Shortly before the debacle of the Greek army in Asia Minor I was discussing the question of war weariness with English friends at luncheon in a London club. Aware that good fortune had thrown me with men who knew—if any did—the state of the public mind in Great Britain, I was trying to find out whether the British would be ready to back by force of arms the French reparations demands upon Germany. My informants were unanimous in the belief that no Government could lead the English people into a new war. “Not a chance in the world, any more than there is in your country,” declared a Foreign Office man. “We know that so well that we got out of Ireland, compromised with Egypt, put up with a makeshift in Mesopotamia, stalled on the Zionist business in Palestine, and are constantly warning the Government of India to avoid trouble internally and with Afghanistan.”
“You mean that the people are not behind you in support of traditional policies abroad, unless you can work them into feeling that pride and honor are involved.”
“As for pride, we’d swallow a lot before we would allow the income tax to go higher, and that honor business depends upon the press. Well, our press is as pacifist now as it was jingo a few years ago. We are not in a fire-eating mood. I do not think of any problem in international politics that could involve our people in war.”
“How about the Straits?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, the Straits; that’s different,” admitted my friend. “We should have to fight for the freedom of the Straits. No alternative there if the Greeks should lose out and the Turks push us.”
“Having been incited to push you,” I commented.
“Having been incited to push us,” he repeated gravely. And the others bowed assent.
This took me back to the previous week in Paris, when I had twice secured modifications of sweeping statements from men in the highest position by the same simple question. When one statesman told me that France would never extend the hand of fellowship to the Bolsheviki, I asked, “How about the Straits?” And when another statesman declared that France and Great Britain must and would see eye to eye in perfect solidarity “for the sake of the future of civilization,” I asked, “How about the Straits?” In both instances there was the admission that making up with Lenin and destroying the Entente were lesser evils to France than seeing the English, either openly or indirectly through Greece as a tool, installed at Constantinople, and, ergo, in control of the Straits.
Without going into history further than the Conference of San Remo in the spring of 1920, we see that the determination of France to oust Great Britain from Constantinople and of Italy to prevent Greece from profiting by her intervention in the World War has made strange political bedfellows, has split the Entente alliance, has given Russia her chance to get back into the councils of the great powers, has made possible the repetition of massacres of Christians by the Turks, has jeopardized the advantages granted in the Treaty of Sèvres to the Entente Powers as well as to Greece, and has created the dangerous precedent and example in allowing one of the enemy states, to whom a victors’ treaty had been dictated, to tear up the treaty and turn the tables by dictating a new treaty to the erstwhile victors.
It is not too much to say that the quarrel among the Entente Powers over the disposition of the Straits has ended in robbing them of virtually all the spoils of their victory over the Central Empires, in damaging their prestige, and in undermining still further their authority in the Mohammedan world, already seriously impaired during the World War and the Peace Conference. The Conference of San Remo came to an agreement that saved the Entente from dissolution. But the failure of the three contracting parties—Great Britain, France, and Italy—to live up to the agreement and to enforce the Treaty of Sèvres revealed a house divided against itself and demonstrated the fact that treaties imposed upon the vanquished by force would be upset the moment the force was dissipated. When the Entente generals met the representatives of Kemal Pasha at Mudania, they were confronted with demands the acceptance of which meant the first step in the inevitable surrender of all that had been gained by the World War. It was an hour of supreme danger when Ismet Pasha demanded the surrender of Constantinople before the terms of a new peace settlement in the Near East had been arranged. And yet France dared to support this demand, which Great Britain and Italy opposed, risking everything on playing the card that would get the British out of Constantinople.
Why did the triumph of their respective points of view in regard to the Straits seem of such vital importance to the British and French statesmen that they were willing to sacrifice friendship, alliance, and the war aims in the defense and furtherance of which they fought to a glorious and successful end the most stupendous and costly war of history? Both nations professed to be defending “the freedom of the Straits” and to be working to avert “a more horrible war than we have yet known,” as Lloyd George put it. But they acted toward one another more like enemies than friends, and their premiers, with the support of Cabinets and the press, advanced diametrically opposite opinions as to the best way to prevent the war they dreaded.
If the sorry mess in the Near East is settled without war, we shall be told that a dreadful calamity has only been postponed; and for this doubtful victory France will have paid the price of loss of British support in wringing money out of Germany. If it leads to war, Great Britain fears the entry of Soviet Russia against her and uprisings in her Mohammedan possessions.
The Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, so narrow that you can shoot an ordinary rifle from one continent to the other, so winding that cannon can rake a ship fore and aft as well as shell broadside at many places, afford the only outlet to the outside world for Bulgaria, Rumania, southern Russia, the Caucasus republics, and some of the largest and richest vilayets of Turkey. For all Russia these waterways are the sole ice-free passage. They are the nearest and most practicable outlet for northern Persia and the khanates of central Asia. A considerable portion of the wheat supply of many European countries comes in normal times from southern Russia, while Europe learned to count upon the regular appearance on the market of the vast petroleum output of the Baku region of the Caucasus. The major portion of the trade of a region inhabited by one and a half times the population of the United States is carried through Black Sea ports. So important to the world’s well-being was the free passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean considered before the World War that Italy and the Balkan States, in their wars with Turkey, had to yield to the remonstrances of other nations and forego the advantage of bringing pressure to bear upon Turkey by attacking and blockading the Straits.
Although during the nineteenth century the danger to the British Empire of the control of the Straits by an enemy power in time of war was never given a practical demonstration, it was vividly enough imagined for the British to have fought once (the Crimean War) and to have been ready to fight on two other occasions (Treaty of Unkiar-Skelessi, 1833, and Treaty of San Stefano, 1878) to prevent Russia from dominating the Straits.
A practical demonstration of this danger was given during the recent World War. The disastrous effects to the Entente Powers of Turkey’s alliance with their enemies, which closed the Straits for four precious years, have not yet been fully measured. By handing over to Germany the control of the Straits the Turks are directly responsible for (1) the length of the war, (2) the collapse of Russia, (3) the year of grace during which the Bolshevist régime got itself thoroughly established in Russia, (4) the menace to the Suez Canal during the war, and (5) the unchecked spread of anti-British propaganda in northwest India, Afghanistan, Persia, Arabia, and Egypt. The Dardanelles expedition, which was a holocaust for Australians and New Zealanders as well as British, was entered upon and persisted in because the British Government realized that the Straits ought to be forced, if possible, regardless of cost, for the sake of vital imperial interests. Using Turkey and the Holy War, Germany was in a fair way to cut England’s communications with India, the Far East, and Australasia. In 1916 the British were saved by their success in fomenting a rebellion of Mecca against Constantinople, which was possible because of the tactlessness of the Turks toward the Arabs and the cruel repressions of Djemal Pasha in Damascus and Beirut. In 1917 they were saved by the entry of the United States into the war. American credits and supplies, the moral effect of America’s entry, and the American contribution to the Entente armies on the western front in the spring and early summer of 1918 alone made possible the retention of the British armies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Macedonia. But to the wise man a menace successfully confronted is not a menace forgotten. The Islamic belt stretches around the Black Sea, across the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, and across the Suez Canal. The British Empire is defended by the British fleet. If the fleet is powerless to exercise pressure upon the enemies of the Empire in the interests and defense of the Empire, the Empire will crumble to pieces in short order.
Breathing a sigh of relief when the armistice was signed, the British Foreign Office, aware of the vital importance of the Black Sea region to the future of British rule in Asia, sent troops not only to Constantinople but also to the Caucasus and northern Persia. Pressure was once more brought to bear upon Afghanistan; and, despite interpellations in Parliament on the ground of expense, the Mesopotamian army was reinforced and extended its occupation northward and eastward. The powerful sympathies of international Jewry were enlisted to create a buffer region on the Asiatic side of the Suez Canal.
Gradually, however, it was realized that tax weariness and war weariness at home must be reckoned with. This meant abandonment of the Caucasus, Persia, and Afghanistan to the undisputed influence of Soviet Russia, whose propaganda it was planned to call off by trade agreements and the lifting of the economic blockade. The Mohammedan world, not being interested in trade and not being vitally vulnerable to any form of economic or food blockade, could best be watched and intimidated by a British fleet at Constantinople, holding Stambul and the Sultan’s palace of Dolmabagché under its guns, and able to cruise at will in the Black Sea. As the tax-payers accept the burden of maintaining the fleet without complaint, the freedom enjoyed in the Straits since 1918 has been a boon to the British Government in exercising pressure without spending too much money!
