Tusan, Michelle: The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East' - Book Review by Jay Winter

 

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• Winter on Tusan, 'The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East' [Review]

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Winter on Tusan, 'The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East' [Review]

H-Net Reviews

Tusan, Michelle.  The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Illustrations, maps. 348 pp. $39.99 (cloth), ISBN 9781009371087.

Reviewed by Jay Winter (Yale University)
Published on H-Diplo (March, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=59901

The centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne on July 24, 1923, has been the occasion of the publication of two fine histories of the event from different national perspectives. Hans-Lukas Kieser’s When Democracy Died: The Middle East’s Enduring Peace of Lausanne (2023) is a richly documented history of the treaty in the context of the emergence of the authoritarian regime set up by Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal. Michelle Tusan, the author of two important books, one on Britain and the Armenian genocide (British Empire and the Armenian Genocide: Humanitarianism and the Imperial Politics from Gladstone to Churchill [2017]) and the second on the aftermath of the destruction of Smyrna in 1922 (Smyrna's Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East [2012]), now tells the story of Lausanne from the British perspective.

What distinguishes Tusan’s book is the way she braids together the problem of war and peace in the Middle East with the establishment of new forms of control of populations displaced by the war, both before and after the Armistice of 1918. Her chapter on refugee camps as concentration camps breaks new ground by showing how the term “civilian” became interchangeable with the term “refugee” and how both became the target of “negotiations with military, humanitarian and regional actors in the context of total war” (p. 84). The linkage between “coercion and care” (in Aidan Forth’s terms) provides the backdrop to the diplomatic maneuverings that led from the failed Treaty of Sèvres to the flawed Treaty of Lausanne.[1] Here Tusan explores a dynamic of humanitarian discipline that ties together saving lives with exploiting the labor of those protected. This is an important theme recently examined by a number of talented scholars. Davide Rodogno’s Night on Earth: A History of International Humanitarianism in the Near East, 1918–1930 (2021) and Laura Robson’s Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work (2023) are among the new research to which Tusan has contributed. A focus on displaced populations and the efforts made to deal with them enables Tusan to shape an original and incisive contribution to our understanding of Lausanne and its consequences.

The work of Tusan and her colleagues is to be welcomed in part because it fulfils the call Irish historian John Horne has made to return to the cultural history of politics.[2] Tusan’s interpretation of the use of film in humanitarian projects is a case in point. The use of the visual in commanding attention and in securing funding for refugee work is a subject of great importance today, the origins of which can be traced in Tusan’s study of Lausanne. In both part 2 and part 3 of her book, Tusan brings together in original ways the history of foreign policy and the history of refugees in the former Ottoman Empire. She helps account for the mixed sense of relief felt throughout the world that the last peace treaty of the Great War had been signed but that justice had not been done to those who had suffered the most in the war—millions of innocent civilians displaced, starved, raped, murdered, or left adrift in the decade after 1914.

No one book can do justice to the turbulent period 1918-23 to which the Treaty of Lausanne put a kind of conclusion, and the following remarks are meant as suggesting ways to both make use of and complement Tusan’s insights. Her mastery of British sources is her strength and to a degree her weakness. Unfortunately, the book uses French sources only in so far as they intersect with the British narrative. This means that she misses one of the key driving forces of the drafting of the Treaty of Lausanne: the economic weakness of both Britain and France in the aftermath of the war. One essential mediating factor in war, as in peace, between cultural history and political history is economic power. Britain and France both paid a huge economic price for victory in the 1914-18 war and were unable to mobilize the cash or the troops to secure their objectives in the postwar period. The crushing weight of the Lost Generation was felt in both countries, but British illusions about maintaining its hegemonic position in world affairs lasted longer than did French dreams of grandeur. Consequently, British and French objectives at Lausanne seemed to be aligned but were, in fact, very different.

