The Treaty of Lausanne

On 24 July 1923, in the great hall of the university’s Palais de Rumine in Lausanne, representatives of the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes signed a peace treaty with Turkey. Turkey was represented by the government of the Grand National Assembly in Ankara, and its delegation was led by the foreign minister, İsmet Pasha, later İnönü. The treaty ran to 143 articles and was signed together with more than a dozen conventions, protocols and declarations, among them a convention on the Straits. It formally ended the state of war that had lasted in the East since 1914 and replaced the Treaty of Sèvres, which the Sultan had signed in 1920 but which nobody in Turkey had ever carried out. It was the only peace treaty ending the First World War that the defeated side negotiated as an equal rather than accepting as a “diktat”. For Turkey it meant recognition of the borders won in the war against the Greeks and of full sovereignty; for Greece, the end of its dreams of Asia Minor; and for Europe, proof that the order established in Paris could be changed by force.

From Sèvres to Lausanne

The Treaty of Sèvres of 10 August 1920 had left the Turks a truncated Anatolia. Greece was to receive Eastern Thrace and administer the Smyrna district, the Straits were to be placed under international control, a greater Armenia and Kurdish autonomy were envisaged in the east, and the state’s finances were to be supervised by the powers. Mustafa Kemal’s national movement declared the treaty null and void and overturned it by force of arms. In the war with Greece, which had begun with the Greek landing at Smyrna in May 1919, the Ankara army halted the Greeks on the Sakarya in 1921 and in August and September 1922 drove them into the sea. After the Chanak crisis, which brought Britain to the brink of war with Turkey, the Armistice of Mudanya of 11 October 1922 ended the fighting and gave the Turks Eastern Thrace up to the Maritsa river. The victors of the Great War now had to sit down to negotiate with men whom, two years earlier, they had regarded as rebels.

The powers invited two Turkish delegations to Lausanne: one from the Sultan’s government in Constantinople and one from the government in Ankara. Kemal responded with a step that sealed the fate of the dynasty. On 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate, and on 17 November the last Sultan, Mehmed VI, left the capital aboard a British battleship. Only the Ankara delegation went to Lausanne.

The first round: Curzon and İsmet

The conference opened on 20 November 1922, and its first working session was held the following day. It was chaired by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord George Curzon, who had earlier agreed a common line with the French Prime Minister, Raymond Poincaré, and with Benito Mussolini, who had been Prime Minister of Italy for three weeks. Mussolini appeared in Switzerland for the opening, demanded equal treatment for Italy and quickly left. Ernest Hemingway, who covered the conference for the Toronto Star, later described his press conference as a performance in which the Duce pretended to be engrossed in a book – which, according to the reporter, he was holding upside down. Curzon divided the work among three commissions: a territorial and military one under his own chairmanship, a financial and economic one under the Frenchman Camille Barrère, and one on the status of foreigners under the Italian Marquis Camillo Garroni. Greece was represented by Eleftherios Venizelos, who had returned to favour in Athens after the defeat of the royalists. Bulgaria and Soviet Russia were admitted to the talks on the Straits; Soviet Russia was represented by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin. The United States, which had never declared war on Turkey, sent only observers.

The clash between Curzon and İsmet became the stuff of diplomatic legend. The Englishman – an aristocrat, a former Viceroy of India and a master of rhetoric – dominated the proceedings. İsmet, a general with no diplomatic experience and hard of hearing into the bargain, stubbornly repeated his demand for full independence. According to an often-repeated anecdote, whenever Curzon delivered a long speech, İsmet switched off his hearing aid and then calmly set out his position all over again, as though he had heard nothing. Curzon complained in his dispatches that the Turkish minister was impervious to argument, warning and appeal, and could only repeat the same slogans.

Agreement on territorial questions came relatively easily, since the war had largely settled them. The dispute over the Straits turned into a duel between Curzon and Chicherin. The Russians demanded that the Bosporus and the Dardanelles be closed to all warships except Turkish ones and that Turkey regain the right to fortify them; the British wanted freedom of passage and demilitarised shores. The Turks, anxious for the support of the Western powers, eventually accepted the British solution. Two other issues, however, proved irreconcilable: the fate of Mosul, an oil-rich district which the British had occupied only after the armistice and incorporated into mandatory Iraq, and the capitulations – the privileges of foreigners who in the Ottoman Empire had been subject to their own courts and exempt from Turkish law. On 30 January 1923 Greece and Turkey signed a separate convention at Lausanne on the compulsory exchange of populations. A few days later the powers presented the Turks with a draft of the entire treaty. On 4 February İsmet accepted its territorial part, with a reservation regarding Mosul, but rejected the judicial, economic and financial clauses. Curzon broke off the talks and left for London on the Orient Express that same evening.

