Equally Unhappy?

Lausanne may be Turkey’s “title deed”, but what is it to Greece? Mustafa Aydin (Kadir Has University) was not the only Turkish scholar at the conference organized by the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) to express surprise that Lausanne was considered important enough, a hundred years on, to merit the attention of Greek diplomats, political scientists, historians and scholars of international relations. Any remaining doubts were dispelled by the opening ceremony, addressed by Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou, who described the treaty’s centenary as “an excellent opportunity to reaffirm its validity and the solid multilateral framework it created, that continues to be the pillar of peace in the region.”

Her Excellency’s contribution, as well as those of former Greek foreign minister Evangelos Venizelos and an equally distinguished roll-call of former Greek ambassadors such as Pavlos Apostolidis, demonstrated that Athens also considers Lausanne to be their “title deed”. The treaty drew a line under the revisionism of the Megali Idea and restored Greece to a liberal international order. But the attention also reflects a concern that this “pillar of peace” is showing its age, struggling to cope with recent controversies between Greece and Turkey, themselves couched in terms – Exclusive Economic Zones, continental shelves, Grey Zones – that would have had Venizelos (Eleftherios, not Evangelos) scratching his head.

The population exchange did not get a panel to itself, yet loomed large in a number of contributions. For Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, Professor of Postwar History at the National & Kapodistrian University, the university that hosted the conference, the novelty of a mandatory exchange was a case of recognizing a “fait d’accompli”, regulating a process already well underway. As Konstantinos Tsitselikis (University of Macedonia) noted, it nonetheless involved denying exchangees their human rights, including the right to change their religion. Tsitselikis cited leading international jurists’ condemnations of the exchange in the years immediately following 1923: Greek foreign minister-turned-international jurist Georgios Streit even used the term nationale Bereinigung, proving that the charge of “ethnic cleansing” has a longer pedigree than we might imagine. As Constantinos Antonopoulos (Democritus University of Thrace) noted, the treaty also legitimized genocidal violence by extending an amnesty, whereas Versailles had left the door open to prosecution of the Kaiser. Delegates at Lausanne disagreed with US President Jed Bartlet, who held that “peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice.” Contrary to the West Wing president, Lausanne’s peace was founded on the denial of justice.

H. E. THE PRESIDENT OF THE HELLENIC REPUBLIC KATERINA SAKELLAROPOULOU

In the following session George Mavrogordatos (National and Kapodistrian University) challenged the commonplace view of Lausanne as instigating “ethnic cleansing”. The population exchange was not unilateral expulsion, he observed. It was the fruit of arduous negotiation, and implementation was supervised by a Mixed Commission which “did not kill, maim or rape anyone”. More controversially, Mavrogordatos also argued that it preserved the immovable property of exchangees. Echoing Hatzivassiliou, he noted that an exchange would have taken place anyway, Convention or no Convention, albeit on a larger scale and in a more savage manner. It was unfortunate that there was no time for discussion at this panel, as it was evident that there were many in the room who would have appreciated the opportunity to engage with this thought-provoking thesis.

As Mavrogordatos pointed out with characteristic frankness, he had been assigned the topic of his intervention. Although he was the only one to admit so much openly, many speakers found themselves shoe-horning what they found interesting into papers which otherwise sought to follow their brief. By setting an unusually tight time limit – just eight to ten minutes per paper – the organisers were able to programme 45 speakers across two days. In practice the limit was not enforced (full disclosure: my paper took up 15 minutes). Unable to get to the nub of their argument, much of the conference was devoted to scene-setting introductions from longer papers. Panel themes were woolly, and a lot of time was spent reminding the audience of provisions of the treaty and other facts with which they were already familiar.

Consideration of state actors other than the two Republics was grudging. Lausanne marked the United States’ tentative first steps in Middle East peace-making. The presence of representatives from the Soviet Union was equally noteworthy. For would-be nations denied official representation at Lausanne – Egyptians, Kurds, Armenians, Arabs – Lausanne was the focus of high hopes and lasting disappointments. We heard little about these nations, while non-state actors such as NGOs, the press and MNEs were equally absent. This was the downside of approaching Lausanne as a bilateral treaty.

KALLIOPI AMYGDALOU AND DIMITRIS P. SOTIROPOULOS

Despite a moving tribute from Onur Yıldırım (Middle East Technical University), the achievement of anthropologist Renée Hirschon in shaping scholarship on the population exchange received surprisingly little attention. Another exception was an excellent paper on the “spatial footprint” of the exchange by Kalliopi Amygdalou (ELIAMEP). This showed how settlement of exchangees literally changed the face of Greece, draining swamps and diverting rivers, as well as the ways in which the mapping of new settlements for exchangees reveals the interweaving of “memory, heritage and the politics of social welfare.” We hope to hear more about the associated HOMEACROSS project in a future TLP podcast. When a colleague spoke of the truly remarkable achievement of accommodating hundreds of thousands of exchangees inside Greece in nationalist terms (“We did it.”), Amygdalou gently pushed back, acknowledging the role played by foreign experts, donors and NGOs. “We” did it, certainly, but “we” had help. In today’s climate, that seems a point worth making. As Angela Merkel found to her cost, when it comes to such projects, assuming that “We can do it” (Wir schaffen das) can backfire spectacularly.