The voluminous documents in French diplomatic archives in la Courneuve tell an important part of this story of the economic constraints on Allied diplomacy at Lausanne. These sources are not part of her story, which is overwhelmingly British in design. All three convenors of the Lausanne conference—Britain, France, and Italy—no longer had the means to drive through a settlement that even remotely resembled the failed Treaty of Sèvres. In effect, despite Lord Curzon’s eloquent attempt to draw attention to the Armenian cause, the ultimate goal was to make peace on almost any terms at Lausanne. The British archives, read together with the French archives, show this desperation for peace in no uncertain terms. But without the French sources, several of the economic forces that tore apart the wartime Allies and determined the outcome of the peace conference of 1923 are absent.

The punitive Treaty of Sèvres forced on the unfortunate Turkish sultan in the summer of 1920 was an example of imperial overreach in spades. The draft treaty had positive elements in it, but it was dead in the water from the start. The Allies could not get it ratified. Their failure was a dirty little secret not spoken of publicly or in polite circles at the peace conference. For Britain, the interwar depression began in late 1920. The economic headaches France faced at home made a hard line on German reparations its only choice. And when France moved against Germany in January 1923, it did not have British backing for the occupation of the Ruhr.[3]

The split between Britain and France was all about money. French investors lost one-sixth of their overall portfolio of foreign investments when the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia. Another one-sixth was invested in Turkey and the Middle East.[4] After 1918, that set of economic interests made France view the conflict with Turkey differently than did Britain. The bulk of British overseas investments were not in this region but in North and South America. No delegate to Lausanne missed this key difference underlying the increasingly acid exchanges between Curzon and French prime minister and foreign secretary Raymond Poincaré before, during, and after Lausanne. From an economic perspective, achieving peace rapidly with Turkey mattered more in Paris than it did in London. In short, the entente cordiale was dead, and the Turkish delegates at Lausanne knew it.

To Curzon, the French had promised in 1914 not to negotiate a separate peace with the Central powers. The Italians did the same in 1915. But Poincaré believed that that promise had lapsed in November 1918, and what they were doing at Lausanne was ending not the Great War but rather a nasty war between Greece and Turkey, which British prime minister Lloyd George insisted on fighting to the bitter end. Furthermore, long before Lausanne, France and Italy both had come to understandings with the new power in Turkey, the Grand National Assembly. They had no intention of supporting any military action should negotiations break down at Lausanne. When Curzon made his theatrical bluff, saying that either Turkey would sign a draft treaty or he would leave Lausanne, Mustafa Ismet called him on it. On February 4, Ismet said he could not sign the document. Curzon duly left in a huff, and absolutely nothing happened in consequence as the delegates at Lausanne resumed their deliberations and finished the job without him.

Reading the French archives together with the British archives enables us to see that economic necessity dictated the terms of the treaty, with the sole exception of Britain’s victory on Mosul. The treaty left control of Mosul to be decided by the League of Nations, and at Geneva, Britain got what it wanted on this point. Since the Turkish delegation got everything else they asked for, it was in a giving vein even on the sensitive issue of Mosul. As Tusan notes, for Turkey, the prize they won was international recognition and a free hand over how it treated “minorities” within Turkey. Nowhere in the treaty can we find the word “Armenia” or “Armenians.” The conference chose peace and economic recovery over justice and the protection of the rights of religious minorities.

The British Foreign Office was fully aware of these parameters of French diplomacy. And the French knew very well that Britain was led by a prime minister whose support for the Greek side in the post-1918 period could not be backed up by cash or by sufficient military force to make a difference. The problem of penury was even more evident in Lloyd George’s client state, Greece. If anyone needed a lesson in how to make a mess of military operations by ignoring economic realities, you need look no further than the behavior of the Greek government after Eleftherios Venizelos was removed from power.

