[J.A.R. Marriott, The Eastern Question: An Historical Study of European Diplomacy. Oxford University: The Clarendon Press, 1919. Pp. 1-17]
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
THE PROBLEM OF THE NEAR EAST
"That shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting interests, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths that is veiled under the easy name of the Eastern Question."-John Morley.
The problem defined. From time immemorial Europe has been confronted with an "Eastern Question". In its essence the problem is unchanging. It has arisen from the clash in the lands of South-Eastern Europe between the habits, ideas, and preconceptions of the West and those of the East. But although one in essence, the problem has assumed different aspects at different periods. In the dawn of authentic history it is represented by the contest between the Greeks and the Persians, the heroic struggle enshrined in the memory of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis. To the Roman the "Eastern Question" centred in his duel with the great Hellenistic monarchies. In the early Middle Ages the problem was represented by the struggle between the forces of Islam and those of Christianity. That struggle reached its climax, for the time being, in the great battle of Tours (732). The chivalry of Western Europe renewed the contest, some centuries later, in the Crusades. The motives which inspired that movement were curiously minced, but essentially they afforded a further manifestation of the secular rivalry between Cross and Crescent; a contest between Crusaders and Infidels for possession of the lands hallowed to every Christian by their association with the life of Christ on earth.
With none of these earlier manifestations of an immemorial antithesis is this book concerned. Its main purpose is to sketch the historical evolution of a problem which has baffled the ingenuity of European diplomatists, in a general sense, for more than five hundred years, more specifically and insistently for about a century. In the vocabulary of English diplomacy the Eastern Question was not included until the period of the Greek War of Independence (1821-9), though the phrase is said to be traceable at least as far back as the battle of Lepanto (1571). A definition of the "Question", at once authoritative and satisfactory, is hard to come by. Lord Morley, obviously appreciating the difficulty, once spoke of it, with characteristic felicity, as "that shifting, intractable, and interwoven tangle of conflicting interests, rival peoples, and antagonistic faiths that is veiled under the easy name of the Eastern Question". A brilliant French writer, M. Edouard Driault, has defined it as Le problème de la ruine de la puissance politique de l'Islam. But this definition seems unnecessarily broad. Dr. Miller, with more precision, has explained it thus: "The Near Eastern Question may be defined as the problem of filling up the vacuum created by the gradual disappearance of the Turkish Empire from Europe." But though this definition is unexceptionable as far as it goes, our purpose seems to demand something at once more explicit and more explanatory. Putting aside the -many difficult problems connected with the position of Ottoman power in Asia and Africa, the "Eastern Question" may be taken, for the purpose of the present survey, to include:
First and primarily: The part played by the Ottoman Turks in the history of Europe since they first crossed the Hellespont in the middle of the fourteenth century;
Secondly: The position of the loosely designated Balkan States, which, like Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Roumania, have gradually re-emerged as the waters of the Ottoman flood have subsided; or, like Montenegro, were never really submerged; or, like Bosnia, the Herzegovina, Transylvania, and the Bukovina, have been annexed by the Habsburgs;
Thirdly: The problem of the Black Sea; egress therefrom, ingress thereto; the command of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and, above all, the capital problem as to the possession of Constantinople;
Fourthly: The position of Russia in Europe; her natural impulse towards the Mediterranean; her repeated attempts to secure permanent access to that sea by the narrow straits; her relation to her co-religionists under the sway of the Sultan, more particularly to those of her own Slavonic nationality;
Fifthly: The position of the Habsburg Empire, and in particular its anxiety for access to the Aegean, and its relations, on the one hand, with the Southern Slavs in the annexed provinces of Dalmatia, Bosnia, and the Herzegovina, as well as in the adjacent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro; and, on the other hand, with the Roumans of Transylvania and the Bukovina; and
Finally: The attitude of the European Powers in general, and of England in particular, towards all or any of the questions enumerated above.
The Ottoman Turks. The primary and most essential factor in the problem is, then, the presence, embedded in the living flesh of Europe of an alien substance. That substance is the Ottoman Turk Akin to the European family neither in creed, in race, in language, in social customs, nor in political aptitudes and traditions, the Ottomans have for more than five hundred years presented to the other European Powers a problem, now tragic, now comic, now bordering almost on burlesque, but always baffling and paradoxical. The following pages after sketching the settlement of this nomad people in Anatolia, will describe their momentous passage from the southern to the northern shore of the Hellespont; their encampment on European soil; their gradual conquest of the Balkan peninsula; their overthrow of the great Serbian Empire; their reduction of the kingdom of Bulgaria; and finally, by a successful assault upon Constantinople, their annihilation of the last feeble remnant of the Roman Empire of the East.
