If a new Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep at any time in the nineteenth century and awoke to-day, one column in the morning newspaper would afford him no sensation and surprise. Were his eye to fall first upon a despatch from Constantinople, he would read it without discovering his long sleep. Metternich and Castlereagh and Talleyrand, Palmerston and Napoleon III, Bismarck and Disraeli and Waddington would find history repeating itself with a vengeance on the Bosphorus.

Throughout the World War and during the period of equal duration that followed the collapse of Turkey, European diplomacy ran true to form in the Near East. None can study the history of the great powers in relation to the Balkans and Turkey and maintain that the crisis of 1914–23 shows a difference of spirit and methods from the crises of 1801–15, 1821–30, 1833–40, 1851–56, 1875–78, 1885–86, 1893–1903, and 1908–13. This is a peculiarly distressing and hopeless statement to make more than four years after the creation of the League of Nations. But the truth does not set us free unless we know the truth.

Some who believe that the world was regenerated by reason of our victory over the Germans, and that the high principles of President Wilson are triumphing in international affairs because “after all we have the League of Nations,” declare that the Near Eastern situation is simply one failure which should not discredit the peace settlement as a whole. One hears them argue on the platform and one sees their articles—especially “letters to the editor”—flooding the press. We cannot expect perfection, they say, and the United States should be ashamed to have failed joining our comrades-in-arms to inaugurate a new era in world affairs. Differences of opinion among the Entente Powers? Friction in the Near East? Inability to agree upon a common policy to adopt toward Turkey? These are minor matters. The great fact is that the League of Nations is functioning!

The Near Eastern situation, however, is not a minor matter, and insisting upon having a hand in it would have been the first move of the League of Nations, had that organization been capable of tackling the problems to meet and provide a solution for which it was ostensibly created. The bloody wars of the nineteenth century had their origin in international rivalry in the Near East. The inability of Turkey to retain her European provinces made inevitable the recent World War. The war began in the Balkans, and there was no hope of its ending until a decisive victory had been won in the Balkans. Nor is there any hope of world peace until peace is made in the Balkans. The future of Constantinople has been the dominating factor in setting the great powers against one another since the World War precisely as before the World War. The elimination of Germany from the group of contestants does not seem to make any difference. When there is a bone, one dog less does not mean the end of the fight.

The armistice of Mudros, signed on October 30, 1918, gave the Entente Powers control of Constantinople and the Straits and stipulated the evacuation of the Russian Transcaucasian provinces by the Turks. Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria were already in Allied hands by conquest. Immediately after the armistice the British pressed forward into Cilicia. Three days before the armistice with Germany, Great Britain and France issued a joint declaration in the Near East, announcing that they had no designs upon these countries but were there simply as liberators, with the intention of helping the oppressed non-Turkish elements of the Ottoman Empire to attain complete independence.

But the Entente Powers, separately and together, were already bound by secret agreements which contained their real intentions concerning the devolution of the Ottoman Empire. In March, 1915, the British and French Governments agreed that Russia was to have Constantinople and the European hinterland up to a line drawn from Enos on the Ægean to Midia on the Black Sea; the islands in the Sea of Marmora; Imbros and Tenedos outside the Dardanelles; and the coast of Asia Minor from the Bosphorus to the mouth of the Sakaria River across to the Gulf of Ismid. In exchange, Russia assented to the giving of the middle neutral zone of Persia to Great Britain and to the proclamation of the independence of Arabia. This agreement was enlarged, after Italy entered the war, to give Russia all of Armenia as a sphere of influence.

On April 26, 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia, among the bribes offered in the secret Treaty of London, promised Italy full sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands and the port of Adalia, in the southwestern corner of Asia Minor, with the strategic hinterland. This was afterward enlarged to include a generous quarter or more of Asia Minor, going north to include Smyrna and east to include Konia in the Italian sphere of influence.

In May, 1916, France and Great Britain, to whom had been left by Russia and Italy the non-Turkish-speaking portions of the empire as spoils, concluded the Sykes-Picot agreement, by which France was to have Syria and Cilicia with the hinterland to Mosul, while Great Britain was to take Mesopotamia and Palestine.

