Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T15:02:34.720Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fabricating Fidelity: Nation-Building, International Law, and the Greek–Turkish Population Exchange

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

UMUT ÖZSU
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Supported by Athens and Ankara, and implemented largely by the League of Nations, the Greek–Turkish population exchange uprooted and resettled hundreds of thousands. The aim here was not to organize plebiscites, channel self-determination claims, or install protective mechanisms for minorities – all familiar features of the Allies’ management of imperial disintegration in Europe after 1919. Nor was it to restructure a given economy and society from top to bottom, generating an entirely new legal order in the process; this had often been the case with colonialism, and would characterize much of the Mandate System in the interbellum. Instead, the goal was to deploy a unique legal mechanism – not in conformity with European practice, but also distinct from most extra-European governance regimes – in order to resolve ethno-national conflict by redividing land, reshaping national identities, and unleashing new processes of capital accumulation.

Keywords

minority protectionnation-buildingNear Eastpopulation exchangesemi-periphery
Type
ARTICLES
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 2011 , pp. 823 - 847
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (translated by B. Fowkes) (1990), 182.

2 Quoted in R. Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero (1997), 526.

3 See Nansen, F., ‘The Suffering People of Europe’, in Haberman, F. W. (ed.), Nobel Lectures: Peace 1901–1925 (1972), I, 361Google Scholar.

4 For his own account of Armenia, see F. Nansen, Armenia and the Near East (1928). For analysis, see D. Kévonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: Les acteurs européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l'entre-deux-guerres (2004), especially at 298–315.

5 J. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (2000), 127–9; Hieronymi, O., ‘The Nansen Passport: A Tool of Freedom of Movement and of Protection’, (2003) 22 Refugee Survey Quarterly 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Leach, H. G., ‘Fridtjof Nansen’, (1948) 14 University of Kansas City Review 167, at 167, 173Google Scholar.

7 F. Nansen, Through Siberia, the Land of the Future (translated by A. G. Chater) (1914), 352–3.

8 F. Nansen, Norway and the Union with Sweden (1905), 153. Please note that I use ‘Near East’ in roughly the same sense in which it was generally employed at the time of the Greek–Turkish exchange, namely as a geographical term primarily denoting the Balkans and Asia Minor. The term is both orientalist, having gained wide currency in late nineteenth-century Europe in connection with the ‘Eastern Question’, and notoriously ambiguous, with a range of application that fluctuates radically from one source to another. But it captures many of the assumptions held by those involved in or commenting upon the exchange, and so I have chosen to retain it.

9 The term was one of which he was fond; see, e.g., R. Huntford, Fridtjof Nansen and the Unmixing of Greeks and Turks in 1924 (1998), 8.

10 The best first-hand account is J. L. Barton's Story of Near East Relief (1915–1930): An Interpretation (1930).

11 A 1914 compendium detailed no less than 100 proposals for partition over the centuries; the ‘list of contributors’ included an Erasmus or Leibniz for every Metternich or Garibaldi. See T. G. Djuvara, Cent projets de partage de la Turquie (1281–1913) (1914).

12 A young Nicolas Politis would observe that, during the 1897 Greek–Turkish War, fought over Crete, the Ottomans had had recourse to mass expulsion of Greeks – a measure that may have ‘tombée en désuétude’ over the years but was nevertheless ‘licite à la condition d'être exercée humainement’. N. Politis, La guerre gréco-turque au point de vue du droit international: Contribution à l'étude de la question d'Orient (1898), 21.

13 Particularly in Russia, where public administrators engineered far-reaching land reforms. Holquist, P., ‘“In Accord with State Interests and the People's Wishes”: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia's Resettlement Administration’, (2010) 69 Slavic Review 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 The Greco–Bulgarian ‘Communities’, Advisory Opinion, PCIJ Rep., (1930) Series B No. 17. Four sets of movements – three of which never truly made it past the planning stage – have conventionally been deemed precedents. Each of these experiences – the first projected for Bulgaria and Turkey in 1913, the second planned for Greece and Turkey in 1914, the third and most comprehensive implemented between Greece and Bulgaria in 1919, and the fourth designed for Greece and Turkey again, this time in 1919 – laid the legal and logistical groundwork for the much more ambitious 1923 exchange. Though traditionally understood to typify a different kind of phenomenon, the Armenian genocide was co-ordinated by many of the same Turkish policy makers and driven by much the same technology of demographic engineering. For detailed analysis of the 1919 Greek–Bulgarian exchange, see S. P. Ladas, The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (1932), Part I; A. Wurfbain, L'échange gréco–bulgare des minorités ethniques (1930). From a rapidly growing literature examining these movements, the Armenian genocide included, see especially F. Dündar, Modern Türkiye'nin Şifresi: İttihat ve Terakki'nin Etnisite Mühendisliği (1913–1918) (2008).

