Michelle Tusan. The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War In the Middle East. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. € 35.01.
Hans-Lukas Kieser. When Democracy Died: The Middle East’s Enduring Peace of Lausanne. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. € 35.01.
Lausanne Treaty is one of the litmus tests that can reveal someone’s worldview and ideology in Turkey. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his aides, who succeeded to push back Allied powers from Anatolia, and the victors of the World War I, namely Great Britain and France, signed a treaty in July 1923, almost a 101 years ago. Official narrative in Turkey and Kemalists celebrated the treaty as the greatest achievement of the founding fathers who set Turkey on the course of secularization and modernization. Yet, for Islamists, who regard themselves as the losers of the new deal in Turkey, despised the treaty as a conspiracy against the Turkish nation while Kurds believed it ended the dream of free Kurdistan. Even after 101 years, Turkey still struggles to coming to terms with the Lausanne treaty.
However, the controversy over the Lausanne is not limited with the context of Turkish domestic politics. On the occasion of the treaty’s centenary, discussions over Lausanne have rekindled and provided new perspectives. Michelles Tusan’s The Last Treaty and Hans-Lukas Kieser’s When Democracy Died are two of those studies that were published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Although both books are on the Lausanne Treaty, they tell different but complementary stories with contemporary implications. For both authors, Lausanne was the failure of liberal internationalism and democracy, and this failure gives veiled and unveiled warnings for the current discussions of authoritarianism.
In The Last Treaty, Tusan argues that it was Lausanne, not Versailles, that ended the First World War. For the author, Lausanne is the place where the victors of the War gave up their gains which were secured in Versailles. To that end, the author gives a detailed account of the post-1918 violence in the Middle East while Europe-centric studies focus on the western front and ignores the rest. The war continued for millions of people in this region until 1923. In terms of the scale of the violence, size of populations, allocated resources, and political stakes, the war in the Middle East was not a ‘sideshow’ to the western front. Thus, understanding and appreciating Lausanne’s place – as the treaty that ended the violence – is important to have a better picture of the War.
When Lausanne is considered as the final deal of World War I, the book tells us, the outcome of the war changes to the detriment of the British Empire. Maybe, this is why the dominant narrative in the West chose to see Lausanne as a different chapter from the greater war. For sure, the treaty was not a complete loss for the British Empire. As Kieser clearly notes in his book, Britain secured three of its major geopolitical priorities in Lausanne: keeping Mosul inside Iraq, freedom of navigation in the Straits, and distancing Ankara from Soviets. Yet, it sacrificed its lofty humanitarian and liberal internationalist goals for the sake of its geopolitical interests – the core message that both authors highlight.
Authors evaluate the British Empire’s performance through its self-declared political project of liberal internationalism. In Europe and the Middle East, the British Empire entered to the war to defend unprotected people. In Europe, it was Belgians who suffered under German invasion. In the Middle East, it was minorities, mostly Christian groups but included Muslims too. The idea of protecting minorities was the main justification for the Empire’s military campaigns in the region. Thereby, the Prime Minister Lord Curzon convinced British people to continue fighting in distant geographies. Britain’s refugee camps in the region and humanitarian activities of the NGOs helped selling this message to the people (Tusan, p. 170-171).
Belgium survived the war in Europe. Yet, authors remind, it was not true for minorities in Anatolia. To secure its geopolitical priorities, the war-weary British Empire accepted Ankara’s national state project, turning a blind eye to the Armenian, Greek, and other minorities. So, while the states came to an agreement on their interests, the minorities who found themselves on the wrong sides of new borders paid the price of peace.
Tusan’s criticism is not limited to the state actors. She questions humanitarian cause too. In a separate chapter in her book, she detailly documents how humanitarian activists created written and visual content to make British people empathize with their brutalized and needy Christian fellows. Nevertheless, instead of using this empathy for settling accounts with the perpetrators and enabling a new political settlement in the region, Tusan argues, the non-state actors idealized humanitarianism as a neutral and apolitical act of giving to the needy people from ‘a safe distance’ (Tusan, p. 170 and 195). While this helped soothing the feeling of guilt in Europe, it avoided the costly act of prosecuting the perpetrators (Tusan, p. 195-196). Thus, Tusan concludes that Lausanne ‘marked the end of a part of the war that many Europeans had not to notice.’
While Tusan sees Lausanne as the real and bitter end of a war, Kieser’s perspective more presents Lausanne as a false start whose negative repercussions still influence our world. For Kieser, Lausanne proved how mass violence and authoritarianism worked well. Contrary to the Kemalist Republic’s claims, Kieser does not separate Ankara government and later Republic from previous Community of Union and Progress (CUP) era. To show the continuity, he reminds how Talaat Pasha’s cadres, especially the ones who had active roles in the violence against the Armenians, took prominent positions in the new Turkish state. He also notes the friendship and communique between Talaat and Mustafa Kemal. More importantly, he discusses how the pro-Talaat ideologues like Ziya Gökalp and Riza Nur shaped the mindset of the new state. In fact, Kieser continues, Ankara government finished the job of homogenization that CUP started through populations exchanges and occasional pogroms. What Lausanne did was give a green light to this policy of violence.
From Kieser’s perspective, Lausanne was not only a birth certificate of the new Turkish state but also its DNA. The discourse and arguments that Turkish delegation used during the negotiations continued to shape the Turkish politics throughout the coming decades. Rejecting the Ottoman past to get clean of CUP crimes, defining Kurds as Turanists, or highlighting modernity and secularization to clean up the image of Kemalist authoritarianism in Europe were arguments that Ismet Pasha used during the Lausanne negotiations. These arguments turned later into official narratives which set the fault lines of Turkish politics – fault lines which still effects contemporary politics. Hence, for Kieser, recurrence of Erdogan’s authoritarianism was coded in the DNA of the Turkish state at Lausanne, and this is why Turkey needs a closure with the World War I and the Lausanne Treaty.