Beginning in the summer of 1915, British emissaries began to treat with Sherif Hussein of Mecca to induce him to revolt against the Turks. Negotiations were carried on for a year. The revolution broke out at the beginning of June, 1916, when Hussein proclaimed himself independent of Ottoman rule. In December, 1916, Great Britain, France, and Italy recognized the Hedjaz as an independent kingdom, with Hussein for sovereign. The support of the Arabs being vital to the British both in the Mesopotamian and Palestinian expeditions, the British Government made secret promises to King Hussein of territorial arrangements which conflicted with their earlier promises to the French. This was revealed at the Peace Conference when Emir Feisal, the king’s son, presented the claims of his country to the Council of Ten. The Hedjaz signed the peace treaty and became a member of the League of Nations. The English were involved also in promises given to the Arab tribes of Mesopotamia and the Yemen, made when the situation was desperate, and to the Egyptians. Adding to the embarrassing conflicts in these promises, on December 2, 1917, the British Government, by what is known as the Balfour Declaration, promised to make Palestine a “home-land” for the Jews!

The defection of Russia reopened the most thorny problem of all, the control of Constantinople and the Straits. When the war was over, British, French and Italians occupied Constantinople, not very harmoniously, while their statesmen, still less harmoniously, wrangled and bargained over the disposition of the city.

When the Peace Conference opened, the French aim was to become the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean. Frenchmen of the old school and young illuminati alike had never forgiven Great Britain for grabbing Cyprus and doing France out of the Suez Canal and Egypt. Even the Frenchmen most in sympathy with the British were nervous, realizing that the forte of Great Britain after every war was to reap where she had sown not. When a peace treaty was signed after a war—any war—the choicest bits of spoils were found to have entered into the joy of the pax britannica. After this war, the first one with extra-European spoils in which the French had been on the winning side—that is, Britain’s side—they determined to have a different deal. Canada and India, Egypt and many islands, were past history. The Near East had been culturally French since the crusades. From Saloniki to Beirut, France was determined to reign supreme. Palestine represented the very last concession it was possible for the French to make. Of course, they did not hope to possess Constantinople, but they were not going to let the British settle themselves on the Bosphorus as they had done at Gibraltar and Port Said. This would mean British domination of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and for British capital and goods the priority in markets that had been traditionally French.

Up to the time of the armistice, and afterward until the collapse of Baron Wrangel, France hoped for the miracle of the regeneration of Russia. This would have solved the Constantinople question. And as long as Venizelos was in power in Greece the French did not despair of preventing Greece from becoming infeudated to Great Britain. But aspirations in the eastern Mediterranean had to be subordinated to the more important aspiration of controlling the Rhine.

The British Foreign Office saw this from the very beginning of the Peace Conference and indicated to Mr. Lloyd George the successive moves in a skilful game. The British premier balked every time his French colleagues wanted to speak firmly to Germany—balked on the Rhine occupation, the Saar Valley, the entry into Frankfort, the taking over of the Ruhr basin, the Upper Silesian settlement, the amount and method of payment of the German indemnity, the trial of war prisoners, and the enforcement of German disarmament. Much of the opposition was sincere and based on common sense. But every time Mr. Lloyd George gave in to the French it was a case of do ut des; one after the other the French aims in the Near East suffered dimunition at the expense of British aims. It was not through intrigues and superior skill in working out policies in the Near East that the British gradually gained control of Constantinople, and extended the frontiers of Mesopotamia and Palestine beyond the Sykes-Picot line, but by agreeing to back the French in some new demand upon Germany!

French and British diplomacy, in considering the devolution of the Ottoman Empire, agreed on two points only: the necessity of using the Greeks to prevent Italy’s scheme of monopolizing the commerce of Asia Minor through control of Smyrna; and the passing of the buck to the United States to take over the vast bleak mountains of Armenia, so that we could become benefactors of the helpless and policemen to guard against the infiltration of Bolshevism, while the rich and fertile parts of the empire were being exploited by themselves.7

With all these conflicting aims, motives, and treaty entanglements, is it any wonder that the Peace Conference year brought no agreement as to the terms of the treaty to be imposed upon Turkey? When the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties were imposed, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria were compelled to sign a blank check, agreeing beforehand to whatever disposition of the Ottoman Empire the Principal Allied and Associated Powers might make. So they were out of it! But these treaties did contain a very definite provision for the peoples of Turkey. Article XXII of the League of Nations Covenant provides a mandatory government “to those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of states which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” The “well-being and development of such people form a sacred trust of civilization,” so the Covenant declared, and they were divided into three classes. The first dealt with the liberated regions of the Ottoman Empire. The text is explicit:

Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.