15 C. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (translated by E. Kennedy) (1988), 9.

16 C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (translated by G. L. Ulmen) (2003), 128.

17 R. Redslob, Le principe des nationalités: Les origines, les fondements psychologiques, les forces adverses, les solutions possibles (1930), 168.

18 Ténékidès, C. G., ‘Le statut des minorités et l'échange obligatoire des populations gréco-turques’, (1924) 31 RGDIP 72, at 86Google Scholar.

19 A. Devedji, L'échange obligatoire des minorités grecques et turques en vertu de la convention de Lausanne du 30 janvier 1923 (1929), 84.

20 Séfériadès, S., ‘L'échange des populations’, (1928/IV) 24 RCADI 307, at 331Google Scholar.

21 Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations (Lausanne Convention VI, January 30th, 1923, Article 2), Advisory Opinion, PCIJ Rep., (1925) Series B No. 10, at 17.

22 Palestine Royal Commission, Report, Cmd. 5479 (1937), 390. For analysis, see M. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (2009), 134.

23 Westlake, J., ‘The Balkan Question and International Law’, (1906) 60 The Nineteenth Century and After 889, at 892Google Scholar.

24 A fundamentally intra-European phenomenon, minority protection was instituted in one form or another in a string of states from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the so-called ‘minorities belt’. Iraq is sometimes considered an exception, as it was made to declare its commitment to minority protection as a condition for Britain's formal withdrawal as a mandatory power, but this declaration quickly proved makeshift and toothless. Pedersen, S., ‘Getting Out of Iraq – in 1932: The League of Nations and the Road to Normative Statehood’, (2010) 115 American Historical Review 975, at 992–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 The terminology of ‘semi-periphery’ on which I rely derives mainly from world systems theory, whose adherents have analysed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman history as an exemplary case of politico-economic peripheralization or semi-peripheralization; from a voluminous literature, see especially R. Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (1988), 5, 37–8, 48, 54. This terminology finds something of a parallel in the nineteenth-century ‘standard of civilization’, that fluctuating metric for calibrating international legal personality that was frequently deemed to require a specific category for ‘semi-barbarous’ or ‘semi-civilized’ states. Arguably the most famous illustration is offered by Lorimer, for whom Turkey, like China, Japan, Persia, Siam, and ‘other separate States of central Asia’, demanded ‘partial political recognition’ – recognition of a sort that Lorimer could not countenance extending to ‘savage’ regions and terrae nullius. J. Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations: A Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political Communities (1883), I, at 101–2, 239.

26 For a classic statement, see J. B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers 1939–1945 (1946), 17.

27 On the general shift, see Kennedy, D., ‘The Move to Institutions’, (1987) 8 Cardozo Law Review 841Google Scholar. See further T. Skouteris, The Notion of Progress in International Law Discourse (2010), Chapters 2 and 3.

28 For the convention regulating the exchange, see Convention concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations and Protocol, signed at Lausanne, 30 January 1923, 32 LNTS 75. For the peace treaty, see Treaty of Peace, signed at Lausanne, 24 July 1923, 28 LNTS 11. For the entire package (often termed the ‘Treaty of Lausanne’), see Treaty with Turkey and Other Instruments, signed at Lausanne, 24 July 1923, (1924) 18 AJIL Sup. 1.

29 For the minutes in English, see Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs (1922–1923): Records of Proceedings and Draft Terms of Peace, Cmd. 1814 (1923). For the French, see Conférence de Lausanne sur les affaires du Proche-Orient (1922–1923): Recueil des Actes de la Conférence, 6 vols. (1923).

