On 24 July 1923 the last Treaty ending hostilities in the Great War
was signed at Lausanne in Switzerland. That Treaty closed a decade of
violence. Jay Winter tells the story of what happened on that day. On
the shores of Lake Geneva, diplomats, statesmen, and soldiers came
from Ankara and Athens, from London, Paris, and Rome, and from other
capital cities to affirm that war was over. The Treaty they signed
fixed the boundaries of present-day Greece and Turkey, and marked a
beginning of a new phase in their history.
That was its major achievement, but it came at a high price. The
Treaty contained within it a Compulsory Population Exchange agreement.
By that measure, Greek-Orthodox citizens of Turkey, with the exception
of those living in Constantinople, lost the right of citizenship and
residence in that state. So did Muslim citizens of Greece, except for
residents of Western Thrace. This exchange of nearly two million
people, introduced to the peace conference by Nobel Prize winner and
humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen, provided a solution to the immense
refugee problem arising out of the Greek-Turkish war. At the same
time, it introduced into international law a definition of citizenship
defined not by language or history or ethnicity, but solely by
religion. This set a precedent for ethnic cleansing followed time and
again later in the century and beyond.
The second price of peace was the burial of commitments to the
Armenian people that they would have a homeland in the lands from
which they had been expelled, tortured and murdered in the genocide of
1915.
This book tells the story of the peace conference, and its outcome. It
shows how peace came before justice, and how it set in motion forces
leading to the global war that followed in 1939.
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The Civilianization of War
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192698278
Publisert
2022
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter