FABRICATING FIDELITY: NATION-BUILDING, INTERNATIONAL LAW, and the GREEK-TURKISH POPULATION EXCHANGE by Umut Özsu a Thesis
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
FABRICATING FIDELITY: NATION-BUILDING, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND THE GREEK-TURKISH POPULATION EXCHANGE by Umut Özsu A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Juridical Sciences Faculty of Law University of Toronto © Copyright by Umut Özsu (2011) Abstract FABRICATING FIDELITY: NATION-BUILDING, INTERNATIONAL LAW, AND THE GREEK-TURKISH POPULATION EXCHANGE Umut Özsu Doctor of Juridical Sciences (S.J.D.) Faculty of Law University of Toronto 2011 This dissertation concerns a crucial episode in the international legal history of nation-building: the Greek-Turkish population exchange. Supported by Athens and Ankara, and implemented largely by the League of Nations, the population exchange showcased the new pragmatism of the post-1919 order, an increased willingness to adapt legal doctrine to local conditions. It also exemplified a new mode of non-military nation-building, one initially designed for sovereign but politico-economically weak states on the semi-periphery of the international legal order. The chief aim here, I argue, was not to organize plebiscites, channel self-determination claims, or install protective mechanisms for vulnerable minorities Ŕ all familiar features of the Allied Powers‟ management of imperial disintegration in central and eastern Europe after the First World War. Nor was the objective 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 in Asia and Africa, and would characterize much of the mandates system ii throughout the interwar years. Instead, the goal was to deploy a unique mechanism Ŕ not entirely in conformity with European practice, but also distinct from non-European governance regimes Ŕ to reshape the demographic composition of Greece and Turkey. I substantiate this argument by marshalling a range of material from international law, legal history, and historical sociology. I first examine minority protection‟s development into an instrument of intra-European nation-building during the long nineteenth century, showing how population exchange emerged in the Near East in the 1910s as a radical alternative to minority protection. I then provide a close reading of the travaux préparatoires of the 1922-3 Conference of Lausanne, at which a peace settlement formalizing the exchange was concluded. Finally, I analyze the Permanent Court of International Justice‟s 1925 opinion in Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, examining it from the standpoint of wide-ranging disputes concerning the place of religion and ethnicity in the exchange process. My aim throughout is to show that the Greek-Turkish exchange laid the groundwork for a mechanism of legal nation-building which would later come to be deployed in a variety of different contexts but whose precise status under international law would remain contested. iii for Allison Glaser, who endured it with wisdom and elegance, Nuran and Tamer Özsu, who supported it from the beginning, and Emma, who always remained by my side iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My grandfather, Nureddin Özsu, was a frustrated student of law. Born to a family of modest means, he left his provincial hometown to study in Istanbul in the 1930s. He was forced to abandon his studies at the University of Istanbul Faculty of Law midway through his degree, however, when he was drafted into the army during the Second World War (in preparation for an invasion which, happily, never materialized). He settled for a civil service career in the small, dusty town of Tavşanlı, eventually moving from there to Ankara. An ardent secularist, convinced of the necessity of modernization, my grandfather was also a life-long student of tasavvuf, the canon of Sufi teaching. In principle, he was as staunch an advocate of women‟s rights as any of his contemporaries; in practice, he insisted on maintaining a rigid division of labour within the home. Committed though he was to nationalism, he was embarrassed by what had been done to minority peoples in its name. He held down a number of office jobs, but always nursed literary ambitions. I would have liked to have been able to show my grandfather Ŕ whom neither I nor anyone else knew intimately Ŕ that the law to which he had wanted to devote himself as a young man is at least as patchy and pock-marked, as shot through with contradiction, as he was. Perhaps it is better that I never got the chance. * * * My supervisors, Jutta Brunnée and Karen Knop, deserve my sincere and heartfelt thanks for nearly four years of guidance and encouragement. Jutta shepherded the dissertation through treacherous theoretical territory, and helped sharpen its arguments greatly. Karen was a touchstone for interwar international law, and helped frame and finesse the project enormously. Draft after draft, meeting after