30 Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the Greek–Turkish exchange among historians. From a growing literature, see especially R. Hirschon (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey (2003); M. Pekin (ed.), Yeniden Kurulan Yaşamlar: 1923 Türk–Yunan Zorunlu Nüfus Mübadelesi (2005); O. Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco–Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934 (2006). However, informed legal analysis of the exchange is exceedingly rare. One overview can be found in Barutciski, M., ‘Les transferts de populations quatre-vingts ans après la Convention de Lausanne’, (2003) 41 Canadian Yearbook of International Law 271Google Scholar. For analysis of Lausanne from the standpoint of self-determination, see C. J. Drew, ‘Population Transfer: The Untold Story of the International Law of Self-Determination’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of London (2005), 93–110. I engage with the international law of self-determination only tangentially here, as I am not persuaded that it offers the most illuminating lens for explaining the exchange as a distinct mode of nation-building. What made this mechanism distinctive, particularly in the present context, was not so much the fact that it showed up unsavoury features of self-determination – a concept whose status under the international law of the period was still somewhat nebulous – but the fact that it deviated both from minority protection and from neo-colonialism of the mandatory variety – and in a way that can be appreciated only through close attention to the socio-historical and politico-economic characteristics of the context at hand.

31 Pallis, A. A., ‘The Exchange of Populations in the Balkans’, (1925) 97 The Nineteenth Century and After 376, at 377Google Scholar.

32 Report of the American Section of the International Commission on Mandates in Turkey, reproduced in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris Peace Conference 1919 (1947), XII, at 751.

33 See, e.g., S. J. Shaw, From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of National Liberation 1918–1923: A Documentary Study (2000), II, 429–37. For related proposals, see T. Z. Tunaya, Türkiye'de Siyasal Partiler (1986), II, at 245–63.

34 Bourdieu, P., ‘The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field’ (translated by Terdiman, R.), (1987) 38 Hastings Law Journal 805Google Scholar. I have attempted elsewhere to sketch the implications of such an approach for the study of international law; see U. Özsu, ‘The Question of Form: Methodological Notes on Dialectics and International Law’, (2010) 23 LJIL 687, especially at 697–702.

35 A. D. McNair, ‘Equality in International Law’, (1927) 26 Mich. LR 131, at 135.

36 Cf. Berman, N., “‘But the Alternative is Despair”: European Nationalism and the Modernist Renewal of International Law’, (1993) 106 Harvard Law Review 1792CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Minutes of the Territorial and Military Commission (TMC) on 1 December 1922, in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 111, 114.

38 An American delegate would write that ‘Curzon seemed to have no understanding of the Turkish national aspirations; he did no good to the cause of the Allies by browbeating Ismet at the conference table as if the latter had been one of his “natives” in India’. J. C. Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904–1945 (edited by W. Johnson) (1952), I, 553. Similarly, the memoirs of Turkey's second-highest-ranking delegate speak of the Allies’ lack of appreciation for the Turks’ ‘new mentality’. R. Nur, Lozan Hatıraları (1999), 50 (translation mine).

39 TMC minutes (13 December 1922), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 204, 214.

40 Ibid.

41 TMC minutes (12 December 1922), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 173, 177.

42 Russia's move in the early nineteenth century to merge its ‘humanitarian’ interest in the Balkans with a distinctly post-Napoleonic appeal for national independence for Slavic peoples is a classic case in point. Mirkine-Guetzévitch, B., ‘L'influence de la Révolution française sur le développement du droit international dans l'Europe orientale’, (1928/II) 22 RCADI 295, at 424Google Scholar.

43 TMC minutes (13 December 1922), supra note 39, at 207.

44 Ibid., at 212.

45 Ibid.

46 TMC minutes (27 January 1923), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 406, 412. It is a matter of some interest, though, that Curzon attempted to partition Bengal by segregating Hindus and Muslims. Weitz, E. D., ‘From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions’, (2008) 113 American Historical Review 1313, at 1337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 TMC minutes (12 December 1922), supra note 41, at 177 (emphasis added). Curzon was given to making such statements; see, e.g., M. MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (2003), 373.

48 Art. 7 accorded Turkey the right ‘à participer aux avantages du droit public et du concert Européens’ – a notoriously ambiguous statement, but one conventionally understood to entail entry into the European state system. General Treaty for the Re-Establishment of Peace between Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, Sardinia and Turkey, and Russia, signed at Paris, 30 March 1856, 114 CTS 409, at 414.

49 Quoted in H. Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase 1919–1925: A Study in Post-War Diplomacy (1934), 298.

