Lausanne Conference, 1922-23: The Birth of the Turkish Republic and of European Appeasement, Guest Lecture - Assoc. Prof. Hans Lukas Kieser (University of Newcastle)

The Treaty of Lausanne, which is still in force, liquidated the Ottoman Empire and defined the post-Ottoman Middle East in 1923. It has since been referred to as the birth certificate of Republican Turkey. It was the last treaty in a series of treaties after the First World War, starting with the Versailles Treaty. It revised the Treaty of Paris-Sèvres and, in contrast to all previous treaty texts, was no longer headed by the Covenant of Geneva’s League of Nations. In this seminar, we will explore the question of how the eight-month Lausanne Conference was intertwined with the emergence of the Turkish Republic proclaimed shortly thereafter. Why did this republic start as a dictatorship right away? Why was the “Lausanne Peace” by no means a democratic peace, but rather recognised and emboldened antidemocratic forces in larger Europe? What had the Lausanne Conference and Turkish state-building to do with European appeasement? In this seminar, I will contend that European appeasement started with Lausanne, culminating with the Munich Conference or “Munich Betrayal” in 1938.