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This chapter considers the text and travaux préparatoires of the convention by which the compulsory Greek–Turkish exchange was governed. Reading statements at the 1922–3 Conference of Lausanne, it explains the convention’s role in shaping the juridico-political architecture of post-Ottoman Turkey. Nearly all delegates agreed that the exchange would need to be undertaken with ‘technical’ legal instruments. This, however, did not prevent those at the negotiating table from drawing upon the very ethno-nationalism they sought to elide through reliance upon legal ‘technique’. Crucially, this strained engagement with ethno-nationalism found expression in the question of how the exchange would bear upon the status of non-Muslims remaining in Turkey. The Mandate System was believed to be incompatible with conditions in Turkey, and minority protection to be insufficient to ensure order. Recourse was thus had to the compulsory exchange, a mechanism that would keep the risk of majority–minority conflicts to a minimum.

Sir Harold Nicolson’s international thought, more specifically, his thinking on international order, diplomacy, a united Europe, world government, and global peace, was shaped by his upbringing in a diplomatic household, an Oxford classical education, and two decades as a diplomat in Europe and Asia Minor. Especially significant were his Foreign Office service in London during the First World War and his involvement in peacemaking at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which culminated in the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Nicolson also made important contributions at the Lausanne Conference (1922–23), en poste in Germany between 1927 and 1929, and as an anti-appeasement MP prior to the Second World War. His fifty-year career, from the time of the Balkan Wars to Suez, represented an attempt to resolve the question of how best to secure international stability: through power politics, idealism, or an amalgam of realist and idealist approaches.

The World Economic Conference convened by the League 1933 lies at the heart of international efforts to combat the depression. It was called by the British and French governments, acting in concert with the United States, to combat the crunching impact of the financial crises of 1931, and to further negotiations on international war debts and the reparations settlement reached at the Lausanne Conference of 1932. The League played a crucial, yet hidden, role in facilitating the extensive preparatory meetings for the conference. The secretariat's ground work clarified national positions but also revealed that states' priorities differed so markedly there was no obvious policy territory on which agreement could be built before the main event. It shows how the secretariat promoted the temporary stabilization agreement that culminated in FDR's infamous ‘bombshell message’, and proposals for a tariff truce and negotiations premised on the anticipated US Reciprocal Tariff Agreement Act.

As the Berlin Accord unravelled and became a point of disagreement rather than Franco-German rapprochement, the old wounds reopened, particularly those surrounding reparations and disarmament. The political right gained ground in Germany, undermining French confidence in Berlin’s bona fides while French politics were also gripped by a sense of febrile instability on the eve of fresh elections. Furthermore, French leaders confused a home-grown Alsatian autonomist movement with German-inspired subversion which, despite the best efforts of German diplomacy, triggered one minor upset after another. A greater blow was delivered by the botched publication of the late Stresemann’s private papers alongside sensitive official material. Selective editing in the media left the impression that Stresemann had sought to dupe Briand and that his protestations of friendship were bogus at best. Sporadic efforts continued through 1932 to retrieve the situation, but an impasse at the international disarmament conference simply deepened the sense of estrangement.