Europe Since 1918

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

A practical demonstration of this danger was given during the recent World War. The disastrous effects to the Entente Powers of Turkey’s alliance with their enemies, which closed the Straits for four precious years, have not yet been fully measured. By handing over to Germany the control of the Straits the Turks are directly responsible for (1) the length of the war, (2) the collapse of Russia, (3) the year of grace during which the Bolshevist régime got itself thoroughly established in Russia, (4) the menace to the Suez Canal during the war, and (5) the unchecked spread of anti-British propaganda in northwest India, Afghanistan, Persia, Arabia, and Egypt. The Dardanelles expedition, which was a holocaust for Australians and New Zealanders as well as British, was entered upon and persisted in because the British Government realized that the Straits ought to be forced, if possible, regardless of cost, for the sake of vital imperial interests. Using Turkey and the Holy War, Germany was in a fair way to cut England’s communications with India, the Far East, and Australasia. In 1916 the British were saved by their success in fomenting a rebellion of Mecca against Constantinople, which was possible because of the tactlessness of the Turks toward the Arabs and the cruel repressions of Djemal Pasha in Damascus and Beirut. In 1917 they were saved by the entry of the United States into the war. American credits and supplies, the moral effect of America’s entry, and the American contribution to the Entente armies on the western front in the spring and early summer of 1918 alone made possible the retention of the British armies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Macedonia. But to the wise man a menace successfully confronted is not a menace forgotten. The Islamic belt stretches around the Black Sea, across the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, and across the Suez Canal. The British Empire is defended by the British fleet. If the fleet is powerless to exercise pressure upon the enemies of the Empire in the interests and defense of the Empire, the Empire will crumble to pieces in short order.

Breathing a sigh of relief when the armistice was signed, the British Foreign Office, aware of the vital importance of the Black Sea region to the future of British rule in Asia, sent troops not only to Constantinople but also to the Caucasus and northern Persia. Pressure was once more brought to bear upon Afghanistan; and, despite interpellations in Parliament on the ground of expense, the Mesopotamian army was reinforced and extended its occupation northward and eastward. The powerful sympathies of international Jewry were enlisted to create a buffer region on the Asiatic side of the Suez Canal.

Gradually, however, it was realized that tax weariness and war weariness at home must be reckoned with. This meant abandonment of the Caucasus, Persia, and Afghanistan to the undisputed influence of Soviet Russia, whose propaganda it was planned to call off by trade agreements and the lifting of the economic blockade. The Mohammedan world, not being interested in trade and not being vitally vulnerable to any form of economic or food blockade, could best be watched and intimidated by a British fleet at Constantinople, holding Stambul and the Sultan’s palace of Dolmabagché under its guns, and able to cruise at will in the Black Sea. As the tax-payers accept the burden of maintaining the fleet without complaint, the freedom enjoyed in the Straits since 1918 has been a boon to the British Government in exercising pressure without spending too much money!

The Treaty of Sèvres is a splendid illustration of the vicious methods of world politics, which make agreements between nations unsound and insincere: unsound because they are not arrived at after a fair consideration of the issues at stake and because they represent makeshift compromises; insincere because the contracting parties do not intend to keep them if contingent agreements—or rather bargains—are not lived up to. The British point of view prevailed in the Treaty of Sèvres. But Italy expected to gain from this concession British support against the Jugoslavs in the Adriatic, and France expected British support for extreme measures against Germany in the reparations collection. Both nations looked to Great Britain either to forgive or forget their indebtedness to her or at least to grant them the priority already acknowledged to Belgium in reparations payments.

Before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Sèvres, France and Italy realized that the British could not be depended upon to help them out of their troubles, political or financial; and the return of Constantine gave an excellent excuse to two of the three makers of the treaty not only to consider it null and void but actually to work against it. We must not lay too much stress upon the concessions featured in the secret treaties negotiated by Italy and France with the Angora Government. Considerations of foreign policy were paramount. Italy plotted the ruin of a potential commercial competitor in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. France was bent on destroying the country she believed Great Britain had picked to hold Constantinople and the Straits as agent for British political and commercial interests. The Nationalist Turks had the luck to be a good weapon to be used by two members of the Entente alliance to strike the third; and the Greeks had the misfortune to be lacking in endurance to play through to the end of the game the British expected them to play alone, for the British Government was not prepared to risk Mohammedan difficulties by coming out openly on the side of the Greeks.

