They All Made Peace - What is Peace? The Lausanne Conference and the New Middle East, 1922-23: the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the New Imperial Order

Abstract

The last of the post-World War One peace settlements, Lausanne was very different from Versailles. Like its German and Austro-Hungarian allies the defeated Ottoman Empire had initially been presented with a dictated peace, in 1920. In just two years, however, the Kemalist insurgency turned defeat into victory, enabling Turkey to claim its place as the first sovereign state in the Middle East. Meanwhile the Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Egyptians, Kurds and other communities who had also populated the Ottoman Empire sought their own forms of sovereignty, jostled between the Soviet Union and the resurgence of empire in the guise of League of Nations mandates. Already disillusioned with the Versailles toolkit, recourse was had to a new peace-making initiative: a forced population exchange, affecting 1.5m people. They All Made Peace is the first publication to consider the Treaty and its legacy a century on. A stellar group of historians present a contrapuntal, multi-perspective analysis of 1923. 0Chapters consider British, Turkish and Soviet designs in the post-Ottoman world, situate the population exchanges relative to earlier and subsequent peacemaking efforts, and discuss the economic factors behind the reallocation of Ottoman debt as well as the management of refugee flows. Further chapters examine the?absent presences?, Kurdish, Arab, Iranian, Armenian, and other communities refused formal accreditation at Lausanne, but nonetheless forced to live with the consequences, which are still emerging, one hundred years on