Conquests in Europe. From Constantinople we shall see the Ottomans advancing to the conquest of the whole of the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean: the Aegean islands, Syria, Egypt, and the northern coast of Africa The zenith of their power was attained with remarkable rapidity. Before the end of the sixteenth century it was already passed. The seeds of decay were indeed sown, even if they were not yet discernible, during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66), a period generally accounted the noontide of Ottoman greatness and prosperity. Within five years of Suleiman's death the great naval disaster at Lepanto (1571) had revealed to an astonished world the obvious weakening of Ottoman morale and the waning of their power at sea.
Decadence. Political decay was temporarily arrested during the following century. But for any success achieved by the Turks the Sultans were no longer personally responsible. Not one of the Sultans of the seventeenth century, nor for that matter of the eighteenth, left any impress upon the page of Ottoman history. The revival of Turkish prestige in the seventeenth century was due to a remarkable Albanian family, the Kiuprilis; but that revival rested upon no substantial foundations, and its evanescent character was clearly manifested before the century had drawn to a close. The failure of the Moslems to take advantage of the distractions of their Christian enemies during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) was in itself symptomatic of a loss of energy and initiative. Still more significant were the reverses sustained by Turkish arms. At the great battle of St. Gothard (1664) Montecuculi proved that the Ottomans were no longer invincible on land. as Don John had demonstrated at Lepanto that they were no longer invincible by sea.
Twenty years later the Vizier, Kara Mustapha, did indeed carry the victorious arms of Turkey to the gates of Vienna. But the Polish King, John Sobieski, snatched from him the supreme prize; saved the Austrian capital; and relieved Europe from the nightmare by which it had long been oppressed.
From that moment (1683) the Turks ceased to be a menace to Christendom. The Habsburgs inflicted a series of crushing defeats upon them in the north; the Venetians conquered the Morea; while France was so deeply involved in Western Europe that she could do little to help the Power with whom she had so long been allied in the East. The Treaty of Carlowitz, concluded in 1699 between the Habsburgs and the Turks, supplemented by that of Azov, dictated by Russia in 1702, afforded conclusive evidence that the tide had turned. For two and a half centuries the Ottomans had been the scourge of Christendom and had seriously threatened the security of the European polity. The menace was now dissipated for ever. John Sobieski's brilliant exploit was in this sense decisive. The advance of the Moslem was finally arrested, and the first phase of the Eastern Question had closed.
Change in nature of the problem. Only, however, to give place to another less alarming but more perplexing. Ever since the early years of the eighteenth century Europe has been haunted by the apprehension of the consequences likely to ensue upon the demise of the sick man, and the subsequent disposition of his heritage. For nearly two hundred years it was assumed that the inheritance would devolve upon one or more of the Great Powers. That the submerged nationalities of the Balkan peninsula would ever again be in a position to exercise any decisive influence upon the destinies of the lands they still peopled was an idea too remote from actualities to engage even the passing attention of diplomacy. From the days of Alberoni ingenious diplomatists in long succession have amused themselves by devising schemes for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, but none of these schemes paid any heed to the claims of the indigenous inhabitants. It would, indeed, have been remarkable if they had; for from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth nothing was heard and little was known of Bulgar, Slav, Rouman, or Greek. The problem of the Near East concerned not the peoples of the Balkans, but the Powers of Europe, and among the Powers primarily Russia.
Relations of Russia and Turkey. In its second phase (1702-1820) the Eastern Question might indeed be defined as the Relations of Russia and Turkey. The Habsburgs were frequently on the stage, but rarely in the leading role, and the part they played became more and more definitely subsidiary as the eighteenth century advanced. From the days of Peter the Great to those of Alexander I Europe, not indeed without spasmodic protests from France, acquiesced in the assumption that Russia might fairly claim a preponderant interest in the settlement of the Eastern Question. This acquiescence seems to a later generation the more remarkable in view of the fact that Russia herself had so lately made her entrance upon the stage of European politics. Perhaps, however, this fact in itself explains the acquiescence. Russia was already pushing towards the Black Sea before Western Europe recognized her existence. By 1774 her grip upon the inland sea was firmly established, and she was already looking to the possibilities of egress into the Mediterranean. The Treaty of Kainardji, concluded in that year, not only provided ample excuse for subsequent interference in the Balkans, but gave Russia the right of establishing a permanent embassy at Constantinople. The Treaties of Jassy (1792) and Bucharest (1812) carried her two stages further towards her ultimate goal. But by this time new factors in the problem were beginning to operate.
France and the Near East. France had never been unmindful of her interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. By the capitulations of 1535 Francis I had obtained from Suleiman the Magnificent considerable trading privileges in Egypt. D'Argenson, in 1738, published an elaborate plan for the construction of a canal through the Isthmus of Suez and for restoring, by the enterprise of French traders and the efforts of French administrators, political order and commercial prosperity in Egypt. In the negotiations between Catherine II and the Emperor Joseph for the partition of the Ottoman dominions the interests -of France were recognized by the assignment of Egypt and Syria to the French monarch.
But it was Napoleon who first concentrated the attention of the French people to the high significance of the problem of the Near East. The acquisition of the Ionian Isles; the expedition to Egypt and Syria; the grandiose schemes for an attack on British India; the agreement with the Tsar Alexander for a partition of the Ottoman Empire-all combined to stir the imagination alike of traders and diplomatists in France.
English Policy. And not in France only. If Napoleon was a great educator of the French, still more was he an educator of the English. For some two hundred years English merchants had been keenly alive to the commercial value of the Levant. The politicians, however, were curiously but characteristically tardy in awakening to the fact that the development of events in the Ottoman Empire possessed any political significance for England. The statesmen of the eighteenth century observed with equal unconcern the decrepitude of the Turks and the advance of the Russians. The younger Pitt was the first and only one among them to display any interest in what, to his successors in Downing Street, became known as the Eastern Question. With a prescience peculiar to himself he perceived that England was supremely concerned in the ultimate solution of that problem. His earliest diplomatic achievement, the Triple Alliance of 1788, was designed largely, though not exclusively, to circumscribe Russian ambitions in the Near East. But his apprehensions were not shared by his contemporaries. Few English statesmen have commanded the confidence and the ear of the House of Commons as Pitt commanded them. Yet even Pitt failed to arouse attention to this subject, and when in 1790 he proposed a naval demonstration against Russia he suffered one of the few checks in his triumphant parliamentary career. The enemies of England were less slow to perceive where her vital interests lay. "Really to conquer England," said Napoleon, "we must make ourselves masters of Egypt."
Hence the importance attached by General Bonaparte, at the very outset of his political career, to the acquisition of the Ionian Isles. Corfu, Zante, and Cephalonia were, he declared in 1797, more important for France than the whole of Italy. They were the stepping-stones to Egypt; Egypt was a stage on the high road to India. Hardly a generation had elapsed since Clive, strenuously seconded by the elder Pitt, had turned the French out of India. To Egypt, therefore, the thoughts of Frenchmen naturally turned, not only as affording a guarantee for the maintenance of French commercial interests in the Near East, but as a means of threatening the position so recently acquired by England in the Further East. These ideas constantly recur in the reports of French ambassadors at the Porte, and Talleyrand, on taking office, found, as he tells us, his official portfolio bulging with schemes for the conquest of Egypt.[1] Napoleon, therefore, in this as in other things, was merely the heir and executor of the traditions of the Ancien regime. He brought, however, to the execution of these schemes a vigour which, of late years, the old monarchy had conspicuously lacked. But even Napoleon was only partially successful in arousing the attention of the English people to the importance of the Eastern Mediterranean. The decrepitude of the Turk, the advance of Russia, the ambitions of France were all regarded as the accentuation of a problem that was local rather than European.
The Greek Revolution. Not until the events which followed upon the insurrection of the Greeks in 1821 did the English Foreign Office, still less did the English public, begin to take a sustained interest in the development of events in South-Eastern Europe.
