swa
-:;:-.
m&
in ■■'}' ■'•'*
HH
>HKBB
llBl
';■■■•■■•.
■I/1,
»$
9£ ' BSE ,; r
WWM
^H8^
flufiSfi
Hi
eh
,,:■>; ^.",
THE WESTERN QUESTION
TO
THE PRESIDENT AND FACULTY OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE FOR GIRLS AT CONSTANTINOPLE
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED BY
THE AUTHOR AND HIS WIFE
IN GRATITUDE FOR THEIR HOSPITALITY
AND IN ADMIRATION OF THEIR NEUTRAL-MINDEDNESS
IN CIRCUMSTANCES IN WHICH NEUTRALITY IS
'hard AND rare'
498303 \
PREFACE
This book is an attempt to place certain recent events in the Near and Middle East in their historical setting, and to illustrate from them several new features of more enduring importance than the events themselves. It is not a dis- cussion of what the peace-settlement in the East ought to be, for the possibility of imposing a cut-and-dried scheme, if it ever really existed, was destroyed by the landing of the Greek troops at Smyrna in May 1919. At any rate, from that moment the situation resolved itself into a conflict of forces beyond control ; the Treaty of Sevres was still-born ; and subsequent conferences and agreements, however im- posing, have had and are likely to have no more than a partial and temporary effect. On the other hand, there have been real changes in the attitude of the Western public towards their Governments' Eastern policies, which have produced corresponding changes in those policies themselves ; and the Greeks and Turks have appeared in unfamiliar roles. The Greeks have shown the same unfitness as the Turks for governing a mixed population. The Turks, in their turn, have become exponents of the political nationalism of the West. The break-up of the Ottoman Empire has been arrested at the borders of Anatolia, where Turkey has asserted her inde- pendence as successfully as her former Near Eastern subjects have asserted theirs in the Balkan Peninsula ; and in this last stage in the redistribution of Near and Middle Eastern territories, the atrocities which have accompanied it from the beginning have been revealed in their true light, as
viii THE WESTERN QUESTION
crimes incidental to an abnormal process, which all parties have committed in turn, and not as the peculiar practice of one denomination or nationality. Finally, the masterful influence of our Western form of society upon people of other civilisations can be discerned beneath the new phenomena and the old, omnipresent and indefatigable in creation and destruction, like some gigantic force of nature.
Personally, I am convinced that these subjects are worth studying, apart from the momentary sensations and quandaries of diplomacy and war which are given more prominence in the Press, and this for students of human affairs who have no personal or even national concern in the Eastern Question. The contact of civilisations has always been, and will always continue to be, a ruling factor in human progress and failure. I am, of course, aware that the illustrations which I have chosen involve burning questions, and that my presentation of them will not pass unchallenged. Indeed, the comparatively few people interested in disproving or confirming my statements may be my chief or only readers. I had therefore better men- tion such qualifications as I possess for writing this book.
I have had certain opportunities for first-hand study of Greek and Turkish affairs. Just before the Balkan Wars, I spent nine months (November 1911 to August 1912) travelling on foot through the old territories of Greece, as well as in Krete and the Athos Peninsula, and though my main interest was the historical geography of the country, I learnt a good deal about the social and economic life of the modern population. During the European War, I edited, under the direction of Lord Bryce,1 the Blue Book published by the British Government on the ' Treatment of Armenians in the
1 Whose death has removed one of the most experienced and distinguished Western students of Near and Middle Eastern questions, though this was only one among his manifold interests and activities.
/
PREFACE ix
Ottoman Empire : 1915 ' (Miscellaneous No. 31, 1916), and incidentally learnt, I believe, nearly all that there is to be learnt to the discredit of the Turkish nation and of their rule over other peoples. Afterwards I worked, always on Turkish affairs, in the Intelligence Bureau of the Department of Information (May 1917 to May 1918) ; in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office (May to December 1918) ; and in the Foreign Office section of the British Delegation to the Peace Conference at Paris (Decem- ber 1918 to April 1919). Since the beginning of the 1919-20 Session, I have had the honour to hold the Korais Chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History, in the University of London ; and on the 20th October 1920 * the Senate of the University kindly granted me leave of absence abroad for two terms, in order to enable me to pursue the studies connected with my Chair by travel in Greek lands . I arrived at Athens from England on the 1 5th January 1921, and left Constantinople for England on the 15th September. During the intervening time, I saw all that I could of the situation from both the Greek and the Turkish point of view, in various parts of the two countries. The most important of my journeys and other experiences were shared by my wife, and I have profited more than I can say by constant discussion with her of all that we saw and did together, though I alone am responsible for the verification and presentation of the results of our observations. My itinerary was as follows : 2
(a) Jan. 15-26 : Athens ;
(b) Jan. 21 -March 15 : Smyrna, and the following journeys into the hinterland :
1. Feb. 1-8 : Alashehir, Ushaq, Kula, Salyhly, Sardis ;
1 Just a month before the change of government and consequent crisis in Greece, which I (like most other observers at a distance) had not foreseen.
2 The route is plotted out on the map at the end of the volume.
x THE WESTERN QUESTION
2. Feb. 11-18: Ephesus, Kirkinje, Aidin, Tire, Torbaly ;
3. Feb. 26-March 10 : Manysa, Soma, Kinik, Bergama,
Yukbara Bey Keui, Aivali, Dikeli ;
(c) March 11-Aug. 2 : Constantinople, and the following
journeys into the hinterland :
1. March 27- April 5 : Brusa, Pazarjyk, Kovalyja,
Nazyf Pasha, Yenishehir, Koprii Hissar ;
2. April 7-13 : Brusa, Gemlik, Ermeni Solos ;
3. May 24-25 : Yalova ;
4. June 2-6 : Gemlik, Omer Bey, Yalova ;
5. June 13-18 : Gemlik, Omer Bey, Armudlu ;
6. June 22-27 : Armudlu, Gemlik ;
7. June 27-July 3 : Ismid, Baghchejik, Karamursal,
Eregli, Deirmendere ;
(d) Aug. 3-8 : Smyrna ;
(e) Aug. 9-Sept. 1 : Athens, and the following journey into
the hinterland : Aug. 16-26 : Tripolitsa, Sparta, Mistra, Trypi, Kala- mata, Vurkano, Mavrommati, Meligala, Isari, Astala, Kokoletri, Bassae, Pavlitsa, Kyparissia, Samiko, Olympia, and back via the Pyrgos-Patras- Korinth railway ; (/) Sept. 1-9 : Athens to Constantinople via Larisa and Salonika, with an excursion to Fiorina, Kozliani, and Shatishta ; (g) Sept. 9-16 : Constantinople.
My wife arrived at Constantinople, a few days before me, in March and started home by sea from the Peiraeus on the 15th August. Between those dates we were travelling together.
This summary will indicate what facts I am in a position to know, and it is for readers to judge whether I have presented them impartially and drawn fair conclusions. When a writer passes from statements of fact to judgments of right and wrong, his propositions become doubly con- troversial. But the observer of any conflict is bound to form moral judgments in the process of informing himself about
PREFACE xi
events, and to abstract the one from the other, though it may give the appearance of scientific objectivity, is really less scientific than to put all his cards on the table. I have therefore expressed freely, though carefully, my judgments of right as well as of fact, and I submit that I am not con- victed of partiality by the fact that, in discussing particular chapters of a long story, I sum up against one party in favour of the other. If that disqualifies me, then every verdict must be accounted a miscarriage of justice. The fact that I am neither a Greek nor a Turk perhaps creates little pre- sumption of my being fair-minded, for Western partisans of non- Western peoples are often more fanatical than their favourites. I hope that it will appear from my method of treatment that my own interest in Greece and Turkey arises from curiosity (the most respectable of human motives), and that I am as much interested in their past, about which it is futile to break lances, as in their present and future.
It may, I fear, be painful to Greeks and ' Philhellenes ' that information and reflections unfavourable to Greece should have been published by the first occupant of the Korais Chair. I naturally regret this, but from the academic point of view it is less unfortunate than if my conclusions on the Anatolian Question had been favourable to Greece and unfavourable to Turkey. The actual circumstances, what- ever personal unpleasantness they may entail for me and my Greek friends and acquaintances, at least preclude the suspicion that an endowment of learning in a British University has been used for propaganda on behalf of the country with which it is concerned. Such a contention, if it could be urged, would be serious ; for academic study should have no political purpose, although, when its sub- ject is history, its judgments upon the nature and causal
xii THE WESTERN QUESTION
connection of past events do occasionally and incidentally have some effect upon the present and the future.
In this connection I ought to add that I made my journeys in 1921 as special correspondent for the Manchester Guardian,1 and to mention the reasons. I did so first in order to pay my expenses ; secondly, because the Guardian is a paper which it is an honour to serve ; and thirdly, because without this status it would hardly have been possible for me to learn what I wanted. My travels coincided with a historical crisis ; and, during such crises, travellers like myself who are not persons of eminence have little chance of meeting the important people and witnessing the important events, if they travel as students or tourists ; while journalists, however unimportant personally, have greater opportunities in such circumstances than under normal conditions.
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE.
London, 22nd March 1922.
1 The sketches appended to Chapters IV. -VII. were originally published in the Manchester Guardian, and are reprinted here by the kind permission of the Editor.
c
NOTE ON SPELLING
I cannot pretend that my spelling of Greek and Turkish proper names, of which this book is full, has been consistent, though I have been careful always to spell the same name in the same way — except in quotations, where I have purposely left the names as they stand. I have used the following symbols :
(i) In Turkish words —
'='ain (impossible to transliterate into the
Roman alphabet).
'=hemze (a hiatus in the middle of a word).1
gh=ghain (like the German guttural g).
q=qaf (hard k).
y (when a vowel) =hard ye or hard essere (something like the
u in English ' until ' when rapidly
pronounced).
other unmodified^ x ..
, f= Italian vowels,
vowels J
modified vowels = German modified vowels.
(ii) In Greek words —
gh=hard gamma (like ghain). consonantal y=soft gamma.
dh=dhelta (like the th in English ' the ') th=thita (like the thin English ' ^in '). s=sigma (like s in English 'this,' but never like s in English ■ his ') . kh=khi (like chin Scotch ' loch ').
1 Except in the proelision of the Arabic definite article {e.g. in ' Abdu'l- Hamid'), which I have indicated by using this sign in the ordinary English way.
xiv THE WESTERN QUESTION
(ii) In Greek words — continued.
x=ksi (like x in English ' axe,' but never like
x in English ' examine ').
ph=phi (English/).
vowels (as written! .
, • , i ^ r = Italian vowels, in this book) J
I have often indicated the Greek stress accent, which is as puzzling as the Russian.
However, I have not gone to extremes. In fact, I have hardly used \ ', or q at all (the latter only, I think, in ' Saljuq ' and ' Ushaq,' which have somehow impressed themselves on my mind in those forms). On the other hand, I have always used vowel y for Turkish hard i, except in words familiarly spelt otherwise — e.g. ' Aidin ' and ' Osmanli.' To write ' 'Uthmanly ' would be misleading as well as affected.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAP.
PREFACE .....
NOTE ON SPELLING I. THE SHADOW OF THE WEST . II. WESTERN DIPLOMACY
III. GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
IV. THE BACKGROUND IN ANATOLIA
Two Ruined Cities
V. GREEK AND TURKISH GOVERNMENT .
A Journey through the Mountains An Agricultural Experiment . Greek Prisons at Smyrna The Turkish National Pact
VI. THE MILITARY STALEMATE
The Battle of In Onu . The Origin of a Legend
VII. THE WAR OF EXTERMINATION
Yalova ..... The Area of the Organised Atrocities
VIII. NEW FACTS AND OLD VIEWS .
TABLE OF DATES .... LIST OF BOOKS ....
ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER V . ADDITIONAL NOTE ON CHAPTER VII . INDEX ......
PAOE
vii
xiii
1
37
63
107 148
153
196
201 ^ 204 207
211 246 254
259 299 311
320
365 371
387 390 406
MAPS
THE THEATRE OF WAR IN WESTERN ANATOLIA, folding
out at the end of Chapter VI. ..... 258
THE DANGER LINE OF OMER BEY . . . .314
THE AUTHOR'S JOURNEYS IN 1921, folding out at the end of
the volume ....... 420
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST
Savages are distressed at the waning of the moon and attempt to counteract it by magical remedies. They do not realise that the shadow which creeps forward till it blots out all but a fragment of the shining disc, is cast by their world. In much the same way we civilised people of the West glance with pity or contempt at our non-Western contemporaries lying under the shadow of some stronger power, which seems to paralyse their energies by depriving them of light. Generally we are too deeply engrossed in our own business to look closer, and we pass by on the other side — conjecturing (if our curiosity is sufficiently aroused to demand an explanation) that the shadow which oppresses these sickly forms is the ghost of their own past. Yet if we paused to examine that dim gigantic overshadowing figure standing, apparently unconscious, with its back to its victims , we should be startled to find that its features are ours . The shadow upon the rest of humanity is cast by Western civilisation, but it is difficult for either party to comprehend the whole situation. The other human societies, or at any rate the civilised and educated people among them, are thoroughly aware of the penetrating and overpowering effect of the West upon their public and private fife, but from this knowledge they draw a mistaken inference. In the Near and Middle East, for example, most observers are probably struck by the fact that their Greek and Turkish acquaintances, who differ about almost everything else, agree in the conviction that Western politics turn upon the Eastern Question, and that the Englishman or Frenchman
A
2 THE WESTERN QUESTION
looks abroad on the world with eyes inflamed by a passionate love or hatred, as the case may be, for the Greek or the Turkish nation. At first one is inclined to attribute this misconception purely to megalomania, and to shrug one's shoulders at it as being the kind of infirmity to which non- Western peoples are heir. Later, one realises that, erroneous though it is, it arises from the correct understanding of an important fact regarding us which we ourselves are apt to overlook. Just because we are aware of what passes in our own minds, and know that interest in Eastern affairs is almost entirely absent from them, it is difficult for us to realise the profound influence on the East which we actually, though unconsciously, exercise. This conjunction of great effect on other people's lives with little interest in or intention with regard to them, though it is common enough in human life, is also one of the principal causes of human misfortunes ; and the relationship described in my allegory cannot per- manently continue. Either the overshadowing figure must turn its head, perceive the harm that unintentionally it has been doing, and move out of the fight ; or its victims, after vain attempts to arouse its attention and request it to change its posture, must stagger to their feet and stab it in the back.
It is worth examining these two features in our relation- ship to other civilisations which are so dangerous in com- bination. Our indifference — to start with that — is partly temporary, at any rate in its present degree of profundity. Interest in Eastern (as in other) foreign affairs was suddenly and artificially stimulated in all Western countries during the European War. The destinies of England, France, Germany, and even the United States were obviously affected then by the policy of the Greek, Ottoman, and other Eastern Governments, and hundreds of thousands of English soldiers, and many thousand French, German, and Austrian soldiers, serving in the East, were constantly in the thoughts of their families at home. But the moment Turkey asked
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 3
for an armistice and the bulk of the European expeditionary forces were drafted back and demobilised, this unusual interest died away and was followed by an access of apathy, also abnormal, which was partly due to war-weariness and partly to the pressure of more urgent post-war problems nearer home. Greece and Turkey have been pushed into the background by Silesia, the Coal Strike, Reparations, Ireland, the Pacific, Unemployment, and the rift in the Entente. During the eight months of 1921 x which I spent in Greece and Turkey, Greek and Turkish affairs only occupied the attention of Western statesmen or were given prominence in Western newspapers during the three weeks 2 when a conference of Allied ministers, expressly convened to reconsider the Treaty of Sevres, was sitting in London. But even on this special occasion the faint interest aroused was immediately eclipsed by a crisis in the relations between the three Entente Powers and Germany.
I generally found the Greeks and Turks incredulous when this was pointed out to them. They insisted (of course erroneously) that the immense effects which were being produced all the time in the East by Western action, must be the result of policy ; it was inconceivable that they could be unintentional and unconscious ; or at any rate the interest of the Western public was bound in the near future to be aroused by the striking consequences of its unconscious activity. The most effective way to combat this delusion was to remind them that the British public was almost apathetic about the violent disturbances which were then taking place in Ireland, a country next door to Great Britain, vitally affecting our security and actually under our government. Was it likely, then, that Great Britain was or would be interested in Near and Middle Eastern countries for which we had no direct responsibility and whose fate was of secondary concern to the British Empire ?
1 15th January to 16th September.
2 21st February to 12th March.
4 THE WESTERN QUESTION
This extreme degree of indifference towards non-Western affairs is no doubt unlikely to be permanent ; but in the lesser degree in which it has always existed, it will probably continue, because it is a natural state of mind. Western society is a unity — a closer and more permanent unity than either the independent states that form and dissolve within its boundaries or the Empires compounded of Western and non-Western populations — and its own internal affairs are bound to draw its attention away from the borderlands or the regions beyond them. Our English politics and economics are more closely concerned with the East than are those of any other Western nation, and yet English children at school are still taught French and German and not Hindustani and Arabic — just because many more individual English people have relations with neighbouring Western nations than with our non-Western fellow-subjects overseas .
This historic Western indifference is strikingly illustrated by the policy of the Hapsburg Monarchy, a Western Power which had vital interests in the Eastern borderlands of our world and might have made its fortune, between a. d. i699and 1768, as heir to all the provinces of the Ottoman Empire on this side of Constantinople. Yet though, during this favour- able period, the Austrian Government had at its disposal some of the best political talent in Europe, the Drang nach Osten was perpetually arrested and reversed by the attraction of the West. Even to the most sharp-sighted statesmen at Vienna, a province in Germany or Italy looked as large and as desirable as a kingdom in the Balkans. They expended their strength in the three great Western wars of the eigh- teenth century ; Russia got ahead of them on the road to Constantinople ; and then the spread of Western political ideas among the local nationalities closed the thoroughfare altogether. When Bismarck at last cut off the Austrian Eagle's Western head, and advised the bird to use the other, 4 it was too late . The optical illusion which minimised Eastern
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 5
and magnified Western objectives in the eyes of eighteenth- century Austrian statesmen, is possibly the principal cause of the break-up of that ancient Western Monarchy in our own generation, and it is certainly characteristic of the permanent attitude of the Western public.
In dramatic contrast to this indifference is the actual influence on Eastern life which the West has long exerted. On the Near and Middle East, at any rate, where the superior vitality and effectiveness of Western civilisation are rein- forced by proximity, our influence has been increasing during the last two and a half centuries till it is actually paramount there, while we have remained hardly conscious of a process which now impresses itself upon the local populations at every turn. This combination of maximum actual effect with minimum consciousness and interest has made the Western factor in the Near and Middle East on the whole an anarchic and destructive force, and at the same time it appears to be almost the only positive force in the field. Whenever one analyses a contemporary movement — political, economic, religious, or intellectual — in these societies, it nearly always turns out to be either a response to or a reaction against some Western stimulus. In some form, a Western stimulus is almost invariably there, and a purely internal initiative is rarely discoverable, perhaps even non-existent, the reason being that, before Western penetration began, the indigenous civilisations of these regions had partly or wholly broken down. A brief review of these break-downs is necessary for an understanding of the present situation, and in attempting it I can at the same time define my terms.
The term ' Near Eastern ' is used in this book to denote the civilisation which grew up from among the ruins of Ancient Hellenic or Graeco -Roman civilisation in Anatolia and at Constantinople, simultaneously with the growth of our civilisation in the West . The two societies had a common parent, were of the same age, and showed the same initial
6 THE WESTERN QUESTION
power of expansion, but here the parallel ends. Western civilisation (whatever its ultimate limitations) has so far continued to progress and expand, while Near Eastern civilisation, after a more brilliant opening, broke down un- expectedly in the eleventh century after Christ, and fell into an incurable decline, until, about the seventeenth century, its influence over men's minds became extinct, except in Russia. The cause of this break-down — to state it briefly and roughly — was the premature development of the Near Eastern state, which reached an efficiency at the very beginning, in the eighth century, which the Western state did not attain until the close of the fifteenth.1 This over- growth of a particular social organ had two fatal effects. First, it stunted or arrested the growth of other social institutions and activities. The Church became a depart- ment of state in the various Near Eastern monarchies, not, as in the West, an institution transcending states and binding a civilisation together ; monastic orders, boroughs, marches, bishoprics, and universities never struggled into autonomy, and only the rudiments of new vernacular literatures appeared. The state absorbed or subordinated all, and so there was nothing to mediate between one state and another. The ' East Roman ' (that is, the mediaeval Greek) and the Bulgarian Empires, each claiming to be a complete embodi- ment not only of the political but of the ecclesiastical and spiritual life of Near Eastern civilisation, were incompatible. There was no room for both in the Near Eastern world, and the fatal consequence was the Hundred Years' War (a.d. 913-1019) between these two principal Near Eastern Powers, which resulted in the temporary subjection of mediaeval Bulgaria and the exhaustion of mediaeval Greece. The victorious empire — militarised, distended, and over- strained— became an easy prey to its neighbours, and Near
1 Except in the city-states of Northern and Central Italy, where during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries miniature samples of the modern Western 'Great Power' were grown experimentally, like seedlings in a nursery -garden.
