The East After Lausanne

Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

MORE than eight months after the opening of the conference, and more than nine months after the signature of the armistice of Mudania, a peace treaty has at last been signed at Lausanne. The armistice was the more important of the two events as regards the avoidance of war; and, once this step had been achieved, there was never any real danger that a break-down in the diplomatic negotiations would lead to a renewal of hostilities, though for this very reason it was impossible to predict when the negotiations would be brought to an end.

Now that the diplomatists have concluded their labors, have they presented us with a good peace or a bad one? That depends on the meaning of the word "good" in this connection. To the casual reader, no doubt, a peace treaty, like a novel or a play, is satisfactory in so far as it is coherent, consistent and clear; but these qualities generally depend on unity of authorship, while a good peace treaty, unlike most good works of literature, must necessarily be a product of collaboration. Conspicuous clarity in a peace treaty is apt, indeed, to be a danger-signal that one of the two parties has had things too much his own way. The Treaty of Sèvres, for example, which can lay far more claim than its successor to literary virtue, has been a disastrous diplomatic failure because it altogether ignored the point of view of one of the prospective signatories; and when the full text of the Treaty of Lausanne is published it will therefore be short-sighted to depreciate it because it is full of patches and tatters. These aesthetic blemishes testify to long and ultimately successful endeavors to work two designs into one, and the goodness of the workmanship is to be tested not by its sightliness but by its durability. In regard to the latter, it would be rash to prophesy; but at least the Lausanne conference has been the first genuine attempt to find a settlement between vanquished and victors in the European War which shall be intolerable to neither of the two sides...