The Greek Revolution was indeed sufficiently startling to arouse the attention even of the careless. For more than four hundred years the Greeks, like the Bulgarians and the Serbians, had been all but completely submerged under the Ottoman flood. To the outside world they had given no sign whatever that they retained the consciousness of national identity, still less that they cherished the idea of ever again achieving national unity. There had indeed been a rising in Serbia in 1804, and by the Treaty of Bucharest the Serbians had obtained from the Porte a small measure of internal autonomy, but all the strong places were garrisoned by Turks, and the step towards independence was of insignificant proportions. Besides, Europe was preoccupied with more important matters; Balkan affairs were of merely local interest.
The Greek rising was in a wholly different category. When Prince Alexander Hypsilanti unfurled the flag of Greek independence in Moldavia, still more when the insurrection spread to the Morea and the islands of the Aegean archipelago, even the dullards began to realize that a new force was manifesting itself in European politics, and that an old problem was entering upon a new phase. The Greek rising meant an appeal to the sentiment of nationality: Pan-Hellenism-the achievement of Hellenic unity and the realization of Hellenic identity-was the motto inscribed upon their banner. Plainly, a new factor had entered into the complex problem of the Near East. But the nationality factor was not the only one disclosed to Europe by the Greek insurrection. Hitherto, the Eastern Question had meant the growth or the decline of Ottoman power; a struggle between the Turks on the one hand and Austrians and Venetians on the other. More lately it had centred in the rivalry between the Sultan and the Tsar. Henceforward it was recognized, primarily through the action of Russia and the newly aroused sympathies of England, as an international question. The more cautious and more disinterested of European statesmen have persistently sought to "isolate" the politics of the Near East. They have almost consistently failed. The Greek insurrection struck a new note. It refused to be isolated. The Tsar Alexander, though deaf to Hypsilanti's appeal, had his own quarrel with Sultan Mahmud. There was, therefore, an obvious probability that two quarrels, distinct in their origin, would be confused, and that the Tsar would take advantage of the Greek insurrection to settle his own account with the Sultan.
England and the Greek Revolution. To avoid this confusion of issues was the primary object of 1 English diplomacy. Castlereagh and Canning were fully alive to the significance of the Hellenic movement, alike in its primary aspect and in its secondary reaction upon the t general diplomatic situation. And behind the statesmen there was for the first time in England a strong public opinion in favour of determined action in the Near East. The sentiment to which Byron and other Philhellenist enthusiasts appealed with such effect was a curious compound of classicism, liberalism, and nationalism. A people who claimed affinity with the citizens of the States of ancient Hellas; a people who were struggling for political freedom; who relied upon the inspiring though elusive sentiment of nationality, made an irresistible appeal to the educated classes in England. Canning was in complete accord with the feelings of his countrymen. But he perceived, as few of them could, that the situation, unless dexterously handled, might lead to new and dangerous developments. Consequently, he spared no efforts to induce the Sultan to come to terms with the insurgent Greeks lest a worse thing should befall him at the hands of Russia.
The Porte was, as usual, deaf to good advice, and Canning then endeavoured, not without success, to secure an understanding with Russia, and to co-operate cordially with her and with France in a settlement of the affairs of South-Eastern Europe. That co-operation, in itself a phenomenon of high diplomatic significance, was in a fair way of achieving its object when Canning's premature death (1827) deprived the new and promising machinery of its mainspring. Owing to untimely scruples of the Duke of Wellington England lost all the fruits of the astute and farseeing diplomacy of Canning; the effectiveness of the Concert of Europe was destroyed and Russia was left free to deal as she would with the Porte and to dictate the terms of a Treaty, which, by the Duke's own admission, "sounded the death-knell of the Ottoman Empire in Europe". But, although the Treaty of Adrianople represented a brilliant success for Russian policy at Constantinople, Great Britain was able to exercise a decisive influence on the settlement of the Hellenic question. By the Treaty of London (1832) Greece was established as an independent kingdom, under the protection of Great Britain, Russia, and France.
Mehemet Ali. The tale of the Sultan's embarrassments was not completed by the Treaties of Adrianople and London. The independence of Greece had not only made a serious inroad upon the integrity of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, but had precipitated a disastrous conflict with Russia. Worse still, the effort to avert the disruption of his Empire had induced the Sultan to seek the assistance of an over-mighty vassal. If there is anything in politics more dangerous than to confer a favour it is to accept one. Mehemet Ali, the brilliant Albanian adventurer, who had made himself Pasha of Egypt, would, but for the intervention of the Powers, have restored Greece to the Sultan. The island of Crete seemed to the vassal an inadequate reward for the service rendered to his Suzerain. Nor was the revelation of Ottoman weakness and incompetence lost upon him. He began to aspire to an independent rule in Egypt; to the pashalik of Syria; perhaps to the lordship of Constantinople itself. The attempt to realize these ambitions kept Europe in a state of almost continuous apprehension and unrest for ten years (1831-41), and opened another chapter in the history of the Eastern Question.