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 7
Eastern civilisation, which it had pressed altogether into its service, fell with it.
The inroads of the Central Asian nomads upon Eastern and Central Anatolia in the eleventh century are discussed in Chapter IV., but the first general conquest of Near Eastern society by another came from the West. Near relations are not always the best friends, and any one who reads Liutprand of Cremona's memoir of his embassy to the court of Constantinople l (a.d. 968) or Anna Comnena's description of the First Crusade (a.d. 1096-7), 2 will be impressed by the mutual antipathy of the Near East and the West at their first encounters.
The Western conquest (begun by the Norman invasions, and completed at the beginning of the thirteenth century by the Fourth Crusade) naturally increased and embittered this antipathy on the Near Eastern side, and hatred of the ' Latins ' materially assisted the later and more thorough conquest of the Near Eastern world for Middle Eastern civili- sation by the Osmanlis (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries after Christ). On the eve of the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Power, ' the first minister of the [East Roman] Empire . . . was heard to declare that he had rather behold, in Constantinople, the turban of Mahomet than the Pope's tiara or a cardinal's hat ' ; 3 and while the submerg- ence of Near Eastern society was naturally accompanied by a general heightening of consciousness among its members of their difference from other civilised communities, the memories of Western domination seem to have over- shadowed the actualities of Middle Eastern for at least two centuries . At any rate, down to the middle of the seventeenth century the Near East on the whole displayed greater hostility towards Western than towards Middle Eastern influences.
The exception which proved the rule, while also pointing
1 New edition by Becker, J. (Hanover, 1915, Hahn), of Pertz's edition in the Monumenta Germ. Hist., vol. iii.
2 Annae Comnenae Alexias, ed. ReiiTerscheid, J. (Leipzig, 1884, Teubner, 2 vols. ). 3 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, oh. lxviii.
8 THE WESTERN QUESTION
towards an approaching mental revolution, was the career of Cyril Lukaris. This exceptional man was a Greek and a priest of the Orthodox Church who went westward to study in Venice and Padua, pushed on to Geneva, and (without leaving his own Church) came under the spell of Calvinism. His character and his Western education carried him to the highest positions. In 1602 he was elected Patriarch of Alexandria, in 1621 of Constantinople. He held the Oecumenical Patriarchate for sixteen years ; sent numbers of young Greeks to study in the Protestant Universities of Western Europe ; and published a Confession of Faith (adapting Calvinistic ideas to Orthodox theological ter- minology) not only in Greek but — significant innovation — in simultaneous French, Latin, German, and English editions. And then he fell. The Near Eastern hatred of the West — even when represented by Western opponents of the Roman Church — was stronger than Lukaris 's genius. His enemies persuaded the Ottoman Government in 1637 to have him executed as a dangerous innovator, and his doctrine was finally condemned by an Orthodox synod in 1691.1
By that date, however, the mental reorientation of the Near East towards the West was in full swing. The ' Westernisa- tion ' of the Near Eastern world is one of the most remark- able phenomena in the intercourse between different civilisations . It appears to have begun rather suddenly in the same generation — about the third quarter of the seventeenth century — among both the Russians and the Greeks, and among the latter, where there was no ' en- lightened monarch ' like Peter the Great to give it an im- pulsion, its origins are more mysterious and more interesting. No doubt it was encouraged by the contemporary tendency in the West towards religious toleration, which was at last making Western culture accessible without the necessity of accepting some variety of Western religious dogma. At any rate, a movement began among Near Easterners of that
1 The Roman Catholic missionaries in the Levant were his enemies as well as the anti-Western majority of the Orthodox hierarchy.
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 9
generation which will have far more momentous results than the commercial, diplomatic, and military rivalries of Western Powers in the Levant, for which the name of ' Eastern Question ' is commonly reserved. The Near East saw its Western neighbours in a new light, no longer as the barbarian Franks, but as ' Enlightened Europe ' (a phrase that constantly recurs in the writings of Korais), and it adopted Western clothes and manners, Western commercial and administrative methods, and above all Western ideas. Western literature was translated, was imitated, and was able to propagate new branches in the Near Eastern vernaculars, which had failed in the Middle Ages to produce a literature of their own. For the last two and a half centuries, the Near East, having lost its distinctive civilisation, has flung itself into the Western movement with hardly any reserves or inhibitions.
Middle Eastern civilisation has broken down in a different way and with different consequences. In this book the term ' Middle Eastern ' is used to denote the civilisation which has grown up from among the ruins of the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Its parentage is not the same as ours, and it is not our contemporary but our junior by about six centuries. The interregnum, accompanied by barbarian invasions, between the break- down of Hellenic or Graeco -Roman civilisation and the beginnings of the modern West occurred approximately between the years a.d. 375 and 675, while the similar interregnum, preceding the birth of the modern Middle East, when the Abbasid Empire broke down and the Egyptian and Mesopotamian world was overrun by Turkish and Mongol nomads and Western Crusaders, did not begin til] the tenth century a.c. and was hardly over by the close of the thirteenth. The new civilisation which was emerging by the date a.d. 1300 had a not unpromising beginning. There was practical genius in the political and military organisation of the early Ottoman Empire ; religious fervour in the Shi'i revival in Persia ; architectural beauty
10 THE WESTERN QUESTION
in such buildings as the Great Mosque at Ephesus, the Green Mosque at Brusa, the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed at Con- stantinople, or the Taj Mahal at Agra, which range from the close of our thirteenth to the middle of our seventeenth century. Yet the break-down in Middle Eastern civilisa- tion began at an earlier stage than in Near Eastern. In both the Ottoman and the Indian x Empire, the decline of vitality and creative power was perceptible by the close of the sixteenth century, only about three hundred years from birth ; and by a.d. 1774 the Mogul Power in India and the Safawi Power in Persia had perished, while the Ottoman Power seemed to be in its death agony.
Two causes of this Middle Eastern break-down suggest themselves, one connected with the design of the new building, the other with the site on which it was laid out. Middle Eastern institutions, which were worked out most logically in the Ottoman Empire and somewhat less syste- matically in Northern India, did not lack originality. The selection, education, and life-long discipline of soldiers and officials were as audaciously conceived in the Empire of Muhammad the Conqueror as in the imaginary Republic of Plato,2 but they were equally contrary to nature. The new institutions were a thorough -going adaptation to sedentary conditions of the nomad economy which had enabled the ancestors of the Moguls and Osmanlis to make a livelihood on the steppes, and the relations between ruler, servants, and subjects were modelled on those between shepherd, watch-dog, and herd. The system could hardly have sur- vived even if the populations on whom the founders of the
1 The Mogul dynasty, which did not really secure its hold over Northern India till the beginning of Akbar's reign (a.d. 1556), was only the last and outwardly most magnificent phase of a Moslem state in Northern India which had a continuous history, in spite of changes of dynasty and other vicissi- tudes, from the conquests of Muhammad Ghori in the last decade of the twelfth century after Christ onwards.
2 See Lybyer, A. H., Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent (Harvard, 1913, University Press), and compare Lane-Poole, S., Mediaeval India (London, 1903, Fisher Unwin), for the slave system of Firoz Shah of Delhi, in the fourteenth century after Christ.
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 11
new order imposed it had been characterless and impres- sionable, for the Osmanli watch-dogs rebelled against their Sultan's regulations long before the Near Eastern rayah 1 challenged the watch-dogs' control. But the principal experiments in this system happened to be made in areas where other civilisations, or at least the ruins of other civilisations, already covered the ground, and this was certainly the second cause of failure. It is not difficult to see why the new civilisation attempted to develop in Northern India and in the Near East. The old centres of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilisation were exhausted. Persia and Iraq had been trampled down by the first sweep of the nomadic invasions in the interregnum, Syria and Egypt broken by resistance on two fronts, to the Crusaders and the Mongols. It also seems to be a law of history that every death, interregnum, and rebirth of civilisation is accompanied by a change of locality. Modern Western civilisation made its first progress not in Greece and Southern Italy, which had nurtured its parent, but on the almost virgin soil of outlying provinces of the Roman Empire ; and even Near Eastern civilisation started, away from the centres of Ancient Greek culture, in inner Anatolia, and expanded among the unsophisticated Slavs. But the sites which fell to Middle Eastern civilisation were not untenanted, though its own principal parent had not been the occupant. To conquer and assimilate such venerable, self -conscious, and exclusive societies as the Near Eastern and the Hindu was a difficult enterprise for any young civilisation, and the proximity of Western civilisation, rising towards its prime, made the attempt dangerous. The early break-down of the nomadic institutions was neither surprising nor necessarily fatal in itself. The Teutonic institutions with which the West made its first experiments in construction were equally unsuccessful, yet the failure of the Carolingian system did not kill the new Western civilisation which had begun to
3 'Cattle.'
12 THE WESTERN QUESTION
develop within that framework. It has lived to build itself a whole series of political mansions. The parallel break- down in the modern Middle East was less easy to repair because it laid bare the old ruins on the site which had not been worked into the new plan, and set free their original tenants to reconstruct them on the quite different and more attractive Western model.
This ' Westernisation ' of the Near East has been discussed above, but it is important to note that the break-down of Middle Eastern civilisation, which helped to make it possible, has only been partial. Civilisations, like individuals, spring from two parents, and in all new civilisations whose parentage we can trace, the heritage from the civilised mother has been more important than that from the barbarian who violated her. In the West, the Near East, and the Middle East alike, this heritage from the mother civilisation has been handed down in the form of ' universal religions ' — Christian churches in the two former cases, Islam in the other. Just as the Western Church survived the failure of the early Teu- tonic kingdoms, so Islam has survived the collapse of the Mogul and Osmanli Powers. Moreover, because modern Middle Eastern civilisation is six centuries younger than ours, Islam is still a greater force in its world than Chris- tianity now is among us . As an expression of emotions and ideas and as a bond of society, it is at least as powerful as Christianity was in the West in the fourteenth century, and even more indispensable — for in the Middle East no new secular structure has yet been successfully erected, the submerged Hindus and Near Easterners have lifted their horns, and the West has trespassed through the ruined walls. Islam, and nothing but Islam, now holds the Middle Eastern world together.
These considerations explain the difference between the two processes of ' Westernisation ' in the Middle East and the Near East which are observable in our generation. The process in the Near East began about 250 years ago and
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 13
has gone forward fairly smoothly and easily, because the positive previous obstacles had already been removed. In the Middle East it did not begin till a century later. It first manifested itself in the Ottoman Empire after the disastrous Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarjy, imposed by Russia in 1774, and it has been constantly retarded and inter- rupted by the real presence of Islam. In fact, though the Ottoman Empire, by adopting Western methods, has achieved what seemed impossible a century and a half ago and has survived — even though with diminished territory and sovereignty — until our day, it has never so far gone much beyond the minimum degree of Westernisation necessary to save it, at any given moment, from going under. It has borrowed more technique than ideas, more military technique than administrative, more administrative than economic and educational. Thus, if Westernisation were in itself the summum bonum for non-Western peoples, the Middle Eastern world, just because it is not a tabula rasa, would be a less promising field than the Near Eastern world for the advancement of humanity. But any such notion, though flattering and therefore plausible to Western minds, is surely improbable. Middle Eastern civilisation, while in many respects obviously less successful than ours, is also likely to contain valuable different possibilities, and its disappearance would be a loss, as the disappearance of a distinctive Near Eastern civilisation in South-Eastern Europe has proved to be already. The practical certainty, therefore, that the ' Westernisation,' like the break-down, of the Middle East will only be partial, is a gain and not a calamity. It would only be disastrous if the Islamic element in Middle Eastern civilisation and the constructive element in con- temporary Western life were incompatible, for then the survival of Islam in the Middle East might certainly wreck the development of Middle Eastern society and involve our two worlds in an irreconcilable conflict. Butvthis in- compatibility, though often asserted, is disproved by the
14 THE WESTERN QUESTION
modus vivendi between Islam and the Western spirit which the Middle Eastern peoples have been working out, in their internal life as well as in their relations with Western countries, during the last 150 years. Their problem is more complicated than that of their Near Eastern neighbours, it will take longer to solve, and they have begun a century later. But it is certainly not insoluble, and if and when the modus vivendi is completed, it may have more fruitful results than are to be expected from the more thorough- going assimilation of the Near East to the Western character.
Moreover, when the difference between the processes of Westernisation in the Near and the Middle East has been given full consideration, the fact remains that both societies are moving along the same road in the same direction. It would be out of place to digress further here in order to demonstrate this proposition. It is a postulate of this book. It will meet with opposition, partly through prejudice and partly because it is easier to regard objects of thought as constants than as variables. One slips into thinking of Western, Near Eastern, and Middle Eastern civilisation as each something with an unchanging identity, and from this it is only a step to assume that because the Near East is at this moment nearer than the Middle East to the West, it is therefore somehow a priori within the Western pale, and the Middle East permanently outside it. It is more difficult to bear in mind that none of the three are stationary, and that while the Near and Middle East are both approach- ing the West, at different rates and intervals and from different angles, the West is all the time moving on a course of its own. Yet relativity is as fundamental a law in human life as it now appears to be in the physical universe, and when it is ignored, a true understanding of past history or contemporary politics ceases to be possible.
When one turns from generalisations to instances, it becomes clearer that the phenomena produced respectively by the contact of the Middle East and the Near East with
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 15
the West have more resemblances than differences. As we look into the recent problems and struggles of each of these societies, we find the same necessity to borrow from the West and the same destructive initial consequences. On the one hand, the survival of Near and Middle Eastern communities, after the break-down of their own forms of life and in the face of Western expansion, has only been made possible by the adoption of certain Western elements. The present Greek National State could never have been built up, as it has been since 1821, if during the preceding century numbers of Greeks had not acquired Western commercial methods and educational ideals. Again, the Ottoman Empire could never have survived the apparently desperate crisis of 1774-1841, during which its indigenous institutions finally broke down and its existence was threat- ened by Russia, the Greek Revolution, and Mehmed Ali, if it had not taken over successfully a modicum of Western military and administrative technique. Yet all the time this infusion of Western life, which was essential to the peoples that experienced it and was welcomed and brought about by these peoples deliberately because they recognised that it was the alternative to going under, has worked havoc with their lives. It has been new wine poured suddenly and clumsily into old bottles .
This is equally true of ideas, institutions, and intellectual activities — for example, the Western political idea of nationality. The Near and Middle Eastern peoples had to reorganise themselves on national lines if they were to hold their own at all in modern international politics, because nationality is the contemporary basis of Western states and, owing to the ascendency of the West in the world, the relations of non-Western peoples to each other and to Western Powers have to approximate to the forms which the Western world takes for granted. Yet this principle of nationality in politics is taken for granted by us simply because it has grown naturally out of our special conditions,
16 THE WESTERN QUESTION
not because it is of universal application. The doctrine really is that a sovereign independent territorial state ought to be constituted, as far as possible, of all and none but the speakers of a single vernacular. The existence of a French- speaking population implies for us an ' all-French' sovereign national state, an English-speaking population an English one, and so on. This is common-sense in Western Europe, where languages are on the whole distributed in homogeneous territorial blocks, corresponding to convenient political units. The Western national state has grown up among us because it has brought with it the maximum political efficiency and economy of effort possible for our world, and since it has grown and has not been manufactured, it has accommodated itself to other political realities and not asserted itself a outrance. The survival of Switzerland and Belgium, whose unity is real but not linguistic, is evidence of the political moderation and sanity of Western Europe. But the value of this nationality principle depends on the prevalence of solid blocks of ' homophone ' population, a condition which is unusual in the homelands of civilisations , which are perpetually drawing into their focus fresh rein- forcements of population from all quarters. No doubt this is the reason why no known civilisation except ours has made community of language the basis of political de- marcation ; and in this the Near and Middle East both conform to the general rule, while we are exceptions.
In the Near and Middle East (at any rate since their contact with the West began) populations speaking different languages have been intermixed geographically, and do not represent local groups capable of independent political life so much as different economic classes whose co-operation is necessary to the well-being of any local state. The introduction of the Western formula among these people has therefore resulted in massacre. The formula has been rigidly applied, because it has had no local history behind it, and local institutions, which might have modified it, had
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 17
already broken down. It has been applied more and more savagely as it has exacted its toll of suffering and exasperation. The Greek War of Independence, which was perhaps the first movement in this region produced by a conscious application of the Western national idea,1 occasioned massacres of Turks throughout the Morea and of Greeks at Aivali and in Khios. Even the nuclei of the Near Eastern national states, though formed in areas where some single nationality predominated, had to be carved out by procrustean methods, and the evil has increased since the attempt to reorganise the political map on Western lines has been carried into districts where no single nation- ality is (or was) numerically preponderant. In the north- eastern provinces of Turkey, the massacre of Armenians by Moslems has been endemic since 1895; in Macedonia the mutual massacre of Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs, and Albanians since about 1899 ; and after the Balkan Wars the plague of racial warfare spread — with the streams of Moslem refugees — from Macedonia to Thrace and Western Anatolia. In the latter country, a Greek and a Turkish population which had lived there side by side, on the whole peaceably, for at least five centuries — even during the wars between Greece and Turkey in 1821-9 2 and in 1897 — have both been seized by fits of homicidal national hatred. It broke out among the local Turks in 1914 and 1916 ; among the local Greeks at the landing of the Greek Army in May 1919 and, since April 1921 , all over the interior of the occupied territory, in parts of which my wife and I had personal experience of it during the May and June of that year.3 Such massacres are only the extreme form of a national struggle between mutually indispensable neighbours, instigated by this fatal
1 The Serbs of course revolted earlier, but Serbian independence, though the influence of Western ideas was no doubt at work from the beginning, came about more by a gradual re-grouping of certain indigenous forces in the Ottoman Empire. The movement was not so revolutionary, nor the Western idea so dominant, as in the Greek case.
8 In Anatolia, in contrast to Rumili, the destruction of Greeks by Turks at Aivali in 1821 was exceptional. 8 See Chapter VII.
B
18 THE WESTERN QUESTION
Western idea, and carried on unremittingly by the other deadly weapons of expropriation, eviction, hostile interfer- ence with education and worship and the use of the mother- r tongue, and the refusal of justice in courts of law. The recent history of Macedonia and Western Anatolia has been a reductio ad absurdum of the principle of nationality, and has made the Western public begin to see that there are limits to the application of it in non-Western countries. But the historical interest of these limiting cases lies in the doubt which they cast back upon the fruitfulness of the principle even in those areas where, by hook or by crook, it has been made to work. The historian is led to speculate whether the inoculation of the East with nationalism has not from the beginning brought in diminishing returns of happiness and prosperity. Given the previous break-down of indigenous institutions and the irresistible ascendency of the West, he must admit that it has been inevitable. But when, after a century of waste and bloodshed, the resultant Jugoslav, Rumanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Albanian, Turkish, Arab, Armenian, Georgian, and other Near and Middle Eastern national states have reached (if they ever do reach) some stable equilibrium, he will possibly judge the move- ment of which they are a monument to have been not so much a political advance as a necessary evil.
Next, let us consider the Westernisation of some in- stitution, like the Ottoman Army. The most important internal struggle in Turkey during the crisis of 1774-1841 was between would-be reformers of the army on Western lines and the interests vested in the lumber of the old, broken- down Osmanli system. Sultan Mahmud's principal achieve- ment was that he got rid of the Janissaries during the Greek War of Independence and built up enough of a new model army to save Constantinople from the Russians in 1828-9. The formation of regional army corps on the Prussian model was carried out in 1843, and universal service introduced for Moslems in 1880 and for Christian subjects of the Empire
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 19
after the Revolution of 1908. The progressive Westernisa- tion of the army has undoubtedly saved Turkey from extinction during the last century, and has made possible an unprecedented assertion of the Central Government's authority over unruly tribes and outlying provinces. The military schools for officers have also been a valuable instrument of national education. Yet these essential military reforms have almost been the death of the Turkish nation, because they have been introduced artificially and therefore in isolation from the contemporary advances in hygiene, administrative method, and official integrity, which, in the Western countries where universal service has grown up, have counteracted the dangers otherwise attaching to such a vast extension of state power over the life of the individual. The Turks had to mobilise, train and arm in Western fashion a large — too large — proportion of their able-bodied male population in order to preserve the Ottoman Empire's existence, and under this stimulus they mastered the means, but they never learnt to clothe these conscripts adequately, pay them regularly, look after their health, and demobilise them punctually after their proper term of service. Western efficiency was no more natural to nineteenth -century Turks in these spheres than in the sphere of pure military technique, and the necessity for it was less immediately obvious. Accord- ingly, for several generations the Turkish peasantry have been mobilised to die of neglect or mismanagement or to return home with broken health, perhaps carrying con- tagious diseases, to find their family dispersed or their property ruined. The drafts of soldiers from Anatolia, shipped off in Western-made uniforms and Western-built steamers to fight in Albania or the Yemen with hardly any of the arrangements for personal welfare which make such campaigns endurable for Western troops, were also victims of the fatal side of the contact between the Ottoman Empire and the West. Their Government was not capable of
20 THE WESTERN QUESTION
victimising them in this way before it borrowed the neces- sary minimum of Western technique. All that can be said is that the reduction of the Ottoman Empire to the territories inhabited by a Turkish majority (itself the result of a Western agency, the principle of nationality) may at last bring the Turkish peasant some relief. His antagonists will have unwittingly liberated him, by liberating from his Government those useless alien provinces which used to drain his blood. If the blood of foreign soldiers is shed hereafter among the Albanian or Arabian mountains, it will be Serb, Greek, Italian, Indian, or English blood, not Turkish.
