An analysis of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne from multiple historical, economic, and social perspectives.
 
The last of the post-World War One peace settlements, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne departed from methods used in the Treaty of Versailles and took on a new peace-making initiative: a forced population exchange that affected one and a half million people. Like its German and Austro-Hungarian allies, the defeated Ottoman Empire had initially been presented with a dictated peace in 1920. In just two years, however, the Kemalist insurgency enabled Turkey to become the first sovereign state in the Middle East, while the Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, Egyptians, Kurds, and other communities previously under the Ottoman Empire sought their own forms of sovereignty.

Featuring historical analysis from multiple perspectives, They All Made Peace, What Is Peace? considers the Lausanne Treaty and its legacy. Chapters investigate British, Turkish, and Soviet designs in the post-Ottoman world, situate the population exchanges relative to other peacemaking efforts, and discuss the economic factors behind the reallocation of Ottoman debt and the management of refugee flows. Further chapters examine Kurdish, Arab, Iranian, Armenian, and other communities that were refused formal accreditation at Lausanne, but which were still forced to live with the consequences, consequences that are still emerging, one hundred years on.
 

In the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, nearly two million citizens in Turkey and Greece were expelled from homelands. The Lausanne treaty resulted in the deportation of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The transfer was hailed as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not coexist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies of a single culture. The opinions and feelings of those uprooted from their native soil were never solicited.

In an evocative book, Bruce Clark draws on new archival research in Turkey and Greece as well as interviews with surviving participants to examine this unprecedented exercise in ethnic engineering. He examines how the exchange was negotiated and how people on both sides came to terms with new lands and identities.

Politically, the population exchange achieved its planners' goals, but the enormous human suffering left shattered legacies. It colored relations between Turkey and Greece, and has been invoked as a solution by advocates of ethnic separation from the Balkans to South Asia to the Middle East. This thoughtful book is a timely reminder of the effects of grand policy on ordinary people and of the difficulties for modern nations in contested regions where people still identify strongly with their ethnic or religious community.