The Treaty of Sèvres is a splendid illustration of the vicious methods of world politics, which make agreements between nations unsound and insincere: unsound because they are not arrived at after a fair consideration of the issues at stake and because they represent makeshift compromises; insincere because the contracting parties do not intend to keep them if contingent agreements—or rather bargains—are not lived up to. The British point of view prevailed in the Treaty of Sèvres. But Italy expected to gain from this concession British support against the Jugoslavs in the Adriatic, and France expected British support for extreme measures against Germany in the reparations collection. Both nations looked to Great Britain either to forgive or forget their indebtedness to her or at least to grant them the priority already acknowledged to Belgium in reparations payments.
Before the ink was dry on the Treaty of Sèvres, France and Italy realized that the British could not be depended upon to help them out of their troubles, political or financial; and the return of Constantine gave an excellent excuse to two of the three makers of the treaty not only to consider it null and void but actually to work against it. We must not lay too much stress upon the concessions featured in the secret treaties negotiated by Italy and France with the Angora Government. Considerations of foreign policy were paramount. Italy plotted the ruin of a potential commercial competitor in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. France was bent on destroying the country she believed Great Britain had picked to hold Constantinople and the Straits as agent for British political and commercial interests. The Nationalist Turks had the luck to be a good weapon to be used by two members of the Entente alliance to strike the third; and the Greeks had the misfortune to be lacking in endurance to play through to the end of the game the British expected them to play alone, for the British Government was not prepared to risk Mohammedan difficulties by coming out openly on the side of the Greeks.
Great Britain did not feel uneasy about the Turks on the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus until after the Young Turk revolution. The new régime had not been long installed before foreign observers began to see that the Young Turks were smitten with megalomania. They had an inordinate confidence in their own strength and in their ability to impose their cultural and political hegemony, in a constitutional state, upon the non-Turkish elements, Moslem as well as Christian. Abdul Hamid and his predecessors had been past masters in the art of knowing how far to go in pitting one European Power against another, in collecting taxes from Christians and oppressing them, and in extending administrative control over non-Turkish Moslems and conscripting for the army among them. The Young Turks provoked Albanians and Arabs to rebellion, alienated Circassians and Kurds, and goaded the Balkan States to the point of desperation where they were able to forget their own rivalries long enough to combine and drive the Turks out of Macedonia and Thrace. How could a British Liberal Government, relying upon the Nonconformist vote, continue to aid the Turks in maintaining their domination over subject peoples who had proved their ability to free themselves? After the first year of enthusiasm and generous impulse ended in the horrible Adana massacre, the Young Turks were thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the electors to whom Messrs. Asquith and Lloyd George had to appeal in two bitterly contested General Elections.
Turkey was weakened both by fruitless efforts to put down the rebellions among Mohammedan subject peoples that her new masters foolishly provoked and by the Young Turk policies in Tripoli and Macedonia, which were heading directly toward wars that could end only disastrously. Her leaders looked to Europe for some powerful ally. Abandoning Abdul Hamid’s safe policy of pitting one against another, the Young Turks deliberately chose Germany as their friend, put their army and the control of the Straits in Germany’s hands a year before the World War broke out, and during the months of August and September, 1914, so critical to the Entente Powers, deceived the British and French by protestations of friendship and neutrality. But as soon as the engineer officers of their German allies advised them that the Dardanelles could not be forced by a fleet, they threw in their lot with the Central Powers. During the years since the armistice the Turks have been in close touch with Soviet Russia and have assisted materially in the anti-British propaganda of the Bolshevists in Asia.
The difference between the Young Turks and the Old Turks is that the régime since 1908 purports to represent a people conscious of its nationhood and power, while the Hamidian régime was a system that had existed for centuries upon the threefold foundation: a theocratic absolutist Government, centralized at Constantinople, for the Turkish element and other Mohammedan elements near the sea or in lowlands; virtual autonomy, on the principle of non-intervention or laisser-faire, for non-Turkish Mohammedan peoples of the mountains or hinterland; and separate communities under their hierarchies for the Christian peoples of the empire. Old Turkey could be the enemy of no country except one that invaded her, and during the nineteenth century intervention of other powers was always invoked against an aggressor power. Abdul Hamid’s pan-Islamic movement was a political one, with a limited appeal. The autocrat did not allow it to get out of hand through the awakening of a national consciousness. Until 1908 it never occurred to the British that Turkey was a country that might at any time, without provocation upon the part of Great Britain, join the enemies of the British Empire in time of war, close the Straits, and proclaim a Holy War against the greatest Mohammedan power in the world (for the British Empire is that). But since 1908 Great Britain has had to reckon with Turkey as a potential enemy, and, since 1914, as an actual enemy. As a military menace the Turks are negligible to the British. But the Turks handing the key to the Straits to an enemy of Great Britain in time of war—that has happened once, and the British know that if it is allowed to happen again the death-knell of the British Empire may sound.