meeting, their astute and detailed comments proved invaluable. Nehal Bhuta offered a number of suggestions at the project‟s outset which played a critical role in its design and development. I thank him for these suggestions, as well as for his helpful comments on the final dissertation. v I drew upon Nergis Canefe‟s knowledge of historical sociology when initially conceptualizing the project. I also thank her for facilitating some of my research in Turkey. I was deeply honoured to have Anne Orford as my external examiner. I thank her for an exceptionally careful reading of the dissertation, and for a number of penetrating suggestions and observations that I will be pondering closely over the months to come. I have benefited from conversation and correspondence with a variety of scholars, legal and non-legal, during the course of my graduate studies. For counsel, criticism, engagement with draft material, or simply for forwarding their own published or unpublished work, my thanks go to Nathaniel Berman, Tanıl Bora, Bill Bowring, B. S. Chimni, Matthew Craven, Fuat Dündar, David Dyzenhaus, Anver Emon, Huri İslamoğlu, David Kennedy, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Martti Koskenniemi, Patrick Macklem, Erez Manela, Susan Marks, Mark Mazower, Lauri Mälksoo, Frédéric Mégret, China Miéville, Akbar Rasulov, Kerry Rittich, Thomas Skouteris, Turgut Tarhanlı, Mark Toufayan, Keith David Watenpaugh, and Peer Zumbansen. I also thank the large number of graduate students, in Toronto and elsewhere, with whom I exchanged ideas, compared notes, and refined allegiances. Staff at the University of Toronto‟s Robarts and Bora Laskin libraries, Osgoode Hall Law School‟s library, the National Library of Turkey, and Columbia University‟s Rare Book and Manuscript Library assisted diligently. Ahmet Yüksel, antiquarian bookseller extraordinaire, was particularly helpful in locating less accessible material in Ankara. Finally, my thanks go to the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generosity and institutional support. vi CONTENTS TABLE OF TREATIES AND OTHER INSTRUMENTS ix TABLE OF CASES xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xiv NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION xv INTRODUCTION 1 Organization of the Dissertation 6 The International Legal Field of the Exchange 13 Distinguishing the Problematic 18 CHAPTER I. Governing the Ungovernable: Turkey and the International 26 Law of Minority Protection, 1815-1923 Minority Protection as Collective Action – The Long Nineteenth Century 27 Managing Minorities in a New World Order 43 Before and After the Exchange 57 CHAPTER II. En Route to the Exchange: Demographic Engineering in the 67 Near East, 1913-9 Early Experiments in Demographic Engineering 69 A Refuge for the Displaced 80 Toward a Definitive Arrangement 92 vii CHAPTER III. “A Subject Which Excites the Deepest Interest throughout 95 the Civilised World”: Lausanne and the Craft of Diplomatic Nation-Building Bargaining Ethno-Nationalism 96 An Enterprise neither European nor Non-European 110 Two Tensions Enshrined 124 CHAPTER IV. Litigating the Exchange before the World Court: 130 Humanitarianism and the Mobilization of an International Legal Community “To Bring upon Turkey the Pressure of Moral Force” 132 “National Sovereignty is Not Affected by the Convention in Question” 147 Intervention and Interpretation 159 CONCLUSION 165 BIBLIOGRAPHY 173 viii TABLE OF TREATIES AND OTHER INSTRUMENTS Traité de paix, d‟amitié et de commerce [février 1535], reproduced in I. de Testa, Recueil des traités de la Porte ottomane avec les puissances étrangères depuis le premier traité conclu, en 1536, entre Suléyman I et François I, jusqu‟à nos jours, Vol. I (Paris: Amyot, 1864) 15. Treaty of Peace and Frontiers: The Ottoman Empire and Persia, 17 May 1639, 105 BFSP 763. Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Amity between Russia and Turkey, signed at Kuçuk Kainardji, 10(21) July 1774, 45 CTS 349. Act of the Congress of Vienna, signed between Austria, France, Great Britain, Portugal, Prussia, Russia and Sweden, 9 June 1815, 64 CTS 453. Treaty between France, Great Britain and Russia for the Pacification of Greece, signed at London, 6 July 1827, 77 CTS 307. Arrangement between France, Great Britain and Russia, and Turkey, for the Definitive Settlement of the Continental Boundaries of Greece, signed at Constantinople, 21 July 1832, 82 CTS 477. Convention of Commerce and Navigation between Great Britain and Turkey, signed at Balta- Liman, 16 August 1838, 88 CTS 77. 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. Treaty between Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Russia and Turkey for the Settlement of Affairs in the East, signed at Berlin, 13 July 1878, 153 CTS 171. Treaty of Peace between Bulgaria and Turkey Ŕ Constantinople, September 16 (29), 1913, 107 BFSP 706. 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: 1914-1956, Vol. II (New York: Octagon, 1972) 2.