The New Map of Europe (1911-1914) / The Story of the Recent European Diplomatic Crises and Wars and of Europe's Present Catastrophe

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

Since the creation of modern Italy, the great German trade route to the Mediterranean has been changed. The influence in Teutonic commercial evolution of the passing of Lombardy and Venetia from the political tutelage of a thousand years has been of tremendous importance, for the connection between Germany and Italy had always been vital. It was the first Napoleon who broke this connection. It was the third Napoleon who nullified the effort of the Congress of Vienna to re-establish it. United Italy gave a new direction to Teutonic expansion. United Germany gave to it a new impulsion. The Drang nach Osten was born.

By the Convention of Reichstadt in 1876, Austria-Hungary secured from Russia the promise of the Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina in return for her neutrality in the "approaching war of liberation" of Russia against Turkey. In order to liberate some Slavs, Russia changed the subjection of others. The Convention of Reichstadt is really the starting-point of the quarrel which has grown so bitterly during the last generation between Austria and Russia over the Slavs of the Balkan Peninsula. Russia paid dearly for a "free hand" with Turkey in 1877. She is paying still.

In her attitude towards the Balkans, Austria has had three distinct aims: the prevention of a Slavic outlet to the Adriatic, the realization of a German outlet to the Ægean, and the effectual hindrance of the growth in the Balkans of a strong independent south Slavic state, which might prove a fatal attraction to her own provinces of Croatia and Dalmatia. It was this triple consideration that led her to the occupation and annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to the policy of hostility to Servia, which is developed in another chapter. Desiring to possess for herself the wonderful port of Salonika on the Ægean bea, to reach which her railroads would have to cross Macedonia, the policy of Austria-Hungary towards Macedonia has been consistently to endeavour to uphold the semblance of Turkish authority, and at the same time to make that authority difficult to uphold through the exciting of racial rivalry among Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Albania, in this turbulent country. Turkey and Austria met on the common ground of "keeping the pot boiling," although with a different aim. By keeping the pot boiling, Turkey thought that her sovereignty was safe, while Austria hoped that when Turkey and the Balkan States had worn themselves out, each opposing the other, she could step in and capture the prize.

Turkey and Austria-Hungary, then, conspired together to create as many points of conflict as possible among the Macedonians of different races. The most devilish ingenuity was constantly exercised in stirring up and keeping alive the hatred of each race over the other. While frequently aroused to the point of making perfunctory protests, the other nations of Europe, with the exception of Russia, let Austria and Turkey do as they pleased, just as Turkey was allowed a free hand in massacring the Armenians. The laissez faire policy of the Powers was a denial of their treaty obligations.

It was only when the Balkan States awoke to the realization of the fact that they were regarded as mere pawns upon the chessboard of world politics, to be sacrificed without compunction by the European Powers whenever it was to their interest, that they buried differences for a moment, and worked out their own salvation. If the Balkan Wars have brought the present terrible disaster upon Europe, it is no more than the contemptible diplomacy of self interest and mutual jealousy could expect.

Why was the Austro-Turkish policy possible, and why did it succeed for a whole generation?

The Ottoman Empire was founded in the Balkan peninsula by rulers whose military genius was coupled with their ability to use one Christian population against the other. The Osmanlis never fought a battle in which the Balkan Christians did not give valuable assistance in forging the chains of their slavery. The Osmanlis conquered the Balkan peoples by means of the Balkan peoples. They kept possession of the country just as long as they could pit one chief against another, and then, when national feeling arose, one race against another.

Gradually, in the portion of the Balkans where one race was predominant, nationalities began to form states, which secured independence as soon as they demonstrated the possibility of harmony. Greece was the first, and was followed by Servia. Moldavia and Wallachia united into the principality of Rumania. Last of all came Bulgaria. After having gained autonomy, independence was only a matter of form. But in the central portion of the Balkan Peninsula, from the Black Sea to the Ægean, through Thrace, Macedonia, and Albania, the sovereignty of Turkey, restored by the Treaty of Berlin, was able to endure. For the people were mixed up, race living with race, and in no place could the Christians of any one race claim that the country was wholly theirs.

As emancipated Greeks, Servians and Bulgarians formed independent states, they looked towards Macedonia as the legitimate territory for expansion. But here their claims, both historically and racially, overlapped. Greece regarded Macedonia as entirely Hellenic. Had it not always been Greek before the Osmanlis came, from the days of Philip of Macedon to the Paleologi of the Byzantine Empire? The Servians, on the other hand, invoked the memory of the Servian Empire of Stephen Dushan, who in the fourteenth century, on the eve of the Ottoman conquest, was crowned "King of Romania" at Serres. It was from the Servians and not from the Greeks, that the Osmanlis conquered Macedonia in the three battles of the Maritza, Tchernomen, and Kossova. The Bulgarians invoked the memory of their mediæval domination of Macedonia and Thrace. It was by the Bulgarians that northern Thrace was defended against the Ottoman invasion; a Bulgarian prince was the last independent ruler of central Macedonia; and long before the ephemeral Servian Empire of Stephen Dushan, the Bulgarian Czars were recognized from Tirnova to Okrida. This latter city, in fact, was the seat of the autonomous Bulgarian patriarchate in the Middle Ages.

These historical claims, to us of western Europe, would have only a sentimental value. They had been forgotten by the subject populations of European Turkey for many centuries. The first revival of political ambitions was that of Hellenism. Modern Greece, divorcing itself from the impossible and pagan dream of a restoration of classic Greece, with Athens as its capital, which had been woven for it by western European admirers during the first half century of its liberation, began to take stock of its Byzantine and Christian heritage during the latter part of the reign of Abdul Aziz. The new Hellenism, as the prestige of the Ottoman Empire decreased, took the definite form of a determination to succeed the Ottoman Empire, as it had preceded it, with Constantinople as capital.