The organizers are nonetheless to be saluted for engaging with the Japanese presence at Lausanne, something TLP has failed to address (not for want of trying!) at its conferences. Despite the participation of the Japanese Institute of International Affairs, however, we did not learn why Japan was at Lausanne, or gain insight into Japanese delegate Baron Hayashi Gonsuke’s thought-provoking interventions at the 1922-3 conference. Hayashi presented Japan as a kind of wise elder brother to Turkey: after all, Japan had already staged its own surprising military humiliation of a powerful Empire (Russia, at Tsushima in 1905), and had faced similar challenges of rapidly adapting its legal systems and economy to western norms.

The conference’s parameters enabled it to tackle the important question of how to ensure that the Lausanne treaty lives to be 200.

Given its focus on high diplomacy, the proposals it advanced tended to be top-down, but were no less significant. There was wide support for the view that, regardless of the many downsides for a liberal international order, Erdogan’s victory in Turkey’s recent elections, to be followed (we presume) by a strong mandate for Kyriakos Mitsotakis in the current Greek elections, represented a diplomatic window of opportunity. A respected media commentator as well as professor at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Panayiotis Ioakimidis sketched out what such a démarche might look like, and urged Turkey to join UNCLOS, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Overall a consensus held that negotiations should not be mediated by third-parties, certainly not the EU, despite the role played by Britain and the United States in previous eras of detente, in the 1930s and 1950s.

It feels nice to scratch an itch. Several speakers recognized that leaders on both sides of the Aegean need to work harder to “prepare the public” (as Mustafa Aydın put it), or at least cease scratching nationalist boils. Though entertaining in one sense (featuring several video clips) Ayhan Aktar’s paper on the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories fostered by Turkish state television in long-running historical dramas such as Resurrection: Ertuğrul (2014-2019) and Payitaht: Abdülhamid (2017-2021) was otherwise chilling. Aktar demonstrated the close relationship between propaganda and entertainment, showing how Erdoğan and AKP parliamentary candidates directly quoted from such dramas, feeding a victimisation theory that stands in contrast to decades in which Turks remembered Lausanne as a victory.

SERHAT GÜVENÇ AND PANAYIOTIS IOAKIMIDIS

Aktar traced this back to Ismet’s own refashioning of Lausanne, in the late 1960s, as an anti-imperialist peace, an attempt to undermine the leftists. Myths around Lausanne launched by leftists were later picked up by Islamists, noted Serhat Güvenç (Kadir Has University). At university a younger Güvenç had, he confessed, fallen victim to such myths, originally studying engineering in hopes of helping his nation access the natural resources allegedly placed off-limits by Lausanne’s fictional secret clauses. Far from being unwelcome distractions, such autobiographical asides recurred across the two days, as speaker after speaker spoke movingly of their own ties to exchangees, reminding us of the personal legacies of 1923. Intriguingly, Güvenç claimed to hear whispers within the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggesting that a focus on old-style sovereignty might be giving way to a universalist, pre-national paradigm, with a “slow but gradual shift towards the human security element.” Seen in this way, officials could even express regret that Greek Muslims had not been left where they were in 1922-3: these communities did not need to be relocated in order to be an asset to their co-religionists inside Turkey’s borders.

Although such initiatives can seem piddling in the face of a well-resourced and venal Turkish media, speakers addressing the final panel (“The Diplomats’ View”) did see a role for civil society projects aimed at university students and young people. TLP is, in a small way, endeavouring to play a role here. Next month Turkish and Greek high school history teachers will come together in Lausanne to co-create shared teaching resources, intended to teach Lausanne and its legacy in a less one-sided manner: acknowledging this past as a shared trauma, and developing transferable skills in media literacy that might make the next generation view tendentious television dramas a bit more critically. To quote Professor Aydın yet again, his observation that Lausanne has survived for a century because “Lausanne made everyone equally unhappy” seems just. Peace-making demands give and take, yet as several participants noted, the Greek and Turkish words for “compromise” can seem unhelpfully pejorative. As Fatih Ceylan (President, Ankara Policy Centre) noted, communities on both sides of the Aegean need to learn to “own” Lausanne. In that regard the ELIAMEP are to be warmly congratulated for organizing the conference, for the media coverage it generated, as well as for the associated podcasts they have produced.

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