The vanquished

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A war with no victors.

The period between the end of World War 1 and the beginning of World War II is something of a historical shadow. The two wars represent bright beacons of active history, and the period in between is lost in the shadows between the two lights. In listening to this as an audiobook, I was surprised to find out how much I didn't know.

Here is a case in point, I knew Ataturk was important to the modern Turkish state, but I had no real idea why. I also had no real idea of the Greek-Turkish War that resulted in the destruction of the 2,500 year-old Greek communities of Asia Minor in a final orgy of ethnic cleansing. This incident isn't just nice to know. It is absolutely illuminating in explaining fascism and genocide, Most people know that Hitler waved-off the damage to the reputation of Germany that the massacre of Jews would have with the statement “Who now remembers the Armenian,” referring to the World War One Armenian Genocide.

But Ataturk's victory resulted in a defeated Axis power negotiating with the Allies as a sovereign, rather than being forced to accept a dictated peace. More importantly, Turkey was able to revise the terms of surrender and end the plan to the drastically partition Turkey that was the plan of the Allies. For any other power that felt that they had gotten an unfair deal from the peace terms, particularly Germany, which had felt the sting of partitioning and onerous peace terms. Ataturk had succeeded with brilliant military strategy, iron will, and a nationalism tied to ethnic and religious homogeneity. Ataturk was an inspiration to Mussolini and Hitler and showed that nationalism was the answer to the problems of Europe:

“The Greek delegation and the Turkish representatives, led by Kemal's trusted general (and future successor as President of the Turkish Republic), Ismet Inönü, also agreed that peace between them would be accompanied by a ‘population exchange', which, in fact, was already well on its way when the conference had first convened. In total some 1.2 million Orthodox Anatolians were transferred from Turkey to Greece, while nearly 400,000 Muslims were resettled the other way. Religion was the sole criterion for the ‘exchanges', according to the ‘Convention on the Compulsory Exchange of Populations' that was signed in Lausanne on 30 January 1923.
This was a radical reversal of the logic guiding the Minorities Treaties of 1919, which had sought to legally protect minorities in multi-ethnic states. Yet it was not completely without precedent: it was first suggested by Venizelos in the context of the Balkan Wars and again during the negotiations for the Neuilly Treaty when Sofia and Athens agreed on a ‘voluntary' population swap of some 100,000 people to resolve their long-term dispute over the control of Western Thrace.62 Although in reality many Bulgarian refugees had no choice in the matter, the openly mandatory character of the transfer sanctioned at Lausanne differentiated the Treaty from any previous agreements.63 In the eyes of some it confirmed the now increasingly popular idea that a ‘true' nation state could only be founded on the principle of ethnic or religious homogeneity, and that this had to be achieved at almost any human price.”

The implication may be that Turkey in 1923 gave a direction that Europe would follow for the next twenty years.

The author Robert Gerwarth goes on to explain:

“Yet the Lausanne Convention also had a significance that went well beyond the Greek and Turkish context to which it ostensibly applied. The Convention effectively established the legal right of state governments to expel large parts of their citizens on the grounds of ‘otherness'. It fatally undermined cultural, ethnic and religious plurality as an ideal to which to aspire and a reality with which – for all their contestations – most people in the European land empires had dealt with fairly well for centuries.71 Lausanne signalled that the West's prior commitment through the Minorities Treaties to the defence of vulnerable ethnic minorities had been fatefully reversed.72 If, in 1919, ethnic coexistence had still been seen as something worth protecting, the future now seemed to belong to ethnic homogeneity as a kind of precondition for nation states to live in peace. Although the Lausanne Convention had been drawn up to prevent mass violence between different religious groups, the application of this logic to eastern Europe would prove to be catastrophic: for in the multi-ethnic territories of the vanquished central European land empires, the utopia of a mono-ethnic or mono-religious community could only be achieved through extreme violence. This was indeed the case in the following two and a half decades, ending in the later 1940s, when the forced expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from east-central Europe was completed.73
Few politicians observed the developments in Anatolia between 1918 and 1923 with greater interest than Adolf Hitler, who would later profess that in the aftermath of the Great War he and Mussolini had looked up to Mustafa Kemal as a model of how defiance and will power could triumph over Western ‘aggression'. Hitler not only admired Kemal's uncompromising resistance to Allied pressure, but also sought to imitate his means of constructing a radically secular, nationalist and ethnically homogeneous nation state after a crushing military defeat. The CUP's genocidal wartime policies towards the Armenians and Kemal's ruthless expulsion of Christian Ottomans featured prominently in the Nazi imagination. They became a source of inspiration and a model for Hitler's plans and dreams in the years leading up to the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.”

These observations put Hitler's comments in a different light.

Gewarth deals with broad panorama of Europe. A lot of the book deals with Russia, on the winner's side but vanquished by Germany and ostracized by the Allies after the Bolshevik revolution. Gewarth provides some fascinating insights into the eastern European countries - Romania, Bulgaria and Romania - who were variously rewarded or punished depending on which side they ended up on. Likewise, Gewarth offers good insights into the situation of Italy, which was on the winner's side, but considered itself the loser when the spoils were handed. out.

I said at the outset that there were no winners, but that was not strictly accurate. The book does not examine the conditions of France, England and America, who were the true winners of the war.

This is well-written, informative and entertaining book.