A final example — this time from the intellectual field — is offered by the history of the Modern Greek language and literature. Here, too, sudden contact with the West has sown confusion. It is to the credit of the Greeks that they have been fascinated by the Western intellect as well as by Western fashions, comforts, money-making, weapons, constitutions, and other externals. From the beginning they wanted to conceive and exchange Western thoughts in their own language and bring a new tributary to the great stream of Western literature. But what language ? They broke out of the Ottoman Empire not as a Western nation with a long national history but as a commercial class and a provincial peasantry in a Middle Eastern scheme of society. The poverty of their previous social life was reflected, naturally enough, in the poverty of their vernacular. It was poor in syntax, in vocabulary, in power of expression. In the course of centuries it might no doubt have enriched itself with the progress and experience of those who spoke it, but there were no centuries to spare. The language had to be Westernised like the nation. It had immediately to be converted into a vehicle for Western ideas, and it was an inevitable temptation to reconstruct it artificially out of the materials of Ancient Greek. Here was a language — the parent of the living vernacular, never obsolete as the liturgical language of the Church, a link with the mediaeval
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 21
splendours of Near Eastern civilisation and with the greater ancient splendours of Hellenic. The West admired Ancient Greece as much as Modern Greece admired the West, and the ancient language, having sufficed in its day for a civilisa- tion which enlightened Westerners regarded as the equal of their own, would surely supply now the indispensable medium for a Modern Greek variety of Western culture. Every motive for recourse to Ancient Greek existed — the wish to establish a connection with past greatness, the wish to impress the West and flatter themselves, and the urgent need for a wider range of expression. Modern Greek men of letters, moved by these important and legitimate con- siderations, persuaded themselves that the ancient language had never been replaced by another, and that in contamina- ting Modern Greek with Ancient they were really purifying their ancestral language from vulgarisms. The line that they took was inevitable, but short cuts are even more dangerous in literature than in politics, and the ancient language had two fatal defects for their purpose : it was a different language from Modern Greek and it was dead. Their amalgam of dead and living idioms has been un- satisfactory, even for official and technical prose, and poetry rebels against it. Its limitations have become so apparent that in the present generation a movement has set in for purifying the purified language in its turn by going back to the elements of the vernacular. But this popularising movement has its own fanaticisms and pedantries, and though it may be healthier in principle, it ignores the problem which the amalgam was intended to solve. The 1 popularists ' have not satisfactorily discovered how to express Western thought in Modern Greek without calling up reinforcements from the ancient language. The contro- versy is bitter, and is hampering not only literature but public education. Contact with the West is again the cause of the mischief, and here, too, it is difficult to see any solution. Such examples seem to support the thesis that the shadow cast by the West, which is affecting these two contemporary
22 THE WESTERN QUESTION
civilisations profoundly in every department of life, has at present a destructive rather than a constructive influence. But the more one examines its effects the more one feels that they have hardly yet begun to work themselves out, and this is also indicated by the nearest historical parallel within our knowledge. The ancient civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia were in contact with Ancient Hellenic or Graeco-Roman civilisation from the early seventh century B.C., when the first Greek pirates and mercenaries landed in Cilicia and Egypt, to the late seventh century after Christ, when the last official documents in Greek were drafted in the public offices of the Arab Empire.1 Out of these thirteen centuries, the two Eastern civilisations may be said to have been overshadowed by Hellenic, as Near and Middle Eastern are overshadowed now by Western, during the ten centuries from the conquests of Alexander (334-323 B.C.) to the conquests of the first two Caliphs of Islam (a.d. 632-644). Compared with this millennium, the two and a half centuries of modern Western influence over the Near Eastern world, and the century and a half of its in- fluence over the Middle Eastern world, can be seen in their true proportions. They are only the opening phase in what will be a far longer relationship, and if the ancient analogy holds good, that relationship will change its character as it continues. The contact between the Hellenic world and the two ancient Eastern societies began with the superficial conquests of commerce, war, and administration, and ended with a fusion of religious experiences . Further, while those first external conquests were made by the dominant, over- shadowing Power, the religious fusion — the most thorough and intimate kind of conquest which it is possible for one society to make over another — was substantially a victory for the worlds of Egypt and Mesopotamia. As the relation- ship worked itself out, it deepened in character, changed
1 One might even say : Until the last translations were made from classical Greek literature into Arabio, which was about two oenturies later.
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 23
from a one-sided influence into an interaction, and ended in the spiritual ascendency of the externally conquered party over the original conqueror.
Some similar ultimate reversal in the relations between the modern West and our Eastern contemporaries is not improbable, and we shall view the passing situation with greater interest and in better perspective if we bear this possibility in mind. At the same time, we must recognise that it is still beyond our horizon. Our first act — the Western conquest of the East — is still far from completion, and there is little prospect in the near future of dramatic or catastrophic reactions by the Eastern civilisations upon the West, particularly in the field of international politics and war. It would be a mistake, for instance, to take too seriously the bogeys lately dangled before us to draw us into some ' pro-Moslem ' or ' anti-Moslem ' policy. The dangers of an entente between the Turkish Nationalist Power in Anatolia and the Bolshevik Power in Russia have been portrayed now as a reason for crushing the Nationalists, now as a reason for conciliating them. By force or by persuasion, we have been urged to deprive Russia of a formidable ally, but neither school of alarmists ever suc- ceeded in demonstrating that this Russo-Turkish combina- tion was going to be a permanent reality. On the face of it, it has been an entente not for action but for concerted bluff and propaganda. Even within these limits, it has evidently been viewed by both parties with misgiving. They have been forced into it because the Allied Powers have insisted on treating them both as enemies, but both have shown themselves anxious to come to terms with one or all of the Allies (even at their partner's expense), when- ever they have seen an opportunity. The continuance of the special intimacy between them, after the removal of its transitory cause, is most improbable. At present Russians and Turks are more alien from each other than either are from the West, and a temporary common danger can hardly
24 THE WESTERN QUESTION
efface centuries of antipathy. A genuine rapprochement between Russia and Turkey is only conceivable on common ground produced by simultaneous Westernisation . Reaction against the West seems bound to result incidentally in mutual alienation on those deeper planes of consciousness which are not touched by policies of state.
Another recent bogey is the Moplah rebellion in the Madras Presidency of India, on account of which we were asked to believe a general armed rebellion in India imminent unless the British Government's policy towards Turkey were reversed. It is true that the Moplah leaders called their organisation a ' Khilafat Kingdom,' but any one who has been following the Khilafat movement in India and has looked up the Moplahs' record, will not be misled by names. The Moplahs are a wild mountain population who have risen periodically against British rule ever since it has been established over them, though for the greater part of the time the British Government have been friendly to the Government of the Ottoman Caliph and have frequently given Turkey diplomatic and military support against her Christian enemy Russia. Thus the name attached to the latest Moplah rebellion is not the true explanation of its origin, and indeed the choice of this name by Indian Moslems who made a rebellion against the British Government an occasion for massacring Hindus, can only have been embarrassing to the educated Moslem leaders of the real Khilafat movement, whose policy has been based on Moslem and Hindu co-operation. The Khilafat movement among the educated classes (the only classes capable of under- standing its rather abstract chains of argument) is certainly not a force to be underestimated. Underneath its academic formulas, there is a real sentiment and a real grievance, as is argued below. But the features of the Moplah rebellion indicate that the Khilafat movement will be forced to take a slow and peaceful rather than a violent headlong course. The effectiveness of the movement lies in the co-operation
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 25
of the Hindus, and the Moplahs have demonstrated that while co-operation may now have become possible between Western-educated Hindus and Moslems when confined to Western lines of political agitation, they cannot take up the sword against the British without a danger of their followers turning their swords against each other.
Indeed, all the symptoms at present visible of reflex action by the Near and Middle Eastern worlds upon the West, point to slower and vaguer, though perhaps ultimately wider, movements than those generally prophesied in dis- cussions of international politics. A real and a rather disquieting process is indicated by the word ' Balkanisation.' It was coined by German socialists to describe what was done to the western fringe of the Russian Empire by the Peace of Brest -Litovsk, and it has since been applied to certain general effects of the Versailles and supplementary Treaties upon Europe. It describes conveniently the growing influence in the Western world of Near Eastern peoples who are still only imperfectly assimilated to Western civilisation, and it can be traced in various spheres. It is most obvious in politics. The sovereignty of the Western Austro -Hungarian Monarchy has been superseded over large territories by that of two Near Eastern states, Jugo- slavia and Rumania, and Western populations — Germans and Magyars — have even been brought under the govern- ment of Rumans and Serbs. This settlement is in accords with our own Western principle of nationality. The greater part of the redistributed districts are inhabited by the peoples to whose national states they have now been assigned, and the new subject Western populations are minorities, some at least of whom were bound to be trans-
ferred with the non-Western majorities among which they live. Still, when one compares the standards of the old Austrian, or even the old Hungarian Government with those of the new governments, or the relative civilisation of the new subject minorities and the old subject majorities,
V
26 THE WESTERN QUESTION
one feels that the principle of nationality offers no more than a partial solution for the problems of South-Eastern Europe. Balkanisation is an unmistakable and an unsatisfactory, though it is to be hoped only a temporary, result.
The process is even more disquieting in the economic sphere, for the Western countries, just because they are more civilised and more complicated in their economic organisation, suffered more damage from the War in pro- portion than the non-Western belligerents. The immense expenditure of munitions on the Western front devastated the industrial districts of Belgium and Northern France far worse than Mackensen's and Franchet d'Esperey's brief campaigns of movement damaged the fields and pastures of Serbia. German industry was crippled by the blockade ; Austrian (and to some extent Tchecho-Slovak) by the net- work of new frontiers ; British by the collapse of our best continental customers. On the other hand, Jugoslavia, Rumania, and Greece have been strengthened economically by the great enlargement of their territories, and at any rate the two former by the enhanced value of Near Eastern raw materials, especially food-stuffs, compared with Western manufactures. This change has been as legitimate as the simultaneous redistribution of national wealth among the inhabitants of every country, but Westerners cannot regard it with satisfaction.
It is also not fanciful to discern a psychological reaction of the Near East upon the West. It has been pointed out that Western nationalism, introduced into the Near East, has promoted violence and hate. It now looks as if the Near East were infecting conflicts of nationality in Western Europe with the ferocity and fanaticism which it has im- ported into its own. Before the War, the ancient conflicts of interest between Ulstermen and Catholics in Ireland or Germans and Poles in Silesia were waged with some restraint, and bloodshed was uncommon. In 1921 both these and other zones of national conflict in the West were a prey to
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 27
revolutionary bands, semi-official bashy-bozuks, regular combatants whose activities were disavowed while approved by their governments, and all the other indecencies familiar in the Armenian vilayets or Macedonia. This moral Balkan- isation is also unmistakable, and it is more dangerous than the political and economic manifestations of the tendency.
For good or evil, the barriers between the West and the Near East are down, and the interchange of currents seems certain to go on increasing until the waters find a common level. It is to be hoped that the Western level will not have to be permanently depressed in order to enable the Near Eastern to rise to it. But at any rate, as has been suggested above, the process will probably be spread over a long period. There is one sphere, however, in which it may produce important immediate effects, and that is in the relations between the West and the Middle East. The equally desirable adjustment between these two civilisations is so difficult, and is in so delicate a stage, that it is affected by imponderables. A hardly perceptible Near Eastern pressure in the Western scale at this moment might make the desirable balance between West and Middle East impossible.
This question is the special subject of this book, and is the point of permanent historical importance in the Graeco- Turkish conflict after the close of the European War, for in this connection Greece and Turkey represent respectively the Near Eastern and the Middle Eastern worlds. The other Near Eastern nations — Humans, Serbs, and Bulgars — which have been brought by the results of the European War into closer connection with Western civilisation, have at the same time broken almost the last of their former links with Turkey. The Treaty of Sevres, or rather the occupation of Thrace by the Greek Army, which preceded by some weeks the signing of the treaty, even removed the common frontier between Turkey and Bulgaria. The Moslem minorities in these three East European states are no danger to the ruling nationalities and are not conspicu-
28 THE WESTERN QUESTION
ously ill-treated. Thus no controversy remains between Rumania or Jugoslavia or Bulgaria and the Middle Eastern world, and their relations with the West have no bearing on the relations between the "V^est and the Middle East.
It is different with Greece. On the one hand, Greece is in closer touch with the West than her Near Eastern neigh- bours are. She is more permeated than they are with Western education and more dependent economically than any of them on trade with Western countries. In the commercial and social capitals of Western Europe and the United States — London, Paris, Vienna, Manchester, Liver- pool, Marseilles, Trieste, New York, Chicago, San Francisco — there are Greek colonies. Many families have lived in the West for several consecutive generations, married into Western families, naturalised as subjects of Western states, sent their children to the best schools of their adopted countries, and become Englishmen, Frenchmen, Austrians, or Americans in everything except a traditional loyalty towards their mother-country. Since there is a very wide- spread sentiment for Greece in the West, which has had its influence on international politics, this loyalty of the Greeks abroad has seldom conflicted with their new allegiances . On the contrary, a fortunate combination of the two has given the wealthy and the cultivated Greeks abroad (both numerous classes) opportunities of catching the ear of Western business men, Western politicians, the Western Churches, Western men of letters, and, last but not least, the Western Press.
It would have mattered less if the Greeks had only used their exceptional influence in the West against their Near Eastern neighbours like the Bulgarians, but unfortunately they are not only more closely bound up than the other Near Eastern nations with the West. Unlike them, they are still in close relations, and in very hostile relations, with the Turks, and the Osmanli Turkish nation, on its side, enjoys a special position in the Middle Eastern world.
The Middle East finds it most natural at present to express
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 29
its regard for Turkey through a personal symbol. It feels loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph of Islam, and Western scholars have rather perversely exercised their ingenuity in criticising the Sultan's claim to the title. Certainly the claim (which only dates from a.d. 1517) is as doubtful as the Carolingians' claim to be Roman Emperors, and even if it were proved good in law, the Osrnanli Turks are as remote from the Ancient Middle Eastern world as the Austrasian Franks were from Ancient Greece and Rome. In fact, the title seems to have been regarded as an antiquarian curiosity (something like the sword and crown of Charlemagne at Vienna) by the Ottoman Dynasty till it was exploited by Abdu'l-Hamid, and the new conditions which made it worth his while to do this were chiefly due to the progress of Westernisation. The spread of Western posts, telegraphs, railways, and steamers had made it possible to keep up communications between Constantinople and the large outlying Moslem communities in India, the East Indies, China, and Russia ; and the influence of Western nationalism, with its ingrained romantic archaism, had set the fashion of reviving forgotten history, even when it had little real bearing on the present. The Khilafat movement is also part of that wave of sentiment which moves Modern Greeks to think of themselves as the special heirs of Pericles or Alexander, or to overload their language with reminiscences of Thucydides and Homer. Rationally considered, it is rather a maladroit symbol for Islamic unity, since the succession to the Caliphate is the subject of the chief controversies by which Moslems have historically been divided. Technically, the Ottoman claim is rejected by the Shi' i sect (which includes all Islam in Persia and a large percentage of Moslems in Russia, Meso- potamia, and India) ; by the Imam of San a in the Yemen ; and by the Sherif of Morocco. Even among the more numerous Sunni or orthodox, the Osrnanli Khilafat is not uni- versally accepted . A puritanical aversion from the Western
30 THE WESTERN QUESTION
taint in modern Osmanli life alienates the Wahhabis and the followers of the Idrisi in Arabia and the Senusi fraternity in North Africa. Others are alienated by conflicting national interests or family ambitions — for instance, the Hashimite Sherifs of Mecca and their Hijazi and Syrian supporters. The most extraordinary feature is that the Sultan's claim is extremely awkward for the Turkish Nationalists, who do not want a theocracy but some kind of limited representative government in the hands of the Turkish official and officer class ; and Nationalism has un- doubtedly won the allegiance of the Turkish people. But all these criticisms of the symbol do not affect the deep and general and not irrational feeling which it expresses suffici- ently well for the time being. If and when it proves in- adequate, it will doubtless be modified or discarded ; but the feeling will continue, and this is the reality with which we have to reckon.
The Middle Eastern world feels affection and esteem for the Turks, and is concerned about their welfare, because the Ottoman Empire combines several features which Middle Eastern opinion values. Turkey is an independent Middle Eastern state, much stronger than Persia and much more civilised (in the Western as well as in the Middle Eastern sense) than Afghanistan. In fact, she is the only Middle Eastern state which, in a world dominated by the West and more and more organised on Western lines, can still play the part of a Great Power. It is not realised that Turkey has not been a Great Power, or even a completely inde- pendent Power, since a.d. 1774. The circumstance that she still has Christian subjects and that she keeps a celebrated Christian cathedral as her principal mosque and a famous European city as her capital, lends her an appearance of dominion which is gratifying to Middle Eastern populations under Western rule. Though Constantinople, Aya Sofia, and the rayah are trophies from the Near Eastern and not from the Western world, the Middle East, outside Turkey,
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 31
makes no clear distinction between Frank and Rum ; and after all Turkey, dominated though she is by Western Powers and forced in self-preservation to find a modus vivendi with Western civilisation, is still independent in a very important sense. She can accept some Western elements and reject others ; choose her own way of adapting what she borrows ; and take her own time. In fact, she can work out her modus vivendi for herself, and this is just what is denied to Middle Eastern populations under British, French, Dutch, or Italian administration. | In dependencies of Western empires the process is guided by the ruling Power. The subject populations are more or less resigned to this ; for the Indian Moslems, in particular, the loss of initiative has important compensations ; and it is common ground, except among a small number of extremists, that in some form and by one or other party the modus vivendi must be found. But there is a strong feeling that, at any rate in one leading Middle Eastern country, the problem ought to be worked out independently by the people them- selves. This will not seem pedantic or far-fetched to any one acquainted with conditions in civilised non -Western countries under Western government. It does not imply that Western government has been a failure or ought to be terminated abruptly in the countries over which it has been established. It does mean that the shadow of the West chills other civilisations when it cuts them off from the sun altogether. Sunshine cannot be replaced by excellent artificial light. In the eyes of other Moslems, an independent Ottoman Empire is a precious window (it need not be a large one) through which a few rays of natural sunshine still reach the Middle Eastern world. Many Western readers who are aware of the misdoings, and only of the misdoings, of the Ottoman Turks and their Govern- ment, will feel all this fantastic. Nevertheless, Moslem sentiment about Turkey is not only genuine but reason- able. There is the possibility here of a very serious mis-
32 THE WESTERN QUESTION
understanding between the Western and Middle Eastern worlds.
This is the danger in the three-cornered relationship between Western civilisation, Turkey, and Greece. Greece interposes between the other two, and some of her national ambitions cannot be realised without alienating them from each other. Such ambitions have not necessarily been more illegitimate or pursued by more undesirable means than the ordinary policies of other sovereign national states. Only, in this case, the same evils may have disproportionately grave consequences. Greece, who has gained much by the special place she holds in Western sentiment, may fairly be required to forego undue advantages on account of the special position of Turkey in the Middle East ; and clearly Western states- manship cannot afford to leave Greece and Turkey in such bad relations that each stands to gain by the other's losses.
Greece has interposed in the literal sense. In 1921, under the Allied occupation of Constantinople, an English- man keeping an appointment with an officer at the General Headquarters of the British ' Army of the Black Sea,' or calling on an official at the Embassy, or applying for a visa at the British section of the Inter-Allied Passport Control, had to make his way through a cordon of Greek (or Armenian) door-keepers, interpreters, and clerks before he could get into touch with one of his own countrymen. Sometimes one had difficulties, and then one wondered what happened to Bulgars and Turks on similar errands, with the rival nationality holding the gates, and no other avenue to their English superiors. The employment of Near Easterners as military interpreters seemed a particularly hazardous policy. They were numerous, and wore the regular British uniform, with nothing to distinguish them except a green- and-white armlet.1 When off duty, it was only natural
1 The interpreters to the French and Italian forces at Constantinople wore armlets but not uniforms. The British regulation was more generous — the foreigner in British service was treated like an English soldier — but the motive was inevitably misunderstood.
