The Lausanne Treaty of 1923 marks the formal recognition of the new Turkish Republic that had emerged out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. This meant, among other things, the universal recognition of the sovereignty of the Turkish state within the borders that were drawn in the aftermath of World War I. With minor adjustments, these borders have continued to define Turkey ever since. The new nation-state that was thus recognized had no semblance to the Ottoman Empire. Whereas the latter had been successful in absorbing and managing an ethnically and religiously complex and diverse society, the former strived to become an ethnonationally homogenous entity. In this interesting book, Özsu studies the role played by international law in the homogenization of the people of Turkey. Specifically, he focuses on the exchange of almost all of the Greek Orthodox population of Anatolia with their Muslim counterparts in Greece. Although there had been population exchanges before, the Turco-Greek exchange that took place after Lausanne was unique in its scope, and also in the fact that it was compulsory.

The path and the shape of the borders that circumscribed Turkey reflected the consensus that developed between the European powers and Turkey during the lengthy negotiations that preceded the signing of the Lausanne Treaty, but no such consensus existed about the identity of the national community that was supposed to inhabit the newly minted country of Turkey. Leaving aside the ambiguity of the term “Turk,” Anatolia still had large numbers of culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse communities for whom being “Turk” and the country “Turkey” would have no meaning. It would have been impossible for the new state of Turkey to survive without addressing this problem. Lacking any recognizable basis for distinguishing the inhabitants of this land, the parties in Lausanne fell back on religion. Only Sunni Muslims who belonged to the Hanefi school of Islam were accepted as the principal members of the new national community. Other Muslims and the entire communities of non-Muslims had no place in the making of this new nation. Of the two largest non-Muslim groups, Armenians had already been wiped out thorough forced deportation and mass murder during the war years. Close to 1,000,000 Greeks, on the other hand, were still living in their ancestral homeland in Anatolia at the end of the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–22. The Lausanne Treaty targeted these communities with its clauses that required them to move outside of the new Turkey to be “exchanged” with approximately 300,000 Muslims who were in Greece.

Özsu points out that the inclusion of the mandatory exchange of populations in Lausanne laid bare an important contradiction in the evolution of international law in the nineteenth century. Starting from the end of the nineteenth century, the protection of minorities had gradually become an important focus for European states, especially in their dealings with the big land-based empires of the Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, and Russians. Laudable as it was, however, minority protection would never over-ride the principle of the sanctity of national borders, which had a much longer pedigree going back to Westphalia. The two, in Özsu's description, coexisted in a state of “productive tension.” In practice, however, when the simultaneous pursuit of both goals proved impossible in Lausanne, state sovereignty prevailed. Instead of protecting them in their places, Lausanne mandated the removal of almost the entire remaining Orthodox Greek minority population from Anatolia. In effect, international law facilitated the formation of the nationally “homogeneous ” Turkish nation-state by becoming an instrument of ethnonational politics and an accessory to ethnic cleansing.

By pointing out the fundamental contradictions that shaped the formation and implementation of the Lausanne Treaty, Özsu corrects the widespread assumption that this was a success story. Even though relatively few people died in the course of this massive shuffle of people, what the Greco-Turkish exchange succeeded in doing was not protecting minorities but rather erasing them, both physically from their lands, and also from how the history of those lands would be written in the rest of the twentieth century.

Özsu's book is based on exhaustive reading of secondary material on population exchange, and an extensive review of the legal documents that formed the basis of discussions and decisions in Lausanne. The book is important for highlighting the intricate relationship between law and politics and reminding the reader that even the purest notions and ideals that form the basis of interstate legal relations cannot escape being entangled in the political realties of their time. They are, after all, the products of those very political realities.