No more complete disavowal of Russian imperialism could be desired by the New Turkey. It is by no means certain, however, that Russia will continue indefinitely to pursue so magnanimous a policy in the Near East. With the development of her natural resources and the extension of industrialism, it is not improbable that Russia—in common with the other Great Powers—will once again feel the urge to imperialism. Raw materials, markets, the maintenance of unimpeded routes of commercial communication, and opportunities for profitable investment of capital are likely to be considered—in the present anarchic state of international relations—as essential to an industrial state under working-class government as to an industrial state under bourgeois administration. If such be the case, Russian economic penetration in Turkey and Persia may be resumed, and Russian eyes may once more be cast covetously at Constantinople. “In Mongolia and Tibet, in Persia and Afghanistan, in Caucasia and at Constantinople, the Russian has been pressing forward for three hundred years,” writes an eminent American geographer, “and no system of government can stand that denies him proper commercial outlets.”[5]
Nevertheless, whatever be the future policy of Russia in the Near East, for the present the Russian Republic has no economic or strategic interests which are inconsistent with the national development of the Turkish people. Certainly Russia has neither the economic nor the political resources to demand a share in the Bagdad Railway or to seek for herself other railway concessions in Anatolia. And the Western Powers are little likely to heed the wishes of the Soviet Government until such time as those wishes are rendered articulate in a language the Western Powers understand—the language of power.
France Steals a March and Is Accompanied by Italy
Those who believed that the defeat of Germany and the withdrawal of Russia would solve all problems of competitive imperialism in the Near East were destined to be disillusioned. For no sooner was the war over than France and Great Britain took to pursuing divergent policies regarding Turkey. The rivalry between these two powers—which had been terminated for a time by the Entente of 1904—was resumed in all its former intensity. The Entente, in fact, had been formed because of common fear of Germany, rather than because of coincidence of colonial interests; and with that fear removed, the foundation of effective coöperation had been undermined.[6] The Great War may be said to have terminated the first episode of the great Bagdad Railway drama—the rise and fall of German power in the Near East; it opened a second episode, which promises to be equally portentous—an Anglo-French struggle for the right of accession to the exalted position which Germany formerly occupied in the realm of the Turks.
Anglo-French rivalry in the Near East will not be an unprecedented phenomenon. “Since the Congress of Vienna in 1814, France and Great Britain have never fought in the Levant with naval and military weapons (though they have several times been on the verge of open war), but their struggle has been real and bitter for all that, and though it has not here gone the length of empire-building, it has not been confined to trade. Its characteristic fields have been diplomacy and culture, its entrenchments embassies, consulates, religious missions, and schools. It has flared up on the Upper Nile, in Egypt, on the Isthmus of Suez, in Palestine, in the Lebanon, at Mosul, at the Dardanelles, at Salonica, in Constantinople. The crises of 1839–41 and 1882 over Egypt and of 1898 over the Egyptian Sudan are landmarks on a road that has never been smooth, for conflicts [of one sort or another] have perpetually kept alive the combative instinct in French and English missionaries, schoolmasters, consuls, diplomatists, civil servants, ministers of state, and journalists. One cannot understand—or make allowances for—the post-war relations of the French and British Governments over the ‘Eastern Question’ unless one realizes this tradition of rivalry and its accumulated inheritance of suspicion and resentment. It is a bad mental background for the individuals who have to represent the two countries. The French are perhaps more affected by it than the English, because on the whole they have had the worst of the struggle in the Levant as well as in India, and failure cuts deeper memories than success.”[7]
French statesmen were dissatisfied with the division of the spoils of war in the Near East. They had a feeling that here, as elsewhere, Britain had obtained the lion’s share. They believed that Mr. Lloyd George had been guilty of sharp practice in his agreement of December, 1918, with M. Clémenceau, by the terms of which Mosul and Palestine were to be turned over to Great Britain.[8] Frenchmen were suspicious of British solicitude for the Arabs, which they believed was not based upon disinterested benevolence; in fact, self-determination for the Arabs came to be considered a political move to render precarious the French mandate for Syria. French patriots chafed at British emphasis upon the fact that “the British had done the fighting in Turkey almost without French help” and that “there would have been no question of Syria but for England and the million soldiers the British Empire had put in the field against the Turks.” French pride was hurt by the rapid rise of British prestige in a region where France had so many interests. And prestige—diplomatic, military, religious, cultural, and economic—has always been an important desideratum in Near Eastern diplomacy.[9]
