THE PROBLEM OF THE NEAR WEST
The foregoing reflections and the arguments drawn from them were
penned before the outbreak of the war between Turkey and the Balkan
Allies.
That war is still undecided as I write (March 1913), but whatever its
precise outcome may be, it is clear that the doom of Turkey as a great
power is sealed, and that the complications of the Near East will,
in future, assume an entirely fresh aspect. Hitherto, there was only
the possibility that Germany might find at least a commercial and
financial outlet in the Asiatic dominions of the Sultan. There was
even the possibility, had Turkey held together, that England, to
mitigate pressure elsewhere, would have conceded to an expanding and
insistent Germany, a friendly interest and control in Asia Minor. It
is true that the greatest possible development, and under the most
favoured conditions of German interests in that region, could not have
met the needs or satisfied the ever increasing necessities of Teutonic
growth; but at least it would have offered a safety valve, and could
have involved preoccupations likely to deflect the German vision, for
a time, from the true path to greatness, the Western highways of the
sea.
An occupation or colonisation of the Near East by the Germanic peoples
could never have been a possible solution under any circumstances of
the problem that faces German statemanship. As well talk of reviving
the Frank Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The occupation by the fair-haired peoples of the Baltic and North Seas
of the lands of Turk and Tartar, of Syrian and Jew, of Armenian and
Mesopotamian, was never a practical suggestion or one to be seriously
contemplated. "East is East and West is West," sings the poet of
Empire, and Englishmen cannot complain if the greatest of Western
peoples, adopting the singer, should apply the dogma to themselves.
Germany, indeed, might have looked for a considerable measure of
commercial dominance in the Near East, possibly for a commercial
protectorate such as France applies to Tunis and Algeria and hopes
to apply to morocco, or such as England imposes on Egypt, and this
commercial predominance could have conferred considerable profits on
Rhenish industries and benefited Saxon industrialism, but it could
never have done more than this. A colonisation of the realms of
Bajazet and Saladin by the fair-skinned peoples of the North, or the
planting of Teutonic institutions in the valley of Damascus, even with
the benevolent neutrality of England, is a far wider dream (and one
surely no German statesman ever entertained) than a German challenge
to the sea supremacy of England.
The trend of civilized man in all great movements since modern
civilization began, has been from East to West, not from West to East.
The tide of the peoples moved by some mysterious impulse from the
dawn of European expansion has been towards the setting sun. The
few movements that have taken place in the contrary direction have
but emphasized the universality of this rule, from the days of the
overthrow of Rome, if we seek no earlier date. The Crusades furnished,
doubtless, the classic example. The later contrary instance, that of
Russia towards Siberia, scarcely, if at all affects the argument, for
there the Russian overthrow is filling up Northern rather than Eastern
lands, and the movement involves to the Russian emigrant no change
of climate, soil, law, language or environment while that emigrant
himself belongs, perhaps, as much to Asia as to Europe.
But whatever value to German development the possible chances of
expansion in the Near East may have offered before the present Balkan
war, those chances to-day, as the result of that war, scarcely exist.
It is probably the perception of this outcome of the victory of the
Slav States that has influenced and accelerated the characteristic
change of English public opinion that has accompanied with shouts of
derision the dying agonies of the Turk. "In matters of mind," as a
recent English writer says in the _Saturday Review_, "the national
sporting instinct does not exist. The English public invariably backs
the winner." And just as the English public invariably backs the
winner, British policy invariably backs the anti-German, or supposedly
anti-German side in all world issues. "What 1912 seems to have
effected is a vast aggrandizement of the Slavonic races in their
secular struggle against the Teutonic races. Even a local and
temporary triumph of Austria over Servia cannot conceal the fact that
henceforth the way south-east to the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea is
barred to the Germans."[5]
[Footnote 5: Mr. Frederick Harrison in the _English Review_, Jan.,
1913.]
That is the outstanding fact that British public opinion perceives
with growing pleasure from the break up of Turkey.
