From Ouchy to Auschwitz?

2023 saw the publication of three monographs addressing the meanings and legacies of Lausanne, by Michelle Tusan, Jay Winter and Hans-Lukas Kieser, none of them strangers to this topic, thanks to important prior publications on related themes. Having addressed Winter’s The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923 (Oxford University Press) and Tusan’s The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press) in previous contributions to this site, it’s high time to consider the third part of this centenary trifecta, Kieser’s When Democracy Died: The Middle East’s Enduring Peace of Lausanne (Cambridge University Press).

As Kieser knows better than anyone, the Swiss resort was hardly a blank slate: during the Balkan Wars one member of its community of Ottoman exiles, Ziya Gökalp, wrote a poem in which Lausanne was reimagined as “Kizilelma”, the font from which “a new stream” and “river of enlightenment shall pour to Turan” (61). Lausanne’s Foyer Turc (established in 1911) hosted a Turkish Nationalist Conference in May 1919. Such was this “diasporic presence”, deeply steeped in an almost religious Pan-Turkism, that in 1922-3 Lausanne “could at times look like a home game for Ankara’s delegation” (112).

To continue the metaphor, it has long been common to celebrate Lausanne as turning the tables on the victorious allies. We are invited to cheer on Ismet, as the underdog who defeated a dream team of all-star western diplomats, led by Curzon. The degree to which such accounts have unwittingly rehearsed Kemalist rhetoric is clear to Kieser from, say, the way in which Kemalist maps of the Sèvres partition are reproduced wholesale in Anglophone textbooks, reproduced together with the assumption that the proposed “zones of influence” assigned to the victorious powers were “no longer Turkish territory” (95). TLP is guilty of invoking some of this “sporting upset” language in its webpage introducing the treaty. Other historians, such as Sevtap Demirci, have opted for a less heady tale of pragmatism and realism. Kieser calls out the former’s “thrilling saga” of “a showdown in Lausanne”, denouncing it as “a juicy combination of Kemalist and Bolshevik rhetoric of liberation” (21). As for the latter’s “rational pragmatism”, this allegedly “underestimates the lack of democratic foundation” to the Ankara regime, as well as the West’s “critical loss of an ethical stand internationally” (22).

The ultimate failure of covenant-based peace coincides with the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire at the Conference of Lausanne. The failed ‘great peace’ after the Great War is an essential antecedent of the Shoah, the Jewish catastrophe in Europe culminating in the Holocaust. Put pointedly, Lausanne made Europe and international diplomacy safe for fascist party-states, minority repression, and future genocides – Ankara serving in this process as the model dictatorship.

Kieser, When Democracy Died, p. 7.

Rather than accept this as Realpolitik, Kieser insists that we refer to it as “new realpolitik” (36) or “the new interwar realpolitik” (110): a license “for all peoples to consolidate their existence through the destruction or violent assimilation of other nations”, (28) as the international jurist André Mandelstam put it in 1925. Lausanne was not a victory for Turkish nationalism, but for a Turkish “ultranationalism” that “received its diplomatic baptism at Lausanne”, developing from proto-fascism into fascism proper. Kieser proposes that it was Kemal, not Mussolini, who served as Hitler’s “teacher and guiding star” (137). And it was Lausanne that “taught seminal lessons of appeasement” (277) which Hitler also eagerly absorbed: here was “a revisionist blueprint” (280) for the Nazis. When Democracy Died targets all the mantras, shibboleths and euphemisms associated with the Lausanne settlement, translating Lausannese into very plain language. He picks off all the S-words: “sovereignty”, “stability”, “success”. Ismet’s repeated demands for legal sovereignty masked “a deep-seated contempt for law in its universal, supranational dimension” (248). As for the “stability” Lausanne allegedly fostered in the region,  something which led diplomatic historians such as Alan Sharp and Zara Steiner to hail it as a “success”, Kieserargues that this “success” came at the price of “entirely overlooked hard facts of trauma, genocide, and forestalled democracy” (29). There was no accountability for the Armenian Genocide, just as there would be none for perpetrators of the “Dersim Genocide” of 1937-8 (259).

There are a few weak points. The brief account of the genesis of the population exchange (148) lays almost all the blame on Hamid Bey (Hamit Hasancan), when the story is surely not that simple. Nor is there much mention of decades of forced migration of Muslims from the Balkans, familiar from the work of Isa Blumi. Repeated references in the text to what When Democracy Died is doing or saying feel laboured. Telling a reader what your book aims to do (quoting its title in italics) is fine in the introduction, but Kieser keeps on doing it (170, 171, 189, 200, etc). This risks making an important book feel self-important.

Kieser concludes with the claim that the “inviolability of facts and historical truths”  will always be among the “core values” of “existing democracies” – democracies who will, eventually, stop making compromises like Lausanne and insist that those values are respected. As a historian, the thought makes Kieser “serene” (288). Yet When Democracy Died is far from serene. The indignation and anger that seethes beneath the surface is both a strength and a weakness: the thesis is searing, but at times threatens to overwhelm us, rather than invite us to join a scholarly discussion. Make no mistake: this is a banked fire of a book: you can sense the red-hot embers that lie under the thin black and white layer of words.