When the peace conference at Lausanne opened in November 1922, the only nation with an army in the field worthy of the name was the Turkish army under Mustafa Kemal and the Grand National Assembly. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, decorum aside, the British delegation in Lausanne had no clothes. One bit of gossip had it that an inebriated valet stole Curzon’s trousers in Lausanne; the metaphor mattered more than the attire in question. Without one hundred thousand men in the field, the British could not force the new Turkish authorities in Ankara to protect minorities, let alone to carve out a homeland in Anatolia for the survivors of the Armenian genocide. And the Conservative-dominated House of Commons was not going to pay the price for another bout of warfare. Peace broke out by default, not by British design. In this sense, Tusan’s story is that of a British failure. Promises made to the Armenians and to the Kurds at Sèvres vanished into thin air. That is hinted at in T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland,” written in 1922, when he wrote “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept.”[5] All that suffering, and for this document?

In France, the Treaty of Lausanne was not a failure but the liquidation of a bad debt that was owed to the survivors of the Armenian genocide to provide them with a homeland. Instead France settled for peace with the new Turkey and the beginning of a new phase of foreign investment. In 1923, Maurice Bompard, formerly French ambassador to Constantinople and head of the French delegation at Lausanne, signed the treaty for his country. Four years earlier, he put together a brochure for French investors, highlighting the opportunities available for them in Turkey once peace arrived. His assignment and that of his colleagues was to end the state of war between France and Turkey. At Lausanne, Bompard finished the job. Both he and his Italian colleagues saw the deliberations in very different terms than did Curzon and the rest of the British delegation.

For the British and French delegates, the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne on July 24, 1923, is a moment that arose out of two very different imperatives. Many of them were financial. To say so is not to detract from Tusan’s important contribution to the history of the Greater War in the Middle East. Her book is a fine account of the British part of the story. She brings to her work a sharp analytical eye and a mastery of a wide range of archives not previously exploited.[6] She is one of a new generation of scholars of the period of the Great War, many of them women, taking the field in new and exciting directions. They draw from social and cultural history materials and insights that considerably enrich our understanding of diplomatic history. My hope is that in the future these talented cultural historians make the most of old-fashioned economic history. To (mildly) paraphrase Mao Zedong, power still comes out of the barrel of a bank.

Notes

[1]. Aidan Forth, “An Empire of Camps: British Imperialism and the Concentration of Civilians, 1876-1903” (PhD diss., Stanford University Press, 2012), v, 5, 25, 200, 249, 364; and Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain's Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 18, 223.

[2]. John Horne, “End of a Paradigm? The Cultural History of the Great War,” Past & Present 242 (February 2019): 155-92.

[3]. For the French side, see Stanislas Jeannesson, Poincaré, la France et la Ruhr, 1922-1924: Histoire d'une occupation (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1998); and Stanislas Jeannesson, “Pourquoi la France a-t-elle occupé la Ruhr?,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d'histoire 51 (1996): 56-67. For the British side, see Conan Fischer, The Ruhr Crisis, 1923-1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 

[4]. There is general scholarly agreement on the order of magnitude, though not the precise regional distribution, of France’s foreign investment portfolios. V. Necia Geyikdači, Foreign Investment in the Ottoman Empire: International Trade and Relations 1854-1914 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); and V. Necia Geyikdači, “French Direct Investments in the Ottoman Empire before World War I,” Enterprise & Society12, no. 3 (2011): 525-61. Adam Tooze and Ted Fertik put the share of France’s portfolio of overseas investments at even higher levels. See Adam Tooze and Ted Fertik, “The World Economy and the Great War,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 40, no. 2 (2014): 214-38, esp. 219. See also, Suzanne Berger, Notre première mondialisation: Leçons d’un échec oublié (Paris: Seuil, 2003).

[5]. T. S. Eliot, “The Wasteland” (1922), verse 182, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land.

[6]. There is one detail she needs to correct in the second edition of the book. On page 50 she says that the Battle of the Somme “would ultimately kill over one million British, French, and German soldiers.” The Battle of the Somme was indeed horrendous, but it cost not one million lives but one million casualties.

Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History emeritus at Yale University. He was editor in chief of the Cambridge History of the First World War (2014) and is author of The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923: The Civilianization of War (2022).

Citation: Jay Winter. Review of Tusan, Michelle. The Last Treaty: Lausanne and the End of the First World War in the Middle East. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59901

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.