The second round

In early March 1923 Ankara put forward new proposals, and the conference resumed on 23 April, this time without Curzon. The British delegation was led by the High Commissioner in Constantinople, Sir Horace Rumbold, and the French by General Maurice Pellé. The talks turned on technical matters: the Ottoman debt, concessions and the status of foreigners. The most dangerous crisis, however, arose from the Greco-Turkish dispute over reparations. The Turks demanded that Greece pay for the destruction its army had left behind in Anatolia, and ruined Greece had nothing to pay with. Meanwhile, the rebuilt Greek army of General Theodoros Pangalos stood on the Evros, ready to march on Adrianople (Edirne). Venizelos threatened to leave the conference and, in return for dropping the reparations claim, offered Turkey Karaağaç, a suburb of Adrianople on the western bank of the Maritsa, with its railway station. Kemal agreed to the compromise, and at the end of May 1923 İsmet accepted it. The threat of a new war had passed. (Some sources date this compromise to April, but the day of the week they give corresponds to 26 May 1923.)

During the second round a crime was committed that poisoned relations between Switzerland and Moscow for years. On 10 May 1923, in the restaurant of the Hotel Cecil in Lausanne, Maurice (Moritz) Conradi, a Russian-born Swiss and a former officer in the White army, shot dead the Soviet diplomat Vatslav Vorovsky, who had come to Lausanne as an unofficial representative for the Straits question, and wounded two of his colleagues. The trial turned into an indictment of Bolshevik terror, and a Lausanne jury acquitted the killer. Moscow broke off relations with Switzerland, which were not restored until 1946.

On 9 July, after night-long negotiations, the last outstanding matters were settled: the interest on the Ottoman debt, the concessions and the evacuation of Allied troops from Constantinople. After a further fortnight or so spent finalising the details, the treaty was signed at a formal plenary session on 24 July 1923. The day before, 23 July, Poland had concluded a separate treaty of friendship with Turkey at Lausanne, establishing diplomatic relations between the two states.

Provisions

Borders. Turkey kept the whole of Anatolia, Eastern Thrace up to the Maritsa, including Adrianople and Karaağaç, as well as Constantinople and the Gallipoli peninsula. In the Aegean it received the islands of Imbros (Imroz) and Tenedos (Bozcaada) at the entrance to the Dardanelles, which were promised a special administration for their Greek inhabitants. The remaining Aegean islands, except those lying within three miles of the Turkish coast, went to Greece. Turkey renounced its rights to the Arab lands and recognised the British annexation of Cyprus, Italian rule over the Dodecanese and Libya, and the loss of Egypt and Sudan. The border with French-mandated Syria was drawn according to the 1921 agreement with France. The border with Iraq – in other words, the fate of Mosul – was left to British-Turkish negotiations and, should these fail, to a decision of the Council of the League of Nations. The treaty made no mention at all of the greater Armenia and the Kurdistan envisaged at Sèvres.

Sovereignty. The capitulations were abolished. Turkey undertook only to employ a few foreign legal advisers for five years. The powers gave up control over the state’s finances, and the Ottoman debt was divided between Turkey and the other states that had emerged on the empire’s former lands. No limits were placed on the size of the Turkish army, unlike in the treaties with Germany, Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria. Turkey and the powers mutually renounced war reparations. In Article 59 Greece acknowledged its obligation to make good the damage its army had done in Anatolia, and Turkey, “in consideration of the financial situation of Greece”, finally renounced the claim.

Minorities. The treaty obliged Turkey to protect its non-Muslim minorities and Greece to protect the Muslims of Western Thrace. In practice it protected few people, because the population exchange agreed in January covered almost all the Orthodox Christians of Anatolia and the Muslims of Greece. The criterion was religion, not language. The only exceptions were the Greeks of Constantinople, Imbros and Tenedos and the Muslims of Western Thrace. Some 1.2 million Orthodox Christians were resettled in Greece, most of them people who had already fled the Turkish army in 1922, and some 350,000–400,000 Muslims in Turkey.

Amnesty. Attached to the treaty was a declaration of amnesty covering acts committed between 1914 and 1922 in connection with political and military events. It closed the door to prosecuting the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and of the crimes against Greeks and Assyrians. The trials held after 1918 by courts martial in occupied Constantinople had in any case already ceased.

