Economic Consequences enjoyed an outright favourable reception in Turkey. This chapter illuminates the circumstances that made this possible. Of the Carthaginian peace-imposing treaties of the Paris Conference (1919), only the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) concerning the Ottoman Empire was annulled after a battleground victory (1922), and replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). An officer and a diplomat, Ali Fethi (Okyar), soon to become prime minister of Turkey, was a prisoner of war in Malta when he heard of Keynes’s book, acquired a copy, and translated it in 1920. Because the national leaders were anxious to know what awaited them in the peace talks, given the huge Ottoman debt they inherited, impending war reparations, and the discriminatory treatment they suspected, upon Ali Fethi’s release and return, the translation was published in 1922 by the official press in Ankara. It helped prepare the Turkish delegation to the Lausanne conference. This case provides us with an early example of Economic Consequences as a policy instrument in favour of a new international integration serviceable to peace and reconstruction in the face of an international conflict.

A reason given for a power in the United Nations to partition Palestine was that Palestine lacked standing as a state. In response, it was said that Palestine was a state; hence, any division of its territory by the United Nations would violate Palestine’s sovereignty. As result of the peace treaty with Turkey, the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, it was argued in support of this position, Palestine became a state, as did the other Arab territories taken from Turkey. The Treaty of Lausanne provided renunciation of sovereign to Palestine. When Palestine’s status became an issue in a case before the Permanent Court of International Justice, the Court found Palestine to be a state. When Palestine’s status became an issue in regard to tariffs being legislated by Britain, the major powers indicated that Palestine was a state.

The Palestine Mandate was argued to have been a document with legal force on the basis that the Council of the League of Nations voted to approve it. The Palestine Mandate lacked such a status, it was argued in response. The Palestine Mandate was not concluded as a treaty. It was not registered with the League as a treaty. It does not appear in League records that give treaties to which League members are party. Britain’s A. J. Balfour told the Council that the Palestine Mandate would have legal force once Turkey ceded sovereignty to the World War I Allies. Turkey never did so. When a peace treaty with Turkey was finalized, Turkey renounced sovereignty in favor of Palestine, not in favor of the Allies. When Britain explained its status in Palestine to the Permanent Court of International Justice, its counsel wrote that, as result of Turkey’s refusal to renounce sovereignty to the Allies, Britain acquired no legal status. He said that Britain’s standing in Palestine was that of belligerent occupant as result of having taken Palestine by force of arms. He did not mention any rights of Britain that might have come from the League of Nations.

This chapter examines the formation and development of modern Kurdish political activism in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire’s existence. It charts the evolution of the movement through an examination of contemporary documentary evidence, including newspapers, publications and archival materials. Over the course of the period between 1880 and 1923, there was a slow but steady uptick in Kurdish political agitation. However, while growing numbers of Kurdish elites came to see themselves as part of a Kurdish ‘nation’ and began to advocate for Kurdish ‘rights’, there was little consensus on how or within what type of framework those rights might be secured. While some looked towards the creation of an autonomous or even independent Kurdish nation-state as a panacea to the Kurdish question, many early Kurdish intellectuals remained committed to the continuation of the Ottoman state. Indeed, it was only in the aftermath of Ottoman defeat during the First World War that support for Kurdish statehood emerged as the dominant trend within Kurdish intellectual circles. However, ultimately the geopolitical circumstances that came into being with the empire’s collapse served to foreclose nationalist aspirations.

This chapter opens the third section of the book on the aftermath of the war. It addresses the end of the war and its many legacies. It starts with the armistice, and then considers the discussion about enemy aliens during the peace conference; it also explores the treaties that ended the war and their consequences for aliens, citizenship and property rights. It continues with the signing of all the final treaties, the emptying of the concentration camps and the lifting of the provisions on foreign movements, the agreement that regulated restitution or liquidation of assets, and the final exchange of populations. The chapter covers the period up to the late 1920s and deals with the transition from the state of emergency to peace, the resumption of naturalization procedures, new rules on borders and migration, new citizenship regimes that emerged from the war in both victorious and defeated countries as well as in the new successor states, and mass denaturalization and statelessness as a consequence of the emergence of new political regimes (such as the Soviet Union) or population exchange. It investigates the impact of special legislation on alien and enemy aliens on policies of migration control and explores the debate among jurists about the many violations of the conventions and human rights and the failed attempts at writing a new convention on enemy aliens.