The freedom of the Straits, from the British point of view, means the insertion of guarantees in the peace settlement in the Near East of such a nature that a repetition of 1914 will be impossible. The Straits must be open to British warships in time of war as in time of peace, open in such a way that nothing can close them. It is unnecessary to make any provisions concerning merchant ships. The British undertake to have a fleet large enough to look out for their merchant marine in war and peace!
What are these guarantees? First of all, prohibition of any form of fortification along the Straits or in the Sea of Marmora. Second, a neutral zone, whose inviolability will be under the vigilant control of an international commission on both sides of the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. Third, the absence of armies and armaments in the neutral zone. When Mr. Lloyd George declared that never again should the Straits be closed against the British, his political opponents (except the Labor men) agreed that the French needed to be told bluntly that the Straits guarantees meant as much to the British as the Rhine guarantees meant to the French, and that it was a case of quid pro quo. Great Britain’s future policy toward German guarantees was going to be contingent upon France’s policy toward Turkish guarantees.
The British warning to France was heeded by Premier Poincaré. When Lord Curzon called at the Quai d’Orsay on October 6, he was informed that instructions had been sent to Constantinople for the French to agree with General Harington in rejecting the Kemalist demand that Eastern Thrace be turned over to Turkey immediately. But the attitude of M. Franklin Bouillon, negotiator of the Angora Treaty, at the Mudania conference the previous day showed that what France really wanted was the return of Constantinople and Eastern Thrace to the Nationalist Turks without serious or effective guarantees.
The French have a clarity of vision that Teutons and Anglo-Saxons do not possess. If they seem more selfish and cynical and hard-hearted than ourselves it is only because they do not possess our comfortable faculty of deceiving ourselves into believing that motives are mostly actuated by altruism rather than self-interest. The intellectual honesty of the French people shocks us when they apply it to their own actions, for we have never learned how to be honest with ourselves. To the Anglo-Saxon mind naked motives are like nude women; we know there are such things but our modesty clothes them!
The French look at the freedom of the Straits as something akin to the freedom of the seas. It is a comfortable formula without any meaning. For is not freedom that which one enjoys through the exercise of superior strength? And is it possible to enjoy freedom without denying it to others? The seas are free to the British, and the affirmation of this freedom for themselves is the negation of it to others. The British (I am still presenting the French point of view) would think that they had lost the freedom of the seas unless they were able to go where they pleased and do what their interests dictated in time of war. Now for the Straits. Although Italy is wholly and France partly and Great Britain not at all a Mediterranean power, the one of the three possessing no littoral in the Mediterranean controls both entrances to it. The French and Italians have never heard the British advocating the dismantling of Gibraltar and the application to the Suez Canal of the Sèvres Treaty provisions for the Dardanelles and Bosphorus. From the point of view of her allies, what does Great Britain mean by the freedom of the Straits? They believe that she conspired with the Greeks to close the Straits, which necessitated drastic counter-moves. And now that these counter-moves have succeeded, why all this great fuss over neutral zones? At the bottom of it (au fond, as the French love to say in summarizing the discussion of a problem or an argument), what the British want is immunity for their fleet from the inconveniences created by nature to free movement in and out of the Black Sea. Once this immunity is granted them, they will be in a position, owing to their naval superiority, to make it valueless to any other nation. By the treaty negotiated at Washington, France and Italy were asked to agree to a naval ratio of 1.75 to 1.75 in proportion to Britain’s 5. Together they are asked to accept 3.5 to Britain’s 5. As long as this naval proportion holds by treaty, the freedom of the Straits is valuable only for Great Britain and the United States.
