From Libya to Lausanne: International Law, Diplomacy, and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty in Wartime
Panel 007, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, November 14 at 5:30 pm
Panel Description
International law was a central tool in efforts to preserve Ottoman sovereignty in the last decades of the Empire in the face of Great Power encroachment. This panel will explore the interaction between international law, diplomacy, and conflict during the transition from empire to nation-state, focusing specifically on how approaches to international law were shaped by warfare, centralization, militarization, and larger trends in diplomacy and law across the Empire, across Europe, and around the world. The first paper looks at the aftermath of the war by examining the 1912 arbitration , by examining the 1912 arbitration between the Ottoman and Russian Empires over indemnities from the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War. An international arbitral panel rejected the Ottoman state's broad vision of sovereignty, paving the the way to the modern system of sovereign debt and global governance. The Ottomans' unsuccessful claims, then, suggest both the empire's active role in the legal arena, and the international legal paths not taken. The second paper looks at the negotiations in between two Balkan Wars (1912-13) when the Ottomans pushed to alter the Midye-Enez border drawn by the European powers to include Edirne. Drawing evidence from the Ottoman foreign ministry and military archives, it argues for the importance of Edirne for Ottoman sovereignty and the utilization of the language of violence in maintaining the Empire's territorial integrity. The third paper analyzes the 1917 Ottoman Family Law in the geopolitical context of World War I, arguing that the law's passage marked a pivotal moment in the abrogation of the Capitulations. Placing the law in its wartime political context and the geopolitical milieu of larger Europe, this research demonstrates that the 1917 family law was a centerpiece of the wartime struggle for control between the Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and their proxies within the Empire. The last paper considers the Ankara government's efforts at Lausanne to end European legal restrictions imposed upon Ottoman sovereignty, particularly the Capitulations. The paper shows a profound shift in Ottoman diplomatic practice from preserving sovereignty by treaty to ending foreign interference into the domestic affairs of the state. The panel will explore how militarization overtook international law in Ottoman policymaking over decades of conflict, dramatically impacted long-standing diplomatic and international legal regimes, like the Capitulations, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and semi-autonomous provincial structures that had undermined the Empire's sovereignty for decades.
This paper uses Ottoman archival sources and published court documents to chart a vitally important encounter between the Ottoman Empire and the European-dominated international legal system that has never received sustained study by historians. The Ottoman and Russian Empires fought eleven wars between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in their mutual demise during the First World War. But in 1912, the two Eurasian empires took their differences to a new venue: not a military campaign in the Balkans, but a legal arbitration. The Ottomans had agreed to pay indemnities after losing the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war, but they had not fully paid. Now, Russia wanted its money. So representatives of the tsar and sultan traveled to the Hague to argue, in French, before the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Idealistic Atlantic activists had conceived of this court as a utopian alternative to war, and the agrarian empires of Eurasia now used it.
The resulting Russian Indemnities case—unlike most Ottoman encounters with international law—is better known today among lawyers than historians. The court ordered the Ottoman state to pay both the indemnities and interest on them, rejecting the Porte’s expansive claim that no state could be bound to pay moratory (penalty) interest without its express consent. This seemingly picayune legal point paved the way for the modern regime of sovereign debt and global governance.
By combining the published record with contemporary European commentaries and Ottoman archival documents, I will argue that Ottoman, Russian, and western European arguments reflected not just states’ own interests, but also their deeper commitments to overarching theories of international law. The Ottoman state took a sharply positivist position. The laws that bound it, the Porte maintained, came only from formal agreements. There was no law without consent. This Ottoman view was now defeated by a more expansive European claim: that all states were bound by a thick web of custom, the contents of which were determined by Europeans.
The case thus illuminates a critical historical moment, when the promise of arbitration as a utopian, pacifist project collided with the racism inherent in international law, the ominous approach of World War I, and the Ottoman state’s increasingly desperate struggle to save itself by any means necessary.
This paper explores the role of Edirne as a symbol of Ottoman territorial integrity and sovereignty during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Edirne had always been an important Ottoman urban center, especially in the European territories of the Empire, because of its proximity to the (later) capital, ?stanbul, and its strategic location on the overland trade routes. It became a more significant urban center during the 19th century as the Ottoman Empire lost many of its European territories due to frequent wars and the rise of new nation-states in the Balkans. This experience gradually put Edirne at the western frontier of the Empire as the city was occupied by the Russian army in 1829 and during the Russo-Turkish Wars of 1877-78.
