No study on post-Ottoman peace-making is complete without fully taking into account the last decade of the Ottoman Empire, its predominant radical ideologies, and its practices of rule. This last Ottoman-imperial phase was informed by the dictatorial party regime of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). A lot of solid research has been done in this formerly under-researched field during the last twenty years. Defining and seminal, the ideologemes and practices of the last Ottoman decade need to be carefully connected to the eventual negotiations and Conference outcome in Lausanne.

The Conference and Treaty of Lausanne offer invaluable insights into the state of the world, Europe, and the Middle East at a crossroads in the early 1920s. Main lines drawn in this last settlement of the Paris-Geneva peace system have for a century defined the post-Ottoman space, Western relations with post-Ottoman countries, political behaviors, and far-reaching paradigms of “conflict resolution.” There was the challenge of “world peace,” as repeatedly invoked. Understandably, Lausanne failed to meet this almost utopian challenge.

The Middle East is a global hotspot. Peace in the Middle East is among the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century and the topic of this book. Of particular concern is the former Ottoman imperial core region that had remained part of the sultanate-caliphate until the 1910s: Anatolia (today’s Turkey), Iraq, and “Greater Syria,” including Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. The negotiators at the Near East Peace Conference in Lausanne in Switzerland, 1922–3, rightly insisted that they faced the challenge of “world peace,” that is, of working for the world’s most precious common good. This Conference and its outcome, the Treaty of Lausanne, mark the end of a world war that proved particularly long and devastating in the Middle East.

Why title a book on the Near East Peace Conference in Lausanne with the phrase “When Democracy Died”? Why radically question the quality itself of the “Near East Peace of Lausanne”? This book’s title is a statement. Although Lausanne’s Near East Peace Conference was a highly complex event of global history and a diplomatically successful resettlement, its strongest message proved unambiguous: violence, including genocide, politically paid.

Part IV focuses on post-Lausanne Turkey, analyzing the rise of an internationally acclaimed “model dictatorship,” a modernizing unitary nation-state after the Conference. When Democracy Died has emphasized the need to understand the Lausanne Treaty by considering the whole decade of transformative politics, wars and violence that preceded the Conference. It has stressed proactive planning by Turkish leaders in the context of the European and global crises of the 1910s and 1920s. It has insisted on a mutual shaping: the Conference fundamentally shaped the nascent Republic of Turkey, whilst the delegation from Ankara’s National Assembly government marked the Lausanne Conference and defined the Allies’ (i.e. the West’s), new realpolitik.

The Conference of Lausanne consisted of several months of intense interactions. Most participants arriving by or after mid-November expected, like French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré, that it would take not more than a month to come to a conclusion.1 It took more than eight months, including the busy interval after the Conference‘s first half.