CHAPTER III
THE "BAGDADBAHN"
In the development of her Weltpolitik, the most formidable, the most feasible, and the most successful conception of modern Germany has been the economic penetration of Asiatic Turkey. She may have failed in Africa and in China. But there can be no doubt about the successful beginning, and the rich promise for the future, of German enterprises in the Ottoman Empire.
The countries of sunshine have always exercised a peculiar fascination over the German. His literature is filled with the Mediterranean and with Islam. From his northern climate he has looked southward and eastward back towards the cradle of his race, and in imagination has lived over again the Crusades. As long as Italy was under Teutonic political influence, the path to the Mediterranean was easy. United Italy and United Germany were born at the same time. But while the birth of Italy threatened to close eventually the trade route to the Mediterranean to Germany, the necessity of a trade route to the south became more vital than ever to the new German Confederation from the sequences of the union.
When her political consolidation was completed and her industrial era commenced, Germany began to look around the world for a place to expand. There were still three independent Mohammedan nations—Morocco, Persia, and Turkey. In Morocco she found another cause for conflict with France than Alsace-Lorraine. In Persia and Turkey, she faced the bitter rivalry of Russia and Great Britain.
The rapid decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the fact that its sovereign was Khalif of the Moslem world, led German statesmen to believe that Constantinople was the best place in the world to centre the efforts of their diplomacy in the development of the Weltpolitik. Through allying herself with the Khalif, Germany would find herself able to strike eventually at the British occupation of India and Egypt, and the French occupation of Algeria and Tunis, not only by joining the interests of Pan-Islamism and Pan-Germanism, but also by winning a place in Morocco opposite Gibraltar, a place in Asia Minor opposite Egypt, and a place in Mesopotamia opposite India.
The certainty of economic success helped to make the political effort worth while, even if it came to nothing. For Asia Minor and Mesopotamia are countries that have been among the most fertile and prosperous in the whole world. They could be so again. The present backward condition of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia is due to the fact that these countries have had no chance to live since they came under Ottoman control, much less to develop their resources proportionately to other nations. The natives have been exploited by the Turkish officials and by foreign holders of concessions. Frequently concessions have been sought to stop, not to further, development. If there have been climatic changes to account for lack of fertility in Asia Minor, this is largely due to deforestation. Ibn Batutah, the famous Moorish traveller of the first half of the fourteenth century, and Shehabeddin of Damascus, his contemporary, have left glowing accounts of the fertility and prosperity of regions of Asia Minor, now hopelessly arid, as they existed on the eve of the foundation of the Ottoman Empire. Not only have all the trees been cut down, but the roots have been torn up for fuel! One frequently sees in the markets of Anatolian towns the roots of trees for sale. The treatment of trees is typical of everything else. The country has had no chance. In Mesopotamia, the new irrigation schemes are not innovations of the twentieth century, but the revival of methods of culture in vogue thousands of years before Christ.
The Romans and Byzantines improved their inheritance. The Osmanlis ruined it.