50 G. H. Bennett, British Foreign Policy during the Curzon Period, 1919–24 (1995), 91. Curzon had experience in this regard, having established a battery of intelligence agencies in India. R. J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 (1995), Chapter 2.

51 See, e.g., M. L. Smith, Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922 (1998), 240.

52 H. J. Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period 1918–1940 (1997), 11, 14.

53 Barlas, D., ‘Friends or Foes? Diplomatic Relations between Italy and Turkey, 1923–36’, (2004) 36 International Journal of Middle East Studies 231, at 233CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 See, e.g., V. Chirol, ‘Our Imperial Interests in Nearer and Further Asia’, in The Empire and the Century: A Series of Essays on Imperial Problems and Possibilities by Various Writers (1905), 728, at 728.

55 Karvounarakis, T., ‘End of an Empire: Great Britain, Turkey and Greece from the Treaty of Sevres to the Treaty of Lausanne’, (2000) 41 Balkan Studies 171, at 172Google Scholar.

56 Treaty of Peace between the Allied Powers and Turkey, signed at Sèvres, 10 August 1920, (1921) 15 AJIL Sup. 179.

57 A. Özcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain (1877–1924) (1997), Chapter 6. Efforts to win support among Muslims in India and elsewhere were not new; they had been made repeatedly and with great success by Abdülhamid II, the last sultan to wield effective authority. See especially K. H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (2001), 211–14, 233–9.

58 See, e.g., de Zayas, A. M., ‘International Law and Mass Population Transfers’, (1975) 16 Harvard International Law Journal 207, at 224Google Scholar.

59 Treaty of Friendship between Russia and Turkey, Moscow, 16 March 1921, 118 BFSP 990.

60 First, that respecting the Turkish straits; see, e.g., TMC minutes (8 December 1922), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 154–65. Cf. A. Fuad, La question des Détroits: ses origines, son évolution, sa solution à la Conférence de Lausanne (1928), 135–43; S. Kabbara, Le régime des Détroits (Bosphore et Dardanelles) avant et depuis le traité de Lausanne (1929), 88–98.

61 See especially B. Gökay, A Clash of Empires: Turkey between Russian Bolshevism and British Imperialism, 1918–1923 (1997), 109–12.

62 See, e.g., TMC minutes (14 December 1922), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 216, 217.

63 Fisher, J., ‘The Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest and British Responses to Bolshevik and Other Intrigues against the Empire during the 1920s’, (2000) 34 Journal of Asian History 1, at 2Google Scholar.

64 Cf. D. Dakin, ‘The Importance of the Greek Army in Thrace during the Conference of Lausanne 1922–1923’, in Greece and Great Britain during World War I: First Symposium Organized in Thessaloniki (December 15–17, 1983) by the Institute for Balkan Studies in Thessaloniki and King's College in London (1985), 211.

65 Quoted in F. M. Göçek, ‘The Politics of History and Memory: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Lausanne Peace Conference, 1922–1923’, in I. Gershoni, H. Erdem, and U. Woköck (eds.), Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions (2002), 207, at 214.

66 TMC minutes (1 December 1922), supra note 37, at 113.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., at 114.

69 Ibid., at 117.

70 See, e.g., ibid., at 113.

71 Ibid., at 116–17.

72 Ibid., at 115.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid., at 114.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., at 115.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid., at 116.

79 Ibid.

80 One searches in vain in Nansen's transcribed speech for an indication that ‘the economic aspect’ was not of greatest significance. A search of the French minutes yields similar results; see ‘Séance du vendredi 1er décembre 1922’, in Conférence de Lausanne, I, supra note 29, at 95, 96–9.

81 TMC minutes (1 December 1922), supra note 37, at 117. Turkey adopted this stance frequently when dealing with League officials; for a revealing case, see Watenpaugh, K. D., ‘The League of Nations' Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927’, (2010) 115 American Historical Review 1315, at 1333–6CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

82 TMC minutes (1 December 1922), supra note 37, at 117.

83 Ibid., at 120.

84 ‘Statement read by Ismet Pasha’, annex to TMC minutes (12 December 1922), supra note 41, at 190–204.

85 Ibid., at 197.

86 Ibid., at 191.

87 Chief among them, P. M. Brown's Foreigners in Turkey: Their Juridical Status (1914). Brown's book – a slim study growing partly out of his time in the American embassy in Istanbul – lent support to İsmet's position; see, e.g., ibid., at 23–4, 118. For İsmet's reference, see ‘Statement’, supra note 84, at 190–1.