The mandatory idea was seized upon by General Smuts as a way of overcoming Mr. Wilson’s strenuous objection to the fait accompli of the distribution of Germany’s colonies. The American President accepted this in good faith, and agreed to present to the American people the proposal that the United States assume the Armenian mandate. Taking for granted the sincerity of his colleagues, he proposed that an international commission be sent to the Ottoman Empire to ascertain “the wishes of these communities” in regard to the selection of mandatory powers. His colleagues agreed; but they did not send their delegates. The Americans went alone, and brought back a report quite at variance with the mandate distribution as arranged among the Entente Powers.

What Mr. Wilson did not appreciate was the fact that the moot questions had been settled long before the war ended by secret compacts, and that the object of the Paris Conference was not to draw up terms of peace, in the interest of the peoples and regions concerned, but to arrive at a satisfactory adjustment of interests among the victors. The Turkish treaty was not drafted in 1919 simply because the Entente premiers could not agree upon a satisfactory compromise. They paid no attention to the Covenant, with its mandatory provision. It was too much to ask of them the fulfilment of this promise when they were unable to reconcile their previous commitments.

For instance, Article XII could not be carried out either in Palestine or Syria. Ninety per cent of the Palestinians, including thousands of its Jewish population, were bitterly opposed to the Balfour Declaration. Mr. Wilson’s mandate commission discovered that the great bulk of the Syrians were hostile to the French mandate. When Emir Feisal took over Damascus, in conformity with the Anglo-Hedjaz agreement and the undoubted wishes of its inhabitants, the French sent an army against him, drove him out, and hanged “for treason” many of his followers. In vain the Hedjaz invoked Articles XIII, XV, XVI, and XVII of the Covenant, which were supposed to make impossible such an event as the French expedition against Damascus. The inhabitants of Palestine, also, have tried for more than four years to get a hearing from the League of Nations, which has consistently ignored Article XXII. The Arabs of Mesopotamia were unable to secure the recognition of their rights until they had succeeded in driving the British almost entirely out of their country. The French formed the Armenians of Cilicia into regiments, told them that they were fighting for their independence, and then deserted them when French interests seemed to make it advantageous to betray the Armenians and hand Cilicia back to the Turks.

The Conference of Paris adjourned without having come to an agreement upon three vital questions: the terms of the treaty with Turkey, the adoption of a common policy toward Russia, and an understanding as to the means to be employed to compel Germany to fulfil the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. These problems led to a series of continuation conferences from 1920 to 1923, without reaching understandings of even a quasi-permanent nature. The continuation conferences as a whole are discussed in another chapter. Here we shall limit ourselves to the Conference of San Remo, in April, 1920, which endeavored to settle the devolution of the Ottoman Empire by drafting a treaty with Turkey. The results of its deliberations were the ill fated Treaty of SÈvres and the demonstration of two facts: that the three great problems cited above could not be dissociated; and that the Entente premiers believed that the League of Nations could not help in the solution of any one of them.

Had Czarist Russia survived the war, she would have installed herself at Constantinople. There would have been no question of international control of the Straits, an independent Armenia, or the satisfaction of Greek national aspirations. When the three premiers met at San Remo, almost a year after Premier Venizelos had been invited at Paris by Great Britain, France, and the United States to occupy Smyrna, they had to reckon with electorates weary of war and taxes and unwilling to engage in further military ventures in the Near East. Outside of Constantinople, held under the guns of battle-ships, the only forces available for compelling respect of their decisions were the Greek armies in Western Thrace and Smyrna. It was a case either of surrendering the fruits of the victory over Turkey or of recognizing, in a measure at least, Greek claims.

The first alternative was dismissed. Russia seemed to be behind Turkish nationalism, and the Entente Powers feared that a capitulation of Turkey would not bring peace, but rather the spread of Bolshevism in western Asia, the stirring up again of Bulgaria, the weakening of Rumania and Poland, and the encouragement of nationalist movements throughout the Mohammedan world. It seemed the lesser of two evils to allow the Greeks to defend Thrace and the Smyrna region against the Turks by granting the titles Venizelos claimed. Lloyd George faced the breakdown of the attempt to make the Caucasus a barrier to Bolshevism, and Millerand knew that the French army in the Orient was not strong enough to hold the positions it had occupied confidently the year before. In fact, the Nationalists under Mustafa Kemal Pasha had already defeated the French and driven them out of several cities, and it was only a question of time when General Gouraud would be compelled to ask the Turks for an armistice in Syria. Premier Nitti had withdrawn the Italian forces from Konia, and had adopted the policy of encouraging the Nationalists against the Greeks. The Greek army might be able to create such a diversion in Thrace and the hinterland of Smyrna as to save French prestige and prevent the whole-hearted coÖperation of Turks with Russians.

