ⁴⁸ These and similar statements prove the centrality of the Lausanne Treaty for Ankara’s political elite. This went hand in hand with what has later been called a “Sèvres Syndrome,” namely, conspiracist allegations of a centuries-old Western complot against Turkey.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this political mindset, claiming both unique victimhood and triumph, Nutuk states that the Lausanne Treaty ensured “the collapse of a great murderous plot prepared against the Turkish nation for centuries and thought to have been completed by the Treaty of Sèvres.”Footnote ⁵⁰

For Kemal Atatürk, an immigrant to Ankara from late-Ottoman Saloniki (Greek Thessaloniki since 1912), the Turkish nation-state in Anatolia had to be the exclusive land of Muslim Turks after the Empire’s loss of the Balkans. His contemporary “Turkish History Thesis” comprehended Turkishness in racial terms. Main claims of this – at last craniology-based and state-sponsored, but widely speculative – Thesis already played a defining role at the time of the Lausanne Conference. In a public speech in Adana during the Conference break in March 1923, the Turkish president pretended, “The Armenians do not have any right in this prosperous country. This country is yours, it belongs to the Turks. This country is historically Turkish, which means that it is Turkish and will remain Turkish forever.” In this vein, for Atatürk, the Conference of Lausanne not only settled centuries-old Ottoman accounts, as underlined in the Nutuk, but also issues of several millennia. His Adana speech continued:

What foreign academics and diplomats have read at times, in certain party programs or individual declarations, as signs of a voluntarist Turkish nation based on common culture and political consensus, clearly diverged from actual policy and the ingrained beliefs of the leading decision-makers at the historic hour of Lausanne.Footnote ⁵²

4 Armenia: When Violence Won and Democracy Died

For decades, scholars contented themselves by saying, “In the end the Allied Powers completely abandoned Armenia and the Armenians” (at the Lausanne Conference)Footnote ⁵³ – without further comment and analysis. There was an “unresolved question” in the Conference’s parlance, but after some poignant moments during the negotiation, it seemed no longer to belong to this world. When Democracy Died, however, takes it as a core element of Lausanne, thus paying attention to the abandonment of the weak on which after diplomacy, post-Lausanne academia too turned its back. This book includes and emphasizes this “other history of Lausanne.”

The Armenia and related abandonments shaped macro-history on many levels. It is hardly a coincidence that during the rest of the twentieth century in socialist countries and beyond, fictive Armenian “Radio Yerevan” was in charge of all matters that could be addressed only by jokes, not frankly and directly. In the world after Lausanne, the Armenian question as a whole appeared as a sad, anachronistic joke. The Holocaust took place in a Europe and West amnesic of the Armenians, except for the Yiddish victims themselves. Only after the Holocaust did public political ethics change. However, things only changed for Europe where open social-Darwinist contempt for the weak and defenseless was no longer acceptable publicly and in politics. The unconditional condemnation of a disparaged people’s murder was made the doctrinal cornerstone of political ethics after 1945.

Outside Europe, in and for the post-Ottoman world, however, the spirit and politics of Lausanne lived on. When concluding the Lausanne Treaty, there had been many (disquieting) reasons for weak Western democrats to acquiesce in inacceptable ideologemes. No one embodied these more strikingly than Dr. Rıza Nur, the vice-chief of the Turkish delegation. He had acted as Ankara’s first education minister and was one of its foremost representatives. “The Treaty of Lausanne has buried the Armenian question,” he states in his derogatory History of the Armenians, a book manuscript he wrote mostly before and during the Conference. “The Armenian is weak and incapable. His impotence is established by his only 2,000 years-old [political] life and fate.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In contrast, so-called “Turanians” (thus Turks for the matter of Ankara and the delegation in Lausanne) were war heroes, state builders, pioneers of civilization as well as – an important argument – indigenous to Asia Minor and the Middle East for at least 4,000 years. “We Turanians, we are the pure, unmixed [indigenous] population.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In contrast, he categorized the Armenians as “foreign elements,” that is, of foreign – non-Turanian – background.