88 Ibid., at 192. The claim was not without basis, as humanitarian intervention's doctrinal crystallization had been related integrally to great-power involvement in the Near East. ‘L'origine et le développement de l'idée d'intervention d'humanité paraissent liés dans une certaine mesure à l'histoire de la question d'Orient’, declared one jurist, adding ‘c'est au fur et à mesure des excès commis par le gouvernement turc que la diplomatie tente de cette idée de timides applications et que la doctrine se précise’. Rougier, A., ‘La théorie de l'intervention d'humanité’, (1910) 17 RGDIP 468, at 472Google Scholar. It was Turkey, argued another, that was ‘[t]he particular case thinly concealed behind most of the generalities concerning humanitarian intervention’, observing that ‘the discussion of humanitarian intervention has become so bound up with atrocities in the Near East that it may be doubted whether it would have been quite so freely admitted by its supporters in the case of barbarities incidental to internal disputes in any other State’. Winfield, P. H., ‘The Grounds of Intervention in International Law’, (1924) 5 BYIL 149, at 161–2Google Scholar. A particularly vocal exponent of such views at the time of the exchange was André Mandelstam, who argued that ‘[l]a cause principale de l'intervention constante des grandes Puissances en Turquie a été dans le caractère despotique de l'Empire ottoman’ and that ‘les Puissances se pénétraient peu à peu de la conviction que le respect du droit humain ne devait pas être imposé aux seuls Turcs’. Mandelstam, A., ‘La protection des minorités’, (1923/I) 1 RCADI 363, at 373, 382Google Scholar.

89 ‘Statement’, supra note 84, at 201 and similarly at 203–4.

90 Ibid., at 204.

91 Ibid.

92 TMC minutes (12 December 1922), supra note 41, at 189.

93 Loewenfeld, E., ‘The Protection of Private Property under the Minorities Protection Treaties’, (1930) 16 Transactions of the Grotius Society 41, at 41Google Scholar.

94 As outlined in the Minority Schools in Albania opinion, the system had two objectives: to ‘secure for certain elements incorporated in a State, the population of which differs from them in race, language or religion, the possibility of living peaceably alongside that population and co-operating amicably with it’, and to preserve ‘the characteristics which distinguish them from the majority’. Minority Schools in Albania, Advisory Opinion, PCIJ Rep., (1935) Series A/B No. 64, at 17.

95 The most comprehensive analyses remain those in B. Braude and B. Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols. (1982).

96 Minutes of the Commission on the Régime of Foreigners (CRF) on 2 December 1922, in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 465, 469.

97 The two systems – the one designed for the zimmi (the non-Muslim subject of an Islamic sovereign), the other for the müstemin (the non-Muslim foreigner resident on Islamic soil) – intermeshed to form complex jurisdictional arrangements; see, e.g., L. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (2002), 108–9. Still, their relation is open to interpretation and not entirely clear; see, e.g., M. H. van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis, Consuls and Beratlıs in the 18th Century (2005), 30–1, 55–6.

98 See, e.g., F. Martens, Das Consularwesen und die Consularjurisdiction im Orient (translated by H. Skerst) (1874), 320; Lorimer, supra note 25, at 313–14; J. Westlake, Chapters on the Principles of International Law (1894), 101–3; E. Root, ‘The Basis of Protection to Citizens Residing Abroad’, in E. Root, Addresses on International Subjects (edited by R. Bacon and J. B. Scott) (1916), 43, at 48; L. Oppenheim, International Law: A Treatise (edited by R. F. Roxburgh) (1920), I, 34.

99 The term was employed loosely by Allied delegates in reference to commercial establishments, a feature of eastern Mediterranean trade at least as far back as the fondachi operated for trading and tax-farming purposes by Genoese, Venetian, and other merchants during the Renaissance. For references to such ‘colonies’, see, e.g., CRF minutes (28 December 1922), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 480, 484. For their proto-history, see K. Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (1999), especially at 134–41.

100 TMC minutes (13 December 1922), supra note 39, at 210.

101 TMC minutes (9 January 1923), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 289, 292.

102 Ibid., at 301.

103 ‘Statement’, supra note 84, at 203.

104 B. N. Şimşir (ed.), Lozan Telgrafları: Türk Diplomatik Belgelerinde Lozan Barış Konferansı (1990), I, at xiv (translation mine).