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 33
that some of them should take advantage of their khaki to pay off old scores against the former ruling race at Con- stantinople ; and on duty, whenever they had to interpret between an Englishman and a Bulgar or Turk, they were under constant temptation to misuse their opportunities. Even if they were scrupulously honest, a tone of voice, an expression on their faces, or the mere knowledge of their nationality in the mind of the other party, might do mischief. I came across a very pertinent case when I accompanied the Red Crescent Mission to the southern coasts of the Marmara.1 The British officers successively attached to the Mission always brought with them the same Greek interpreter. He was in a painful position. The better he did his duty, the more he exposed the misdoings of — not his fellow-subjects, for he was an Ottoman Greek who had recently taken out British naturalisation papers — but his own nation, in the persons of the Greek troops and the local Greek population. His presence certainly did harm, and yet the British officers could not dispense with an interpreter, and presumably no qualified Englishman or Israelite could be found. Certainly this Karamanly Greek knew his busi- ness, and he was typical of his nation. The Greeks have taken Western education seriously. If you visit a Greek divisional or corps headquarters on active service, you may ind clerks and non-commissioned officers studying a French or an English grammar in their intervals off duty. Efficient Greek interpreters are abundant, Turkish or English interpreters rare or unknown. The preponderance of Greek and Armenian interpreters in the British Army of Occupation it Constantinople was a result of the ordinary economic aws of supply and demand. But it did create a real barrier oetween the British Army and members of the other local rationalities, and both Greeks and Turks regarded it as an ndication of British policy. They were wrong, but the nisconception has done considerable political damage.
' See itinerary in Preface. Q
34 THE WESTERN QUESTION
Greece had also interposed geographically by her acquisi- tion of Eastern Thrace under the Treaty of Sevres. From the Black Sea to the Marmara and the Aegean, an unbroken belt of Greek territory separated Turkey in 1921 from every other state in Europe. , You could not telegraph from Constantinople or Smyrna to London or Paris without running the gauntlet of the Greek censorship, for the marine cable passes through a transmitting-station on the Greek island of Syra, and the overland wire from Constantinople crosses Eastern Thrace. In the spring and summer of 1921, at any rate, the Greek military censorship was stringently exercised over both Press and business messages in transit. In this the Greek Government were only exercising their legal sovereign rights, but it is as much against the general interest that Greece should be invested with the right to control private communications between Turkey and the West as it is that Turkey should control the passage of merchant shipping through the waterway between the Mediterranean and Russia. It is no answer to say that this was an exceptional war-measure, for Greece and Turkey might often be at war for years together, and in peace-time the possibilities of surreptitious censorship might be even more objectionable. Presumably more expensive and cir- cuitous telegraphic routes could be organised (for instance, through Varna or Constanza), but this would still leave Greece astride the Oriental Railway between Constantinople and Sofia — the only possible route for quick travelling between Turkey and Western Europe.
But the most serious disturbance in the relations of West and Middle East has been produced by the Greek occupation of Western Anatolia. The mischief has been out of all proportion to the extent of the territory. The area pro- visionally assigned to Greece round Smyrna under the Treaty of Sevres was small compared to the territories mandated to Great Britain and France in Syria, Palestine, and Meso- potamia. The whole area carved out of the Ottoman
THE SHADOW OF THE WEST 35
Empire since 1821 to make an independent Greece is even smaller in comparison with the vast French and British dominions over Middle Eastern peoples in India, the Nile Basin, and North-West Africa. It is the misfortune as well as the fault of Greece — and the unmitigated fault of Allied statesmanship — that the occupation of Smyrna has had specially untoward consequences, but the circumstances could not fail to make trouble. The Greek troops were sent to Smyrna, with a mandate from the Supreme Council and under cover of the guns of Allied warships, more than six months after the armistice with Turkey. The landing — technically camouflaged as a movement of Allied troops for the maintenance of order — was probably contrary to the letter of the armistice, for no previous local disorder had been proved, and it was certainly contrary to its spirit. Within a few hours of the landing, the troops committed a bad massacre in the city ; within a few days they advanced into the interior ; and a new and devastating war of aggres- sion against Turkey began in her only unravaged provinces. In the sixteenth month of this war, the Powers gave Greece a five-years' administrative mandate in the Smyrna Zone, with the possibility of subsequent annexation. Turkey was the leading state of the Middle Eastern world, Greece a Near Eastern state of recent origin. She had been admitted with generous facility into the Western concert of nations ; but the mandate now given to her — to govern a mixed population in which one element was of her own nationality — would have been a difficult test, in parallel circumstances, for the most experienced Western Power. It was wanton rashness to make such an experiment at Turkey's expense ; and after the experiment had proved a failure, it showed blind prejudice and partiality on the part of Western Governments that they should continue to give Greece material and moral support in her enterprise as an apostle of their civilisation.
This policy would in any case have made bad feeling
36 THE WESTERN QUESTION
between the Western and the Middle Eastern worlds, for we had reached a phase in our relationship in which Middle Eastern peoples were — rightly or wrongly — ceasing to tolerate the domination even of the leading Western Powers, in countries which they have governed, on the whole bene- ficially, for many years. This movement of revolt, which might have been gradual, has been formidably accelerated by the consequences of the European War, and our relations have now entered on a phase which is admittedly critical. In these circumstances, the statesmanship responsible after the armistice for the Graeco-Turkish conflict is unpardon- able. It introduced a cruel and unnecessary irritant into a dangerous wound, at the risk of making it incurable. It is not as if our misunderstanding with the Middle East had been past mending. It was not, and it may still not be, if the irritant can be removed without leaving malignant after-effects. Conflicts between civilisations are terrible, because civilisations are the most real and fundamental forms of human society. But just because they are ultimate forces, their differentia does not consist in externals like colour or physique or birthplace or mother-tongue, but in states of mind ; and while the Ethiopian cannot change his skin or the foreigner his accent, and it is difficult for the subject of an efficient government even to forge a birth- certificate, men's minds can be turned, even at the eleventh hour, from the paths of destruction. Civilisations are differentiations of consciousness, and happily there are possibilities of extensive mental adjustments between the members of one civilisation and those of another. The absorption of the Near Eastern into the Western outlook, and the discovery of a modus vivendi between the outlooks of West and Middle East, are not desperate, though they are difficult problems. But at any moment they can be made desperate by errors of judgment on the part of a few men in power.
II
WESTERN DIPLOMACY
On the 18th March 1912 I was walking through an out-of- the-way district in the east of Krete. The landscape was the bare limestone mountain-side characteristic of the Aegean. Villages were rare, and some of them had been sacked during the civil war of 1897 and not reoccupied. Suddenly, as the path turned the corner round a hillside in the limestone wilderness, a Western country-house came into view. It was built in the Jacobean style ; the curves and flourishes of its facade were in excellent preservation ; one's own friends, or their great -grandparents, might have walked out of the front door. But, after a few steps towards it, the illusion of life faded. The door was half walled-up with loose stones to convert the ground-floor into a sheepfold, the windows stared blindly, the cornice had no roof above it. It was the villa of some Venetian land- owner or official, and must have been deserted since the great War of Candia, two and a half centuries ago.1
The empires founded by mediaeval Western states in Near and Middle Eastern countries are a memento mori for the modern Western Empires which are such an imposing and characteristic feature in the landscape of the contem- porary world. That Venetian colony in Krete lasted four and a half centuries, a longer life than any British colony can yet boast of. In Galata, where French, English, and American firms now have their offices, there was once a Genoese settlement, extra-territorial and self-governing in the manner of modern Shanghai. When this Western community had diplomatic difficulties with the Imperial
1 a.d. 1644-69.
37
38 THE WESTERN QUESTION
East Roman Government, it used to shoot large stones across the Golden Horn into Constantinople from its muni- cipal catapults. It lived two centuries (a.d. 1261-1453), and planted daughter-colonies in the Crimea and on the Don, which opened up an overland trade with Russia, India , and China. Modern Russia has only been the principal Black Sea Power for the last 148 years. Genoa held that position for about fifty years longer. The Genoese Chartered Com- pany which governed the Aegean island of Khios had as romantic a career as John Company in India. The Floren- tine bankers who became Dukes of Athens anticipated the exploits of Rajah Brooke and Cecil Rhodes ; and the trans- formations of the Order of St. John in Palestine, Rhodes, and Malta suggest strange possibilities of evolution for the more recently founded Jesuit and Evangelical Missions. About the year 1400, the Near East seemed on the verge of becoming an annex to the constellation of miniature Western Great Powers in Northern Italy, and then, within a century or two, this exotic growth of commerce, war, administration, and diplomacy was swept away.
When we look at our present ascendencies in the East through this glass, they too appear unsubstantial, and it becomes possible to imagine that Western manufactures, garrisons, governors, protectorates, diplomatic understand- ings and rivalries may be eliminated from the non-Western civilised countries of the modern world before the mental influence of the West upon other civilisations has reached its maximum, and long before their counter-influence upon the West has properly begun. However, the external and material ascendency of the West is one of the realities of the moment, and the most interesting chapter in a story is often the last. In the Graeco-Turkish borderland of the Near and the Middle East, the diplomatic aspect of this ascendency is in the foreground.
During the battle of In Onii in March 1921,1 a Greek
1 See Chapter VI.
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 39
private soldier said to me : ' This is really a battle between England and France for the possession of Anatolia.' He meant it, I think, in the literal sense, for a majority of the Greek and Turkish combatants in this battle believed that French and British officers were directing operations on opposite sides.1 Their misapprehension showed the crude- ness of their views about Western diplomatic methods. Western governments which are supposed to be allies are too experienced, and almost too respectable, to act openly against each other. They know that scandal is never worth while ; and yet in essence this Greek soldier's remark was true. The distant Western Powers were the protagonists in the war-after-the-war which has devastated considerable tracts of the Near and Middle East, while the local peoples, who were acting and suffering, were pawns. If Mr. Thomas Hardy were to write a drama called ' The Patriots,' he would no doubt present Professor Masaryk, Mr. Venizelos, Mr. Stambolisky, General Pilsudsky, the Emir Feisal, and Mustafa Kemal Pasha as men walking in a dream, like his Pitt and Napoleon ; and when the scene dissolved into a vision of the real agent, we should see the grey outlines of rooms and corridors in Downing Street and on the Quai d'Orsay. Perhaps the chorus of spirits would be composed of impotent Western observers like myself.
There is nothing new or paradoxical in this view of the relations between Near and Middle Eastern states and Western Powers. Change the metaphor from chess to sport, and it is a commonplace. The correspondent of the Times at Constantinople subscribed to it on the 5th October 1921,2 when he reported a rumour that certain circles in the Quai d'Orsay were advising the Turkish Nationalist Govern- ment at Angora to adopt an attitude of reserve towards any suggestions of negotiation until Greece found herself in greater difficulties. ' The policy,' he telegraphed, ' of back-
1 See ' The Origin of a Legend,' pp. 254 seqq.
1 See his telegram in the Times of the 10th October 1921.
40 THE WESTERN QUESTION
ing the protagonists (sic) in the present Eastern War as if they were race -horses, is a policy of which each of the Entente Powers in turn has been guilty, and must be abandoned if peace is ever to be restored in the Levant.' The metaphor was not of his invention. It was an allusion to Lord Salisbury's famous recantation of the policy which he had pursued at the Berlin Conference of 1878: 'We have backed the wrong horse!' The phrase sums up the spirit in which Western Powers have betted and quarrelled in the Near and Middle Eastern arena for the last 250 years, ever since they had the ships, men, and money to fight there if they wanted to. It has been wrong- headed and disastrous behaviour. The mere description of it is an indictment, but it is an exposure of the little wisdom in the government of human affairs rather than of any special depravity in Western civilisation.
The exploitation of small states by greater is particularly mischievous when the two groups of states belong to different civilisations, but this difference is not the cause of it. It occurs whenever such small states are hostile to one another and weak and the larger states hostile to one another and strong. A group of small, mutually hostile, and therefore un-self -sufficient states creates automatically a sort of inter- national vacuum, into which the powerful states around are attracted. Their centripetal movement is one form of ' imperialism, ' and when several converging imperialisms collide in the vacuum, there may be a general disaster. What has been happening latterly in the Near and Middle East had been going on for four centuries (from about 1470 to 1871) in the bosom of Western Europe. Little rival German and Italian states were backed by the big rivals — Spain, France, England, Austria, Prussia, Sweden, Russia. The dynamic consequences were perpetual diplomatic con- flicts and wars, which recurred until the national unification of Germany and Italy changed this particular vacuum into a plenum and made a local equilibrium possible. It was after
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 41
this that the thrust of forces, balanced at last further west, directed itself eastwards into another vacuum and danger- ously accentuated the stresses of the ' Eastern Question.'
Such vacua are always a source of danger, and though the Italian and German vacua in Western Europe were removed before they had produced fatal consequences, the sort of catastrophe which they might have brought, and the Eastern vacuum still may bring about, is illustrated by the history of Graeco-Roman civilisation in the third and second centuries B.C. The ambitions, fears, and rivalries of the small states round the Mediterranean — Messana, Syracuse, and Saguntum ; Aetolia, Pergamon, and Rhodes — involved their powerful neighbours in wars which did not come to an end till one Great Power, Rome, had eaten up four others — Carthage, Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt. The sequel was universal impoverishment and revolution, and the victorious Power also came to an unpleasant end, like a snake in the Zoological Gardens some years ago which, in a tug-of-war with another snake over the same pigeon, swallowed its rival as well as the bird, and died by inches as the foreign body stiffened in its throat.
Only the Great Powers themselves can save each other from such fatalities, as well as from the constant friction and waste of energy into which the presence of vacua more commonly leads them. The first safeguard against the danger is moderation on their part, but the small states cannot be acquitted of responsibility. So long as they are willing to sell their services to some Great Power in order to procure that Power's backing against their own small rivals, they deserve to be treated as pawns and no sentiment need be wasted upon them. A remedy for their situation is in their peoples' hands. They can change the vacuum into a plenum by co-operation. When the Italian and German peoples made up their minds to combine into national states,1 the traditional diplomacy of the Powers was unable
1 Between 1848 and 1871.
42 THE WESTERN QUESTION
to stop them, and from that time onwards Italy and Germany ceased to be arenas of international conflict. Instead, they took their places as Great Powers in the new arena of the Near and Middle East, and began to use the small states here as they had been used themselves. This arena is un- happily still open, but the Eastern peoples can close it by refusing, in their turn, to be pitted against one another. As it is, they are willing victims, and the Powers are in some degree victims as well as villains. In such situations, international politics move in a vicious circle, and the good- will of all the parties is needed in order to break it.
Having stated the case for the defence of the Powers' diplomacy in the East, I can now proceed with the indict- ment. In the terms suggested above, the first phase after the European War may be described somewhat as follows. France was backing Poland vigorously, and Hungary tentatively, against Germany and Russia ; and she was backing Turkey tentatively against Russia and vigorously against Greece because Greece had been backed by Great Britain. Great Britain was backing Greece against Turkey, because an aggrandised Greece dependent on British support would save Great Britain the trouble of herself imposing her Eastern peace-terms. Italy was backing Turkey against Greece as payment on account for prospective economic con- cessions in Anatolia ; and Russia was backing Turkey against Greece to deter her from purchasing the backing of any of the Western Powers who were Russia's enemies. Russia also backed the Armenian Republic of Erivan to a limited extent against both Turkey and Azerbaijan, as a barrier between possible Turkish ' Pan-Turanian ' ambitions and the oil-fields of Baku ; and she backed both Erivan and Azerbaijan against Georgia in order to complete the restora- tion of her authority over her previous possessions in Trans- caucasia. In this criss-cross of exploitations Russia's part was perhaps the least blameworthy, because she had the best claim to be acting hi self-defence.
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 43
As for the pawns, the three Transcaucasian states threw away their brief independence by refusing to settle their boundary disputes and work together. Hungary would sell herself to anybody who would help her to recover her frontiers of 1914, and Poland would almost do the same for the frontiers of 1772. Greece had sacrificed her exchange and her young men's lives for a gambler's chance of realising her utmost national ambitions. Turkey, who was genuinely fighting for her life, deserved the same cautious sympathy as Russia.
Only four small states in the area had begun to shake themselves free from the vicious circle of clientage and exploitation. These were Tchecho-Slovakia, Jugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria. The ' Little Entente ' between the first three ought not to be condemned because its primary motive has been mutual insurance against the largely justi- fiable restlessness of Hungary under the Treaty of Trianon. Short of an appeasement of the feuds between the small states, it is a gain that they should pursue these feuds among themselves without drawing in the Great Powers as rival backers ; and, besides, arrangements originally made for one purpose may often be found serviceable for others. Dr. Benes probably had economic co-operation in his mind from the beginning. This economic motive might attract Austria into the group, and might even bring about the ultimate adhesion of Hungary. One thing is certain : the treatment of minorities everywhere — including unneces- sarily and unjustly subjected minorities — will improve in proportion to the growth of mutual confidence between the state of which they are subjects and the other state of which they would prefer to be citizens.
Bulgaria, defeated and denied her national unity but not embittered, was showing even more remarkable wisdom. Mr. Stambolisky's policy has apparently been to let terri- torial claims lie, to bring about a reconciliation in feeling as well as in form with Jugoslavia and Rumania, and to build
44 THE WESTERN QUESTION
up a ' Green International ' of the peasant-proprietors of South-Eastern and Central Europe, who find themselves in a precarious position between the urban capitalism of the Western Powers and the urban communism of Petrograd and Moscow. His movement is complementary to Dr. Benes°s, and the two seem bound to converge. The Poles, Tchechs, Slovenes, and Croats, who have common economic interests and no national quarrel with the Bulgars, are the natural intermediaries between Bulgaria and the Rumans and Serbs.
These are promising materials for the establishment of a plenum in the Near East, and there are Near Eastern statesmen who realise its desirability. For example, Mr. Take Jonescu, the leading advocate of the Little Entente in Rumania, was careful to declare (in a statement published in the Times of the 11th October 1921, after a visit to London): 'I am not following any "French' policy against Britain or any " British " policy against France.' It would have been difficult for Greek and Turkish statesmen at that date to make any similar declaration, though if they are wise, they will take the first opportunity to enable one another to dispense with French, British, or any other back- ing. Until they succeed, they will both be broken more and more cruelly upon the wheel of a greater rivalry than theirs.
In modern times, since the effacement of the miniature Powers of Northern Italy, there have been three main Western rivalries in the Near and Middle East : between Great Britain and France, between Great Britain and Russia, and between Great Britain, France, and Russia together and Germany. The first is the most important of the three. It is the oldest ; it lived on underground after the Entente of 1904 and even during the European War ; and since the armistice it has again overtopped the other two.
This Anglo-French rivalry in the Near and Middle East can be traced back to the sixteenth century. It was a commercial rivalry so long as the vacuum which attracted
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 45
it was only economic and not political. In the eighteenth century, after the break-down of the Mogul Empire, it blossomed out in India into a military struggle for direct dominion, which terminated in the complete defeat of France. This was its classic period, but Napoleon's efforts to recover a footing in India by a new route transferred the centre of stress to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire and developed an intermediate form of competition, conditioned by the semi-recovery of Turkey from her eighteenth-century decline, and the semi-self-sufficiency of the Near Eastern nations which have been disentangling themselves from her. Since the Congress of Vienna in 1814, France and Great Britain have never fought in the Levant with naval and military weapons (though they have several times been on the verge of open war), but their struggle has been real and sometimes bitter for all that, and though it has not here gone the length of empire-building, it has not been con- fined to trade. Its characteristic fields have been diplomacy and culture, its entrenchments embassies, consulates, re- ligious missions, and schools. It has flared up on the Upper Nile, in Egypt, on the Isthmus of Suez, in Palestine, in the Lebanon, at Mosul, at the Dardanelles, at Salonika, in Constantinople. The crises of 1839-41 and 1882 over Egypt and of 1898 over the Egyptian Sudan are landmarks on a road that has never been smooth, for conflicts between Sultan Mahmud and Mehmed Ali, Maronites and Druses, Greeks and Turks, Syrians and Hijazis, Arabs and Jews, have perpetually kept alive the combative instinct in French and English missionaries, schoolmasters, consuls, diplo- matists, civil servants, ministers of state, and journalists. One cannot understand — or make allowances for — the post- war relations of the French and British Governments over the ' Eastern Question ' unless one realises this tradition of rivalry and its accumulated inheritance of suspicion and resentment. It is a bad mental background for the individuals who have to represent the two countries. The
46 THE WESTERN QUESTION
French are perhaps more affected by it than we, because on the whole they have had the worst of the struggle in the Levant as well as in India, and failure cuts deeper memories than success.
The other two rivalries less immediately concern my subject. The Anglo-Russian rivalry has been diplomatic and military, with the main stresses in Afghanistan, in Persia, and at the Black Sea Straits. It was prominent from about 1815 until 1917, suffered a sudden eclipse with the collapse of the Russian Power, and is at present a secondary though far from a negligible factor in the Middle Eastern situation. It will reassert itself as Russia recovers, unless the vacuum continues to be occupied by the Anglo-French rivalry, or the formation of a local plenum happily eliminates this arena of rivalry altogether.
