Masterpiece and Mourning

In the centenary year the familiar view of the Treaty of Lausanne as a “masterpiece of diplomacy” came under attack from a number of scholars, not least Jay Winter. Winter’s The Day the War Ended argues that concepts of war and peace were transformed by the decade of violence that ended in 1923. In what Winter calls “the civilianization of war” the already-eroded line separating combatants and civilians was completely obliterated, as civilians suffered various forms of violence, from starvation and torture to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

In seeking to bring the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922 to an end, the Treaty of Lausanne introduces into international law the deeply problematic and troubling principle of the compulsory exchange of populations and their “unmixing”, thus legitimizing the civilianization of war and rendering that a precondition for peace. As Winter writes, Fridtjof Nansen proposed it shortly after the destruction of the cosmopolitan city of Smyrna: “There ‘unmixing’ meant murder, rape, and pillage. Everyone knew of the plight of the victims of this event, and of hundreds of thousands of others living in what had been a war zone”.[1]

In Winter’s eloquent formulation, the result of Lausanne, leninistically condensed, is “one step forward, many and various steps backwards”. The treaty was a controversial and mixed blessing: the step forward was the formal end of the Great War and Greek-Turkish conflict. The optimist focuses on the endurance of the border settlement. The pessimist wonders who paid the price. Winter presents the negative legacy of Lausanne as threefold: (a) it gave a stamp of legitimacy to the erasure of the Armenian state, an entity provided for in the Treaty of Sèvres (b) it was disastrous for the League of Nations’ policy on so-called minorities, as the League became an accomplice to a violation of human rights (c) the population exchange enshrined the monstrosity of forced relocation as a precondition for peace.

Granted, the violence ended, for a time, but in a manner that established a heavy precedent that paved the way for Mark Mazower’ s Dark Continent.

A Greek role in conceiving population exchange?

If the core “of the tragedy of Lausanne” was, in Winter’s words, “an unavoidable dénouement of an avoidable disaster”, certain questions regarding the Greek policies of the period follow. What was the Greek role in conceiving the idea of compulsory population exchange? While Winter attributes the original idea to Nansen, Winter stressed that the Greek side, and Venizelos personally, had unconditionally agreed to the idea in discussions with Nansen held in Athens around mid-October 1922. Ever since, the exchange has been presented as something imposed on the Greek side, something they accepted reluctantly, necessarily, and with disgust.

The story goes even further back, however, to the Paris Peace Conference and the Hellenic Army’s landing in Smyrna. Expansionist goals aside, was the protection of the Greek Christian Orthodox population a sincere and necessary aim? Was the threat that community faced real? Citing Taner Akçam, Winter argues that they were, and that “an Ionia safe for populations that had lived in Western Anatolia for millennia was the objective of partisans of the Megali Idea long before the outbreak of the Great War.”[2] The Hellenic Army’s presence in Anatolia, however, ignoted Turkish resistance that could not be stamped out. As Winter has it, Greece’s “political aims were beyond her economic, and therefore military, capacity. That is why we can conclude that the Greek tragedy that unfolded in 1921 and 1922 was worse than an act of short-sightedness. It was an act of blindness.”[3] Greek Orthodox communities already at risk were hence exposed to even greater danger.

The key lesson learned from the War, according to Winter, was the decisive role of economic strength: Greece’s leaders failed to see that its economy was too weak to sustain its war effort in Anatolia. To whom does Winter attribute this “blindness”?

The Greek campaign suffered from the outset from two fundamental weaknesses: insufficient Allied support and poor financial and logistical organization. The key lesson learned from the War, according to Winter, was the decisive role of economic strength: Greece’s leaders failed to see that its economy was too weak to sustain its war effort in Anatolia. To whom does Winter attribute this “blindness”? By his account the blame lies with Venizelos, with King Constantine and his prime minister, Dimitrios Gounaris, who recognized the country’s economic collapse and the unbridgeable political divide.

Gounaris bet on Britain’s good faith, expecting Britain to lend its financial support, and paid for it with his life. Though he had sown the seeds of defeat, Venizelos escaped, picking up the pieces of a project he had promoted and turning it, out of necessity, into a program of internal modernization. Refugees would be its propulsive force. Kemal, for his part, would use the Greek invasion and the atrocities of the Greek army as a pretext to justify the brutal mistreatment of civilians and the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of those he considered “internal enemies”.

Yes, but the optimist will argue that the refugees were given legal status in their new home country. They lost one house but gained another, even if they were treated as second-class citizens within it. Expulsion is not extermination, but Winter reminds us that ethnic cleansing and genocide are a continuum. Winter adds that the promises made to compensate exchangees for lost properties were never fulfilled. “As to the real price they paid for the Treaty of Lausanne, the loss of their homes, their past, their local landscape, their freedom, their history, there could be no recompense. ”. [4]

The Allies and the Greek “Adventure”

There remains one final question, a question with geopolitical implications: what was the attitude of the Allies, especially the British, to the Greek “adventure”? The Pyrrhic victory in the War meant that the restoration of British power in the Eastern Mediterranean would be achieved through satellite powers. Greece was one of them. This meant that either Venizelos or his opponents would have to be more careful: as Michael Llewellyn Smith notes “large powers are reluctant to put all their eggs in one basket”.[5]Although the Allies, and especially the British, unleashed the Hellenic Army as a conquering force in Anatolia in 1919, two years later they deprived it of funds.

Conventional wisdom has it that this was the consequence of the Constantinian restoration. Winter notes that Curzon may have warned the Greek allies against military action, yet they found themselves in Anatolia in 1919 with his blessing, doing the “dirty job” that the British wanted to be done, even as they publicly denounced it. Winter reconstructs the November 1922 confrontation between Curzon and his Cabinet rival Lord Birkenhead, during which Birkenhead accused Curzon of not telling Gounaris to withdraw from Anatolia as soon as possible. The revelation that Curzon urged a desperate Gounaris to stay the course is illuminating.

As Winter’s book invites us to reassess the Treaty of Lausanne, it inevitably prompts us to do the same with regard to Greek policies of the period.

As Winter’s book invites us to reassess the Treaty of Lausanne, it inevitably prompts us to do the same with regard to Greek policies of the period. In a context of great geopolitical turbulence and instability, Venizelos -with rhetorical British support but without its firm commitment- took the speculative and mistaken decision to fulfill the dream of a greater Greece. This is the seed of the Catastrophe. Venizelos’ political rivals had neither the will nor the courage to recall this policy –this is the blindness. The “masterpiece of diplomacy” confirmed the tragic consequences of these decisions. The refugees -we see some of them on the cover of Winter’s book- paid the price for this masterpiece. Their interests were subordinated to those of the Greek state.

It seems difficult, if not impossible, that Jay Winter’s book and these conclusions will change or even shake what Paschalis Kitromilides has identified as a doubtless fact: “a Venizelos cult is growing in Greek political thought”.[6] Certainly, what is requested here is neither an unhelpful blame-game nor the revival of the old divisions. However, the deep study of Winter’s work and of all the scholars who criticize the Treaty of Lausanne is a matter of historical, historiographical, and –why not– of national self-reflection and self-awareness.

Notes

[1] Jay Winter, The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923: The Civilianization of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 8.

[2] Ibid., p. 72.

[3] Ibid., p. 73.

[4] Ibid., p. 35.

[5] Smith Michael Llewellyn, Ionian vision. Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922 (2nd ed., Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1998, xiv.

[6] Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “Introduction: Perspectives on a Leader”, in Kitromilides (ed.), Eleftherios Venizelos. The Trials of Statesmanship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 1.

Blogposts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.