Forced Migration as Nation-Building: The League of Nations, Minority Protection, and the Greek-Turkish Population Exchange

Although the two League of Nations projects worked at cross purposes, both aimed to accomplish the same objective: protecting minorities in the lands of the recently defeated Ottoman Empire. The provisions for protecting minorities that were included in the peace treaty with Turkey in July 1923 sought to guarantee special rights to religious, linguistic, and national minorities in former Ottoman territories. On the other hand, the Convention for the Exchange of Populations, signed in January 1923, called for the expulsion of minorities and the expropriation of their properties. The minority-protection provisions in the peace treaty and the forcible expulsions envisioned in the accompanying convention were obviously inconsistent solutions to the ‘problem of minorities’, and the juxtaposition of the two efforts is striking. Nonetheless, the paradoxical new legal arrangements belie an underlying consistency: both measures created the conditions for the new political institutions required by an emerging international consensus on proper political organisation.