The Entente between France, Great Britain, and Russia against Germany has been the shortest and strangest grouping of all. It was only in existence from the Anglo- Russian Agreement of 1907 to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia at the close of 1917. It never had the solidity of the older Franco -Russian combination against Germany in Europe, and it is unlikely to recur. It lacked the com- paratively strong cement of fear, except in so far as it was a corollary to the rapprochement of the same three parties over European politics. Its direct motive was covetousness, and it rested locally on nothing more substantial than the precarious honour among thieves who find their business threatened by a vigorous and talented competitor. Some of the thieves, at any rate, never got out of the habit of picking their temporary partners' pockets.
The venerable Anglo-French rivalry in the Near and Middle East was not brought to an end by the Entente of 1904, whatever results that agreement may have had in the North-American Fisheries or in Tropical Africa.1 This
1 Egypt and Morocco came within the purview of the understanding, but not Turkey or Greece,
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 47
rivalry was more or less dormant during the few years before the War, when the partition of Asiatic Turkey and the alteration of the status of the Straits did not appear im- minent. Each Power's attention at that time was mainly taken up by the common rivalry with Germany, and both Powers — to their credit — tried to come to agreements with Germany over their respective Eastern interests before the War began. But Turkey's intervention in the War removed all restraint on Western appetites. Germany dreamed of swallowing Turkey gradually but whole, the Allied Powers of dividing her piecemeal. But how was she to be carved up ? Their abandonment of any thought of compromise with Germany in the East made it extremely difficult for them to compromise with one another. Their conflicting ambitions, dragging on the leash, pulled them asunder, in spite of their acute common danger ; and by the middle of 1915 the tension had become so serious that the problem had to be faced and some immediate definite agreement attempted. The deciding factors were the military break- down of Russia in the course of 1915 and the overtures made to the British Government in the summer of that year by the Sherif (now King) Husein of Mecca, on behalf of a secret Arab Nationalist Committee at Damascus.
To prevent the Russian Government from making a separate peace, the French and British Governments acquiesced in the acquisition by Russia of Constantinople and adjoining territories commanding the Black Sea Straits. An agreement was signed, in which these territories were defined. They included the Gallipoli Peninsula and a strip along the European coast of the Marmara joining it to the Peninsula of Constantinople — the whole roughly correspond- ing to the European section of the ' Zone of the Straits ' as laid down in Article 179 of the Treaty of Sevres and indicated on the map annexed to it. On the Asiatic side, most of the Ismid Peninsula was included, but not the Bigha Peninsula nor the Asiatic parts of the Sevres Zone between Bigha and
48 THE WESTERN QUESTION
Ismid. France and Great Britain did not bind themselves to carry on the war till these terms were enforced on Turkey and her allies, but merely consented to them in advance, in the event of their proving enforceable when peace was concluded. In 1917, however, any claim to annexations was twice * formally and publicly renounced by Russia, and no Russian Government is likely to revive this particular claim, unless either Turkey or the Western Powers establish some regime in the Straits which does not secure a permanent com- mercial right-of-way for the riverain Powers of the Black Sea.
King Husein's overtures in the summer of 1915 led to long negotiations between him, as spokesman of the Arab National Movement in the Ottoman Empire, and the British Government acting for the Allies, and subsequently to the revolt of the Hijaz against Turkey on the 9th June 1916. But they also forced Great Britain, France, and Russia to agree upon a definition of their own respective claims in Turkey-in-Asia. The resulting secret agreement between the three Powers about the disposal of Asiatic Turkey, un- officially and also unjustly known as the ' Sykes-Picot ' Agreement,2 was signed in May 1916, and its terms were afterwards published by the Bolsheviks when the Petrograd archives fell into their hands.
The parts of this agreement relating to the Arab provinces do not directly concern the Graeco-Turkish conflict. It is sufficient to say that while the letter of these parts could be so interpreted as not to contradict the commitments to King
1 On the 10th April and the 19th May, both oocasions being before the accession of the Bolsheviks to power.
* The final text of the agreement was drafted by Sir Mark Sykes and M. Georges Picot on behalf of the British and French Governments respectively, but these two gentlemen only settled details and phraseology. The funda- mental points in the agreement had already been worked out in conferences of leading statesmen and officials on both sides, before it was handed over to them for completion. The unofficial name, used for brevity, gives a wrong impression of the part they played, and now that the agreement is discredited and Sir Mark Sykes unable to defend himself, owing to his lamentable death from influenza during the Peace Conference at Paris, it is important that no injustice should be done to his memory. The responsi- bility on the British side for this agreement lies with the British Government.
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 49
Husein into which we were entering simultaneously, the two sets of arrangements were incompatible in spirit. King Husein supposed that he was securing from the Allies a general undertaking, with certain reservations, to promote and uphold the independence of the Arabs. Meanwhile, the Allies were really arranging among themselves that Great Britain and France between them should exercise varying degrees of political authority over all Arab terri- tories in Asia except the Hijaz itself. It is true that the more attenuated degrees of this ascendency were styled 'Arab independence,' but that technical use of the word ' independence ' — a novelty even hi diplomacy — would no doubt have been misunderstood by the Arabs, and so the text of the Three Power Agreement of 1916 was prudently not communicated to the Hijaz Government. When King Husein subsequently got hold of the Bolsheviks' version, there was a diplomatic storm ; and when, after the armistice, the inevitable collision occurred between the Allies' arrange- ments with the Arabs and their arrangements among them- selves, King Husein practically broke off diplomatic relations. No plenipotentiary of the Hijaz Government signed the Treaty of Sevres.
In the non-Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire, the Allied Governments were not embarrassed at the time by any commitments to the people of the country. The Turks were at war with them ; offers previously made to Greece at Turkey's expense had been declined and withdrawn ; the Armenians had got themselves massacred by the Turks for helping the Allies without getting the Allies committed in return to doing anything for them. In these territories, therefore, the partition was denned hi more downright terms. There were to be no ' independent ' spheres of influence here, and each Power recognised the other's right to dispose in whatever way it chose of the zone assigned to it. In this way France was given the absolute disposal of a vast zone including Cilicia, East-Central Anatolia, and
D
50 THE WESTERN QUESTION
Western Kurdistan, the boundaries being identical with those of the ' area in which the special interests of France are recognised ' in the Tripartite Treaty of the 10th August 1920, as defined in Article 5 and set out on the published map. Russia received a somewhat smaller territory 1 bounded by the French Zone, the town of Trebizond, and the pre-war Russo-Turkish frontier. It is worth noting that this area, which Russia, if she chose, was to annex outright, was practically identical with the area which President Wilson, arbitrating in pursuance of Article 89 of the Treaty of Sevres, has since awarded to an independent Armenia. Russia's intentions in regard to it may be judged, not only from the general record of the Tsardom towards subject nationalities, but from the fact that during the period in 1916 and 1917 when this territory was temporarily under Russian military occupation, General Yudenich began to plant Cossack colonies on lands belonging to local Ottoman Armenians who had previously been deported and massacred by the Turks on account of their supposed sympathy with the Allies. The colonies were meant to be permanent, and natives of Transcaucasia (i.e. practically all Russian Armenians) were declared ineligible ! The intention was clear, and the terms of the agreement debarred our Govern- ment from protesting against it. Yet at the very time when the agreement was being made, I was being employed by His Majesty's Government to compile all available documents on the recent treatment of the Armenians by the Turkish Government in a ' Blue Book, ' 2 which was duly published and distributed as war-propaganda ! The French Government made use of the Armenians in a different way. They promised to erect an autonomous Armenian state, under their aegis, in the Cilician part of their Anatolian Zone,
1 Russia's principal Eastern gains under the secret agreements were (1) Constantinople and the Straits, and (2) the right, apparently conceded by Great Britain, to do as she pleased with the ' Russian Zone ' in Persia established by the bipartite agreement of 1907.
2 Miscellaneous No. 31 (1916).
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 51
and the promise brought them several thousand Armenian volunteers, most of whom were enrolled in the Legion d' Orient and served for the rest of the War. That is perhaps the only asset which France has ever realised from this zone, which looked so substantial an acquisition in the emphatic terminology and highly-coloured sketch-maps of the agreement. What the Armenians have got out of the French Government's promise can only be realised ade- quately by a study of events in Cilicia since the armistice !
One other point in the 1916 agreement has to be noted. The British Government — which had annexed Cyprus to the British Empire after declaring war on Turkey, had offered it to Greece in 1915, and subsequently had withdrawn the offer — now undertook not to alienate the island without the con- sent of France. As four-fifths of the Cypriots are Greeks and the other fifth Turks, this pledge has a bearing on the relations of these two nationalities.
The agreement of 1916 was not communicated to the Italian Government any more than to King Husein, but Western Governments are efficient, and the Italian Secret Service discovered its existence.1 Under the Treaty of London, in virtue of which Italy had come into the War, the three other Powers had promised Italy — among other things — an ' equitable ' zone in the region of Adalia (in South- western Anatolia) in the event of their making territorial acquisitions in Turkey themselves. Accordingly a new, long, and ludicrous series of negotiations began. The word ' equitable ' in itself was an inexhaustible mine of dialectic. How was it to be translated into square kilometres ? And had it not a moral implication ? An assessment of moral damages suffered by being kept in the dark must have swelled the Italian Government's territorial claim, and the immense extent of the Turkish territories eventually assigned to Italy in the secret agreement made by the British, French, and Italian Prime Ministers in April 1917 at St. Jean de
1 I had this information recently from an excellent Italian source.
52 THE WESTERN QUESTION
Maurienne, indicates that two of these gentlemen had a bad conscience. This Italian Zone consisted of a substantial section which Italy might dispose of as she chose, and a much more modest section north of it in which she was to have the monopoly of giving advice and assistance to an ' independent ' native Government. The annexable zone included both Smyrna and Konia, and the total area (the two parts would hardly in practice have been distinguish- able) can be most easily described by reference to the ' area in which the special interests of Italy are recognised ' in the Tripartite Treaty of the 10th August 1920. It differed from the latter area in excluding its north-western corner, while including practically the whole of the ' territory of Smyrna ' afterwards provisionally assigned to Greece under the Treaty of Sevres. A portentous commitment — but there was a way out, for the instrument contained a legal flaw. Here, however, I shall follow the example of Herodotus, when he touches upon mysteries, and ' though I know, prefer to hold my tongue.' This particular mystery is indeed common knowledge among those interested — not least among Italians. At the same time, I cannot discover that it has been made public in the technical sense, either by the Allied Governments or by their enemies, and cer- tainly my own knowledge of it was originally obtained through official channels. An even more pertinent reason for passing it over is the undesirability of reviving old griev- ances at a time when co-operation and goodwill between the Western Powers in the East are of particular importance. . . . So the validity of the St. Jean de Maurienne agreement remained debatable, but the controversy has become aca- demic. One need only turn to the public ' Tripartite Agreement between the British Empire, France, and Italy respecting Anatolia, signed at Sevres, 10th August 1920.' 1
1 Treaty Series No. 12 (1920), not to be confused with the Treaty signed at Sevres on the same date by all the Allies (except Jugoslavia and the Hijaz) and Turkey.
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 53
Here the French and Italian Zones (with the modifications in the Italian Zone above mentioned) reappear, but their bold colours and solid outlines have faded into something rather blank and thin. They have become merely ' areas in which the special interests of France and Italy are respectively recognised ' by them and by Great Britain. The treaty only binds the three Powers ; Turkey is not a party to it ; the ' special interests ' are defined in Article 1 as a ' preferential claim ... to supply assistance ... in the event of the Turkish Government or the Government of Kurdistan being desirous of obtaining assistance in the local administration or police.' The only unconditional advantage now attaching to the zones is that ' the Contract- ing Parties undertake not to apply, nor to make or support applications on behalf of their nationals, for industrial or commercial concessions in an area in which the special interests of one of the said Powers are recognised, except in cases where such Power declines or is unable to take ad- vantage of its special position.' r Moreover, an uncondi- tional obligation to ' accept therewith the responsibility for supervising the execution of the Treaty of Peace with Turkey with regard to the protection of minorities ' is un- dertaken 2 by each Power in the area within which its special interests are recognised.
The advantages respectively appropriated by the three Powers in this treaty are so remarkably small compared with those envisaged in the agreements of 1916 and 1917, that one seeks a reason. Did it lie in the necessity in this case for publicity, and if so, did the public document simply mean to the initiated what its secret predecessors said outright ? This explanation is supported by the pre- cedent of the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 concerning Persia — a public bipartite agreement between two Powers, who mutually proclaimed zones of respective ' disinterested- ness ' in Persia in each other's favour. Persia was not a
1 Article 2, * Article 9,
54 THE WESTERN QUESTION
party, and the analogy of form with the present Tripartite Treaty concerning Turkey is very close. On the other hand, the Anglo-Russian Agreement in practice rapidly approached results analogous to those avowedly contemplated in Turkey according to the two secret agreements.1 Did the authors of the Tripartite Treaty of 1920 calculate that in Turkey, too, the same transformation could be effected without too much scandal in the course of time ? This explanation is plausible but cannot easily be reconciled with the subsequent policy at any rate of the French Government. On the 20th October 1921, M. Franklin-Bouillon, acting for his Government, made an agreement with Yusuf Kemal Bey, acting on behalf of the Turkish Nationalist Government of Angora, and in this agreement the French Zone was tacitly abandoned. The claim to special interests was passed over without a word ; the rights of minorities were confirmed not by France nor even jointly by both contracting parties, but by the Great National Assembly of Turkey ; and the sole economic concession secured to a French group was the exploitation of the Bozanty-Nisibin section of the Baghdad Railway.2 When they ratified this agreement with Angora, the French Government can hardly have contemplated putting aggres- sive interpretations on the Tripartite Agreement there- after.
Before searching further for the cause of these far-reaching abatements of claims, it will be well to compare with the original claims of the Powers the assets actually held by them in Turkey in the autumn of 1921.
The Russian claim to Constantinople and the Straits had
1 The transformation of the other party's zone of disinterestedness into one's own zone of interest (in the most unfettered sense) would undoubtedly have been completed in Persia at the end of the War, if the process had not been cut short by the Russian Revolution. The Russian Government in- tended this transformation from the outset. The British did not, but had to follow the Russian lead.
2 In his personal letter of the 20th October 1921 to M. Franklin-Bouillon, Yusuf Kemal Bey also offered the concession of one group of mines (with 50 per cent. Turkish participation) and promised benevolent consideration of future French applications.
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 55
disappeared. The Constantinople and Ismid Peninsulas remained under Ottoman administration, but three Allied High Commissioners were in control and there was a mixed British, French, and Italian garrison. There were also Allied troops on Gallipoli and at Chanak Kale, and the Straits were commanded by the Allied navies.
The Powers had recognised the nominal independence of all the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire in Asia, even of those which they had left at one another's absolute disposal under the secret agreement of 1916 ; and the ' control,' contemplated in the 1916 agreement, over ' inde- pendent ' Arab territories had been conferred by a mandate from the League of Nations. In ' independent ' Palestine, and the half-dozen ' independent ' states which France, as mandatory, had set up in Syria, the British and French Governments respectively were wielding all the powers of sovereignty. In Syria the French mandate had actually been established bj^ military operations. The Arab National Government formed at Damascus after the Turkish evacua- tion had been overthrown by force in July 1920 and a war indemnity had been imposed.
In Mesopotamia, which was conquered by the British Army from the Turks during the War, British troops had remained in occupation, and man}7 small risings of the Arab population, and one big rising in the summer of 1920, had been put down. But the mandatory Power had since set up a single Arab government for the whole country and was rapidly reducing its garrisons. It looked as if the Mesopo- taniian Arabs would become genuinely independent before long, and if this happened, the independence of Syria was likely to follow. The Syrians being more ripe for self- government than the Mesopotamians, the liquidation of British control in Mesopotamia seemed bound to hasten that of French control in Syria. Thus, even in the Arab area, the claims staked out in the secret agreements were far from having been realised, and a still further diminution of the
56 THE WESTERN QUESTION
authority exercised there by the British and French Govern- ments was probable in the near future.
But the difference between claim and actuality was far more striking in Anatolia. Here three immense zones, swallowing up two-thirds of the whole country and placed at the absolute disposal of Italy, France, and Russia respec- tively, had simply disappeared from the map. The Soviet Russian Government had not only renounced the Russian claim but had even ceded to Turkey (under a treaty signed at Moscow with the plenipotentiaries of Angora *) territories possessed by Russia in 1914. France had renounced her claim, in the Franklin-Bouillon Agreement of the 20th October 1921 ; and she had incidentallv made a vicarious sacrifice on behalf of Italy, for Italy could no more avoid following the French lead in regard to Anatolian Zones than France the British in regard to mandates over Arabs. The paper structure of Western dominion had collapsed, and the site was occupied by a national Turkish Government. This Government had laid solid foundations ; it disposed of a formidable army ; and its independence was a reality, not a fiction or an experiment like that of the new Arab Governments at Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad.
But the picture has still to be completed, for in the autumn of 1921 one Power held not only everything accorded to her by treaty but a great deal more, and that was Greece. Under the treaty signed by the Allies and Turkey at Sevres on the 10th August 1920, Greece acquired provisionally a zone round Smyrna which had been assigned to Italy by the agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, and the whole of Eastern Thrace except the Constantinople Peninsula — including the strip along the Marmara and the Dardanelles assigned to Russia in 1915, as well as the interior. All this
1 The terras of this Treaty of Moscow between Angora and Russia had been anticipated in the Treaty of Alexandropol, imposed by Angora on the Armenian Republic of Erivan after Kiazym Kara Bekir Pasha's campaign in the autumn of 1920. They were afterwards confirmed in a third treaty signed at Kars by representatives of Angora and the three Transcaucasian Soviet Republics. For dates see the table at the end of the book.
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 57
was now in her effective possession, and not only this but almost the whole north-west of Anatolia up to the rivers Maeander and Sakkaria,1 with the two strategic positions of Mum Kara Hissar and Eski Shehir.
This was an extraordinary reversal. In the secret agree- ments made during the War, Greece had had no share. She had been a small Near Eastern state and an unpopular neutral. And now, in the fourth year after the armistice, she alone could point to substantial acquisitions, while the three self-styled ' Principal Allied Powers,' who had borne the brunt of the fighting and the intriguing in Asiatic Turkey, had got next to nothing in hand, and nothing lucrative at all. This was the fact, but what was its moral ? Taking the situation at its face value, a Greek might have been tempted to suppose that his nation had more virility and 'survival-value' than the English, French, and Italians. Here was ' little Greece ' making good her treaty rights when greater Powers were waiving theirs, and standing up to the Turkish Nationalists of whom the West had fought shy. The Turks, and their Indian admirers, might have drawn similar conclusions. They, for their part, had got rid of the French and Italian Zones ; thev had even secured the retrocession by France of a long strip of frontier territory, containing the permanent way of the Baghdad Railway, which the Treaty of Sevres had included in the French mandated territory of Syria ; they had recovered from Russia territories which she had taken from them in 1878 ; and they looked forward confidently to forcing the Greek army out of Anatolia and the Allied garrisons out of Con- stantinople. This was an unmistakable turn of the tide. Which looked decadent ? The West or Turkey ?
Many Turks and Greeks have seen things in this light during the last few years. Their consequent exaltation of spirits has been one of the obstacles to a settlement. But
1 Except for the Peninsulas of Haidar Pasha and Bigha, which, like the Constantinople Peninsula, were controlled by the Three Powers.
58 THE WESTERN QUESTION
in so far as they have thought and felt like this, they have ignored the most important fact in the situation. What- ever the Western Powers had sacrificed in the Near and Middle East, they were none of them any longer at war there, while Greece and Turkey, in the fourth year after the armistice, were fighting with all their might.
Here we have the key to the diplomatic situation. The renunciations made by the Western Powers in the Near and Middle East were neither uncompensated nor involuntary, while the price of her gains was proving ruinous to Greece. The striking inconsistency between the Powers' claims before the armistice and their later policy is certainly damaging to the reputation of the few dozen British, French, and Italian officials and politicians who made the secret agree- ments. The long tradition of professional rivalry had obsessed them. They were stupefied by the stale, poisonous atmosphere of 1839, 1882, and 1898, which still hung about their consulates, embassies, and foreign offices ; and the clandestine and unedifying activities on which they were employing their energies during the most critical moments of the War had little relation to the present or the future. They were completely out of touch with the public opinion of their respective countries. They not only miscalculated the relative values which their public would set upon peace and Oriental annexations after the War. They even mis- judged their own ability to coerce or cajole their publics into carrying out their policy.