105 ‘Letter addressed to M. Paderewski by the President of the Conference transmitting to him the Treaty to be signed by Poland under Article 93 of the Treaty of Peace with Germany’, reproduced in H. W. V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (1921), V, 432.

106 Ibid., at 434. See also ‘Statement’, supra note 84, at 202.

107 See, e.g., H. Rosting, ‘Protection of Minorities by the League of Nations', (1923) 17 AJIL 641, at 647; P. E. Corbett, ‘What Is the League of Nations?’, (1924) 5 BYIL 119, at 145.

108 With the institution of new modes of minority protection after 1919, wrote an early republican international lawyer, ‘powerful states were held to one standard, while other states were held to another’. This demanded a decision: ‘Europe must choose between two paths: either everyone within a state must be as much a subject of the nation as a subject of the state, or else borders must be redrawn and population exchanges undertaken in accordance with nations in order to remedy the situation. There can be no state within a state.’ M. C. Bilsel, Lozan (1998), II, at 266, 269 (translations mine). Sentiments such as these gained wide currency in the 1930s; for an assessment, see C. Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (2004), Chapters 10 and 11. And they remained with Turkish jurists for some time to come: for an aggressive illustration, see Y. M. Altuğ, Turkey and Some Problems of International Law (1958), 153 (asserting that ‘[t]he minority is subordinate to the sovereignty of the state and it must respect the juridical order on which its rights depend’).

109 ‘Statement’, supra note 84, at 202.

110 Ibid., at 202–3.

111 Ibid., at 202 and similarly at 203.

112 Ibid., at 203.

113 TMC minutes (9 January 1923), supra note 101, at 302.

114 Ibid.

115 For the argument in full, see TMC minutes (14 December 1922), supra note 62, at 222–3.

116 TMC minutes (12 December 1922), supra note 41, at 187.

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid., at 188.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid.

121 ‘Memorandum read by the Turkish Delegate at the Meeting of December 2, 1922, of the Commission on the Régime of Foreigners’, annex to CRF minutes (2 December 1922), supra note 96, at 471, 478.

122 That the capitulations were treaties was often assumed rather than argued. The most comprehensive pre-Lausanne study, for instance, began with the proposition that ‘[l]a condition des étrangers dans l'Empire Ottoman est réglée par une série de traités intervenus entre la Porte et la plupart des Etats chrétiens de l'Europe et de l'Amérique, auxquels on donne communément le nom de Capitulations’. G. P. du Rausas, Le régime des capitulations dans l'Empire ottoman (1902), I, at 1. This assumption was often shared by Allied delegates at Lausanne: see, e.g., CRF minutes (6 January 1923), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 508, 516 (an Italian delegate arguing that ‘the Capitulations were nothing more nor less than conventions’). For contemporaneous discussion of the question, which was never resolved definitively, see, e.g., S. S. Liu, Extraterritoriality: Its Rise and Its Decline (1925), Chapter 9; M. Essad, Du régime des capitulations ottomanes: Leur caractère juridique d'après l'histoire et les textes (1928).

123 ‘Memorandum’, supra note 121, at 478–9. More than a hint of the influence of contemporaneous German legal thinking can be felt here; see especially M. Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (2001), Chapter 3.

124 ‘Memorandum’, supra note 121, at 479.

125 Ibid.

126 Şimşir, supra note 104, at xiv.

127 ‘Memorandum’, supra note 121, at 479.

128 TMC minutes (13 December 1922), supra note 39, at 206–7.

129 Ibid., at 207.

130 Ottoman Circular Announcing the Abrogation of the Capitulations, 9 September 1914, reproduced in J. C. Hurewitz (ed.), Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East: A Documentary Record: 1535–1956 (1956), II, 2.

131 Aksakal, M., ‘Not “by those old books of international law, but only by war”: Ottoman Intellectuals on the Eve of the Great War’, (2004) 15 Diplomacy and Statecraft 507CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the context, see especially Ş. Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (2008), 167–82.

