The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and Its Impact upon Greece by Dimitri Pentzopoulos

Review by: Douglas Dakin

Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Jan., 1968), pp. 183-187
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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tion, and indeed retrogression,of the Middle East must be as diverse
as those given for the Decline and Fall of Rome, which range from
malaria, through slavery and barbarian invasions to Christianity!
This reviewer (The EconomicHistoryof the MiddleEast, 1800-1914)
has listed a few which are not mentioned by M. Rodinson: lack of
wood and water power, wars and invasions, loss of seapower,
intellectual rigidity, lack of mechanical inventiveness,etc. Most of
these can be reduced to 'material' factors, but the 'idealist' spectre
will not be exorcised and one cannot help wondering whether the
Muslim religion did not play a part, after all. Thus the distinction
between Caesar and God, and the conflicts between Emperorsand
Popes, may well have facilitated the development of European
feudalism and the emergence of cities. This, in turn, together with
diffused sources of waterpower, may have favoured the decentrali-
zation of production, which certainly helped the emergence of
capitalism. But in Islam church and state were one, there were
no free cities and little that can be called feudalism. Again, who
shall assess the influence of the doctrine of Natural Law or the
developmentof Europeanphilosophyand science, and the inhibiting
effect of the denial of natural or scientific law by Muslim theolo-
gians ? These and many other questions will, no doubt, continue
to be debated for several decades. In the meantime, M. Rodinson
has made a very valuable contribution to the study of Muslim so-
ciety. In view of this, and of his somewhatdifficultstyle, it is to be
hoped that his book will soon be translatedinto English and given
the wide readership it deserves.
CHARLES ISSAWI

THE BALKAN EXCHANGE OF MINORITIES AND ITS

IMPACT UPON GREECE. By DIMITRI PENTZOPOU-
LOS. Pp. 293, 3 maps. Mouton and Co., Paris and The
Hague. Dutch Gilders, 27,50.
This well-planned and useful book is based on an extensive
published literature consisting of reports of the League of Nations,
Greek official publications, pamphlets, newspapers, memoirs, con-
temporary and later studies in the form of books and articles. From
all these the author has extracted the essential information and has
written a succinct and well-documented study of the Greek refugee
problem, showing its origins, its magnitude, its solution and its
impact upon modern Greece. In doing this he has provided us, in
addition to a sociological study of great interest, a very good outline
of several aspects of Greek history roughly from 1912 to 1960,
though necessarily the story becomes less detailed from 1950, by
which time the new Greek populations, having registered their