But the folly of the Western diplomatists has been the measure of the Western public's common -sense. During the War, the Eastern ' side-shows,' though frequently criticised, were rightly regarded as a technical military problem. They were a part of the general conduct of the War, and a comparatively small proportion of our man -power and material resources was involved in them. The public let them be, and the diplomatists made their secret agreements on the supposition that the men and money available in the
WESTERN DIPLOMACY 59
East for military purposes during the War would remain at their service for political purposes after it. But from the moment of the armistice, public opinion began to assert itself. The main operations on the Western front had been terminated by complete victory ; why should subsidiary fronts be kept in being ? The soldiers who had been defending the heart of France, Italy, and England were being demobilised ; why should their comrades be kept under arms to hold down unwilling populations in outlandish Eastern countries, where neither they nor their families had any interests at stake ? And why should the taxpayers, on whom the national struggle for existence had imposed crush- ing burdens, accept further burdens for the sake of their diplomatists' professional struggle for power ? The soldiers and the taxpayers revolted against the further expenditure of lives and money to which the diplomatists had secretly committed them. British troops in Transcaucasia and Mesopotamia, and French troops in Cilicia, clamoured to be demobilised ; French sailors in the Black Sea refused to operate against the Bolsheviks ; Italian reinforcements refused to embark for Albania, not to speak of the Central Desert of Anatolia, which Italian diplomatists had worked so hard to acquire for their countrymen ; and there had been a growing opposition in the Press and the Parliaments. Confessions about the strength of the respective military forces in the East, their casualties, their cost of maintenance, and about the budgets of the civil administration in the occupied territories, had been wrung out of unwilling Govern- ments and subjected to unanswerable criticisms.
This internal struggle had been going on simultaneously and with similar fortunes in all three countries. Official resistance had been very stubborn, and at first the unspent momentum of the War and the distraction of the public mind enabled the officials to carry on. They were not prevented from embarking on costly aggressive operations in Russia, though they were forced to break them off ; and
60 THE WESTERN QUESTION
as recently as the summer of 1920 the French Government found ways and means of conquering Syria and the British of reconquering Mesopotamia. But it was always a losing battle, and the last offensive ended in rout. M. Franklin- Bouillon's agreement with Yusuf Kemal Bey and our own Government's treaty with the Emir Feisal were unmistak- able admissions of defeat. Substantially, the Western nations have demonstrated their comparative wisdom and strength of character at then representatives' expense. They have re-established an effective, though belated, limited, and rather negative ' democratic control ' over their public servants, and they have realised more quickly than the ' experts ' that the days of Oriental dependencies are numbered. Under post-war conditions — especially political conditions — these pieces of property are going to bring hi diminishing returns, and their owners, the Western nations, have therefore begun to force their official overseers to liquidate them.1 But this victory and defeat are incidents in an internal struggle, and it would be as absurd to treat them as a defeat of Great Britain by the Arabs or a victory of the Turks over France, as it would be to represent the rejection by the American Senate and people of President Wilson's projects in the Old World (which included a man- date over the northern half of Turkey) as a defeat of American by European imperialism. Had she chosen, America could have taken up her mandate as far as the European Powers were concerned ; and in the same way Great Britain, France, and Italy were physically capable at the time of the armistice of executing the secret agreements. They had the ships, men, and money to overcome any resistance which could then have been put up by the local populations. The deciding factor was not any stronger
1 On the other hand, public opinion may insist on the retention of Tropical African dependencies, which will probably remain profitable, and may even have them exploited by methods at which professional administrators will be revolted. The Western public is only more businesslike, not more high- minded, than its servants.
western Diplomacy 6i
' will to live ' on the part of the Greeks, Turks, and Arabs, but the deliberate preference of the British, French, and Italian peoples to conserve their remaining resources instead of squandering them abroad.
It is necessary to insist on this in order to explain the sequel, for the illusions of the local nationalities have been utilised by the Western diplomatists in order to save some- thing from the wreck of their schemes. The harder they have found it to coax supplies out of their own Parlia- ments, the more they have turned their attention to other ways and means ; and they have found these nations much more ' suggestible ' than the comparatively well-educated, sophisticated, and politically experienced public of Western Europe — particularly in regard to Eastern affairs, which involve their national freedom, unity, and honour, while only very speculative material interests are at stake for Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Italians. Greeks and Turks can be swayed and stampeded by visions of ' The City,' 'Ionia,' 'The Abode of Felicity,' or the Holy Sepulchres of Edirne. The herd-instinct can be relied on, as it cannot be in the West, to override the interest and judgment of the individual ; and a kind of ' Juggernaut ' national personality can be conjured into existence and induced, by offerings attractive to its divinity, to drive over its worshippers' bodies. On the international chess-board such pieces make excellent pawns, and the Western diplomatists — wrapped up in their tradition and instinctively using every available means to carry on their professional activities — have not neglected them. ' This is really a battle between England and France.' The Greek and Turkish pawns carried on the game of the French and English players. This pawn- playing, however, has not been so odiously cold and dis- ingenuous as an analysis makes it appear. The trap in which the victims have been caught in order to be exploited was not cunningly hidden. They rushed into it with their eyes open because they could not resist the bait. This
62 THE WESTERN QUESTION
second phase of Western diplomacy is rather less discredit- able to its authors than the secret haggling during the War. There has been less conspiracy about it and more sport, and — most disarming defence — it has been just as stupid. The statesmen miscalculated again. Their fellow-country- men had the means to carry out their policy but not the will ; their pawns had the will without the means. They were too weak to perform the role marked out for them, however great the bribe. They could not struggle on to the eighth square and turn into queens. On the contrary, they have displayed an exasperating faculty of making queens out of the opposing pawns. Greek and Turkish armies, fighting French and English battles, have aroused, and always will arouse, more resistance than they can overcome.
Ill
GREECE AND TURKEY EN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE
The last chapter was an attempt to analyse the post-war problem on the Near and Middle Eastern chess-board. If the analysis was correct, it ought to throw light on the particular roles of Turkey and Greece. A game played with living pieces may be a cruel spectacle, and, half through her own fault, Greece has been the principal victim. The fault is only half hers, for at first she struggled hard not to be drawn into the rivalries between the Powers, and the struggle cost her her internal unity. But instead of common- sense and moderation prevailing, as since the armistice they have begun to prevail in the West, they were overborne by the pressure of the Entente Powers and the imperious personality of Mr. Venizelos ; and Greece, more than ever divided at home, was pushed into that foreign policy of reckless aggrandisement towards which the blind herd- instinct under the surface of her politics was all the time impelling her. At last, fatally at war within herself and at the same time fatally united for war against a neighbouring nation, she was brought to a point from which she could neither reach internal or external peace, nor retreat without loss or even disaster. The world has sympathised with the personal tragedy of Mr. Venizelos. There is a greater pathos in the national tragedy of his country.
Mr. Venizelos is tragic not on account of his fall, but because of the change of part which was the cause of it. He came to Greece in 1910 in order to banish personal partisanships from her politics. It has been his fate — the fatal conjunction of his country's circumstances and his
63
64 THE WESTERN QUESTION
own character — to reimport into the old feuds a ferocity to which they have seldom been degraded since the worst moments of demoralisation during the War of Independence.1 He made his mark as a great peace minister, and like Pitt he left his poor country involved in a desperate war. In the first war through which he guided her destinies, he showed striking moderation in the hour of victory. After the second war, he grasped at such excessive territorial prizes that he failed to secure the greater prize of peace. Being a statesman of great force and great charm of char- acter, he has been able to give ample effect to his policy, and when it has been mistaken, his country has therefore suffered its consequences to the full.
There has been a parallel change hi the part latterly played in international politics by Greece. At the beginning, Greece distinguished herself from her neighbours by holding aloof from the European War. Serbia had no choice ; Turkey and Bulgaria were committed by a few men in power ; Rumania's intervention seems mainly to have been decided by party leaders and by Russian coercion, and though made at leisure, to have been not exactly a national decision. In Greece alone of the Near and Middle Eastern belligerents, there was a real canvassing of opinion com- parable to the internal struggle which preceded the intervention of a Western nation like Italy, or to the post- armistice struggle in the principal Western Allied countries, alluded to above.
The controversy was brought on by a private offer from the Allied Governments to Mr. Venizelos, at that time premier and at the height of his prestige, of territorial acquisitions for Greece on condition that she intervened on their side. The territories offered were very large — a much bigger zone in Western Anatolia than that provisionally assigned to Greece under the Treaty of Sevres, and Cyprus
1 e.g. The civil wars of November 1823 to June 1824 and of November and December 1824.
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CTRCLE 65
in addition — and the scheme, as worked out by Mi*. Veni- zelos, would have diminished the risks of departing from neutrality, for he proposed to purchase the co-operation of Bulgaria (also still neutral) by ceding to her Eastern Mace- donia. Yet it was after all a policy of adventure, and nothing but the fact that it suited our interests has made us think ill of King Constantino for rejecting it. The hard things said about him may be true, but his opposition to Mr. Venizelos on this question does not prove them. Neutrality, during the whole period during which we respected the King's legitimate claim to insist upon it, was more prudent for Greece, and more dignified, than the purchase of territory by intervention ; and it makes for the general betterment of international relations if small states always and everywhere keep as clear as possible of the rivalries between Great Powers. Indeed, King Con- stant ine was not alone hi his views. Possibly a majority among the politically educated people in Greece agreed with him, and such sentiment for Germany as really counted in the controversy (its importance has been exaggerated) was natural and proper. Greece had not borrowed Western civilisation only from the three Western Powers that happened to be on one side in the European War. In her eager apprenticeship she had sought instruction from all members of Western society. By the decision of the British, French, and Russian Governments of the day,1 her first Western instructors had been Bavarians. Their tutelage was not a success, but a number of them married Greeks and founded families hi the country, and the link thus created with Germany as well as with the other Western nations was perpetuated by the intellectual gifts which Greece has since received from her. German archaeologists like Schliemann and Dorpfeld have taught the Modern Greeks how to rediscover the history of their predecessors, and Greek students have gone to German universities as well as
1 Convention of London, 7th May 1832. E
66 THE WESTERN QUESTION
to Paris and Oxford. Our murderous civil war in the West naturally produced a mental and sentimental schism in Greece, which contributed to the political cleavage in the country.
Thus Greece rapidly became divided against herself, and the conflict took more and more violent forms. There was a bad tradition of violence and personal vendetta in the politics of Greece, which was not surprising considering the suddenness and recentness of her political Westernisation. The miracle was that the Fathers of the Revolution — that incongruous assemblage of peasants and merchants, brigands touched by romanticism, and philosophic Ottoman high officials — had been able to found anything resembling a Western parliamentary state. Considering the initial difficulties, the political development of Modern Greece has been rapid ; but she could not be expected to skip stages in the process, and it is not surprising that by 1914 she had not left behind her the spoils system of nineteenth-century America and the personal treatment of politics that prevailed in England before the Reform Bill. Since 1910 she had been making efforts to shake herself free from these anachronisms. The profound disturbance of her internal life by the War has fastened them upon her once more. In a milder form we have been suffering from the same symp- toms of political deterioration in Great Britain.
The schism widened quickly. Mr. Venizelos fell. The Allies' offers were declined and withdrawn. Mr. Venizelos returned to power. The Dardanelles expedition failed, the Allies landed an expeditionary force on Greek territory at Salonika, and a few days later Bulgaria entered the War. Mr. Venizelos fell again, and the hostility of the two factions in Greece towards one another mounted up, as they were driven nearer to committing their country to one side or the other in the battle of Great Powers. The Greek Army under the King's control menaced the rear of the Entente Army at Salonika, whose intrusion had brought the War on
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 67
to Greek territory. An army corps handed over Fort Rupel in Eastern Macedonia to the Bulgarians, and surrendered. The Allies retaliated by subjecting Greece to the naval block- ade, which produced more speedy and acute distress there than in Germany. On the 25th September 1916, Mr. Veni- zelos left Athens for Krete, went on to Salonika, set up a provisional Government over the Greek territories controlled by the naval and military forces of the Entente Powers, and organised a contingent of Greek volunteers to fight for them on the Salonika front. On the 1st December 1916, there was an armed conflict in Athens, in which Allied soldiers and Venizelist civilians were killed by Royalist soldiers and reservists. On the 11th June 1917, King Constantine was forced by a French commissioner, M. Jonnart, to abdicate, and a few days later Mr. Venizelos was brought back to Athens by Allied troops. After this coup d'etat, his Government — thus established in the capital and placed in control of all Greek territory not occupied by the Central Powers — formally entered the European War as a member of the Entente Alliance. As such, it subsequently presented its claims at the Peace Conference held by the victorious states at Paris.
Every event referred to in the last paragraph raises controversial issues. Did the elections and by-elections of 1915 prove or not that Mr. Venizelos was supported by a majority of the Greek nation ? If he was, had the King a right to dismiss and exclude him from office ? Did her treaty with Serbia legally and morally bind Greece to fight when Bulgaria intervened % Had the Allies received a genuine invitation from Mr. Venizelos's Government to land at Salonika ? Which side was morally the aggressor in the fight at Athens on the 1st December 1916 ? Was the will of the Greek nation or the military power of the Entente the real cause of Mr. Venizelos's triumph over King Constantine between his flight from and return to Athens ? These controversies lie behind the horizon of this book ; many of
68 THE WESTERN QUESTION
them had only an ephemeral interest ; others are incapable of settlement. In particular, it is almost impossible to adjudicate upon the relative strength and merits of the two Greek factions. Each contains a few fine and many inferior individuals and a contingent of bad characters. Neither has a solid hold upon the nation, which has fluctuated between them under the pressure of foreign armies, the fancied interests of the moment, or irrational emotion ; and at each turn of the wheel there has been provocation and retaliation. Royalists terrorised Venizelists in 1915 and 1916 ; Venizelists proscribed and imprisoned Royalists from the coup d'etat of the 11th June 1917, down to the elections of November 1 920 ; and after the return of the King, Venizelist placemen were systematically retired, transferred, or otherwise removed to make way for the men whom they had themselves displaced three and a half years before. Each time yet another turn of the wheel has been hoped for and worked for by the temporarily discomfited party, but reversals of party fortunes, when they involve such consequences as these, are nothing but a misfortune for a nation, and Greece cannot begin to rebuild her shattered political life so long as it remains dominated by personal rancours. The point of historical interest is not to pass judgments on these mischievous parties and their unprofit- able vicissitudes, but to trace how a war between the Western Powers has played havoc with the internal develop- ment of a Near Eastern country, and then to observe how this internal disharmony has reacted prejudicially upon that country's foreign policy under a succession of party governments.
At the Paris Conference Mr. Venizelos, on behalf of Greece, put forward startling demands. He asked for the whole of Western and Eastern Thrace up to the Black Sea and the Chatalja lines, and for the entire vilayet or province of Aidin,1 in Western Anatolia, with the exception of the one
1 Of which Smyrna is now the provincial capital.
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 69
sanjak or department of Denizli, but with the addition of a corridor to the south coast of the Marmara. The first claim meant interposing a continuous belt of Greek territory between Turkey and other European states and between Bulgaria and the Aegean. The second meant taking from Turkey the richest province and principal port of Anatolia, bringing a large Turkish population under Greek rule, and leaving the two nations, with these new seeds of discord sown between them, to face one another along an immense land frontier.
These claims, imprudent in themselves, came strangely from Mr. Venizelos, who had stood for a totally different policy after the Balkan Wars. In 1913 he handed Western Thrace over to Bulgaria, though the coast -line had been occupied during hostilities by the Greek Navy, and he doubted the wisdom of annexmg Eastern Macedonia (the lower Struma valley) and the port of Kavala. He realised that Greece must live on good terms with Bulgaria, and that unless Bulgaria had unhampered access to the Aegean, an adjustment of interests would be impossible. In 1915 he was still developing this policy in his proposal to cede Eastern Macedonia to Bulgaria in exchange for Anatolian compensations to Greece. But in 1919 he deliberately took the contrary line ; maintained that Bulgaria, by a second aggression, had shown herself incapable of responding to a policy of confidence ; and submitted that it was no use attempting to conciliate her in the new settlement. As a measure of justice, she should have an economic right-of- way to some port or ports on the Aegean, but sovereignty over the seaboard, even in Western Thrace, ought to be taken from her and given to Greece.
He made a similar change of front hi regard to Turkey. In 1913 he had shrewdly eliminated all land frontiers between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. In Europe he separated the two countries by the assignment of Western Thrace to Bulgaria, and in Asia he took pains to show that
70 THE WESTERN QUESTION
the acquisition of the islands of Khios and Mitylini by Greece would not necessarily menace Turkish sovereignty on the neighbouring mainland of Anatolia. The Ottoman Government had insisted so strongly on this danger that although these islands were inhabited by an overwhelming Greek majority and had been conquered by Greece in the first Balkan War, the question was referred for adjudication to a Conference of Ambassadors of the Powers. This Con- ference awarded the islands to Greece, and there is no doubt that they were largely influenced hi doing so by a belief in the good faith and moderation of Mr. Venizelos. Their confidence seemed justified when, some months later, he signed a convention with the Porte for the inter-migration of Turkish minorities in Macedonia and Greek minorities along the western littoral of Anatolia.1 It was a loyal attempt to assure the Turks that, in pressing her claim to the islands, Greece had nothing in view but a local applica- tion in her favour of the principle of nationality — that she had no intention of taking advantage of their strategic position commanding Smyrna, and of the proximity of a powerful Greek minority on the mainland, in order to use them in the future as a ' jumpmg-off ground ' for an im- perialistic policy in Anatolia. And then, at Paris in 1919, he justified the Turks' worst suspicions and incidentally endorsed their arguments for the reunion of the islands with Turkey. He not only claimed the mainland province opposite the islands, but actually counted in the population of the islands in supporting his mainland claim by statistics of the Greek percentage in the population, on the very ground (put forward by the Turks in 1913) that mainland and islands formed an indivisible geographical unity !
In fact, at Paris the only vestige of Mr. Venizelos ?s old statesmanship was his handling of the Straits and Constanti- nople. He ostentatiously refrained from claiming either the city or the territories immediately commanding the
1 See Chapter IV., p. 141, below.
I
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 71
Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, on the express assumption that they would be placed under some international regime. He saw that Greece would be involved in dangerous conflicts of interest, especially with Russia and the other Black Sea riverains, if she acquired the sovereignty over these strategic positions, and that on the other hand the Greek element in Constantinople would become the dominant local nationality if Ottoman sovereignty came to an end and Greece stretched up to Chatalja. But why, if he realised this, did he ignore the still greater dangers in which he was involving Greece by his policy towards Bulgaria in Thrace and towards Turkey in Anatolia ? If the governing consideration in the Thracian case was the alleged implacability and incorrigible aggres- siveness of Bulgaria, and if friendship with her had been proved impossible by experience, then he ought to have aimed first at securing for Greece the best possible strategic frontier. Instead of that, he proposed a settlement which would produce the longest possible land frontier between the two countries, and would put all the strategical advan- tages on Bulgaria's side. In regard to Turkey, again, the desirability of avoiding a common frontier and of inter- changing the minorities had surely been re -demonstrated rather than disproved since 1913. The Turks had shown themselves bellicose and merciless to minorities. A straggling land frontier in Anatolia as well as in Thrace would be a permanent military anxiety, and though the local Greek minorities stood to gain if Greece acquired the province of Aidin (for they could be protected without having to emigrate), the much larger minorities scattered through the interior and remaining under the Turkish Government's power would be exposed to greater danger, as in the event they have been exposed — with deplorable consequences.1
What had happened to Mr. Venizelos ? Before the formal presentation of his claims to the Council of Ten, he expressed
1 See Chapter VII.
72 THE WESTERN QUESTION
unlimited optimism about the practicability of carrying them out. He refused to admit that in opening the Ana- tolian question he was implicitly reopening the question of the islands ; maintained that the Greek Army could hold his projected Anatolian frontier on a peace-footing ; and suggested that so long as they were given economic outlets to the sea, Bulgaria and Turkey would be reconciled to the losses of territory and population which he hoped to inflict upon them. Had he simply been infected by the hysterical atmosphere of the Peace Conference ? Had the sudden passage from the verge of defeat to apparently absolute victory blinded him to the fact that the momentarily prostrate enemy nations would some time become Powers again ? Had his head been turned by his Western col- leagues' recognition of his personal qualities ? All these things happened to other prominent members of the Confer- ence, but it is difficult to believe that a statesman with such a long experience, such a record of liberalism and moderation, and so much intellectual originality and strength of will, can have based an elaborate programme upon passing impulses and emotions. These may have weakened his judgment, they can hardly have overthrown it. The less improbable explanation is that his optimism was largely feigned, that he was taking the risks with his eyes open, and that his policy was decided partly by some force majeure and partly by the expectation that the dangers, while real, could be discounted by some effective means of insurance.