132 For analysis, see J.-A. Mazard, Le régime des capitulations en Turquie pendant la guerre de 1914 (1923); N. Sousa, The Capitulatory Régime of Turkey: Its History, Origin, and Nature (1933), 195–6; Rechid, A., ‘La condition des étrangers dans la République de Turquie’, (1933/IV) 46 RCADI 165, at 180–2Google Scholar. Germany had been dangling the carrot of terminating the capitulations for some time already. See, e.g., H. İnalcık, ‘Imtiyāzāt’, in B. Lewis et al. (eds.), The Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition (1986), III, at 1179, 1188; R. Bullard, Large and Loving Privileges: The Capitulations in the Middle East and North Africa (1960), 32. This was contemporaneous with the Drang nach Osten, a long-term strategy of expansion aimed in part at gaining control over Near Eastern markets. See, e.g., Ş. Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and Production (1987), 68–72, 79–81.

133 CRF minutes (28 December 1922), supra note 99, at 487.

134 Ibid., at 482.

135 Ibid., at 497. At their most extreme, such assessments were accompanied by sweeping denunciations like the claim that ‘un Droit Turc n'a jamais existé’ and that ‘l'admission de la Turquie comme membre de la famille des Nations européennes’ had been ‘une déplorable erreur’. C.-H. Lebeau, Essai sur la justice en Turquie (à propos du Traité de Lausanne) (1924), 87–8, 89. Cf. L. Ostrorog, The Angora Reform: Three Lectures Delivered at the Centenary Celebrations of University College on June 27, 28 and 29, 1927 (1927), 70 (describing Ankara's post-Lausanne reforms as ‘such a Revolution as the world of Islam had never seen’); G. Sauser-Hall, ‘La réception des droits européens en Turquie’, in Recueil de travaux publié à l'occasion de l'Assemblée de la Société suisse des juristes à Genève, du 4 au 6 septembre 1938 (1938), 323, at 345 (arguing that Turkey's importation of continental codes ‘complètement transformé son armature juridique’).

136 CRF minutes (2 December 1922), supra note 96, at 467.

137 Ibid.

138 Ibid., at 470; CRF minutes (28 December 1922), supra note 99, at 483.

139 Ibid.

140 The Japanese analogue had particularly deep roots: C. Aydın, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (2007), Chapter 4; Worringer, R., ‘“Sick Man of Europe” or “Japan of the Near East”? Constructing Ottoman Modernity in the Hamidian and Young Turk Eras’, (2004) 36 International Journal of Middle East Studies 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

141 CRF minutes (28 December 1922), supra note 99, at 497–8. This was a common sentiment: see, e.g., F. Nansen, ‘Reciprocal Exchange of Racial Minorities between Greece and Turkey’, C. 736. N447. 1922, (1923) 4 LNOJ 126, at 129; A. J. Toynbee, ‘The East after Lausanne’, (1923) 2 FA 84, at 95.

142 CRF minutes (2 December 1922), supra note 96, at 468. Cf. A. N. Karacan, Lozan Konferansı ve İsmet Paşa (1943), 106.

143 CRF minutes (6 January 1923), supra note 122, at 510.

144 TMC minutes (14 December 1922), supra note 62, at 226.

145 CRF minutes (28 December 1922), supra note 99, at 485; CRF minutes (27 January 1923), in Lausanne Conference, supra note 29, at 521, 523.

146 Ibid.

147 TMC minutes (14 December 1922), supra note 62, at 219.

148 An American delegate raised this issue explicitly, stating that ‘new precedents which tend to establish the right of nations to expel large bodies of their citizens to become burdens upon other nations must be carefully considered before countenance is given them, lest a new and unwholesome principle find foothold to vex international law and justice’. TMC minutes (12 December 1922), supra note 41, at 187.

149 Treaty of Sèvres, Arts. 62–4, 88–93, supra note 56, at 192–3, 198–9.

150 TMC minutes (9 January 1923), supra note 101, at 308. For reaction, see especially the documents reproduced in the American Committee Opposed to the Lausanne Treaty's The Lausanne Treaty, Turkey and Armenia (1926).

151 Curzon glossed this with apprehension: ‘The sub-commission originally pressed for the inclusion of all racial minorities, Moslem and non-Moslem – for instance, the Kurds, Circassians and Arabs. The Turkish delegation insisted that these minorities required no protection, and were quite satisfied with their lot under Turkish rule. I hope that this will be the case.’ TMC minutes (9 January 1923), supra note 101, at 296.