In regard to Turkey, three decisions were necessary: what territories to detach, how to force the Turks to give them up, and what to do with them. The premiers were no more ready to make these decisions in April, 1920, than they had been the year before, but there always must be an end to a transitory period. The delay was affecting the prestige of the Entente Powers, was giving encouragement to Germany, and was threatening the harmonious relations among the visitors in the World War.

The compromise of San Remo, embodied in the treaty to be presented to the Turks at SÈvres, followed the lines of the other treaties. Its principal conditions were: (1) open Straits in peace and war to all ships; (2) control of the Straits by an international commission; (3) demolition of fortifications, and demilitarization within a zone twelve miles inland from the coast on both sides of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, thus excluding the Turks from Gallipoli peninsula; (4) cession of Thrace up to the defenses of Constantinople to Greece; (5) limitations in the Turkish sovereignty over Constantinople; (6) Greek protectorate over Smyrna, with a generous hinterland; (7) Italian protectorate over Adalia; (8) acceptance of a boundary in the east to be communicated later, beyond which Armenia would be independent; (9) and cession to Great Britain and France of all the Arabic-speaking portions of the empire.

Certain details were left to direct negotiations between Italy and Greece; and these led to the signing of three agreements by Premiers Nitti and Venizelos, the first of which antedated by several months the San Remo Conference. Italy promised to (1) concede Greek claims in Thrace in return for withdrawal of Greek claims to the plain of the MÆander River in Asia Minor; (2) hand over Northern Epirus to Greece; and (3) surrender all the islands of the Dodecanese to Greece, except Rhodes, for which a plebiscite was to be held after a stipulated number of years.

The Turks gained only two points: the retention of sovereignty over Constantinople, because of the intervention of Indian Mohammedans; and the return of Cilicia, the claim to which was waived by France because she was not strong enough militarily to hold it.

In the disposition of the Arabic-speaking portions of the Ottoman Empire the Treaty of SÈvres clearly and specifically violated Article XXII of the League of Nations Covenant. Palestine was made a “Jewish national home” under the protection of Great Britain, and the rest of the loot was divided in utmost secrecy. The premiers had consulted neither their own parliaments nor the representatives of the races whose land they were cutting up.

The Treaty of SÈvres was not signed until August 10, 1920, and was already discredited long before the ceremony of the signature. Both Premiers Millerand and Nitti had spoken openly against the treaty. The latter said that Italy would contribute no troops to enforce it, and doubted the possibility of getting it signed by men who represented the Turkish nation.

The Treaty of SÈvres was declared null and void by Syrians and Palestinians, who appealed to the League of Nations. The Arabic press sustained the thesis that the three premiers were without competency to decide the destinies of the Arabic-speaking world. They were cosignatories of the Treaty of Versailles with the delegates of the free and independent Hedjaz, and were bound by the Covenant to let the League appoint the mandatory powers after the liberated races had been consulted. Unless the creation of the Hedjaz was an expedient later to be disavowed and the League of Nations a cloak for imperialism, the San Remo Conference was as high-handed and illegal as it was impolitic. The Hedjaz was the logical state to consult about the future of Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia because of geographical proximity, ethnological and religious affinity, and economic interest. Why was not the Hedjaz as vitally interested in these Arabic-speaking neighboring regions as was Great Britain in Ireland?

The Entente premiers at San Remo concluded a secret agreement concerning spheres of influence and oil interests in the territories affected by the Treaty of SÈvres, which, when news of it leaked out, raised an outcry, especially in the United States. The State Department made a strong protest against the assumption on the part of the three Entente Powers of the right to regard the Ottoman mandates as exclusive monopolies. This was according to neither the text nor the spirit of the Peace Conference agreements, embodied in the Covenant.

Premier Nitti had been right in his prophecy at San Remo that representative Turks could not be found to sign the treaty. The Turkish delegation at SÈvres represented only a Constantinople Government in captivity to the Entente Powers. There was a day of mourning at Constantinople in protest against the treaty. But the Turkish Nationalists issued a defiance from Angora, declaring that the Turks would not be bound by the signature. Behind them stood not only Soviet Russia, which had refused to recognize the four preceding treaties, but also France and Italy, who had begun to fear that the Greeks were agents of the British, and that the scheme of demilitarizing the Straits would mean their control by the dominant sea-power.

The Treaty of SÈvres was not ratified. Its sole hope of success depended upon the Greek army. In the end it was going to be seen that force would save Turkey from partition, as it saved Albania, and that, in the chaos and anarchy and slaughter ahead, the League of Nations was going to make no effort to settle the Near Eastern question.