To save himself from Mehemet Ali the Sultan appealed to the Powers. Russia alone responded to the appeal, and as a reward for her services imposed upon the Porte the humiliating Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi (1833). By the terms of that Treaty Russia became virtually mistress of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The Tsar bound himself to render unlimited assistance to the Porte by land and sea, and in return the Sultan undertook to close the Straits to the ships of war of all nations, while permitting free egress to the Russian fleet. To all intents and purposes the Sultan had become the vassal of the Tsar.
England and Russia. Thus far England, as a whole, had betrayed little or] no jealousy of the Russian advance towards the Mediterranean. Canning, though not unfriendly to Russia, had indeed repudiated, and with success, her claim to an exclusive or even a preponderant influence over Turkey. But by the Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi that claim was virtually admitted. Russia had established a military protectorship over the European dominions of the Sultan.
The Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi inaugurates yet another phase in the evolution of the Eastern Question. From that time down to the Treaty of Berlin (1878) the primary factor in the problem is found in the increasing mistrust and antagonism between Great Britain and Russia. Lord Palmerston, inheriting the diplomatic traditions of Pitt and Canning, deeply resented the establishment of a Russian protectorate over Turkey, and determined that, at the first opportunity, the Treaty in which it was embodied should be torn up. Torn up it was by the Treaties of London (1840 and 1841), under which the collective protectorate of the Western Powers was substituted for the exclusive protectorate of Russia. After 1841 the Russian claim was never successfully reasserted.
England and the Near East. That Great Britain had a vital interest in the development of events in South-Eastern Europe was frankly acknowledged by Russia, and the Tsar Nicholas I made two distinct efforts to come to terms with Great Britain. The first was made in the course of the Tsar's visit to the Court of St. James's in 1844; the second occurred on the eve of the Crimean War, when the Tsar made specific though informal proposals to Sir Hamilton Seymour, then British Ambassador at St. Petersburg. Neither attempt bore fruit. The overtures were based upon the assumption that the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was imminent, and that it was the duty, as well as the obvious interest, of the Powers most closely concerned to come to an understanding as to the disposition of the estate. British statesmen refused to admit the accuracy of the Tsar's diagnosis, and questioned the propriety of the treatment prescribed. The "sick man" had still, in their opinion, a fair chance of recovery, and to arrange, before his demise, for a partition of his inheritance, seemed to them beyond the bounds of diplomatic decency. Lord Palmerston, in particular, was at once profoundly mistrustful of the designs of Russia, and singularly hopeful as to the possibilities of redemption for the Ottoman Empire. The advances of the Tsar were, therefore, rather curtly declined.
The Crimean War and after. However distasteful the Tsar's proposals may have been to the moral sense or the political prejudices of English statesmen, it cannot be denied that they were of high intrinsic significance. Had they found general acceptance- an extravagant assumption-the Crimean War would never have been fought; Russia would have become virtually supreme in the Balkans and over the Straits, while England would have established herself in Egypt and Crete. The refusal of the Aberdeen Cabinet even to consider such suggestions formed one of the proximate causes of the Crimean War.
That war, for good or evil, registered a definite set-back to the policy of Russia in the Near East. It has, indeed, become fashionable to assume that, at any rate as regards the British Empire, the war was a blunder if not a crime. How far that assumption is correct is a question which will demand and receive attention later on. For the moment it is sufficient to observe that the Crimean War did at any rate give the Sultan an opportunity to put his house in order, had he desired to do so. For twenty years he was relieved of all anxiety on the side of Russia The event proved that the Sultan's zeal for reform was in direct ratio to his anxiety for self-preservation. To relieve him from the one was to remove the only incentive to the other. Consequently, his achievements in the direction of internal reform fell far short of his professions.