Let us take a concrete illustration. Let us say that the treaty settlement does have guarantees that are effective, that the neutral zone is established and controlled, and that the Bosphorus and Dardanelles are without fortifications. The British fleet is able to pass at will from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and vice versa. Its cruising-radius, and hence its power, is extended to the vast Black Sea regions. But does that freedom work out in the same way for Russia and France and Italy? The Straits are free, yes, but the mistress of the seas, for that very reason, would be able to attack the Russians in their own waters, and then, backed up against the “free” Straits, oppose at either end to any comer (except the United States, who is not interested in that part of the world) a floating barrier of fortifications more powerful than any that ever could be erected at the mouth of the Bosphorus on the Black Sea or the mouth of the Dardanelles on the Ægean Sea. Again, in case of war, if the Straits are free, only the British merchant marine could pass freely in and out of the Black Sea.
One objects that we must consider the good faith of England; and the Anglophile declares that England never abuses her power and that her word is as good as her bond. Yes, that is a powerful argument for us Americans, now that we have our 5 to 5 ratio. It was a powerful argument before, because we were neither trade nor political rivals of our cousins across the sea. But we must get it into our heads that the French and Italians and Russians do not look upon the British as most of us do. The British are a potential enemy. History has demonstrated that nations change alliances bewilderingly. The foreign policy of France (and of Italy) in the Near East always takes into consideration the superiority of the British fleet and the possession by Great Britain of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, and Malta. Whatever steps can be taken to lessen the menace of British sea-power, or, at least, to prevent its becoming a greater menace, are justifiable and worth risking much. As they do not believe Bolshevism will last for ever, French and Italians look upon Russian influence dominating Constantinople as less of a danger in war and far, far less of a stumbling-block to commerce in peace than British control there.
Since Italy has got over her fear of an internal Bolshevist movement, and since France has become convinced that Poland will never replace her old Muscovite ally as the “guardian of civilization against German barbarism” on the eastern marches, there has been a marked tendency in Rome and Paris to talk about the obligations of the Entente secret treaty of 1915. The French, especially, are apprehensive of the moment when a regenerated but thoroughly nationalistic Russia, upon whom France will be able to depend far more than upon Great Britain and the United States for aid against a German recovery, will ask how her friends looked after her interests abroad during the years of misfortune and humiliation. They want to be able to say that they had prevented Great Britain from corralling Constantinople. In Greek hands it might not have been possible to consider Constantinople as a tempting morsel to bait the imperialistic ambitions of convalescent Russia. With an international neutral zone established and the freedom of the Straits guaranteed, the new Russia (although realizing even more bitterly than the two Mediterranean powers the exclusive advantage of this régime to Great Britain) would have her hands tied and would owe nothing but resentment to France. With the Turks back on both sides of the Straits, France can make a secret treaty with Russia by which Turkey will follow Greece as a sacrifice to the exigencies, to the superior interests, of European powers. Why not? France has much less reason to regard Turkey than Greece with a feeling of affection or obligation. Greece was trussed and delivered up as a victim to Kemal Pasha. If ever betrayal of the Turks is the price of winning back Russia in an offensive and defensive alliance against Germany, who would be foolish enough to protest on the score of honor?
I hold no brief for British or French, for Italian or Russian, for Turk or Greek. I have tried not to wander into by-paths but to present here the facts concerning the Straits. It is true that these facts present a sorry picture of international morality. But is it not important for us to analyze the motives actuating the principals in this stupendous diplomatic battle? For only in this way shall we come to understand how futile would be the solution proposed so glibly, i. e., that the League of Nations control the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. For, from the world point of view, there is no separate problem called the Question of the Straits, unless we decapitalize Straits, and cut out the definite article. There is a question of straits, by which we mean all international waterways. The League of Nations can rightly be suspected of being an agent of particular interests, plotting in the interests of some nations against other, until its champions are able to convince themselves and public opinion in the nations whose representatives sit on the League Council that the League can exist and function only as an instrument of impartial administration and justice.
If the United States is willing to give up the Panama Canal to the League, and Great Britain is willing to give up Gibraltar and the Suez Canal to the League, we have the right to criticize French and Italian policy on the Bosphorus, on the ground that these powers have less faith in the League than ourselves! But by what right do we expect these two powers to entrust their interests in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea to the League of Nations when we neither have given the example nor will promise to follow it? And what can we possibly find to say to Russia or Turkey, the countries most interested?