No matter where the dispute or what the purpose of conflict may be,
the supreme issue for England is "Where is Germany?"
Against that side the whole weight of Great Britain will, openly or
covertly, be thrown. German expansion in the Near East has gone by
the board, and in its place the development of Greek naval strength
in the Mediterranean, to take its stand by the Triple Entente, comes
to be jauntily considered, while the solid wedge of a Slav Empire
or Federation, commanding in the near future 2,000,000 of armed men
is agreeably seen to be driven across South-eastern Europe between
Austro-German efforts and the fallow lands of Asia Minor. These latter
can safely be left in Turkish hands yet a while longer, until the day
comes for their partition into "spheres of influence," just as Persia
and parts of China are to-day being apportioned between Russia and
England. This happy consummation, moreover, has fallen from heaven,
and Turkey is being cut up for the further extension of British
interests clearly by the act of God.
The victory of the Balkan States becomes another triumph for the
British Bible; it is the victory of righteousness over wrong-doing.
The true virtue of the Balkan "Christians" lies in the possibility of
their being moulded into an anti-German factor of great weight in the
European conflict, clearly impending, and in their offering a fresh
obstacle, it is hoped, to German world policy.
Let us first inspect the moral argument on the lips of these
professors. We are assured, by it, that the claim of the Balkan Allies
to expel Turkey from Europe rests upon a just and historic basis.
Briefly stated it is that the Turk has held his European provinces
by a right of conquest only. What the sword took, die sword may take
away. When the sword was struck from the Ottoman's grasp his right
to anything it had given him fell too. Thus Adrianople, a city he has
held for over five hundred years, must be given up to a new conqueror
who never owned it in the past and who certainly has far less moral
claim to be there to-day than the descendants of Selim's soldiers.
But the moral argument brings strange revenges.
If Turkey has no right to Adrianople, to Thrace--"right of sword to be
shattered by the sword"--what right has England to Ireland, to Dublin,
to Cork? She holds Ireland by exactly the same title as that by which
Turkey has hitherto held Macedonia, Thrace, Salonika--a right of
invasion, of seizure, of demoralization. If Turkey's rights, nearly
six hundred years old, can be shattered in a day by one successful
campaign, and if the powers of Europe can insist, with justice, that
this successful sword shall outweigh the occupation of centuries,
then, indeed, have the Powers, led by England, furnished a precedent
in the Near East which the victor in the next great struggle should
not be slow to apply to the Near West, when a captive Ireland shall be
rescued from the hands of a conqueror whose tide is no better, indeed
somewhat worse than that of Turkey to Macedonia. And when the day of
defeat shall strike for the Turkey of the Near West, then shall an
assembled Europe remember the arguments of 1912-13 and a freed Ireland
shall be justified on the very grounds England to-day has been the
first to advance against a defeated Turkey.
"But the Turk is an Asiatic," say the English Bashaws: to which
indeed, Europe might aptly reply, "and are the English European or
non-European?" The moral argument, and the "Asiatic argument" are
strange texts for the desecrater of Christian Ireland to appeal to
against that continent which she would fain hem in with Malayan and
Indian battleships, and Canadian and Australasian dreadnoughts. Not
the moral argument, but the anti-German argument, furnishes the real
ground for the changed British attitude in the present war.
The moral failure of Turkey, her inability to govern her Christian
peoples is only the pretext: but just as the moral argument brings
its strange revenges and shows an Ireland that has suffered all that
Macedonia has suffered, and this at the hands of Christians, and not
of Moslems, so the triumph of the Balkan Allies, far from benefiting
Britain, must, in the end, react to her detriment.
The present apparent injury to German interests by the closing of
South-eastern Europe, and the road to Asia Minor, will inevitably
force Germany to still more resolutely face the problem of opening the
Western seaways. To think otherwise is to believe that Germany will
accept a quite impossible position tamely and without a struggle.
Hemmed in by Russia on the East and the new Southern Slav States on
the South-east, with a vengeful France being incited on her Western
frontier to fresh dreams of conquest, Germany sees England preparing
still mightier armaments to hold and close the seaways of the world.