There is not only an analogy with the Aryan obsession of Nazis a few years later and an overlapping of anti-Jewish and anti-Armenian racism, but from 1922, Nazis increasingly admired the successes of Turkish nationalism and looked for concrete recipes from the Turkish experience. With Lausanne, triumphant Ankara became the Nazis’ number one paragon. By September 1922, it was Nazi belief that Turkish nationalism had shown “what we too” must do “to set ourselves free.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In November 1922, Adolf Hitler made explicit that he appreciated Atatürk and Mussolini as role models for Germany. In a Lausanne-induced amnesia, twentieth-century literature on Nazism ignored and omitted these early inceptions. Among a few exceptions are Theodor Adorno with his “Education after Auschwitz,”Footnote ⁵⁷ and before him, of outstanding importance, Franz Werfel, the author of the documentary novel, Forty Days of Musa Dagh.Footnote ⁵⁸

In its Yiddish translations, Werfel’s epic novel on the Armenian genocide accompanied hundreds of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. The “most popular novel among the Adults in the ghetto” was for Turkish authorities and their press the reprehensible product of a greedy Jew.Footnote ⁵⁹ They battled it more viciously and ferociously than the Nazis did. In the USA, Mehmet Ertegün – Ankara’s leading legal advisor during the Lausanne Conference, before finally becoming a combative ambassador in Washington – succeeded in aborting the book becoming a Hollywood film and in censuring its American translation. Ertegün personifies the continuity from Young Turk leader and Grand Vizier Talaat Pasha to Atatürk, Talaat’s successor, via Lausanne.Footnote ⁶⁰

During the Great War, Ertegün had been a collaborator of Talaat, the architect of Anatolia’s genocidal Turkification. This is what German lawyer Carl Schmitt admired in the aftermath of the Lausanne Conference as the “reckless Turkish nationalization of the country,” and what the German officer Hans Tröbst bluntly praised as the “Turkish proof” in the Nazi journal Heimatland: “The Turks have provided the proof that the purification of a nation of its foreign elements on a grand scale is possible.” Concretely: “The bloodsuckers and parasites on the Turkish national body were Greeks and Armenians. They had to be [in bold print] eradicated and rendered harmless; otherwise the whole struggle for freedom would have been put in jeopardy.” As a rule, “those of foreign background” in the combat area had to die.Footnote ⁶¹

Werfel was a poet and novelist, but also a sensitive analyst of what he considered religion-like murderous totalitarian ideologies of his time, including Turkism, Nazism, and Bolshevism. He labeled Enver Pasha, the number two after Talaat, a “childish anti-Christ” who made the Armenians “plague bacilli” in a “world of nihilism with its ersatz religions.”Footnote ⁶² Hitler, in contrast, exalted the same Enver as a pioneering hero who had introduced a “new spirit” of national rebirth in Istanbul, a city “contaminated by democratic-pacifistic, internationalized people.” Hitler’s defense during his trial in Munich in 1924 also praised “the insubordination of the Turkish general Kemal Pasha against the sovereignty of Constantinople” (i.e. the traditional Istanbul government), against which Kemal established the militant National Assembly in Ankara in 1920.Footnote ⁶³

What most haunted the Nazis a decade before they publicly burnt the Forty Days of Musa Dagh in 1933, was the Armenian experience of victimhood and abandonment. Like Nur, they explained Armenian powerlessness by weakness and lack of combativeness. In Munich during the Lausanne Conference, early Nazis internalized the fear of “becoming like the Armenians,” and concluded that adversaries of Germany must preventively be annihilated. The Conference’s abandonment of the Armenians confirmed them in their stance. In an interview with a Munich newspaper at the end of December 1922, Hitler denounced the Jews as agents of Bolshevism and claimed, “A solution of the Jewish question must to be found.” Otherwise, he warned, “the German people will become a [defeated and subservient] people like the Armenians or the Levantines” – what was a priori unacceptable and contemptible. Thus, it was clear for Hitler that “a bloody clash will follow” against Jews and Bolsheviks.Footnote ⁶⁴

While Armenians and Jews belonged for Nazis and Turkish ultranationalist to the same category of inferior people, the Armenians, not the Jews, counted for Rıza Nur and his kind as the most despicable domestic enemies and foreign agents. The Armenians continued to haunt Hitler as the example of a “pitiful existence” that perpetration of violence had to prevent for Germany’s future.Footnote ⁶⁵ Nur was by no means alone with his social-Darwinist convictions and the Turanian tenets of his racial history. In varying degrees, he shared them with the nationalist press and most opinion and decision makers of his cohort, including delegation chief Ismet Pasha and supreme leader Kemal Atatürk. Racial claims also concerned, in particular, the Kurds. “They are not from Iranian roots, on the contrary, they are Turanians,” the Lausanne correspondent of Akşam, a Turkish nationalist daily, wrote on 28 December 1922, in compliance with Ankara’s delegation.Footnote ⁶⁶

