The Lausanne Moment

Our third conference/workshop took place over three days (9-11 November 2023) at the University of Macedonia. Delegates came from the United States and Canada as well as China, Japan, the UK and the Netherlands, Czechia – and, of course, Greece and Turkey. Our discussions in Thessaloniki were geared toward a proposed sequel to They All Made Peace – What is Peace?, the volume of essays that TLP published earlier this year. This is our chance to address topics including international law, the legacies and afterlives of Lausanne (including in high school history teaching), its cultural repercussions, impact on state-making in Greece, as well as Kurdish and Japanese perceptions of the treaty.

As events over this past summer have demonstrated, the Lausanne treaty remains a hot-button issue for the Kurdish diaspora. July 2023 saw mass Kurdish demonstrations in Lausanne itself. For Kurds the negotiations held in that city a century ago represent a defining moment in their history: the moment when the international community denied the Kurds any prospect of an independent state, stripping it of political and cultural rights. While the Kurds were not alone (many Armenians view Lausanne in similar terms), it had become clear to us that any follow-on volume had to include a chapter on Kurdish aspirations during the 1920s, to complement our podcasts with Martin van Bruinessen and Djene Bajalan, as well as Fidan Mirhanoglu’s blogpost.

Having assisted curators at the Musée Historique de Lausanne with their exhibition Frontières: Le Traité de Lausanne, which closed last month, we were well aware of the Municipality of Lausanne’s security concerns around the centenary. We elected not to convene our centenary conference in Lausanne, and welcomed the suggestion by TLP convenor Georgios Giannakopoulos that we consider Thessaloniki: a city that inspired and then endured the coming of a new historical era, one characterized by a shift from cosmopolitanism to nationalisms. We were fortunate to find wonderful hosts at the University of Macedonia, first and foremost Dr Leonidas Karakatsanis, assisted by Angeliki Stamati and a team of student helpers.

Our keynote roundtable brought together a historian, a sociologist, an anthropologist and an international law expert. “Is Lausanne still important today?” asked the journalist Sofia Christoforidou. Ayhan Aktar’s initial response was light-hearted: “But what would Greek and Turkish diplomats do without it? Their lives would be so dull!” Yet, he continued, the “securitization” of Turkish politics has meant that Erdogan no longer feels any need to mention Lausanne. This in stark contrast to his predecessors, for whom Lausanne served as the “birth certificate of the Republic”.

For Laura Robson Lausanne was “one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century.” It marked the inauguration of a global political order, one in which the nation-state would form the only viable building block of international order. Robson reminded delegates of the degree to which the Arab world was watching in 1922-3, and seeking to emulate Turkey’s achievement. Konstantinos Tsitselikis shared his surprise on revisiting the work of leading International Law experts of the 1920s and 1930s, to find a consensus that forced exchange of populations contravened international rule of law and human rights. One such scholar, Georgios Streit, even spoke of it in terms of “ethnic cleansing”.

In Friday’s opening presentation Olga Lafazani and her colleagues introduced their ongoing “multi-temporal research” project comparing the two refugee “crises” of 1923 and 2015. Why was the dis- and relocation of people in 2015 framed as a “crisis”, despite the fact that the numbers (both in terms of people and the funds released to assist them) were proportionally far greater in 1922-23? Why weren’t the migrants of 2015 granted political rights and housed around existing conurbations, as they were a century ago, rather than being isolated in the limbo of refugree camps? According to Lafazani’s team the 2015 “crisis” was operationalised to further the ends of political actors, as well as a “humanitarian industry”. In their paper Katerina Kostopoulou and Antonios Gardikiotis traced shifting social representations of refugees across a century, applying intergroup threat theory to distinguish three narrative frames: refugee as victim, as threat, and as benefit. Greece, they argued, had always been “a community in motion” – “crisis” or no.

As political scientists, Fiona B. Adamson and Kelly M. Greenhill sought to take the longue durée, sharing some preliminary patterns emerging from a dataset they are creating of three hundred-odd instances (dating back to the early nineteenth century) of what they refer to as “organized forced migrations”, loosely categorized as transfers, exchanges, repatriations, expulsions and exoduses. Forced migration could, they noted, serve states as a means of gaining “neighbourhood influence” as well as regime stability. 1923 did not mark the birth of forced migration, though, as Laura Robson argued, Lausanne did mark the point at which this tool gained formal international validation. In a later contribution to the conference Robson would focus on Lausanne’s other “deeply consequential legal innovation”: the amnesty it offered, including to genocidaires.

