Onur Yildirim

I have long been interested in the population transfers during the interwar period with a particular focus on the voluntary and mandatory exchanges of populations that took place in the aftermath of WWI in the post-Ottoman space in southeastern Europe. The Treaty of Neuilly which led to the voluntary exchange of populations between Greece and Bulgaria in 1919 and then the Treaty of Lausanne that caused the forceful exchange of some 2 million people between Greece and Turkey in 1923 formally authorized the nation-states to shuffle populations at their convenience with a view to attaining ethno-religious homogeneity.

These two presumably "successful" examples became part of intellectual and political rhetoric during the interwar period. The small states of Eastern Europe (e. g. Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary etc.) and the Nazi Germany provided fertile ground for these discussions to take place at various levels. Almost all these states were involved in the population transfer of one kind or another before and during WWII. After the War, the Treaty of Potsdam brought about yet another massive wave of displacement across Central and Eastern Europe. Potsdam became the third leg of the tripod that constituted the template of population transfers in Europe. The notions of ‘population transfer’ and ‘refugee’ that came out of these three instances of displacement played a significant role in the formation of a refugee regime in Europe which was sanctioned at the Refugee Convention of 1951.

To this very date, these notions have continued to inform the public opinion on population displacements and refugees across the globe. The recent crisis associated with the Syrian refugees has shown that there is an urgent need to revisit the sources of our current conceptions of population transfer and refugee. The absence of coordination and cooperation between the countries, coupled with the inconsistencies in the implementation of the existing rules and regulations at national and international levels, demonstrated the flaws of the global refugee regime.

My proposed project aims to explore these three diplomatic agreements with a view to tracing the elements of continuity and discontinuity in their core principles and then showing how each of these documents had their unique contributions to the formation and reformation of the notions of "population transfer" and "refugee" not only at home but also beyond their national borders of implementation. I argue that the prevalent refugee regime which was constructed on the basis of these three incidents of massive displacement needs to be reconsidered and revised as the present phase of globalization presents new dynamics that generate refugees.