Unrest in the Balkans. Little or nothing was done to ameliorate the lot of the subject populations, and in the third quarter of the nineteenth century those populations began to take matters into their own hands. Crete, the "Great Greek Island", had been in a state of perpetual revolt ever since it had been replaced, in 1840, under the direct government of the Sultan. In 1875 the unrest spread to the peninsula. It was first manifested among the mountaineers of the Herzegovina; thence it spread to their kinsmen in Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro. The insurrection among the Southern Slavs in the west found an echo among the Bulgars in the east. The Sultan then let loose his Bashi-Bazouks among the Bulgarian peasantry, and all Europe was made to ring with the tale of the atrocities which ensued. The Powers could not stand aside and let the Turk work his will upon his Christian subjects, but mutual jealousy prevented joint action, and in 1877 Russia was compelled to act alone.
Treaties of San Stephano and Berlin. An arduous but decisive campaign brought her within striking distance of Constantinople, and enabled her to dictate to the Porte the Treaty of San Stephano. The terms of that famous Treaty were highly displeasing, not only to ] Austria and Great Britain, but to the Greeks and Serbians, whose ambitions in Macedonia were frustrated by the creation of a Greater Bulgaria Great Britain, therefore, demanded that the Treaty should be submitted to a European Congress. Russia, after considerable demur, assented. Bismarck undertook to act as the "honest broker" between the parties, and terms were ultimately arranged under his presidency at Berlin. The Treaty of Berlin (1878) ushers in a fresh phase in the evolution of the Eastern Question.
The nationality principle. It had already become clear that the ultimate solution of an historic problem would not be reached in disregard of the aspirations and claims of the indigenous inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula The Slavs and Bulgars were indeed only in one degree more indigenous than the Turks themselves. Roumans, Albanians, and Greeks might claim by a more ancient title. But all alike had at any rate been established in the lands they still continue to inhabit many years before the advent of the alien Asiatic power. For centuries, however, all, save the hillsmen of Albania and the Black Mountain, had been more or less completely submerged under the Ottoman flood. When the tide turned and the flood gave signs of receding, the ancient nationalities again emerged. The rebirth of Greece, Roumania, Serbia, and Bulgaria represents in itself one of the most remarkable and one of the most characteristic movements in the political history of the nineteenth century. Incidentally it introduced an entirely new factor, and one of the highest significance, into the already complex problem of the Near East. The principle of nationality is itself confessedly elusive. But whatever may be its essential ingredients we must admit that the principle has asserted itself with peculiar force in the Balkan peninsula. Nor have the peoples of Western Europe been slow to manifest their sympathy with this new and interesting development. The official attitude of Great Britain during the critical years 1875-8 might seem to have committed the English people to the cause of reaction and Turkish misgovernment. Whatever may have been the motives which inspired the policy of Lord Beaconsfield it is far from certain that, in effect, it did actually obstruct the development of the Balkan nationalities. Two of them, at any rate, have reason to cherish the memory of the statesman who tore up the Treaty of San Stephano. Had that Treaty been allowed to stand, both Greece and Serbia would have had to renounce their ambitions in Macedonia, while the enormous accessions of territory which it secured for Bulgaria might ultimately have proved, even to her, a doubtful political advantage.
Since 1878 the progress of the Balkan nations had been rapid, and with that progress the concluding portion of this book will be mainly concerned It will also have to chronicle the appearance of yet another factor in the problem. At no time could the Habsburgs regard with unconcern the development of events in South-Eastern Europe, but between 1848 and 1878 they had much to engage their attention elsewhere. They played a shrewd and calculating game between 1853 and 1856, and not without success; but their conduct during the Crimean crisis was hotly resented in Great Britain, and it may perhaps account for the lack of sympathy with which the English people regarded the misfortunes of the Austrian Empire during the next ten years. Prussia, too, was busy elsewhere, and as long as Bismarck remained in power Prussia disclaimed any interest in the problem of the Near East.
Germany and the Balkans. Nothing differentiates more clearly the policy of the c Emperor William II from that of Bismarck than the in-a creasing activity of German diplomacy in the Balkans. The growing intimacy of the relations between Berlin and Vienna, still more between Berlin and Buda-Pesth, must in any case have led to this result. The virtual annexation of Bosnia and the Herzegovina to the Austrian Empire was Bismarck's acknowledgement of the obligations which in 1870 he had incurred to Habsburg neutrality. But the gift bestowed upon Austria caused the first serious breach in the good relations between Berlin and St. Petersburg. The wire between those capitals was never actually cut so long as Bismarck controlled the German Foreign Office; but his successor found himself compelled to choose between the friendship of Austria and that of Russia, and he deliberately preferred the former.