French dissatisfaction with the Turkish settlement was one of the issues of the San Remo Conference of April, 1920, at which were assigned the mandates for the territories of the former Ottoman Empire. Exclusive control by Great Britain of the oilfields of the Mosul district was so vigorously contested that M. Philippe Berthelot, of the French Foreign Office, and Professor Sir John Cadman, Director of His Majesty’s Petroleum Department, were instructed to work out a compromise. Thus came into existence the San Remo Oil Agreement of April 24, 1920, by which Great Britain, in effect, assigned to France the former German interest in the Turkish Petroleum Company’s concession for exploitation of the oilfields in the vilayets of Mosul and Bagdad.[10] But the British drove a shrewd bargain, for it was provided, in consideration, that the French Government should agree, “as soon as application is made, to the construction of two separate pipe-lines and railways necessary for their construction and maintenance and for the transport of oil from Mesopotamia and Persia through French spheres of influence to a port or ports on the Mediterranean.” The oil thus transported was to be free of all French taxes.[11]
French imperialists likewise were dissatisfied with the disposition of the Bagdad Railway as provided for by the unratified Sèvres Treaty. French bankers had held a thirty per cent interest in the Bagdad line while it was under German control,[12] and they believed, for this reason, that they were entitled to a controlling voice in the enterprise when it should be reorganized by the Allies. Although the settlement at Sèvres—the Treaty of Peace with Turkey and the Tripartite Agreement between Great Britain, France, and Italy—recognized the special interests of France in the Bagdad Railway, and particularly in the Mersina-Adana branch, it provided, as has been seen, for international ownership, control, and operation.[13] Now, Frenchmen were suspicious of internationalization, particularly where British participation was involved. Had not the condominium in Egypt proved to be a step in the direction of an eventual British protectorate? Might not the history of the Suez Canal be repeated in the history of the Bagdad Railway? Would Great Britain look with any greater equanimity upon French, than upon German, interests in one of the great highways to India? To answer these questions was but to increase the French feeling of insecurity.
French dissatisfaction with the distribution of the spoils in the Near East and French fear of British imperial power and prestige—these were factors in a new alignment of the diplomatic forces in Turkey during 1920–1922. British imperialists were desirous of keeping Turkey weak. A weak Turkey could never again menace Britain’s communications in the Persian Gulf and at Suez; a weak Turkey could be of no moral or material assistance to restless Moslems in Egypt and India. To keep Turkey weak the Treaty of Sèvres had loaded down the Ottoman Treasury with an enormous burden of reparations and occupation costs (to which France could not object without repudiating the principle of reparations); had taken away Turkish administration of Smyrna and Constantinople, the two ports essential to the commercial life of Anatolia; and had made possible a Greek war of devastation and extermination in the homeland of the Turks. France, on the other hand, would have preferred to see Turkey reasonably strong. A strong, prosperous Turkey would the more readily pay off its pre-War debt, of which French investors held approximately sixty per cent; payment of this debt was more important to France than payment of Turkish reparations. A strong Turkey, furthermore, might fortify the French position in the Near East. As Germany had utilized Ottoman strength against Russia and Great Britain, so France might utilize Nationalist Turkey against a Bolshevist Russia which would not pay its debts or an imperial Britain which might prove unfaithful to the Entente.[14]
Anglo-French differences in the Near East were brought to a head by the rapid rise of the military power of the Angora Government, for it was against France that Mustapha Kemal’s troops launched their principal early attacks. General Gouraud—his hands tied by an Arab rebellion which had necessitated a considerable extension of his lines in Syria—was unable to repulse the Turkish invasion of Cilicia, which reached really serious proportions in the autumn of 1920. Time and again French units were defeated and French garrisons massacred by the victorious Nationalists. In these circumstances, France “had to choose between the two following alternatives: either to maintain her effectives and to continue the war in Cilicia, or to negotiate with the de facto authority which was in command of the Turkish troops in that region.” The French armies in Syria and Cilicia already numbered more than 100,000 men; to reënforce them would have been to flout the opinion of the nation and the Chamber, “which had vigorously expressed their determination to put an end to cruel bloodshed and to expenditure which it was particularly difficult to bear.” To negotiate with Mustapha Kemal was, to all intents and purposes, to scrap the unratified Treaty of Sèvres. The French Government chose the latter alternative. It is said that during the London Conference of February-March, 1921, “M. Briand declared to Mr. Lloyd George on several occasions, without the British Prime Minister making the slightest observation, that he would not leave England without having concluded an agreement with the Angora delegation. M. Briand pointed out that neither the Chamber nor French public opinion would agree to the prolongation of hostilities, involving as they did losses which were both heavy and useless.”[15]