In Nur’s vision, all other – non-Turanian – peoples in Asia Minor and the neighboring Middle East, in particular the Armenians, “were only guests.”Footnote ⁶⁷ After 2,000 years of miserable existence, by 1915 “the Armenian” had “remained like a malign tumor in our [the Turk’s] body and needed to be removed by a surgical operation,” Nur – a surgeon by profession – concluded. For the likes of him, by 1923, the Armenians should finally have understood that “they lack any rightful claim in the presence of the Turk.”Footnote ⁶⁸ On the dark side of Turkish nationalism and the Lausanne Conference, the Armenians occupy a central place.

As we will see in more detail in Part II, Nur’s historical-political thought is a mélange of Turan ideology, anti-Armenian racism, anti-Christian hate, anti-Semitism, genocidal violence, and denial of responsibility. All related to contemporary social Darwinism, these toxic ingredients had their seminal say in the making of the Lausanne Peace. A century after 1923, mindful scholars, diplomats, and public intellectuals have to face the facts, notwithstanding diplomatic convenience. There was a synergy of early Nazism with triumphant Turkism; and of contempt for the Armenians with that for the Jews. It is true that – starting at the eve of the Lausanne Conference as we will see – Ankara made use of Jewish and later also Israeli representatives for its politics of denial. Mutual opportunism on the back of the weak and the victims does not change basic truths, however.Footnote ⁶⁹

5 A Pivotal “Peace” to Be Reassessed

With the wisdom of a century’s hindsight, it is timely and worthwhile to radically rethink the aspects and consequences of the “enduring peace” brokered in Lausanne. It is time to include and tell “the other history” of Lausanne in a comprehensive historical approach hitherto lacking.

In a traditional Western reading of the Treaty, Lausanne’s coordinates define Turkey’s space of action and international behavior; they thus also underpin Turkish NATO membership that started twenty-nine years after the Treaty. In line with Ankara’s new criticism of the Lausanne Treaty and its expansive Islamist neo-Ottomanism since the 2010s, this membership displays dysfunction to a degree never experienced before. This draws attention to the superficial character of long-held convictions. Conventional Western diplomacy and academia have considered the Treaty of Lausanne “the most successful and durable of all the post-war settlements,” and the Republic of Turkey that rested on upon it, “the success story of the Near East,” according to a British historian at the beginning of the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁷⁰

As for Lausanne’s dealing with non-Turkish groups and with genocide, two political scholars at Princeton University worded the traditional approach half a century earlier, when “genocide” just had become an established legal and historical notion. A few years after the Holocaust, when Turkey was to join NATO, they wrote:

Viewed through the prism of a beneficial geopolitical alliance, these US-American scholars in the aftermath of the Second World War considered extermination in the struggle for Anatolia, whose outcome had forced the revision in Lausanne, “a fight which could have only one winner. It was to be take all or lose all.”Footnote ⁷² Lausanne informed a double speech of Western diplomats and applied scholars after 1945: on the one hand, post-Holocaust insights and ethics; on the other, bluntly continued post-Lausanne realpolitik and social Darwinism. It took many more decades until both the US Senate and House of Representatives remorsefully acknowledged, in late 2019, that they had left the Armenian Genocide unrecognized for reasons of diplomatic expediency.Footnote ⁷³ Too long, there prevailed disinterest in, or ignorance of, what it really would have meant to lead Turkey, this fragile post-genocidal polity in the Middle East, to democracy.