The Canadian naval vote, the Malayan "gift" of a battleship come as
fresh rivets in the chain forged for the perpetual binding of the
seas, or it might more truly be said, for the perpetual binding of the
hands of die German people.
We read in a recent London periodical how these latest naval
developments portend the coming of the day when "the Imperial navy
shall keep the peace of the seas as a policeman does the peace of the
streets. The time is coming when a naval war (except by England), will
be as relentlessly suppressed as piracy on the high seas." (_Review of
Reviews_, December, 1912.)
The naïve arrogance of this utterance is characteristically English.
It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of the Churchill Glasgow
speech, and the fullest justification of the criticism of the
Kreuz Zeitung already quoted. It does not stand alone; it could be
paralleled in the columns of any English paper--Liberal as much as
Conservative--every day in the week. Nothing is clearer than that
no Englishman can think of other nations save in terms of permanent
inferiority. Thus, for instance, in a November (1912) issue of the
_Daily News_ we find a representative Englishman (Sir R. Edgecumbe),
addressing that Liberal journal in words that no one but an Englishman
would dream of giving public utterance to. Sir R. Edgecumbe deprecated
a statement that had gone round to the effect that the Malayan
battleship was not a free gift of the toiling Tamils, Japanese,
Chinese, and other rubber workers who make up, with a few Malays, the
population of that peninsula, but was really the fruit of an arbitrary
tax imposed upon these humble, but indifferent Asiatics by their
English administration.
Far from being indifferent, Sir R. Edgecumbe asserted these poor
workers nourished a reverence "bordering on veneration" for the
Englishman. "This is shown in a curious way by their refusing to
call any European 'a white man' save the Englishman alone. The German
trader, the Italian and Frenchman all are, in their speech coloured
men."
After this appreciation of themselves the English cannot object to the
present writer's view that they are non-Europeans.
Thus while the Eastern question is being settled while I write, by the
expulsion of the Turk from Europe, England, who leads the cry in the
name of Europe, is preparing the exclusion of Europe from all world
affairs that can be dominated by sea power. Lands and peoples held
for centuries by Turkey by a right not less moral than that by which
England has held Ireland, are being forcibly restored to Europe. So be
it.
With settlement of the Eastern question by this act of restitution
Europe must inevitably gain the clarity of vision to deal with the
Western question by a similar act of restoration.
The Western Macedonia must go the way of its Eastern fellow. Like
those of the Orient, the problems of the Occident for Europe are
twofold--a near Western and a far Western question. Ireland, keeper
of the seas, constitutes for Europe the near Western question.
The freedom of those seas and their opening to all European effort
alike on equal terms constitutes the far Western question. But in both
cases the antagonist of Europe, the non-European power is the same.
The challenge of Europe must be to England, and the champion of Europe
must be and can be only Germany. No other European people has the
power, the strength of mind, of purpose and of arm to accomplish the
great act of deliverance. Europe too long blinded to her own vital
interests while disunited, must now, under the guidance of a united
Germany, resolutely face the problem of freeing the seas.
_That war of the seas is inevitable_. It may be fought on a continent;
it may be waged in the air--it must be settled on the seas and it must
mean either the freeing of those seas or the permanent exclusion
of Europeans from the affairs of the world. It means for Europe the
future, the very existence of European civilization as opposed to
the Anglo-Saxon world domination. In that war, Germany will stand not
alone as the champion of Europe, she will fight for the freedom of the
world.
As an Irishman I have no fear of the result to Ireland of a German
triumph. I pray for it; for with the coming of that day the "Irish
question" so dear to British politicians, becomes a European, a world
question.
With the humbling of Great Britain and the destruction of her sea
ownership, European civilization assumes a new stature, and Ireland,
oldest and yet youngest of the European peoples, shall enter into free
partnership with the civilization, culture, and prosperity that that
act of liberation shall bring to mankind.