The force majeure is not far to seek. It lay in the necessities of Greek internal politics. Mr. Venizelos must have known — what his Western colleagues never realised — that his position at home was precarious. He had only been brought back into power by foreign bayonets : he had had to intern or exile many hundreds of his leading opponents in order to maintain himself ; and it was doubtful whether the country was behind him. He had not to deal with the comparatively sober and united nation which had followed
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 73
him from 1910 to 1914, but with a nation exasperated by suffering and faction and then demoralised by unexpected success. If he had not exploited this tremendous oppor- tunity to the utmost — if, besides Constantinople, he had renounced other great traditional (and non-party) national claims — the Royalists might have cried 'Traitor,' and who knows if Greece might not have echoed them ? If, on the other hand, he succeeded, by his undoubted personal magnet- ism and prestige, in obtaining for his country even more in Thrace and Anatolia than the ordinary patriotic public expected, he might prolong his tenure of office for an indefinite period and devote all his abilities to warding off the dangers which the necessities of the moment bade him incur. The post-armistice period was an ' acid test ' for all Entente politicians then in power. Reason and honesty were more important than they ever had been in politics, but it needed high moral courage to act up to them. Was there the same failure of nerve in Mr. Venizelos as in Mr. Lloyd George ?
Possibly the idea of finding insurance for his risks took shape in Mr. Venizelos's mind during his intercourse with Mr. Lloyd George at Paris. Undoubtedly Mr. Lloyd George was more responsible than any other representative of the ' Principal Allied Powers ' for the substantial triumph, at the Conference, of Mr. Venizelos's claims. From that time onwards, the personal attitude of Mr. Lloyd George became one of the most important factors in the Graeco- Turkish conflict. But the British Prime Minister's views are not always to be found in the official documents which will eventually pass into the Public Record Office, and there is no reason to expect that he will ever write an illuminating autobiography. The play of his mind in regard to Turkey and Greece will therefore probably always remain a matter of conjecture, and as we cannot leave it out of account, we must make the best guesses that we can.
Why did Mr. Lloyd George back Greece at the Conference,
74 THE WESTERN QUESTION
and go on backing her, with unusual constancy, when to all appearance he was losing on her ? One must allow something for sentiment — uninformed religious sentiment on behalf of Christians in conflict with non-Christians, and romantic sentiment towards the successors of the Ancient Greeks. He is reported to have read something late in life about the Hellenic or ' Ancient Greek ' civilisation, and to have been influenced by the identity of name. The words ' Christian ' and ' Greek ' possess a magical power of sugges- tion— the political bearings of which are discussed in Chapter VIII. It is no insult to suppose that the Prime Minister's sentiment rested on common fallacies, if we assume that it was sincere as far as it went. But it would be wrong to treat it as other than secondary to practical calculations, and there is reason to believe that he calculated as follows : The British Government cannot keep troops mobilised in the East to enforce eventual terms of peace upon Turkey ; Greece can provide the troops and enforce the terms with British diplomatic and naval backing, and she will gladly do so if these terms include her own claims. If Greece makes these claims good through British backing, she will have to follow Great Britain's lead. She is a mari- time Power, a labyrinth of peninsulas and islands, and the territories that she covets in Anatolia are overseas. In short, if Turkey can be dominated by the land-power of Greece, Greece can be dominated by the sea-power of Great Britain, and so the British Government can still carry out their war-aims in the Near and Middle East without spending British money and lives.
Subsidiary motives may have entered in. From what is known of Mr. Lloyd George's character, it may be guessed that the immediate practical problem of finding some military substitute for British divisions which had to be withdrawn from the Caucasus, the Straits, and Syria, was more present to his mind than any general principle of policy for the future. In his mind, the general appears to
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 75
flower out of the particular by some esoteric process. Incidentally, his policy on this occasion smothered the awkward question of Cyprus. Eighty per cent, of the population of Cyprus are Greeks who want to be united with the Greek Kingdom ; the British Government had no case for incorporating the island in the Empire ; x yet since the armistice they had shown no inclination to give it up. But if Greece were acquiring vast territories elsewhere with Great Britain's assistance, the Greek Government at least would be debarred from taking up the Cypriots' cause and creating an open international scandal. There were many possible motives on Mr. Lloyd George's side for coming to an understanding with Mr. Venizelos.
Did the Welsh and the Kretan statesmen deceive them- selves or one another ? Something was wrong with their calculations, for the bargain turned out badly for both. Probably each deceived himself, and that by overestimating the other's power, in contingent circumstances, to perform more than his bond. Whatever the mutual understanding was (and it may never have been precisely formulated), one need not suppose that either actually 'promised more than he could perform or expected that their joint contri- butions would be insufficient to bring about their combined aims. On the other hand, one cannot believe that either was blind to the risks jointly incurred. Unexpectedly effective opposition from the Turks, the Russians, or one or other of the Allies might render the contemplated Greek military effort, and the contemplated British diplomatic and naval effort unequal to their task, and here some self- deception may have come in. Each party may have been reckoning, for insurance, upon greater efforts being forth-
1 Under the Cyprus Convention, secretly negotiated between the British and the Ottoman Government on the 4th June 1878 (between the Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin), Turkey consented to the occupation and admini- stration of Cyprus by Great Britain so long as Russia retained Kars, Ardahan and Batum, Great Britain undertaking in return to resist further Russian encroachments on Asiatic Turkey by force of arms. Cyprus was annexed to the British Empire by an Order in Counoil on the 5th November 1914.
76 THE WESTERN QUESTION
coming, in case of need, from the other when once com- mitted to action. If Mr. Venizelos were playing for Thrace and Smyrna, would he hesitate to borrow a few more millions, send a few more divisions, sacrifice a few more lives in order to win the game ? And if Mr. Lloyd George were playing for ascendency in the Straits and indeed throughout the Levant, would he not hi the last resort re- inforce the Greek Army with his own to gain so great a prize? So Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Venizelos may have calculated respectively in their private thoughts, for it is evident that neither realised the limits of the other's power over his fellow-countrymen. The British Premier ignored Greek party-politics ; the Greek Premier ignored the limiting veto possessed and since exercised by British public opinion over the commitments of His Majesty's Government in the East. This is, and only can be, conjecture, but at any rate it offers a reasonable explanation of what actually occurred ; for if these two statesmen's minds did work in the way suggested, one can see how circumstances conspired to give then policy its opportunity. Sir Arthur Balfour, with a less naive appreciation of Ancient Greece than Mr. Lloyd George, may have been tickled by the conceit of Modern Greek ' harmosts ' administering ' Ionia.' President Wilson was ignorant and flouted his able expert advisers . M. Clemen - ceau, always symbolic, adopted the characteristic Western attitude towards the ' Eastern Question.' He thought it tedious and unimportant, and was ready to humour his colleagues when Mosul and Smyrna were on the agenda in order to be all the more obstinate over the Saar, the Rhine, and Reparations — somewhat in the spirit in which insurance companies pay small claims and fight big ones. On this tack he was prepared to go to the utmost lengths which the small but energetic Colonial Party in France permitted. Mr. Venizelos adroitly smoothed M. Clemenceau's path by sending two Greek divisions to fight the Bolsheviks in Southern Russia during the early winter months of 1919,
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 77
a job against which the French Navy mutinied. It was an earnest of what he could get his countrymen to do, on the mere expectation of favours to come, in a cause which appealed to French bondholders. Even if the French Government had foreseen all the consequences, they could hardly have raised opposition when, a month or two later, the very Greek troops which had served French policy at Odessa were shipped off to serve Greek and British policy at Smyrna. The fatal decision was precipitated by the public disagree- ment between Italy and the other Powers over the Adriatic. On the 24th April 1919, the Italian Delegation withdrew from Paris. They were back again by the 5th May. But lovers' quarrels between statesmen in Western capitals maj' produce more serious breaches of amity between their representatives in the Near and Middle East, who have been trained in jealousy for generations. On the 29th March, the Italian claim in Anatolia had been staked out by a naval and military occupation of Adalia, and during the interregnum at Paris the Italian forces began to occupy one point after another on the coast from Adalia north- westwards in the direction of Smyrna. The diplomatists came back, but the occupations went on, and the local representatives of the other Powers took alarm. Smyrna was at Italy's disposal according to the agreement of St. Jean de Maurienne, and the instalment of an Italian garrison there would more than compensate for flaws in the legal validity of a scrap of paper. The only certain way to keep the Italians out was to forestall them. Could this be done under the armistice, signed on the 30th October 1918, with Turkey ? According to Article 7 of this instrument, ' The Allies have the right to occupy any strategic points in the event of any strategic situation arising that threatens the security of the Allies.' That was good enough, but what troops to send ? The telegrams passed to and fro between Constantinople and Paris, Mr. Venizelos saw his opportunity, and the ' Big Three ' took their decision. The Porte was
78 THE WESTERN QUESTION
informed that Allied troops were to be landed at Smyrna for the maintenance of order. An Allied naval squadron left the Bosphorus for Smyrna, with Admiral Calthorpe, the British High Commissioner, in command. The local Allied control-officers were instructed to disarm and remove the Turkish troops remaining in the city, in accordance with Articles 5 and 20 of the armistice. In the act of compliance, the Turkish authorities were troubled by a rumour. The troops that were to be landed next day were Greek ! They made urgent inquiries from the control-officers, and were simply informed that the troops would be ' Allied,' as announced already. The answer, technically correct, was of course a deplorable prevarication. The Greek troops went on shore, under the guns of the Allied warships, the following morning.
Various consequences of this landing occupy most of the remaining chapters in this book. The diplomatic con- sequences may conveniently be narrated here in anticipation. Within the first few weeks, so much bloodshed and destruc- tion occurred that the Allied and Associated Governments sent a commission of senior officers, under the presidency of Admiral Bristol, United States High Commissioner at Constantinople, to put a stop to the fighting and establish the responsibility for the atrocities already committed. But the mischief could not be undone so easily. The Commissioners arranged an armistice line ; they could not demobilise the forces already opposing one another in this new war. They reported on the crimes committed, but their report has never been published by their Governments.1 Possibly they were tactless. It may have been difficult to indict Greeks and Turks who had killed, burnt, robbed, and violated in the vilayet of Aidin without reflecting upon statesmen who had made decisions at Paris. There is no doubt that the ' Big Three ' were morally as well as techni- cally responsible for the consequences of this particular
1 Unofficial versions of their findings are current.
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 79
decision, for they cannot plead that they were badly in- formed. The suggestion of a Greek landing at Smyrna had been aired in official circles for some weeks before it was carried into effect, and had evoked emphatic comments and forecasts from the local representatives of the several Powers who were controlling the execution of the armistice on the spot. These representatives cannot be blamed for having reported, as they were in duty bound to do, the danger of an Italian coup de main upon Smyrna. They could not know the diplomatic situation at Paris, or foresee that a Greek occupation would be the safeguard selected by their Governments. The ' Big Three ' were responsible, and if any of them demur to this, they can be challenged to publish, or to invite their successors in office to publish, the official information on which they acted, as well as the Bristol Report. Their unwillingness to publish the report is not incomprehensible, and besides, Mr. Venizelos threw all his personal influence into the scale. He objected to the publication of evidence which had been taken by the Com- mission without the presence of a Greek assessor, and in which the names of the witnesses were withheld.1 There was, of course, a good reason for this, which reflected on the local Greek authorities and not on the Western Commis-
1 On the 22nd March 1920, the following answer to a question by Earl Winterton was given in the House of Commons by the Prime Minister : —
' His Majesty's Government . . . consider it inadvisable to allow the Report of the Commission in question to be published owing to the con- ditions under which the inquiry was conducted. As the Commission was investigating charges against the Greek Army, the Supreme Council decided that a Greek officer should be allowed to follow the proceedings, but not to vote or take part in the preparation of the Report. The Commission, how- ever, when it began its inquiries, decided not to allow any Greek representa- tive to be present, on the ground that Turkish witnesses might be afraid of giving evidence. M. Venezelos immediately protested against this proceeding on the ground that it was contrary to the rules of justice in every civilised country that charges should be investigated and witnesses heard without the accused person being allowed to know the charges and the evidence against him. The Supreme Council were of opinion that M. Venezelos' protest was justified, but before it could alter the procedure the inquiry was completed. Inasmuch as it has not been possible to communicate to the Greek Government the evidence against them upon which the Commission's Report has been based, owing to pledges given to witnesses, the British Government think it inadvisable and unfair to publish the Report itself.'
80 THE WESTERN QUESTION
sioners. The individuals giving damaging evidence against the Greeks were living under a Greek military occupation and could not safely be exposed to reprisals. There were the same legal flaws in the Bryce Reports on Alleged German Atrocities in Belgium and on The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Did the Allied Governments hesitate to publish these documents on that account ?
And so, on the 10th August 1920, when the atrocities committed by the Greeks at their landing were fifteen months old and the war which they had started had spread far into the interior, a treaty of peace with Turkey was signed at Sevres — by plenipotentiaries unrepresentative of all the implicated nations — under which a zone on the mainland of Anatolia round Smyrna was provisionally assigned to Greece (Articles 65-83). It was a very much smaller territory than that which Mr. Venizelos had originally claimed, but even if his claims had been granted in full, the consequences for Great Britain and France, for Turkey and Greece, for Mi*. Venizelos himself and eventually perhaps even for Mi*. Lloyd George, could hardly have been more unfortunate.
Poetic justice got to work quickly. Mr. Venizelos fell only three months after the treaty was signed, and the return of King Constantine led to an open rift between France and Great Britain.
The position of Mr. Venizelos in Greece has been so little understood in Great Britain and France that his fall has been regarded as inexplicable. No doubt he partly suffered for being ahead of his fellow-countrymen. The police regulations against furious driving and cruelty to animals which he introduced at Athens were as unpopular as the similar innovations of the inter-Allied police at Constanti- nople. The lawyers worked against him at the elections because he insisted on their liability to military service. The families of the influential politicians, officials, and officers whom he had interned or exiled were naturally his enemies ; and during his prolonged absence at the Peace
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 81
Conference in the West, his henchmen exercised something like a reign of terror at home. Mr. Gryparis, who was the Kretan chieftain's mighty man of valour, is stated to have silenced Royalist deputies in the Chamber at the point of his revolver, and the murder of Mr. Ioannis Dhraghumis by Kretan ' Special Constabulary ' as he was driving into Athens from the country was only a particularly shocking instance of a regime of violence — unhappily more durable than party fortunes — from which prominent Venizelists had also suffered previously to June 1917 and have suffered again since the change of government in 1920. But these causes of unpopularity were either petty or were confined, in their direct operation, to a comparatively small section of the population. They do not account for the sweeping success of the anti-Venizelist parties in the elections of November 1920. However influential their partisans may have been individually, they were not numerous and they were out of power. Simple superiority of electioneering organisation could not account for the solid anti-Venizelist vote in remote rural districts. There must have been some general and impersonal grievance against Mr. Venizelos of old standing. It cannot have been war- weariness, for after Mr. Venizelos's fall, Mr. Gounaris's 1 Government were able to carry on the war under more discouraging conditions on a larger scale, calling one class after another to the colours. War-weariness did not begin to dominate the internal political situation till the late summer of 1921. In fact, Mr. Venizelos's fall was not the direct consequence of his policy at the Peace Conference. Rather, that policy was an unsuccessful attempt to placate a feeling against him to which his subsequent fall was due.
This feeling is not yet generally realised in England, but it must have been evident to any Englishman who has travelled since in Greece. The Greek nation cannot forgive
1 I have spelt this well-known name in the usual way, instead of 'Ghilnaris.'
82 THE WESTERN QUESTION
CMr. Venizelos for having resorted to foreign support against his political opponents. They do not so much resent the steps taken by Great Britain and France to force Greece out of her neutrality. They recognise that our vital interests were at stake, and that at the Peace Conference we did our best to make amends for previous injuries perhaps pardonably inflicted. But they cherish their right as an independent nation to have remained neutral during the European War if they chose. Their right to this was just as precious (though more difficult to exercise, owing to their weakness and their geographical proximity to the theatre of war) as the right of the United States. But whereas America did make up her mind freely and intervened when she thought good, Greece had her hands forced by Mr. Venizelos. The King's policy may have been wrong, but Mr. Venizelos had no business to associate himself with foreign Powers in coercing him. The Commander of the Allied Army at Salonika, in the situation in which he found himself, may have been justified by military necessity in ex- acting guarantees from the Greek Army ; but Mr. Venizelos ought never to have let himself be reinstalled in the government offices at Athens by an Allied expeditionary force. The fact that his pro -Entente policy put Greece on the whining side does not diminish the objection to the precedent that he has established for the treatment of Greek sovereignty by Great Powers ; and violations of right are not made less humiliating by patronising payments in compensation. The territorial acquisitions of Greece under the Treaty of Sevres are regarded by the Greek nation as their due, by virtue of the principle of nationality, and though they may be mistaken about the application of this principle, it is surely the proper basis on which such claims should be considered. Greece could not, with any self-respect, accept Thrace and Smyrna as rent for the Allies' trenches round Salonika or as compensation for the damage caused by the passage of the European War, any
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 83
more than Belgium could accept the offers which accom- panied the German ultimatum. Still less could she accept them as a personal tribute to Mr. Venizelos for his eminent services to the Allied cause and his distinction of character. This view, however, was ventilated in the French and British Press, if not among responsible officials and states- men, whenever the Greek claims were discussed, and especially at the time when the Treaty of Sevres was signed and published. This exasperated Greek public opinion, and when a few months later the accident of King Alexander's death gave it the opportunity, it is not surprising that it expressed itself as it did. Mr. Venizelos failed in Greece for the same fundamental reason as Generals Kolchak and Denikin and Wrangel in Russia, and foreign intervention did the same service to King Constantine and Mr. Gounaris as to Trotsky and Lenin.
The return of King Constantine brought to light a diverg- ence between French and British policy in the Near and Middle East, which had been growing during the long and laborious incubation of the treaty which was supposed to embody their common policy. It arose directly out of the joint decision of Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau to disembark Greek troops at Smyrna in May 1919, and it is a striking instance of sinister reflex action produced by Western interference in the East upon the internal relations of the Western world.
Whose fault was the divergence ? It is not so easy to say. By the end of 1921, France had obviously reversed her policy, while Great Britain had changed hers little and that unwillingly . But passivity is no proof of virt ue . The original joint policy — which was the British Prime Minister's policy — may have been wrong from the start ; or circumstances may have altered ; or at any rate the reasonable interpreta- tion of the situation may have been modified by experience. It may or may not be possible to justify the change in French policy, but at least it is not difficult to explain it.
84 THE WESTERN QUESTION
In the first place, France had obtained no relief for herself in the East by the employment of Greece as a pawn. On the contrary, she had had additional burdens thrown upon her soldiers and taxpayers. The disembarkation of the Greek troops at Smyrna did not merely produce a guerilla warfare in the hinterland. It created the Turkish National Movement, which rapidly secured control of the whole interior of Anatolia with its military resources.1 The new Nationalist organisation set out to recover for Turkey, if necessary by force of arms, all territories inhabited by non-Arab Moslem Ottoman majorities, and the French were in occupation of such territories on the northern borders of Syria. Nationalist forces attacked the weak French garrisons here in January 1920, and France found herself involved in a costly campaign in difficult country. She tried many expedients. There were repeated changes of command ; at one moment the Cilician Armenians were given arms and encouraged to hold the front ; at other times they were held in leash, the Turks in the occupied territory conciliated, and temporary truces arranged with the enemy. In attempting to escape from an unwanted military burden, France heedlessly embroiled the local nationalities with one another, and made it almost as difficult for them to live together after her evacuation as it has been made in the territories temporarily occupied by Greece in Western Anatolia. But these precarious provisional arrange- ments did not solve the problem, and all the time the resentment at the drain of French lives and money was mounting up at home. It became clear that the drain could only be stopped by coming to terms with the Angora Government over the future frontier between Turkey and Syria, and this was the main object of the agreement signed by M. Franklin-Bouillon and Yusuf Kemal Bey on the 20th October 1921,2 nearly two years from the beginning
1 See Chapters V. and VI.
2 Published, with an English translation, by the British Government as a White Paper (Turkey No. 2 (1921)=*Cmd. 1556).
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 85
of the Cilician campaign. In this agreement France con- ceded practically all the Turkish demands.1 She not only undertook to evacuate Cilicia, which was left under Turkish sovereignty by the Treaty of Sevres. She also retroceded a large strip of territory (mainly inhabited by non-Arab Moslems) along the northern fringe of Syria. It is note- worthy that this territory contains all the strategic positions essential for the defence of Syria towards the north — for instance, the Amanus tunnel, the railway bridge over the Euphrates, and practically the whole track of the Baghdad Railway east of the tunnel, except the loop where it runs down to Aleppo. The French ' will to power ' in the East had become so weak that the French public preferred to hold Syria by the goodwill of the Turks, in order to avoid military commitments on the frontier altogether, rather than to hold it by their own military strength along the line where it could be held thus with the minimum of effort.