During the Balkan Wars, Edirne was occupied by the Bulgarian army in March 1913 after a five month-long siege. The Balkan Wars resulted in a major and a final territorial loss for the Ottoman Empire in Europe, which included the Western Thrace. Edirne was recaptured by the Ottomans during the Second Balkan War and became the only remaining significant urban center in the Ottomans’ European territories and western borderlands. Throughout this turbulent time, first the loss and then the recapture of the city became a focal point of the public discourse. The members of the Young Turk Movement and the CUP leaders rallied for the recapture of Edirne after the city was retained by Bulgarians following the London Peace Treaty that ended the First Balkan War. I analyze diplomatic and military correspondence from the Ba?bakanl?k Ottoman and Genelkurmay Archives to highlight the importance of Edirne for Ottoman territorial integrity and sovereignty, and show how reclaiming the city by pushing west of the Midye-Enez line set by the European powers at the London Peace Conference became a priority for the Ottoman state. I also show how, after the city was recaptured and its fate was still uncertain awaiting the outcome of the peace negotiations between Ottomans, European powers and Balkan states after the Second Balkan War, it became important to document and collect data about the alleged Bulgarian atrocities on the Muslim populace under occupation to solidify Ottoman rule and influence the final settlement in Ottomans’ favor.
During the First World War, the elimination of extraterritorial legal rights was central to the Ottoman quest for sovereignty that drove the Empire’s decision to participate in the war. The 1917 promulgation of a new Ottoman family law is recognized as a landmark moment in the history of Islamic law. Yet the 1917 law’s significance as a site of power struggles over religious jurisdiction, political power, and Ottoman sovereignty has been overlooked. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish and European sources linking internal interpretations of the law and external reactions to its passage, this paper reinterprets the adoption of the family law as a key moment in the geopolitics of the Ottoman First World War, arguing that the passage of the law was a critical turning point in the wartime process of abrogating the capitulations. Placing the law in its wartime political context and the geopolitical milieu of larger Europe, this research demonstrates that although short-lived, the 1917 family law was a centerpiece of the wartime struggle for control between the Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and their proxies within the Empire. Gender continues to be overlooked as a means by which statecraft has been exercised historically and as a proxy for sovereignty in non-national contexts. This analysis of the role of family law in Ottoman wartime policy is a contribution to the broader historiographical effort to understand the impact of gender and family beyond everyday practice and home life, particularly in wartime. This interpretation of the law provides a new way to locate gender at the core of the politics of sovereignty in conflict, particularly in the wartime context of radical political and social transformation that reshaped the post-war Middle East.
In late 1922, Mehmed Münir Bey (Ertegün), an international lawyer arrived at the Lausanne Conference in the capacity of legal advisor for the emergent Turkish state. His former colleague and superior, Gabriel Noradungian, an international lawyer who once served as the Ottoman Foreign Minister, represented Armenian interests at the same conference. Both men had worked for the Ottoman Foreign Ministry’s Office of Legal Counsel (isti?are odas?) – a Hamidian era office established in 1882 to deal with questions related to international law and international relations. The Office of Legal Counsel produced thousands of legal opinions related to public and private international law that were instrumental in the crafting late Ottoman diplomacy. Indeed, the Ottoman Foreign Ministry had relied upon international legal arguments to shore up territorial claims, and effective political control, across the empire - and international law was at the center of Ottoman diplomatic strategy vis-à-vis Europe. But how would international law figure into debates at Lausanne after warfare, not diplomacy, forced revision of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920)?
This paper will examine the Ankara government’s use of international law at the Lausanne Peace Conference – particularly questions related the termination of foreign legal impairments on Ottoman sovereignty including the Capitulations. The paper will trace the shift from Ottoman diplomatic practice of preserving sovereignty by treaty to the Ankara government’s focus on ending foreign interference into the domestic affairs of the state. I will look at the work of Mehmed Münir who was deeply engaged in wartime diplomacy and peacemaking. He was a legal advisor for negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, for the Ottoman Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, and after Lausanne attempted to negotiate for the return of Mosul at the League of Nations. He was also a key figure in establishing the new Foreign Ministry in the Turkish Republic.