In the vein of the quoted scholars, traditional diplomatic history also looked positively on the so-called Greek–Turkish population exchange that concluded (and implicitly endorsed) a decade of extremely violent demographic engineering in Anatolia. A model for the whole twentieth century, this compulsory transfer involving nearly two million people was considered a clear and clean solution for seemingly unending conflicts: After the end of Greater Europe’s continental empires, different ethnic-religious populations should stop sharing territories. Though the recipe for official “unmixing” rested on a landmark decision taken in the first weeks of the Lausanne Conference, it was principally informed by Ankara’s stance in line with demographic engineering during the Great War. Praise for the course set at Lausanne and for Ankara’s diplomatic triumph in 1923 came also from very different quarters. Anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist narratives spread by Ankara’s and Moscow’s interwar propaganda were embraced by far-right nationalists to Muslim spokesmen, from Germany to Egypt, Iran, and India. Preconditioned by the outcome of the Conference itself, the positive judgment of the Treaty of Lausanne was reinforced in the Western world at the end of the Second World War, when Turkey took its place among the allies, and thus among the founders of the United Nations Organization. The victors applied the inauspicious recipe of unmixing populations in Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁷⁴

After democratization, Germany was integrated into a post-1945 Western world. In this case, democracy preconditioned stability, at least to a substantial extent. Lausanne’s Near East Peace had worked differently. Tensions and contradictions during the Cold War, therefore, left a post-Ottoman space excluded from democratic reconstruction – because still based on the Lausanne settlement – particularly bereaved. Holocaust recognition and Armenian genocide denial; praise for democracy and embrace of autocracy; human rights talk and secret services’ lessons in torturing; verbal support for rule of law in electoral democracies and involvement in putsches went all hand in hand during the Cold War in the Middle East. The post-1945, US-led alliances valued Turkey as their strongest partner there and treated the country – now a threatened neighbor of the Soviet Union, after having been the latter’s close pre-1923 anti-Western ally – with care, concern, and an even more appeasing habitus.

This book takes stock of the preexisting interpretations. In addition, it exploits the benefits of hindsight, including the experience of an early twenty-first century that violently shook the Middle East, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Ukraine. Long-held assumptions about Turkey’s post-Ottoman fundaments recently waned. Topics from a hundred years ago – like the caliphate, the Kurdish question, the Armenian genocide, the Straits, and border disputes from the Aegean to Mosul – have vigorously reemerged. Simultaneously, the Conference of Lausanne and its decisions have reentered debate from various sides. Among minoritarian losers not sitting as Lausanne’s table in 1922–3, debates had never ended. When Democracy Died is more than – or en passant only – an antithesis to a century of often diplomatically motivated praise in the political and academic establishment. Its analysis seeks to uncover the view of the historical node and milestone of the Lausanne Conference, in particular its “archeology” in the 1910s.

Criticism of the Lausanne settlement has existed since 1923 – voiced by legal scholars, minoritarian natives, and internationalist missionaries, on one side, and by Islamists who link Lausanne to the loss of the Ottoman sultanate-caliphate, on the other. In the interwar period, Islamic criticism was mostly raised outside Turkey,Footnote ⁷⁵ but this changed markedly after the end of Kemalist single-party rule. Among the particularly victimized, though entirely disregarded in Lausanne, are the Ottoman Armenians of Anatolia. The Ottoman-Armenian population there had barely survived the genocide of 1915, and the Treaty virtually sacrificed the survivors, after the Conference excluded their delegation from sitting at the negotiation table. When Democracy Died takes seriously this and other sidelined groups’ experience, and what we can learn from them. A century’s retrospect provides an opportunity for a deepened and more circumspect history of the Lausanne Treaty.

Unaddressed trauma, denied justice, forceful exclusion, and the question of democracy are not consistently elaborated in traditional historiography. Since 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne is, on the contrary, as we have seen, generally appreciated as a solid and constructive diplomatic milestone; a compromise that made a clear break between before and after, war and peace, diplomatic collapse and repaired relations, old Ottoman and new Kemalist Turkey. Most presentations have put special emphasis on the fact that it was a “negotiated peace” and not, like the rest of the treaties in the Paris system, a peace imposed by the victors.Footnote ⁷⁶ For many people on the ground, and for all survivors from Anatolia, it was, however, entirely a “peace” of victors, rulers, and perpetrators (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 Negotiation table in a subcommission meeting. The American delegate Joseph Grew, standing, is reading a statement; at his right sits the British delegate Horace Rumbold. Vis-à-vis them, before the mirror, sit (from left to right): Rıza Nur, Ismet (Inönü) Pasha, Reşit Saffet (Atabinen), and (probably) Mehmet Münir (Ertegün) from the Turkish delegation.

(Bibliothèque de Genève)