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 impact, had almost ceased to stand out clearly from the older
populations.
The first part of the book (Greecereceivesthe refugees)is especially
useful and convincing. Here we have a clear picture of the old
Greece of the pre-Balkan Wars, its population barely exceeding
2,500,000; here the author describesGreek irredentistideas in their
various forms- the designs to include Greek populations in an
expanded nationalist state and the dreams of a large multi-racial
Greek Empire, a revived Byzantium. Of those Greek populations
of the diaspora, the author cites, without definitely committing
himself, the somewhat conflicting contemporary statistics, chiefly
the official Turkish return of 1910 and the Greek Patriarchate
figures of 1912. As he rightly points out, however, all statistical
evidence, even that provided by the less favourableTurkish figures,
shows that in Greek Macedonia the Greeks were more numerous
than any other people, while in Eastern Thrace and in Ionia they
constitutedvery large minorities. At all events, of equal importance
to the numerical strength of Hellenism in the Ottoman Empire
'was the way the Greek minority lived, behaved and felt. The
unredeemedHellenes were organized in separatelegal communities
of an autonomous nature, discharged all their communal functions
themselves, worshipped freely and supported their churches and
schools which had kept alive through centuries the national senti-
ment'.
As a result of the Balkan Wars Greece almost doubled her terri-
tory and added to her populationjust over 2,000,000 souls, bringing
the total to approximately4,700,000. But not all of the new popu-
lation was Greek. In Greek Macedonia, for instance, the Greeks
(and they were defined by religious persuasionrather than by race
or tongue) formed only about 44 per cent of the inhabitants.
This fact was to be of immense importance a decade later: when
the Greek and Moslem populations were exchanged it was here in
Greek Macedonia that there was soil for settling large numbers of
refugees from Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace. Without that soil
Greece could never have dealt adequately with the problem she
was to face.
The Balkan Wars were also important because the idea of solving
(or more strictly, eradicating) minority problems by exchanges of
population was first put forward at that time. In the peace settle-
ment between Turkey and Bulgaria an arrangement (which for
the most part merely affirmed a fait accompli)was made by which
some 48,570 Moslems and their properties were to be exchanged
for some 46,764 Bulgarians. Shortly after this, Venizelos, confronted
by Turkish designs to deport the Anatolian Greeks, was forced to
accept 'an exchange of the Greek-speakingpopulations of Thrace
and of the Smyrna Vilayet on the one hand, and of the Moslem
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 populations of Greek Macedonia and Epirus on the other...' This
arrangement was based upon the principle of voluntary exchange
of persons and of compensations for property - a principle on
which Venizelos had insisted. But this arrangement was never
ratified: instead, following the entry of Turkey into the First World
War on the side of the Central Powers, the Ottoman authorities
began to deport the Greeks of Eastern Thrace and Western Anatolia,
the numbers concerned eventually reaching close on 500,000.
Further expulsions followed after the armistice, particularly of the
Greeks in the region of Trebizond. Worse was to follow. After the
Greek defeat of 1922 more than a million persons fled from Asia
Minor and Eastern Thrace: for those Greeks who remained the
outlook was terrifying, it being generally known that the Angora
government was determined to get rid of its Christian minorities.
It fell to Dr. Nansen, who had been appointed by the League of
Nations to act as mediator between the Greek and Turkish Govern-
ments, to deal with this appalling problem; and in October 1922 he
began discussions concerning an exchange of populations between
Greece and Turkey. This exchange was agreed in principle by the
Greek and Angora governments, and it received a blessing from the
Allied High Commissioners in Constantinople, who on October 15
invited Dr. Nansen to take all possible steps to reach an agreement
between the two governments independently of the peace nego-
tiations at Lausanne. But it was not until October 31 that Hamid
Bey, the representative of the Angora government in Constantinople,
informed Dr. Nansen that 'his instructions only permitted him to
negotiate on the basis of a total and enforced exchange of popula-
tions, from which the population of Constantinople would not be
excepted'. It is here, as Mr. Pentzopoulos rightly points out, that
we have the origin of the idea of a compulsory exchange. To an
exchange of this nature Dr. Nansen, the High Commissioners and
Venizelos had all been opposed, while Marquess Curzon, the British
Foreign Secretary, described it as a thoroughly bad and vicious
solution. Nevertheless it came to be recognized by all the authorities
concerned that the only way to solve the minority and refugee
problem, given the political circumstances that prevailed, was to
accept the principle of compulsory exchange, which, in any event,
perhaps might not lead to any greater human misery than would
have existed, as a result of pressure brought to bear on the minorities,
under a system of so-called voluntary exchange. It was also re-
cognized that forced emigration of the Turks in Greece would at
least enable the Greeks to deal without undue delay with the already
enormous refugee problem on their hands.
As for the attitude of Venizelos, Mr. Pentzopoulos quite rightly
criticizes the views of Stephan Ladas in his work The Exchangeof
Minorities - Bulgaria, Greeceand Turkey (1932), but in so doing he
