Lausanne Treaty

The Labor Government submitted to the House of Commons a bill for the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne, which established peace between Greece and Turkey, revised the terms of the Treaty of Sevres (1920) between the Allies and the then Ottoman Empire, and adjusted generally relations between Mustafa Kemal's new nationalist Turkish state and the western world.

A brief debate showed that the attitude of the parties was equivocal. The Conservatives were inclined to support the treaty because it was the work of the former die-hard Foreign Minister, Lord Curzon. The Labor Government submitted the Treaty as a matter of routine in maintaining continuity of foreign policy. The Liberals, led by Sir Edward Grigg, onetime private secretary of Lloyd George, whose rapid anti-Turk policy led to the ruin of British imperial ambitions in the Levant, denounced the Treaty. Sir Edward made the usual plea for Christian minorities. His argument that the Treaty was repugnant to the British Dominions was sunk without a trace when Ramsay MacDonald informed the House that all the Dominion Governments had consented to ratification.

Discussion was adjourned. The Treaty is distasteful* to all parties. The Straits Convention, an annex to the Treaty, leaves Constantinople defenseless. The two powers most interested are Russia and Great Britain. Defense of minorities in Turkey will probably occupy the attention of the House in any further debate.

The Treaty of Lausanne was the first conspicuous failure of British diplomacy in more than a century. Greek troops had been permitted to occupy Smyrna and Anatolia in 1919 and 1920. The Treaty of Sevres imposed terms so severe that British policy seemed to have succeeded in strangling the sick man of Europe in his sick-bed in Asia Minor.

After two years of guerilla warfare, Mustapha Kemal Pasha and his lieutenant, Ismet Pasha, drove the Greeks into the sea at Smyrna after a thunderbolt campaign in August, 1922. British troops at Chanak, on the Dardanelles and on the Ismid Peninsula, covering Constantinople, were faced by a threatening concentration of victorious Turkish troops. Lloyd George, genius of the Greek policy in Asia Minor and bitterest foe of the Turk in Europe, called on the Dominions to rally to the defense of the Straits and on the Balkan Nations to join in an anti-Turk crusade. The British public decided that this attitude meant war, and Lloyd George was ousted bag and baggage to let "the only party that understands foreign affairs," the Conservatives, led by Curzon in the Foreign Office, make peace.

Curzon's diplomatic bullying had as little effect as Lloyd George's military gestures. In February, 1923, Curzon ended the first session of the Lausanne Conference by ordering the Turks to sign a treaty. His diplomatic antagonist, Ismet, proved tenacious, resourceful, adroit. The Turkish National Assembly refused to ratify. On April 23, 1923, the Conference reassembled. After four long months of wrangling, Ismet forced the plenipotentiaries, Greeks, French, Italian and British, to yield to his stubborn and irreducible demands. The final draft was signed in August, and did little but establish peace, regulate the number of foreign troops in Turkey and Turkish frontiers.

In separate conventions the Allied demands were whittled down. These included: settlement of the Ottoman debt by apportionment among ex-Ottoman territories; regulation of concessions; settlement of the Mosul (Oil) Question; conclusion of separate judicial treaties granting right of complaint to foreign legal advisers in place of capitulations. The U. S. and Turkey signed a parallel, but separate, treaty of amity and commerce.

In effect, the Lausanne Settlement turned Europe bag and baggage out of Turkey instead of turning Turkey bag and baggage out of Europe. It signified the complete shipwreck of Lloyd George's five years' nursing of Greek ambitions. Flouting the conservative policy of seven decades, it exposed Turkey to intrigue and direct military pressure from Britain's perennial foe, Russia. It excluded France, Italy and Great Britain from exploitation of the spoils of war. It practically abandoned all pretence on the part of the Great Powers to protect the Christians in Turkey, cardinal point of Gladstone's eastern policy. The terms of the Straits Convention reduced British opportunities to checkmate Russia or bring naval pressure to bear on Turkish ambitions, cardinal point of British naval-political strategy.

*In addition to criticism in the British Commons and in the French Chamber of Deputies (see Page 8), the Lausanne Treaty came under heavy fire in the U. S.

In a stormy three-hours discussion at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Manhattan, James W. Gerard, former U. S. Ambassador to Germany, attacked the Treaty, contending that "Christian civilization was crucified at Lausanne and the Stars and Stripes were trailed in the mire in the interest of a group of oil speculators." He characterized the Turks as murderers and the Kemalist Government as a group of adventurers whose regime was on its last legs. His position received needed dignity from the support of Professor A. D. F. Hamlin of Columbia University and Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard, who wrote a letter saying that the Treaty was worthless and the Turks untrustworthy.

Feeling ran so high that blows impended on several occasions when the Turks and their Treaty were defended by Prof. Edward Meade Earle of Columbia, Dr. James J. Barton, Secretary of the Foreign Department of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and the Rev. Albert W. Staub, American Director of Near East colleges.