CHAPTER XXI
THE EXPANSION AND DEBACLE OF GREECE
None can understand the tragedy that was enacted in Asia Minor in 1922, none is fitted to pass judgment upon it, none has the right to venture an opinion on the rôle the Greeks will still play in the settlement of the Near Eastern question, without having made a serious and sympathetic attempt to follow the Hellenic national movement through the century of struggle that culminated in the collapse of the Greek armies in Asia Minor and the burning of Smyrna in September, 1922. The legend has grown that Greece is the victim of the imperialistic folly of her greatest statesman, who involved his people in ambitious dreams of conquest that were impossible of fulfilment. Admirers of Venizelos, to refute this legend, have launched another legend. They have tried to make the world believe that Greece’s disasters and humiliation are due to a pro-German king, supported by an unscrupulous group of politicians, who almost ruined his country during the World War through intrigues with Germany, and whose dramatic return to the throne in 1920 robbed Greece of the advantages Venizelos had secured for her in the Treaty of Sèvres.
The rival legends are based upon a threefold misapprehension of the connection between the Greek people and the little Kingdom of Greece, of the relations of the great powers with the Kingdom of Greece and the Greek people, and of the significance, internally and internationally, of the Venizelist movement since 1910.
It has been assumed by most writers that the Kingdom of Greece, as constituted after the War of Independence, marked the resurrection of the nation, and was the natural and logical outcome of a struggle for emancipation. This error came from a confusion of classical Greece with historic Greece. Up to this day it has not been realized in Occidental Europe and America that the Greek national movement does not have its inspiration in the ancient glory of Athens and Sparta, of Corinth and Thebes. The Peloponnesus and Attica and the coast-lands of the Gulf of Corinth never formed a united country, inhabited by a people enjoying a common nationhood.
The Kingdom of Greece, at the tip of the Balkan peninsula, was an artificial country, brought into being after the War of Independence, by a compromise of interests and jealousies on the part of Russia, France, and Great Britain. The dream of the Greeks who raised the banner of revolt against the Turks was the restoration of the Byzantine Empire, which endured for a thousand years, and not of the Greece we study about in school, which never existed as a united country. National movements are inspired by historic traditions, nurtured by religion, and grouped around a language. The connection between the Greek nation of the nineteenth century and ancient pagan Athens and Sparta is remote. Constantinople and Smyrna have been the foyers of Hellenism. The leaders in the War of Independence, who started and directed the revolt against the Turks, came from Epirus, Macedonia, the islands of the Ægean Sea, and Asia Minor.
The Kingdom of Greece was a makeshift of European diplomacy. The powers were determined to maintain, in so far as it is humanly possible to do so, the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. They feared the preponderant influence, each of the others, in the Near East. Every time a Christian subject people arose against the Turks, their efforts were directed toward preventing the success of national movements. They made use of expedients to bolster up the decaying Ottoman Empire by opposing where they could, and limiting where they could not successfully oppose, the separation of Balkan provinces from Turkey. This policy, justified by the consideration of keeping the peace among themselves, has been followed in every conference of European statesmen from Vienna in 1815 to Lausanne in 1923. The rising tide of nationalism in the Balkans, encouraged by the intrigues of single great powers, has been frowned upon when the great powers came together to adjust their rivalry.
More than Serbians, Rumanians, and Bulgarians, have the Greeks been victims of this policy. For the triumph of Hellenism would have meant not simply the detachment of outlying provinces but a blow struck at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks have never had a fair chance, either by themselves or in alliance with the other Balkan peoples, to work out their own salvation. At times the great powers have intervened directly; on other occasions they have aimed to keep the Balkan peoples weak by setting them against one another. For a hundred years it has been a game of bullying, bribing, fishing in troubled waters.
Venizelos was born and won his spurs in Crete under the Ottoman yoke. He was a leader in revolutions, and his first experiences with European diplomacy convinced him that the powers were determined, for the sake of their own interests, to keep his native island under Ottoman sovereignty. He left Crete and entered into the political life of the little kingdom of Greece to make the kingdom a Piedmont for the unification of Hellas. The Venizelist movement from the beginning, therefore, was not interested primarily in the internal affairs of independent Greece. The Venizelists set out to regenerate and strengthen the Kingdom of Greece for the purpose of using Athens as the starting-point in a campaign to emancipate the Greeks still under the Ottoman yoke. It is impossible to call Venizelos an imperialist, who conceived grandiose schemes and wrecked his country trying to put them through. The Kingdom of Greece was not “his country.” Of the 7,000,000 Greeks in the coast-lands and islands of the Ægean, hardly more than a fourth were inhabitants of the kingdom of Greece. The movement to which Venizelos gave his name was a movement to liberate as many as possible of the 5,000,000 Greeks still under Turkish rule, beginning with his own island of Crete.
The ideas of King Constantine and his great premier were radically antagonistic; they could not be reconciled. Constantine accepted joyfully the partial liberation that came through the Balkan wars at the beginning of his reign. But he looked upon his kingdom as a country whose internal interests were paramount. His policy during the war was to steer Greece through difficult years by maintaining neutrality. The policy of Venizelos was to involve Greece in the war on the side of the enemies of Turkey in order that, as a result of their victory (in which he believed implicitly), Greece might be enabled to free as many as possible of the Greeks still under the yoke of Turkey. When the Allies deposed King Constantine in 1917, Venizelos brought Greece into the war to fight for the redemption of the Ottoman Greeks and the completion of the unification of the nation.
At the Peace Conference no representative of a smaller state had a stronger case than Venizelos. In taking territories away from Germany and Austria and Hungary the Conference went back to the Middle Ages to allow historic claims. Ports were taken from the vanquished on ethnological grounds, even when the hinterland was of another character; and where the inhabitants were not of the nationality of the claimant state, ports were taken away on economic grounds, the self-determination argument being justified by the hinterland! In the changes in Europe there could not be adduced the additional argument of Venizelos, that liberation from the vanquished meant security of life and property and a greater degree of prosperity. And yet the Entente Powers, at one in their determination to despoil Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians, hesitated a little about the Bulgarians and a long time about the Turks. In the atmosphere of the Peace Conference none dared say a word in favor of mitigating the harshness and injustice of the terms imposed upon Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians. But a strong current in favor of the Turks set in; and, had there not been the necessity of placating the Serbians to reconcile them to the Italian demands, the Bulgarians would have got off more easily than they did.