Great Britain did not feel uneasy about the Turks on the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus until after the Young Turk revolution. The new régime had not been long installed before foreign observers began to see that the Young Turks were smitten with megalomania. They had an inordinate confidence in their own strength and in their ability to impose their cultural and political hegemony, in a constitutional state, upon the non-Turkish elements, Moslem as well as Christian. Abdul Hamid and his predecessors had been past masters in the art of knowing how far to go in pitting one European Power against another, in collecting taxes from Christians and oppressing them, and in extending administrative control over non-Turkish Moslems and conscripting for the army among them. The Young Turks provoked Albanians and Arabs to rebellion, alienated Circassians and Kurds, and goaded the Balkan States to the point of desperation where they were able to forget their own rivalries long enough to combine and drive the Turks out of Macedonia and Thrace. How could a British Liberal Government, relying upon the Nonconformist vote, continue to aid the Turks in maintaining their domination over subject peoples who had proved their ability to free themselves? After the first year of enthusiasm and generous impulse ended in the horrible Adana massacre, the Young Turks were thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the electors to whom Messrs. Asquith and Lloyd George had to appeal in two bitterly contested General Elections.

Turkey was weakened both by fruitless efforts to put down the rebellions among Mohammedan subject peoples that her new masters foolishly provoked and by the Young Turk policies in Tripoli and Macedonia, which were heading directly toward wars that could end only disastrously. Her leaders looked to Europe for some powerful ally. Abandoning Abdul Hamid’s safe policy of pitting one against another, the Young Turks deliberately chose Germany as their friend, put their army and the control of the Straits in Germany’s hands a year before the World War broke out, and during the months of August and September, 1914, so critical to the Entente Powers, deceived the British and French by protestations of friendship and neutrality. But as soon as the engineer officers of their German allies advised them that the Dardanelles could not be forced by a fleet, they threw in their lot with the Central Powers. During the years since the armistice the Turks have been in close touch with Soviet Russia and have assisted materially in the anti-British propaganda of the Bolshevists in Asia.

The difference between the Young Turks and the Old Turks is that the régime since 1908 purports to represent a people conscious of its nationhood and power, while the Hamidian régime was a system that had existed for centuries upon the threefold foundation: a theocratic absolutist Government, centralized at Constantinople, for the Turkish element and other Mohammedan elements near the sea or in lowlands; virtual autonomy, on the principle of non-intervention or laisser-faire, for non-Turkish Mohammedan peoples of the mountains or hinterland; and separate communities under their hierarchies for the Christian peoples of the empire. Old Turkey could be the enemy of no country except one that invaded her, and during the nineteenth century intervention of other powers was always invoked against an aggressor power. Abdul Hamid’s pan-Islamic movement was a political one, with a limited appeal. The autocrat did not allow it to get out of hand through the awakening of a national consciousness. Until 1908 it never occurred to the British that Turkey was a country that might at any time, without provocation upon the part of Great Britain, join the enemies of the British Empire in time of war, close the Straits, and proclaim a Holy War against the greatest Mohammedan power in the world (for the British Empire is that). But since 1908 Great Britain has had to reckon with Turkey as a potential enemy, and, since 1914, as an actual enemy. As a military menace the Turks are negligible to the British. But the Turks handing the key to the Straits to an enemy of Great Britain in time of war—that has happened once, and the British know that if it is allowed to happen again the death-knell of the British Empire may sound.

The freedom of the Straits, from the British point of view, means the insertion of guarantees in the peace settlement in the Near East of such a nature that a repetition of 1914 will be impossible. The Straits must be open to British warships in time of war as in time of peace, open in such a way that nothing can close them. It is unnecessary to make any provisions concerning merchant ships. The British undertake to have a fleet large enough to look out for their merchant marine in war and peace!

What are these guarantees? First of all, prohibition of any form of fortification along the Straits or in the Sea of Marmora. Second, a neutral zone, whose inviolability will be under the vigilant control of an international commission on both sides of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. Third, the absence of armies and armaments in the neutral zone. When Mr. Lloyd George declared that never again should the Straits be closed against the British, his political opponents (except the Labor men) agreed that the French needed to be told bluntly that the Straits guarantees meant as much to the British as the Rhine guarantees meant to the French, and that it was a case of quid pro quo. Great Britain’s future policy toward German guarantees was going to be contingent upon France’s policy toward Turkish guarantees.