“The 1923 Lausanne peace in Greek political thought. The cases of Georgios Streit and Emmanouil Emmanouilidis”

Carelos, Markos P.

Title: “The 1923 Lausanne peace in Greek political thought. The cases of Georgios Streit and Emmanouil Emmanouilidis”
Creator: Carelos, Markos P.
Relation: University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
Resource Type: thesis
Date: 2024
Description: Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Description: The focus of this thesis is the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, viewed through the perspectives of two contemporary Greek critics of the treaty: Georgios Streit (1868–1948) and Emmanouil Emmanouilidis (1867–1943). It is a central contention of this thesis that the compulsory nature of the Treaty’s Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations violated what in the 21st century would be regarded as inalienable human rights. Numerous instances of large-scale and systematic violence, targeting the Ottoman Empire’s non-Muslim minorities, which surged in the decade preceding the Empire’s dissolution — displacements, massacres and genocide —, were implicitly endorsed by the Treaty of Lausanne. This thesis calls in question the treaty’s immediate aftermath and its lasting legacy. The views of Streit and Emmanouilidis, two Greek intellectuals and politicians who were both critics of the treaty, are at the heart of this thesis. Based on new archival research and discoursive reading of hitherto neglected or not utilised writings, this thesis examines the two intellectuals’ activities and views in relation to the treaty. Their actions and perspectives are thus situated within both the Greek and transnational intellectual traditions they not only imbibed but also shaped, and, in doing so, aspects of Greek political thought relating to the Treaty of Lausanne are laid open for analysis. Among the premises of this thesis is that the Treaty of Lausanne, by condoning the use of political force as means to resolve ethnic tensions, and by conferring international recognition of these means and the resultant ethnically-based nation states, exacerbated pre-existing chasms, not only across newly defined borders but also within Greek domestic politics and society. Tragically, therefore, the treaty heightened the need for ethnic conciliation but simultaneously impeded it. This particular conclusion embeds Greece as a nation state deeply affected by the Ottoman Cataclysm, the violence it unleashed, and as an exemplar of the consequences of the 1923 treaty.
Subject: Ottoman Empire; late Ottoman history; international law; intellectual biography; Greece; Ottoman Greeks; Rûm; intellectual history; Treaty of Lausanne; population exchange; displacement; human rights
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1510886
Identifier: uon:56453
Language: eng

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