That choice inevitably involved a change in the attitude of Germany towards the Near Eastern Question. Austria made no secret of her ambition to secure access to the Aegean. Germany not only identified herself with this ambition, but she developed similar ambitions of her own. If Salonica was the obvious goal for Austrian activities, those of her ally might naturally be directed towards Constantinople, and from Constantinople onwards to Bagdad and Basra. From such grandiose designs Bismarck instinctively recoiled; but to the very differently constituted mind of William II their appeal was irresistible. Consequently, in the Near East as elsewhere, German diplomacy has followed since 1890 a perfectly consistent and undeviating path. In every conceivable way the Turk was to be caressed. Not even the massacre of the Armenian Christians was allowed to interrupt the growing intimacy between Berlin and Constantinople. The moment when the rest of the Powers shrank in horror from the perpetrator of those massacres was selected by the Kaiser to demonstrate his unalterable friendship for his new ally. From 1904 onwards the Triple Alliance was enlarged to include the Ottoman Turk. Not, indeed, without embarrassment to one of the original partners. Berlin was continually engaged in the delicate task of preventing a rupture between Rome and Vienna on questions connected with the Near East, and for the time her diplomacy succeeded. The Alliance was still further strained by the Turco-Italian War in 1911; but for three more years it remained nominally intact. Not until 1914 was it finally broken.
German policy in the Near East had in the meantime sustained more than one check. Depending, as it did, largely on a personal equation; the deposition of Abdul Hamid and the triumph of the "Young Turks" threatened it with ruin. But the danger passed; the Young Turks proved no less amenable than Abdul Hamid to the influence of Berlin; Germany was again supreme at Constantinople. Even more serious was the formation, in 1912, of the Balkan League and its astonishing success in the field. All the arts known to German diplomacy were needed to avert disaster; but they did not fail. With consummate adroitness Serbia was pushed away from the Adriatic and compelled to turn southwards; the most extravagant demands of Greece were encouraged in Macedonia; Bulgaria was effectively estranged from its allies; a remnant of the Ottoman Power in Europe was salved; a German vassal still reigned at Constantinople.
One danger remained. Between Central Europe and its Drang nach Südosten there intervened Serbia; no longer the Serbia of 1878; no longer the client of Austria-Hungary; but a Serbia in which was reborn the ancient spirit of the Jugo-Slav race; a Serbia which believed itself destined to be the nucleus of a great Serbo-Croatian Empire; which should embrace all the lands in which their race was dominant: Croatia, Slavonia, Bosnia and the Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Dalmatia, with parts of Carniola, Carinthia, Istria, and Styria The foundation of such an empire would mean not only the dismemberment of the Dual Monarchy, but the death-blow to the ambitions of Central Europe in the Near East. At all hazards, even at the hazard of a world war, such a danger must be averted.
The Great War of 1914 was the outcome of this conviction. Once more had the Near East reacted upon the West; indeed upon the whole world. In order that Austria-Hungary might keep a road open to the Aegean; in order to prevent a change of gauge between Berlin and Basra, the world must be flung into the crucible: Belgium, peaceful and unoffending, must be ruthlessly devastated; given over to arson, pillage, and abomination of every description; Poland must pay the last of many penalties; some of the fairest fields and most prosperous cities of France must be laid waste; the vast resources of the British Empire must be strained to the uttermost; Canadians must pay the toll in Flanders; Australians and New Zealanders must make the last heroic sacrifice in Gallipoli; Englishmen must perish in the swamps of the Euphrates; Indians must line the trenches in France; women and babes must perish on land and sea; from London to Melbourne, from Cairo to the Cape, from Liverpool to Vancouver the whole Empire must fight for its life; the whole world must groan in pity and suffering.
If it be true that in its dealings with the Near East Western Europe has in the past exhibited a brutal and callous selfishness, the Near East is indeed avenged.
The end no man can see. But one thing is certain. The future will not be as the past, nor as the present. Yet in order to face the future fearlessly and to shape it aright nothing is more indispensable than a knowledge of the past. Nor can that knowledge safely be confined to the few who govern; it must be diffused among the many who control To diffuse that knowledge is the purpose of the pages that follow.