The Straits. A separate convention proclaimed freedom of passage through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles for merchant ships and, with restrictions, for warships in peace and in war. No power could bring into the Black Sea a fleet stronger than the strongest fleet of the littoral states. The shores of the Straits, the islands in the Sea of Marmara and the islands of Samothrace, Lemnos, Imbros and Tenedos were demilitarised. Turkey could keep a garrison of up to 12,000 men in Constantinople. Compliance was overseen by an International Straits Commission under Turkish chairmanship, acting under the auspices of the League of Nations, and the security of the zone was guaranteed by the great powers sitting on the League Council. Soviet Russia also signed the convention in August, but did not ratify it.

Ratification and the withdrawal of troops

The Grand National Assembly ratified the treaty on 23 August 1923. That same day the powers began withdrawing their troops from Constantinople, which had been occupied since November 1918. The last British, French and Italian units left the city on 4 October, and on 6 October the Ankara forces marched in. A few days later the Assembly made Ankara the capital, and on 29 October it proclaimed the republic. The other signatories ratified the treaty by mid-July 1924, and it came into force on 6 August 1924. The United States signed a separate treaty of amity and commerce with Turkey at Lausanne, but the Senate rejected it in January 1927, partly under pressure from Armenian organisations and their American sympathisers.

The unresolved questions were settled in the following years. In December 1925 the League of Nations Council awarded Mosul to Iraq, and in 1926 Turkey accepted this in an agreement with Britain and Iraq. The last change to the border was the incorporation into Turkey in 1939 of the Alexandretta district, the Hatay State. Contrary to a frequently encountered claim, therefore, the treaty did not fix all of modern Turkey’s borders, though it did settle almost all of them.

Significance

In Turkey, Lausanne became the founding act of the republic and is celebrated to this day as a diplomatic victory on a par with the victory on the Sakarya. In Greece it closed the era of the Megali Idea and, together with the population exchange, almost three thousand years of Greek presence in Asia Minor. In Britain, David Lloyd George, who since October 1922 had been merely a backbench MP, called the treaty “an abject, cowardly and infamous surrender”. Lausanne also proved one of the most durable treaties of the 20th century: the borders it drew, apart from the questions of Mosul and Hatay, remain in force today.

For the road to the Second World War, Lausanne mattered above all as an example. It was the only peace of those years in which the defeated forced the victors to make concessions – and this happened because it had first overturned the previous treaty by force. In the very year Lausanne was signed, France was occupying the Ruhr to compel Germany to fulfil the Treaty of Versailles. German nationalists saw the difference clearly. The historian Stefan Ihrig has shown how the right-wing press in Germany, and later the Nazis, held up the “new Turkey” as a model: a nation that had refused to accept a diktat, built an army, driven out the enemy and forced a new peace. A few months after the treaty was signed, Adolf Hitler tried to launch a march on Berlin from Munich. His chief model was Mussolini’s March on Rome, but according to Ihrig the conspirators also had Ankara in mind: a provincial centre of national resistance that had defied the government in the capital and won.

The second lesson was the population exchange. The Lausanne convention was the first to sanction in international law, on such a scale, the compulsory resettlement of more than one and a half million people solely on account of their religion, and its effectiveness was taken as proof that national disputes could be “solved” by separating populations. Historians such as Norman Naimark and Hans-Lukas Kieser point out that this precedent fascinated revisionists and planners in the 1930s and 1940s, and in December 1944 Winston Churchill invoked it when persuading the House of Commons of the case for expelling the Germans from the east. The 1923 amnesty, which allowed the crimes against the Armenians to be forgotten, is often linked with a remark attributed to Hitler in August 1939: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The authenticity of these words, known only from an indirect account, is disputed, but the question itself captures well what impunity had taught.

The dispute over the Straits survived longest in European politics. The demilitarisation the Turks accepted in 1923 rested on faith in the collective guarantees of the League of Nations. When that faith collapsed in the 1930s, and Mussolini’s Italy was fortifying the Dodecanese opposite the Anatolian coast, Turkey demanded a revision. It went about this differently from Hitler, who in March 1936 unilaterally sent troops into the Rhineland: it approached the signatories, and the Montreux Convention of 20 July 1936 restored its right to fortify the Straits and to control the passage of warships. On the basis of this convention, Turkey closed the Straits to the warships of the belligerents during the Second World War and remained neutral almost to the end, joining the war on the Allied side only in February 1945.