152 Lausanne Peace Treaty, supra note 28, at 31–7.

153 Ibid., at 31–3.

154 That pressure was applied to non-Muslim communities in following years to renounce their rights under Lausanne only compounded these difficulties. For the Greek case, see, e.g., A. Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek–Turkish Relations 1918–1974 (1992), Chapter 4; S. Akgönül, Türkiye Rumları: Ulus-Devlet Çağından Küreselleşme Çağına Bir Azınlığın Yok Oluş Süreci (translated by C. Gürman) (2007), 67–74.

155 L. Leontiades, ‘Der griechisch–türkische Bevölkerungsaustausch’, (1935) 5 ZaöRV 546, at 552 (translation mine).

156 Lausanne Peace Treaty, Arts. 46–57, supra note 28, at 37–51.

157 Commercial Convention, signed at Lausanne, 24 July 1923, 28 LNTS 171.

158 Declaration relating to the Administration of Justice, signed at Lausanne, 24 July 1923, 36 LNTS 161.

159 Indeed, it has been maintained that, despite having secured its political independence, Turkey was in some respects ‘one of the few countries where “Open Door” conditions actually held’, at least for a limited period after 1923. Ç. Keyder, The Definition of a Peripheral Economy: Turkey 1923–1929 (1981), 9, 69–71 for details. On these short-term limitations on protectionism, see also K. Boratav, Türkiye'de Devletçilik (2006), 33–5.

160 Lausanne Peace Treaty, supra note 28, at 27.

161 Legal Status of Eastern Greenland (Denmark v. Norway), PCIJ Rep., (1933) Series A/B No. 53, at 48.

162 Exchange Convention, supra note 28, at 77. Greeks resident on two islands allotted to Turkey were also exempted; see Lausanne Peace Treaty, Art. 14, supra note 28, at 17.

163 The Karamanlides/Karamanlılar, Turkish-speaking Orthodox Christians in central Anatolia, were, for example, subject to the exchange. R. Clogg, ‘A Millet within a Millet: The Karamanlides’, in D. Gondicas and C. Issawi (eds.), Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy, and Society in the Nineteenth Century (1999), 115, at 115, 131–2.

164 Disagreement regarding the scope of the exception lay at the heart of the dispute in Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, supra note 21.

165 Exchange Convention, supra note 28, at 79.

166 S. Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the World War, with a Collection of Official Documents (1933), I, at 42 (‘[T]he Allies avoided a plebiscite in every region of first importance save that of Upper Silesia, and . . . when they resorted to a plebiscite it was as a method of compromise, to escape from a dilemma rather than as a deliberate choice’).

167 Of the contexts to which the leading contemporaneous study found this right inapplicable, foremost was that of reciprocal emigration, ‘une voie radicale pour arriver à une solution du problème des minorités nationales’. J. L. Kunz, ‘L'option de nationalité’, (1930/I) 31 RCADI 107, at 134.

168 Exchange Convention, Arts. 8–17, supra note 28, at 79–85.

169 See, e.g., Kévonian, supra note 4, at 126–9; N. M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (2001), 108, 110, 171.

170 O. Korhonen, ‘The “State-Building Enterprise”: Legal Doctrine, Progress Narratives and Managerial Governance’, in B. Bowden, H. Charlesworth, and J. Farrall (eds.), The Role of International Law in Rebuilding Societies after Conflict: Great Expectations (2009), 15, at 15ff.

171 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, GA Res. 217A (III), UN Doc. A/810 (1948), at 71, Arts. 9, 13, 15, at 73–4.

172 Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of August 12, 1949, 75 UNTS 287, Arts. 49, 147, at 318, 388.

173 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, signed at Geneva, 28 July 1951, 189 UNTS 150, Arts. 32–3, at 174–6.

174 See generally J.-M. Henckaerts, Mass Expulsion in Modern International Law and Practice (1995).

175 M. J. Spiropoulos's contribution to G. B. Pallieri, ‘Les transferts internationaux de populations’, (1952/II) 44 Annuaire de l'Institut de droit international 138, at 185, 186.

176 A. S. Al-Khasawneh, Human Rights and Population Transfer: Final Report of the Special Rapporteur, UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/23 (1997), at 19.

177 W. W. White, The Status in International Law of the Fragments of the Ottoman Empire (1938), 331.

178 See, e.g., M. Pandolfi, ‘From Paradox to Paradigm: The Permanent State of Emergency in the Balkans’, in D. Fassin and M. Pandolfi (eds.), Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (2010), 153, at 168; D. Chandler, International Statebuilding: The Rise of Post-Liberal Governance (2010), Chapter 5.