At this point the delegates experienced a truly Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. A small troupe of actors entered the conference room, accosting their audience with the questions dominating the headlines a century ago – about Mussolini, about the secret influence of oil magnates, and about the mysterious Russian delegation gathered around Chicherin. Jamie Walters’ dramatic vignette used the journalist Clare Sheridan’s two autobiographical accounts of Lausanne to stage a dialogue between twin Sheridans – “then” and “now”.

Saturday began with papers addressing Crete, Albania and western Thrace. “Thracian Muslims did not move, the border passed over their heads,” noted Giorgos Mavrommatis and Panagiota Kalafati in their paper. Lausanne has left this community minoritized, feeling itself obliged to “keep a distance” from their neighbours. When people were forced to relocate, the humanitarian experts of Near East Relief and the Rockefeller Foundation provided “food, shelter and education” to the refugees. But, as Dimitris Kamouzis and Demetra Tzanaki concluded, this was an exercise in “scientific coloniality, a means of rationalizing western domination,” underpinned by eugenic “social hygiene theory”. Kamouzis and Tzanaki identified parallels between these programmes and those of the  Hampton Institute, which sought to educate Black Americans, as well as render them more tractable and amenable to white control.

Turning to address how Lausanne was represented within Turkey itself, Aytek Soner Alpan’s paper noted a dramatic shift in how “Lausanne Day” (24 July) was celebrated. Placing this “Day” alongside similar days of national celebration such as 19 May and “Freedom Day” (23 July), Alpan counted more than 119 official municipal celebrations of “Lausanne Day” in 1939, marked by excursions to beauty spots as well as collective listening to celebratory radio broadcasts. Fifteen years later, however, July 24 festivities were silenced, owing to concern that they had fostered a cult around Ismet considered contrary to a new era of multi-party rule.

Lausanne was not concerned solely with the “unmixing” of people: antiquities also had their fate determined by the “experts” who gathered there. For Ismet it was “purely religious law” which justified retaining treasures taken from the Prophet’s shrine in Medina by Fakhri Pasha (“The Lion of the Desert”) in 1917. As Nilay Özlü noted, for Ismet these objects rightly belonged “to the Caliph as protector of the Holy Relics”. As the archaeologist Hélène Maloigne noted, it was a different rhetoric of “civilisation” that served to justify the movement (and then the non-return) of a statue of Idrimi, King of Alalakh (reigned 1490-1465 BCE). Now in the British Museum, Idrimi’s statue was discovered in Hatay Province in 1936. Maloigne unpicked the rationale developed by British archaeologists to justify the artefact’s movement west, away from peoples they deemed to be unworthy of possessing it. Selvihan Kurt’s paper addressed the Museum of Antiquities in Izmir, exploring how the institution’s successive homes as well as its accession of “abandoned” properties served as a riposte to its “twin” in Thessalonika. Whereas Thessalonika’s museum was housed in the former New Mosque, Izmir’s collections found a home inside a damaged Christian church.

Even a report of this length cannot claim to be comprehensive: other papers considered foreign schools in Istanbul, Rum theatre, parakathi singing and other topics. The conference concluded with a panel consisting of historians and teachers seeking to reform how Lausanne is taught in Greek and Turkish high schools, a TLP project which has been the focus of prior TLP blogposts and workshops. After a quick lunch delegates gathered at Moni Vlatadon for a ninety-minute historical walk, created by the “100 Memories” research team. We literally followed in the footsteps of those who have arrived and departed Salonika/Thessaloniki across the past century and a half. At one point our steps passed over a street in Ano Poli literally paved with the recycled tombstones of the city’s vanished Jewish population. Here as in other former Ottoman cities, the dead as well as the living found themselves subject to radical dislocations, playing new parts not of their own choosing.

Thank you to all our panellists, keynote speakers, our hosts at the University of Macedonia, as well as Gingko, who generously sponsored this event, in association with the Contesting Governance Platform at Utrecht University.