Yet, Lausanne’s impact was larger than Turkey, according to Kieser. Lausanne killed the League of Nations project and encouraged Europe’s Fascists and Nazis too. Turks’ success in purifying the homeland through violence paved the way for Holocaust. Citing Ihrig Stefan’s Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, Kieser claims that Turks’ getting away with their mass crimes became a blueprint for the Nazis who wanted to purify their own homeland (Kieser, p. 280). Lausanne showed how mass violence can be excused for the sake of geopolitical considerations.
Lausanne also set the precedence of Western attitude of preferring authoritarian stability to democracy in the Middle East. In order to secure their interests, the European states and the United States chose to work with authoritarian leaders. ‘As long as business functions on the levels in which foreign governments and companies are interested, Western democracies have hitherto not effectively cared about repeated domestic destruction that resulted in millions of migrants and hundreds of thousands of political asylum seekers’ (Kieser, p. 279). In this way, Lausanne also sowed the seeds of the instability, turmoil, and violence in the Middle East.
In this respect, Tusan and Kieser discuss the Lausanne Treaty in a larger historical context and try to show its century long implications. For sure, they do not ask for the rejection or revision of the Treaty. What they ask is to cross the boundaries of official Lausanne narrative that sees the Treaty as the Middle East’s enduring peace and to have a better grasp of its implications.
Even so, the Treaty’s causal power in leading Europe to fascism and condemning Turkey to authoritarianism needs more elaboration, especially in Kieser’s book. Yes, Lausanne clearly indicates the problems in the international political system, the well-known conflict between geopolitics and values, and the difficulties of cohabitation with authoritarian regimes. However, did Lausanne cause these problems? The Kemalist experience and Lausanne might have given inspiration to Nazis. Yet, why did Mustafa Kemal or Lausanne not cause Nazism in the rest of the Middle East? Thanks to German military advisors and Germanophiles like Enver Pasha, Germans followed the developments in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republic. Yet, they could not know better than Arab nationalists whose many leaders receive education in Istanbul and had acquittance with CUP leaders. Also, needless to say, to Turks, Arabs were culturally closer than Germans. Thus, if CUP and Kemalist ideology triggered Nazism in Germany, it should have triggered a similar ideology way better in Arab countries. Although Kieser writes that the Treaty set the precedence for violence in the Middle East, he attributes this violence to the western toleration of authoritarianism. However, most newly established Arab countries kept their Christian and Jewish populations. ‘[T]he Arab states were far more faithful to their ecumenical Ottoman heritage than was Mustafa Kemal’s Turkey,’ Makdisi writes (Makdisi, p. 130)*. Despite rising Arab nationalism and existence of non-Arab or non-Muslim minorities, the Arab countries mostly stayed away from population exchanges or racial homogenization projects. Instead, Kemalist Republic’s anti-colonial struggle and modernization project inspired newly established Arab countries and Iran. This does not mean rejecting the causal power of ideas, but it needs more clear articulation.
Likewise, the Lausanne might have set some institutional mechanisms that shaped the authoritarian trajectory of the Turkish Republic. Nevertheless, during its 100 years, Turkey was not condemned to authoritarian and ultra-nationalist politics. Albeit failed, it had few chances of democratization too, and in their failures, agents played significant roles. This shows that the starting point of an investigation should be contemporary and local conditions rather than a historical first initiator.
Kieser’s search for ‘real peace’ is also noteworthy. The book’s goal is not to discuss the concept of real peace. Yet, the concept has a central place in the book since the author criticizes Lausanne from that point of view. For British diplomats, Kieser writes, Lausanne was an inglorious peace, but it was a peace. An unjust peace is better than a just war, according to this perspective. In response to that, Kieser argues how this unjust peace caused more war, violence, and injustice. Hence, for the author, an unjust peace is not a real peace. Kieser avoids defining real peace, but he would at least expect a punishment for certain ex-CUP figures in a real peace treaty. It would be a fair expectation. Yet, what does it say to our world? What should be the real peace in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria, Sudan, or other war zones? It is a difficult question that no one has a clear answer.
More importantly, what role do war crimes tribunals play in social peace and cohesion? Nazi officials accounted for their crimes in trials after the World War II. The founding fathers of the new Germany configured the whole state to stop a renewal of 1930s experiment. However, today, a party which seems to have ideological affinity with Nazis is the rising power in the country. Or take the example of the Balkans. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia dealt with war crimes of the 1990s in the region. Yet, what we observe in the region is a cold peace which is highly dependent on the global and regional power balance. According to a study, the former Yugoslavia trials have barely contributed to a social peace. I do not argue against transitional justice, but transitional justice does not guarantee social peace.
The Lausanne Treaty is a living history. It constantly comes up in daily issues of Turkish politics. What Tusan and Kieser show is that Lausanne has close ties with current global discussions too. How much it has caused to Fascism, Nazism, or authoritarian peace in the Middle east is arguable. Yet, at least, we can say that some of these issues first surfaced at Lausanne. Thus, to look at contemporary issues from a different and historical angle, Tusan’s and Kieser’s work on Lausanne should be read.
*Makdisi defines ‘ecumenical heritage’ as Ottoman attempts in the 19th Century to create modern solidarities that enables different religious and ethnic groups to coexist (p. 6).
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