The Greek landing at Smyrna created no corresponding problem for Great Britain, for though Mesopotamia and Turkey had been left with a short common frontier, east of the Tigris, by the dispositions of the Treaty of Sevres, the contact was only nominal. The line ran through tribal hill-country — a no-man's-land in which neither Ottoman, British, nor Arab authority was effective — and the Turkish Nationalists had too much trouble with the Kurds to attack the Mesopotamian plains on the other side of their fast- nesses. It is one of the ironies of Franco-British rivalry that French jealousy was the cause of this British immunity, for till within two months of the first Nationalist offensive, the British Army had been responsible for the defence of Northern Syria. The Anglo-Franco-Arab forces which overthrew the Turks in Palestine, in the autumn of 1918, and forced Turkey to sue for an armistice, had consisted mainly
1 The only important concession made by the Turks was that Alexandretta should be left to Syria, -with provision for the linguistic and cultural autonomy of the Turkish element there.
86 THE WESTERN QUESTION
of British and Indian troops and had been under General Lord Allenby's supreme command. When Syria and Cilicia were occupied, this arrangement was continued ; Lord Allenby remained in supreme command over the zones respectively garrisoned by the several Allies, and British and Indian garrisons actually held the dangerous outpost at Marash, among the hills. But as the Peace Conference pro- crastinated over the settlement of Turkey, French opinion became more and more uneasy about this interim regime. A condominium in Egypt had once resulted in a solely British ascendency.1 Was history to repeat itself in Syria ? Already Mr. Lloyd George had persuaded M. Clemenceau into parting with Mosul, which had been assigned to the French sphere under the secret agreement of 1916. The British Government was no less committed to its Arab allies than to France, and Prince Feisal's army was in occupation, under Lord Allenby, of all Eastern Syria. Pressure was put upon the French Government by French opinion to bring the interim arrangement to an end, and the British Government wished nothing better. They had no intention of making a breach with France by themselves seeking a mandate over Syria ; they could no longer defend in Parliament their expenditure upon a prolonged occupa- tion from which the country was to derive no benefit ; and they were anxious to get rid of their responsibility for keeping the peace before the French and the Arabs came to blows. Agreement was therefore easy, and in November 1919 the British garrison at Marash was replaced by French troops, the British forces retired from all places north of the northern boundary of Palestine, and Lord Allenby's com- mand over the French and Arab forces came to an end. Thus the French had incurred their new military commit-
1 The merits of the old controversy over Egypt are beside the point. The effacement of France may have been her own fault, Great Britain may have been blameless. The relevant point is that what had happened thirty-seven years before in Egypt was resented, and that this resentment coloured the Frenoh view of the situation in Syria.
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 87
ments in Cilicia deliberately, and then unfounded suspicions of British policy in Syria were to blame, as well as the real errors of British policy in regard to Greece and Turkey. But this truth, besides being unpalatable, offered no practical solution, for the British Government could not have sent their troops back to Cilicia even if the French Government could have brought themselves to ask for them. The line of least resistance for France was to come to terms with the Turks and to put all the blame on the British, and in effect this is what the French Government did.
Indeed, one of the direct motives for the reversal of French policy in the Near and Middle East was hostility towards Great Britain, through fear that she might gain a permanent predominance in the old competition between the two Powers. Since the beginning of the War, she had secured a formidable lead. She had become patroness of the Arab National Movement ; she had displayed a military power which overshadowed the Eastern effort of France ; the knock-out blow to the Turks had been delivered by a British commander ; and now Mr. Lloyd George's policy of partner- ship between British sea-power and Greek power on land promised a British ascendency not only in the Black Sea Straits but over Greece and what was left of Turkey. There is no evidence, of course, that any such British ascendency — to the exclusion of Italy, France, and America — was in Mr. Lloyd George's mind. It is much more likely that he was simply trying to co-ordinate the available means for controlling the situation, without clearly distinguishing for whose benefit the control would be exercised. This par- ticular disadvantage of his policy from the French point of view could have been avoided if, from the moment M. Clemenceau had accepted it, the French Government had worked for it as energetically as the British did. But they did not do so, partly because they had not originated the idea, and partly because the whole intention was to saddle Greece with the military effort and to limit the Allies'
88 THE WESTERN QUESTION
liabilities to naval and diplomatic contributions. The French Government could no more embark on fresh military operations in the Aegean area than the British, but at the same time they could hardly make an equal naval and diplomatic contribution. British prestige and British naval power were both far greater than French in the East after the armistice. In practice, the Allied contribution to the policy was bound to come principally, as the idea had come originally, from the British side ; and therefore, if the policy were successful, the Greeks would look on the British as their benefactors and the Turks would look on them as their masters. Automatically, the role of France would dwindle and French influence tend to be effaced.
This influence — in the fields of diplomacy, finance, and culture — is the commodity traditionally at stake in Western rivalries in the Near and Middle East, and in this as in other spheres contemporary France clings anxiously to the assets to which she regards herself as entitled. During the twenty years before the armistice, her cultural property in the Ottoman Empire had been trespassed upon by Germany ; indeed, she had been violently evicted from it by Germany after the outbreak of war. She had a cultural Alsace- Lorraine to recover in the East as well as a political Alsace- Lorraine in Europe, and in both cases she wanted an ' integral ' restitution. She regarded both assets as her property, and the acquisition of them by others as robbery, and on the whole it is less odious to be robbed by one's enemies than by one's allies. That is perhaps the fairest statement of the French point of view. One might put the same thing in another way by saying that France was eager to step into Germany's shoes and appropriate her monopoly of influence over Turkey by carrying on the German policy of diplomatic cajolery, intellectual bedazzlement, financial control, and studied disinterestedness in the Ottoman Government's treatment of subject populations. But this less charitable formulation is also really less correct, for the
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 89
German policy was nothing but the policy invented for France nearly four centuries ago by Francis I. and habitu- ally practised by her till Wilhelm n. filched it from her. Whether the desire of France to revive it on her own account was creditable to her may be questioned ; but, rooted as it was iii a sense of property, and in an old national tradition, the impulse was not so eas}^ to restrain as if it had been a new ambition.
These were the French motives. They were reinforced by the collapse of the last ' White ' movement in Southern Russia in the autumn of 1920, for if the Bolsheviks could not be destroyed by civil war they might still be kept at bay by the hostility of neighbouring nations. French publicists began to think of Turkey as an Eastern Poland. In fact, a French policy took shape for using Turkey against Russia in much the same way as Mr. Lloyd George was already using Greece against Turkey.
As for the recall of King Constantine to Greece by plebiscite, which occurred a short time after the flight of General Wrangel's army from the Crimea to Constantinople, it was not a motive but a pretext for the reversal of French policy, and France would not have reverted to the ' Lloyd George policy ' to which she had been committed by M. Clemenceau, even if the King and all his supporters had been turned out and Mr. Venizelos set up again, before M. Franklin-Bouillon had begun to negotiate his agree- ment. The change of government in Greece was a welcome screen for the somewhat risquee metamorphosis in which French policy was already engaged. The screen was not wholly transparent. The French public did genuinely dis- like seeing a brother-in-law of the ex-Kaiser reascend a European throne ; and they did mind the death of the French marines killed by Royalist Greek troops at Athens on the 1st December 1916. But one can either stimulate or check such feelings. When the Franklin-Bouillon agreement was made public, it was not swept away by public indignation
90 THE WESTERN QUESTION
with the Turkish Nationalists for the treacherous killing of Frenchmen (in this case, prisoners of war) during the recent campaign. Nor Avas France unduly perturbed by the armed raids of the ex-King Charles of Hungary, though they were far more dangerous to the Versailles settlement than King Constantine's constitutional restoration. The French had been looking out for a grievance against Greece, and they had found it. They could not be expected to relinquish it readily.
Great Britain, on the other hand, would not readily relinquish the policy initiated by her Prime Minister. He, too, wielded a screen (the diplomatist's substitute for a buckler). In his case it was the protection of the Christian minorities hitherto subject to Turkey, and here also there was a traditional public sentiment to give the diplomatic form some substance. It is true that the Greek campaign in Anatolia was having the opposite effect to that generally assumed in Great Britain. The minorities hi the occupied territories were being compromised and the more numerous minorities in the vast unconquered interior exposed to reprisals.1 But public feeling is no more rational inEngland than in France. It is inclined to take satisfaction in the liberation of one Christian from Moslem rule, even if this involves the subjection and oppression of ten Moslems on the spot and the massacre of two Christians at a distance. It takes it for granted that the liberation of Christians is always and everywhere an application of the principle of nationality, just because it was so on the whole in the territories taken away from Turkey between 1814 and 1913. It does not face the fact that in Anatolia, where the Chris- tians are in a minority, the two things conflict and can only be promoted at the expense of one another. Nor is its faith shaken by atrocities, for a majority of people in England believe that atrocities are committed only by Turks, and that daily, while the rest mostly believe more or less the same
1 See Chapters VII. and VIII.
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 91
thing about Greeks or Bulgars. Every report of fresh atrocities committed by members of one or other Eastern nationality therefore simply strengthens the existing anti- Turk or anti-Greek or anti-Bulgarian persuasion, as the case may be. As people read of them, they have the double luxury of being confirmed in their views (for they seldom read the other side) and of giving way to moral indignation. They write to the Press or petition the Government to take active measures against the offending nation. They rarely reflect that previous measures of the kind for which they appeal may have provoked the very atrocities which have just aroused their feelings. Because they are indulging their feelings, and not using their reason as they would use it in circumstances where they were more directly respon- sible for what was to be done, they thirst for vengeance and forget to look for remedies. Thus they overlook the obvious and fundamental fact that atrocities are committed in similar exceptional circumstances by people of every nation and civilisation, and that whatever may be the duties of Governments, the mission of philanthropists is not to punish crime but to remove its cause.1
This was the sentimental link between British public opinion and Mr. Lloyd George's policy towards Turkey and Greece, but it was no more the motive for the British Government's constancy than hostility to King Constantine was for the French Government's volte-face. In either case sentiment screened supposed interest, and British policy was slow to change because co-operation with Greece against Turkey did, on a short view, seem better calculated to serve the interests of Great Britain than those of France. The Greek campaign in Anatolia did temporarily lighten for the Allies the task of controlling the Black Sea Straits, and Great Britain cared more about the maintenance of this control than France — not, as the French supposed, because she aimed at a monopoly of political and naval ascendency there,
1 See Chapter VII,
92 THE WESTERN QUESTION
but because the British carrying trade with the Black Sea riverains through this waterway had been more important than the French before the War. The British nation hoped to renew this trade at the earliest opportunity. The French, intending to make no peace with the Bolsheviks until they honoured the debts of the Tsar, were comparatively in- different as to whether the commercial route were open or closed. Indeed, they might prefer to see it closed, if that would bring additional pressure to bear upon Russia. Thus there was a positive British interest to be served by employ- ing Greece as a pawn, and in the summer of 1920, when the Asiatic shores of the Straits were actually threatened by the Turkish Nationalist forces, Mr. Venizelos did play his part according to the understanding. Without any expenditure of British money or lives, the littoral of the Straits was cleared by the Greek Army's advance and the Nationalists driven away into the interior.1 This was a substantial service, and the British Government, who had accepted it in order to extricate themselves from an awkward position, were committed by it more deeply than before to the Anglo- Greek entente in virtue of which it had been rendered. The Greek Army was so immediately convenient that British statesmen ignored the fact that its presence in Anatolia had really created the hostile movement which it showed such obliging readiness to combat, and the still more serious fact that this movement was potentially stronger than the force which had called it into being. They only slowly realised that the Greek military position in Anatolia must ultimately prove untenable, and that when the inevitable evacuation occurred, the Straits would not only be left uncovered but might be exposed to attacks from a military Power driven into hostility towards Great Britain on account of her sup- port of Greece — a Power which did not exist at the time of the original Greek landing at Smyrna.2 Meanwhile, it had become difficult to change and doubtful whether any change
1 See Chapter VI. 2 See Chapters V. and VI.
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 93
at this stage could heal the rift between a Greece backed by- Great Britain and a Turkey backed by France. This rift had disastrous effects upon the local situation, because it made the French and British Governments impotent, on the few occasions when they attempted it in a half-hearted way, to arrest the mischief for which they were jointly responsible.
On the 21st February 1921 the three Western Allied Governments and the Japanese Government held a confer- ence in London at which the Graeco -Turkish problem was the first item on the agenda, and the Governments of Athens, Constantinople, and Angora 1 were invited to send delega- tions. After listening to statements of the Greek and Turkish case, the Allied statesmen laid before each party the following proposal : —
' Viewing the difference of opinion that has arisen con- cerning the populations of Eastern Thrace and Smyrna in the areas assigned to Greece by the Treaty of Sevres, the Powers are willing to refer the question of the populations of those two areas to an International Commission to be appointed by themselves, with instructions to examine into the figures both before and since the War, and to proceed with its investigations on the spot without delay, on the clear understanding, which shall be accepted by both parties — namely, by Turkejr and by Greece —
' (a) That they will accept the results of such arbitration ;
' (6) That the remaining clauses of the Treaty of Sevres shall remain unaltered, and shall be loyally accepted both by Turkey and Greece.' 2
Had the Supreme Council instituted such an investigation two years earlier, before sending the Greek troops to Smyrna, the facts which would have come to light might have impressed them sufficiently to enable them to resist the temptations of opportunism. But they had left undone
1 The Angora delegates were nominally received as members of the Con- stantinople Delegation, in order to save the dignity of the Allied statesmen whose treaty of peace they were defying. The Constantinople delegates solved the problem by entrusting the presentation of their case to Bekir Samy Bey, the ohief representative of Angora.
* Quoted from the official communique published in the Times of the 26th February 1921.
94 THE WESTERN QUESTION
those things which they ought to have done and done those things which they ought not to have done, and there was no health in their diplomacy. The Turkish delegation, through its spokesman Bekir Samy Bey, did indeed accept the proposal, with certain stipulations as to the conditions of investigation and reservations in regard to the remainder of the Sevres Treaty ; but the Greek representative, Mr. Kaloyeropoulos, replied that he had ' instructions from the Greek National Assembly to base himself on the Treaty of Sevres.' ' Physician, heal thyself ! ' No doubt the Greek Foreign Minister divined that the identical formula presented by the Allied Governments concealed a divergence of view. Did Mr. Lloyd George really desire a recount of the population in the disputed districts, based this time not on the collation of interested estimates but on a genuine inquiry ? 1 The acceptance of the proposal by the Turks showed that, at least in their belief, such an inquiry might prove damaging to the ' Lloyd George policy.' In rejecting it, therefore, the Greeks might not incur the displeasure of at least one of the parties that had put it forward, and with a calculated temerity they refused to abandon by negotia- tion what they still hoped to hold by force.
After this first rebuff, an alternative proposal of a very different character was submitted by the Allied Governments on the 12th March. The document 2 consisted of a series of proposed modifications of the Treaty of Sevres. Con- cessions were offered to Turkey in regard to her admission to the League of Nations, her contingent expulsion from Constantinople,3 the chairmanship of the Straits Commission, the scheme for judicial reform, the strength of the Turkish Army, the area of the zone of the Straits, the military status of Constantinople, the size of the Turkish Navy, foreign
1 For the statistics on which the Supreme Council justified the disposi- tions of the Treaty of Sevres in regard to the Smyrna Zone, see Chapter IV. , p. 133.
2 Published in extenso in the Times of the 14th March 1921.
3 See Treaty of Sevres, Article 36.
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 95
financial and economic control, and the admission of residents in Turke}r to the privileges reserved for nationals of the Allied Powers. There were also territorial concessions. In regard to Kurdistan, the Allies ' would be prepared to consider a modification of the Treaty x in a sense in con- formity with the existing facts of the situation.' In regard to Armenia, the stipulations of the Treaty 2 ' might be adapted on condition of Turkey recognising the rights of Turkish Armenians to a national home on the eastern frontiers of Turkey-in-Asia.' But the crucial territorial proposals came at the end : —
' In regard to Smyrna, the Allies would be ready to propose an equitable compromise with a view to ending the present unhappy state of hostilities and ensuring the return of peace.
' The region called the Vilayet of Smyrna would remain under Turkish sovereignty, a Greek force would remain in Smyrna town, but in the rest of the sanjak 3 order would be maintained by a gendarmerie with Allied officers and re- cruited in proportion to the numbers and distribution of the population as reported by an Inter- Allied Commission. The same proportional arrangement, equally according to the report of the Commission, would apply to the administration.
' A Christian governor would be appointed by the League of Nations and assisted by an elective assembly and an elec- tive council. The governor would be responsible for pay- ments to the Turkish Government of annual sums expanding with the prosperity of the province.
' This arrangement would in five years be open to review on the demand of either party by the League of Nations.'
The terms of this second proposal proved that Mr. Kalo- yeropoulos had shown good judgment in rejecting the first. The investigation originally proposed in Thrace had been dropped altogether, and in the district round Smyrna the proportion between the two national elements in the popula- tion, though it was still to be investigated, was only to tell in Turkey's favour within limits previously defined. Turkey
1 Articles 62-64. 2 Articles 88-93.
3 The zone provisionally assigned to Greece by the Treaty of Sevres in- cluded the town of Aivnli and the sanjak of Manysa as well as the sanjak of Smyrna.
96 THE WESTERN QUESTION
was indeed assured on paper of the permanent maintenance of her sovereignty, but what was that assurance worth ? Autonomy under a Christian governor, paying tribute and flying the Ottoman flag, called up in Turkish minds the precedents of Moldavia and Wallachia, Serbia and Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, Samos and Krete and the Lebanon. In all these cases, such arrangements had been pressed upon Turkey by the Western Powers with the solemn guarantee that they would go no further, and invariably they had resulted in the complete separation from the Ottoman Empire of the provinces so differentiated. In the new proposal in regard to Smyrna, they were to be reinforced by the presence of a foreign garrison. No doubt all this was interpreted by both the Turkish and the Greek delega- tions as a method of executing the Sevres clauses in a more roundabout way ; and if it were a choice between the two, the Turks would probably have preferred the less long- drawn-out operation. According to their experience, the lesion involved in autonomy was equally certain to sever the province from Turkey in the long run, and the revival of this traditional diplomatic device was an indication — all the more insulting if unintentional — that the Powers meant to keep the ' Sick Man ' prostrate by applying the old-fashioned treatment. This proposal was therefore as unacceptable to the Turks as the former had been to the Greeks ; and as it promised to promote the ' Lloyd George policy ' by securing for the Greeks the substance of what they wanted, it seemed unlikely that it represented the real wishes of France and Italy, even though it had been put forward (like its predecessors) in the name of all three Powers. The Greeks, on their side, were not enthusiastic over it. It was, after all, a whittling down of their claims ; without the consent of the Turks, it was valueless in practice ; and a military offensive (to which they were looking forward with mistaken self-confidence x) seemed to them a more
1 See Chapter VI.
GREECE AND TURKEY IN THE VICIOUS CIRCLE 97
promising solution. Would it put them in the wrong ? They ascertained that in ' forestalling an enemy attack ' they ran little risk of incurring their backer's displeasure.1 So the Conference broke up ; the delegates went their ways to lay the second proposal before their principals ; but the latter never had to draft their refusals, for within less than a fortnight the Greek Army launched its ill-fated Spring offensive. Because of the rift in the counsels of the Allied Governments, Greek and Turkish soldiers killed each other to no purpose at the battle of In Onii.
On the 21st June 1921, four months after their first failure and on the eve of a much larger Greek offensive, for which preparations had been going forward ever since the In Onii reverse, the Allied Governments attempted media- tion again. After a consultation between Allied statesmen, the British Government telegraphed to the Greek Govern- ment in the name of the three Western Allied Powers, deprecating further military operations :
' They were prepared to attempt the task of conciliation if the Hellenic Government were disposed to place its interests in their hands. Should the Greek Government decide that it was not prepared to accept outside intervention or advice, the Allied Powers could not persevere in an action that would obviously be fruitless. In such a case the responsi- bility for the consequences of [a] renewed struggle would rest upon the Greeks themselves. On the other hand, should the Hellenic Government decide in its own interests to accept the intervention of the Powers, the latter were prepared to state the terms upon which their assistance would be proffered, and, in the event of these being accepted, to approach the Turkish Government with a view to the immediate suspension of hostilities and to negotiations for the conclusion of peace.' 2
The Allied representatives duly ' proceeded to discuss the terms in question, and arrived at a general agreement as
1 Bekir Samy Bey also did business with the backers of Angora ; but the agreements which he negotiated privately with the French and Italian Governments were repudiated by the Great National Assembly on his return.
2 Quoted from a statement made on the 23rd June 1921, in the House of Commons, by Mr. Chamberlain in answer to a question by Major-General Seely.
G
98 THE WESTERN QUESTION
to the lines on which they would proceed,' but this belated second demarche on their part in the cause of peace was terminated by a prompt though courteous refusal from the Greek Government. The Powers were informed that ' the conduct and decisions of the Greek Government can be dictated by military considerations only. . . . Any adjourn- ment of the operations would compromise the situation to the disadvantage of Greece and the encouragement of enemy resistance.' * For three months Greece had been mobilising her reservists and depreciating her currency in order to make her maximum military effort. On the eve of delivering the long-prepared blow, the Greek Govern- ment could hardly be expected to submit the destinies of their country to a court in which they had good reason to believe that two out of the three judges were prejudiced against her ; and in their