Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

The armistice of Mudros, signed on October 30, 1918, gave the Entente Powers control of Constantinople and the Straits and stipulated the evacuation of the Russian Transcaucasian provinces by the Turks. Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria were already in Allied hands by conquest. Immediately after the armistice the British pressed forward into Cilicia. Three days before the armistice with Germany, Great Britain and France issued a joint declaration in the Near East, announcing that they had no designs upon these countries but were there simply as liberators, with the intention of helping the oppressed non-Turkish elements of the Ottoman Empire to attain complete independence.

But the Entente Powers, separately and together, were already bound by secret agreements which contained their real intentions concerning the devolution of the Ottoman Empire. In March, 1915, the British and French Governments agreed that Russia was to have Constantinople and the European hinterland up to a line drawn from Enos on the Ægean to Midia on the Black Sea; the islands in the Sea of Marmora; Imbros and Tenedos outside the Dardanelles; and the coast of Asia Minor from the Bosphorus to the mouth of the Sakaria River across to the Gulf of Ismid. In exchange, Russia assented to the giving of the middle neutral zone of Persia to Great Britain and to the proclamation of the independence of Arabia. This agreement was enlarged, after Italy entered the war, to give Russia all of Armenia as a sphere of influence.

On April 26, 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia, among the bribes offered in the secret Treaty of London, promised Italy full sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands and the port of Adalia, in the southwestern corner of Asia Minor, with the strategic hinterland. This was afterward enlarged to include a generous quarter or more of Asia Minor, going north to include Smyrna and east to include Konia in the Italian sphere of influence.

In May, 1916, France and Great Britain, to whom had been left by Russia and Italy the non-Turkish-speaking portions of the empire as spoils, concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which France was to have Syria and Cilicia with the hinterland to Mosul, while Great Britain was to take Mesopotamia and Palestine.

Beginning in the summer of 1915, British emissaries began to treat with Sherif Hussein of Mecca to induce him to revolt against the Turks. Negotiations were carried on for a year. The revolution broke out at the beginning of June, 1916, when Hussein proclaimed himself independent of Ottoman rule. In December, 1916, Great Britain, France, and Italy recognized the Hedjaz as an independent kingdom, with Hussein for sovereign. The support of the Arabs being vital to the British both in the Mesopotamian and Palestinian expeditions, the British Government made secret promises to King Hussein of territorial arrangements which conflicted with their earlier promises to the French. This was revealed at the Peace Conference when Emir Feisal, the king’s son, presented the claims of his country to the Council of Ten. The Hedjaz signed the peace treaty and became a member of the League of Nations. The English were involved also in promises given to the Arab tribes of Mesopotamia and the Yemen, made when the situation was desperate, and to the Egyptians. Adding to the embarrassing conflicts in these promises, on December 2, 1917, the British Government, by what is known as the Balfour Declaration, promised to make Palestine a “home-land” for the Jews!

The defection of Russia reopened the most thorny problem of all, the control of Constantinople and the Straits. When the war was over, British, French and Italians occupied Constantinople, not very harmoniously, while their statesmen, still less harmoniously, wrangled and bargained over the disposition of the city.

When the Peace Conference opened, the French aim was to become the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean. Frenchmen of the old school and young illuminati alike had never forgiven Great Britain for grabbing Cyprus and doing France out of the Suez Canal and Egypt. Even the Frenchmen most in sympathy with the British were nervous, realizing that the forte of Great Britain after every war was to reap where she had sown not. When a peace treaty was signed after a war—any war—the choicest bits of spoils were found to have entered into the joy of the pax britannica. After this war, the first one with extra-European spoils in which the French had been on the winning side—that is, Britain’s side—they determined to have a different deal. Canada and India, Egypt and many islands, were past history. The Near East had been culturally French since the crusades. From Saloniki to Beirut, France was determined to reign supreme. Palestine represented the very last concession it was possible for the French to make. Of course, they did not hope to possess Constantinople, but they were not going to let the British settle themselves on the Bosphorus as they had done at Gibraltar and Port Said. This would mean British domination of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and for British capital and goods the priority in markets that had been traditionally French.

Up to the time of the armistice, and afterward until the collapse of Baron Wrangel, France hoped for the miracle of the regeneration of Russia. This would have solved the Constantinople question. And as long as Venizelos was in power in Greece the French did not despair of preventing Greece from becoming infeudated to Great Britain. But aspirations in the eastern Mediterranean had to be subordinated to the more important aspiration of controlling the Rhine.

The British Foreign Office saw this from the very beginning of the Peace Conference and indicated to Mr. Lloyd George the successive moves in a skilful game. The British premier balked every time his French colleagues wanted to speak firmly to Germany—balked on the Rhine occupation, the Saar Valley, the entry into Frankfort, the taking over of the Ruhr basin, the Upper Silesian settlement, the amount and method of payment of the German indemnity, the trial of war prisoners, and the enforcement of German disarmament. Much of the opposition was sincere and based on common sense. But every time Mr. Lloyd George gave in to the French it was a case of do ut des; one after the other the French aims in the Near East suffered dimunition at the expense of British aims. It was not through intrigues and superior skill in working out policies in the Near East that the British gradually gained control of Constantinople, and extended the frontiers of Mesopotamia and Palestine beyond the Sykes-Picot line, but by agreeing to back the French in some new demand upon Germany!

French and British diplomacy, in considering the devolution of the Ottoman Empire, agreed on two points only: the necessity of using the Greeks to prevent Italy’s scheme of monopolizing the commerce of Asia Minor through control of Smyrna; and the passing of the buck to the United States to take over the vast bleak mountains of Armenia, so that we could become benefactors of the helpless and policemen to guard against the infiltration of Bolshevism, while the rich and fertile parts of the empire were being exploited by themselves.[7]