The fate of Eastern Thrace is still awaiting the conclusion of peace with Turkey and the settlement of the far greater problem—Constantinople. That most tantalizing of questions has gone through some astonishing phases since 1913. Seven years ago the Bulgar was thundering at the lines of Chatalja, and Tsar Ferdinand was said to be ordering the diadem with which he was to be crowned in St. Sophia. Five years ago the Russian solution was at last accepted by England and France, though those states for a century had seemed to believe that the establishment of the Muscovites on the Bosporus would mean the end of everything. Then after the collapse of Russia and of Turkey people talked only of sending the Turk “bag and baggage” back to Asia and of establishing a small international state on the straits, with the United States as mandatory. This project seems now to be beyond the range of possibilities. The next best plan would seem to be to install the Greeks, who from the standpoint of history and of population statistics have at least as good a right to be there as the Turks, and from the standpoint of their general utility in the world an infinitely better right. But the news dispatches of the last month foreshadow that the drama will end with an anti-climax. Since England and France are each unwilling to allow the other to control this coveted position, since both are rather sceptical of Greece’s present fitness for so responsible a rôle, and England moreover is disquieted by certain possible repercussions in India and elsewhere, it now seems to be agreed that the Sultan is to remain in Constantinople. Once more, the Turk is to make good his claim to having nine lives, and from the old cause—the rivalries of the Christians. There will doubtless be elaborate arrangements about neutralizing and internationalizing the straits, and the Sultan will issue whole batches of paper reforms; but I fear that many people will be inclined to echo the words of the late President Roosevelt, that (after the close of the War), “it would be a betrayal of civilization to leave the Turks in Europe.”
I do not wish, however, to end upon a note of pessimism. Whatever mistakes may have been made in connection with the territorial problems of Eastern Europe—and some mistakes were inevitable, in view of the tremendous multiplicity and complexity of the problems raised—the general outcome represents an immense gain for the cause of liberty and nationality. The dream which haunted Mazzini and so many other liberals of fifty years ago—the transformation of the four great despotisms of Eastern Europe—Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Turkey—into a world of free, self-determining national states—has now been in large part realized. The unification of Italy, delayed for half a century, is now virtually finished; and from the Baltic to the Aegean there has been built up a tier of national states, which may perhaps set a check upon any recrudescence of Pan-Germanism, and which some people have called ‘the new bulwark of liberty in the East.’ Of course, fears are expressed as to ‘the Balkanization of Eastern Europe.’ But if that charge implies a disintegration of the older units into a large number of small and permanently feeble states, the complaint is scarcely well founded. After all, in the area considered in these lectures, only two really new states have been created. In the main, the effort has been to round out older ones so as to make their political frontiers coincide with their ethnographic ones, to unite rather than to divide. As a result we have Poland, with about thirty million people; Czecho-Slovakia with twelve to thirteen millions; Roumania with fifteen millions; Yugo-Slavia with twelve to thirteen millions; Greece, which may attain six to seven millions;—results which scarcely fit in with the charge of Balkanization.
Whatever mistakes there may have been, whatever selfish interests have occasionally come unpleasantly to light, I think it may be justly affirmed that on no similar occasion in the past has so earnest and systematic an effort been made to settle territorial questions on the basis, not of the interests or the convenience of the Great Powers, but of the rights and aspirations of the peoples directly concerned; that the Peace Conference at Paris has liberated and unified more nations than any previous European congress, or all the congresses of the last century taken together; and that the principle of nationality has never before won so sweeping and signal a victory.
Bibliographical Note
In view of the fact that most of the numerous ethnographic maps of the Balkan Peninsula are works of propaganda or else are copied from earlier works so that they often have no independent value, it is a not inessential precaution to consult the article by Haardt von Hartenturm, “Die Kartographie der Balkanhalbinsel im 19. Jht.,” in the Mitteilungen des k. k. Militär-geographischen Instituts, xxi, Vienna, 1901. The later maps are enumerated by Jovan Cvijić in his article, “Die ethnographische Abgrenzung der Völker auf der Balkanhalbinsel,” in Petermanns Mitteilungen, 1913 (i).
This latter article is accompanied by the author’s own ethnographic map of the Peninsula, which represents the conclusions of the most eminent and one of the most moderate of Serbian scholars. Professor Cvijić has published another map of the same character in the Geographical Review, May, 1918.
A large Bulgarian work obviously designed for propagandist purposes is the atlas of forty maps, accompanied by explanatory text, entitled The Bulgarians in their Historical, Ethnographical, and Political Frontiers, published at Berlin in 1917, in German, French, English, and Russian, by a group of scholars headed by D. Rizoff. (Cf. the critical observations on this work by Professor Beliċ, Les Cartes ethnographiques au service de la propagande bulgare. Paris, 1918.)
A similar historic and ethnographic atlas for Roumania has been referred to in the bibliography for Chapter VII.
The geography of the Peninsula is described by Jovan Cvijić, La Péninsule balkanique, géographie humaine, Paris, 1918; and Marion Newbigin, Geographical Aspects of Balkan Problems in their Relation to the Great European War, 2d impression, London, 1915.