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himself remains too critical of Venizelos. Having demolished the
arguments of Mr. Ladas, he then goes on to say that Venizelos
'was ratherfavourablyinclined towardsthe principle of compulsory
exchange' and that he 'did not actually exploit the possibility of
other alternatives'. He suggests that Venizelos could have found
strong support for the principle of voluntary emigrationamong the
allies and, from the context, he obviously has in mind Marquess
Curzon. It goes without saying that he would have received no
support and precious little sympathy from the French and Italians
and that, whatever their views, he would have obtained no effective
assistancefrom the Japanese and Americans. The fact is that he
did solicit support from Curzon but failed to get it, not because
Curzonwas callous, but for the simple reason that Curzon had to
recognizethe inevitable - that desertedby his allies and answerable
to a parliament and electorate which were not prepared to go to
war he was unable on this issue to take a firm line: in any case he
realized, as probably did Venizelos himself, that there would not be
a tremendous difference in practice between voluntary and com-
pulsoryexchangeand that in the absenceof an agreementthe Greeks
would be expelled. In a memorandumof December27, 1922, giving
a list of concessionsmade to the Turkish delegation since the open-
ing of the Conference of Lausanne, under item 56 Mr. Harold
Nicolson wrote: 'We have induced the Greek delegation to agreeto
the proposed exchange of populations being conductedon the basis
proposed by the Turkish delegation i.e. compulsory expatriation'.
There were indeed two desperate moves open to Venizelos
the threat to renew the war and the threat to withdrawthe re-formed
Greekarmy from WesternThrace. He did indeed make the former.
In informing the British delegation that he was sending General
Mazarakisto Western Thrace to inspect and report on the state of
the Greek army, he intimated that if the Army were found to be as
strong as it was said to be then he would not feel justified in pressing
the Athens government to make extreme concessionsto the Turks,
who, besides making difficultiesover the exchange of populations,
were talking of expelling the Patriarchand of insistingon obtaining
the Island of Imbros. This threat, needless to say, invoked a strong
warning from the British government. As for the other threat -
that to withdraw the army from Western Thrace, a move which
would have deprivedthe allies of the only restraininginfluenceupon
the Turks,Venizelos was at this stage hardly in a position to make it.
For one thing he was not the head of state and, for another,everyone
would have known that he was only bluffing. At a later stage in the
negotiations at Lausanne the possibility of a Greek withdrawal
was to cause grave consternation among the allies, but this was
certainly not so at the time when the compulsory exchange of
populations was being decided.
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 This decision to carry out compulsory expatriation meant that
Greece, whose population of 5,000,000 suffered from lack of soil
and lack of highly-developed industry, was called upon to absorb
1,200,000 Greeks in place of 354,647 Moslemswho were transferred
to Turkey. Of this colossal task, of the organizationswhich brought
help in this time of need, of the financing and administrationof the
Greek Refugee Settlement Commission,of the astounding progress
made and the great difficulties encountered, Mr. Pentzopoulos
gives an excellent survey, the value of which is enhanced by his
clear statisticaltables and a map showing the locations of the settle-
ments. This done, he then proceeds to deal with the more difficult
part of his study - the impact of the newcomers upon the social,
economic, political and culturallife of Greece. Here it is not so easy
to be precise, especially in the economic field where it is hard to
disentangle development which was the continuation of that of the
pre-war period from that which resulted from the influx of skilled
business-menand artisansand that which derivedfrom the changing
conditions of the postwar world. But once again Mr. Pentzopoulos
gives illuminating statisticsand interestingfacts, which clearly show
that the new populations made an enormous contribution to the
agrarianand industriallife of Greece. Yet even more difficultis the
task of assessing the impact of the new populations upon Greek
political life. Once again, however, Mr. Pentzopoulos carefully
examines a considerable amount of evidence and comes to some
interestingif rather tentative conclusions. Quite rightly he stresses
the importance of Greek Macedonia. Here the Greek element (i.e.
the Greekorthodox)on the eve of the Balkanwars consistedof about
500,000 persons.Here an influx of 700,000 Greeksand the departure
of the Moslems brought the Greek element up to 88 per cent of the
total. Much the same is true of WesternThrace. Here the Greekshad
constitutedonly 17 per cent of the population. With the emigration
of the Bulgarianminority (the Turkish minority was not disturbed)
and with the arrival of Greeks from Turkey, by 1924 the Greek
element had risen to about 62 per cent. These steps towards the
achievementof national homogeneityespeciallyin GreekMacedonia
were to be of great importancein the later phases of the Macedonia
question when the idea of an autonomous Macedonia was revived
and when Greece's northern neighbours attempted to revise the
settlement made at the end of the Balkan Wars. This importance
of the 'greekness' of Greek Macedonia following the exchange of
populations is briefly but clearly brought out in this study, though
for a more detailedstudy one can now go to Mr. E. Kofos's Nationalism
and Communism in Macedonia(1964) which excellent work is based
upon extensive, some of it unpublished, material.
DOUGLAS DAKIN

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