Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The chaos and weakness which we have described were in full blossom by the seventeenth century, and grew worse during the next two hundred years. As early as 1699 the sultan lost Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia to the Habsburgs, parts of the western Balkans to Venice, and districts in the north to Poland. In the course of the eighteenth century, Russia acquired areas north of the Black Sea, notably the Crimea.

During the nineteenth century, the Near East question became increasingly acute. Russia emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as a Great Power, able to increase its pressure on Turkey. This pressure resulted from three motivations. Russian imperialism sought to win an outlet to open waters in the south by dominating the Black Sea and by winning access to the Aegean through the acquisition of the Straits and Constantinople. Later this effort was supplemented by economic and diplomatic pressure on Persia in order to reach the Persian Gulf. At the same time, Russia regarded itself as the protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and as early as 1774 had obtained the sultan’s consent to this protective role. Moreover, as the most powerful Slav state, Russia had ambitions to be regarded as the protector of the Slavs in the sultan’s domains.

These Russian ambitions could never have been thwarted by the sultan alone, but he did not need to stand alone. He generally found support from Britain and increasingly from France. Britain was obsessed with the need to defend India, which was a manpower pool and military staging area vital to the defense of the whole empire. From 1840 to 1907, it faced the nightmare possibility that Russia might attempt to cross Afghanistan to northwest India, or cross Persia to the Persian Gulf, or penetrate through the Dardanelles and the Aegean onto the British “lifeline to India” by way of the Mediterranean. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 increased the importance of this Mediterranean route to the east in British eyes. It was protected by British forces in Gibraltar, Malta (acquired 1800), Cyprus (1878), and Egypt (1882). In general, in spite of English humanitarian sympathy for the peoples subject to the tyranny of the Turk, and in spite of England’s regard for the merits of good government, British imperial policy considered that its interests would be safer with a weak, if corrupt, Turkey in the Near East than they would be with any Great Power in that area or with the area broken up into small independent states which might fall under the influence of the Great Powers.

The French concern with the Near East was parallel to, but weaker than, that of Britain. They had cultural and trade relations with the Levant going back, in some cases, to the Crusades. In addition the French had ancient claims, revived in 1854, to be considered the protectors of Roman Catholics in the Ottoman Empire and of the “holy places” in Jerusalem.

Three other influences which became increasingly strong in the Near East^ were the growth of nationalism and the growing interests of Austria (after 1866) and of Germany (after 1889). The first stirrings of Balkan nationalism can be seen in the revolt of the Serbs in 1804-1812. By seizing Bessarabia from Turkey in 1812, Russia won the right for local self-government for the Serbs. Unfortunately, these latter began almost immediately to fight one another, the chief split being between a Russophile group led by Milan Obrenovich and a Serb nationalist group led by George Petrović (better known as Karageorge). The Serb state, formally established in 1830, was bounded by the rivers Dvina, Save, Danube, and Timok. With local autonomy under Turkish suzerainty, it continued to pay tribute to the sultan and to support garrisons of Turkish troops. The vicious feud between Obrenovich and Karageorgević continued after Serbia obtained complete independence in 1878. The Obrenovich dynasty ruled in 1817-1842 and 1858-1903, while the Karageorgević group ruled in 1842-1858 and 1903-1945. The intrigues of these two against each other broadened into a constitutional conflict in which the Obrenovich group supported the somewhat less liberal constitution of 1869, while the Karageorgević group supported the somewhat more liberal constitution of 1889. The former constitution was in effect in 1869-1889 and again in 1894-1903, while the latter was in effect in 1889-1894 and again in 1903-1921. In order to win popular support by an appeal to nationalist sentiments, both groups plotted against Turkey and later against Austria-Hungary.

A second example of Balkan nationalism appeared in the Greek struggle for independence from the sultan (1821-1830). After Greeks and Muslims had massacred each other by the thousands, Greek independence was established with a constitutional monarchy under the guarantee of the three Great Powers. A Bavarian prince was placed on the throne and began to establish a centralized, bureaucratic, constitutional state which was quite unsuited for a country with such unconstitutional traditions, poor transportation and communications, a low level of literacy, and a high level of partisan localism. After thirty turbulent years (1832-1862), Otto of Bavaria was deposed and replaced by a Danish prince and a completely democratic unicameral government which functioned only slightly better. The Danish dynasty continues to rule, although supplanted by a republic in 1924-1935 and by military dictatorships on sundry occasions, notably that of Joannes Metaxas (1936-1941).

The first beginnings of Balkan nationalism must not be overemphasized. While the inhabitants of the area have always been unfriendly to outsiders and resentful of burdensome governments, these sentiments deserve to be regarded as provincialism or localism rather than nationalism. Such feelings are prevalent among all primitive peoples and must not be regarded as nationalism unless they are so wide as to embrace loyalty to all peoples of the same language and culture and are organized in such fashion that this loyalty is directed toward the state as the core of nationalist strivings. Understood in this way, nationalism became a very potent factor in the disruption of the Ottoman Empire only after 1878.

Closely related to the beginnings of Balkan nationalism were the beginnings of Pan-Slavism and the various “pan-movements’’ in reaction to this, such as Pan-Islamism. These rose to a significant level only at the very end of the nineteenth century. Simply defined, Pan-Slavism was a movement for cultural unity, and, perhaps in the long run, political unity among the Slavs. In practice it came to mean the right of Russia to assume the role of protector of the Slav peoples outside Russia itself. At times it was difficult for some peoples, especially Russia’s enemies, to distinguish between Pan-Slavism and Russian imperialism. Equally simply defined, Pan-Islamism was a movement for unity or at least cooperation among all the Muslim peoples in order to resist the encroachments of the European Powers on Muslim territories. In concrete terms it sought to give the caliph a religious leadership, and perhaps in time a political leadership such as he had really never previously possessed. Both of these pan-movements are of no importance until the end of the nineteenth century, while Balkan nationalism was only slightly earlier than they in its rise to importance.

These Balkan nationalists had romantic dreams about uniting peoples of the same language, and generally looked back, with a distorted historical perspective, to some period when their co-linguists had played a more important political role. The Greeks dreamed of a revived Byzantine state or even of a Periclean Athenian Empire. The Serbs dreamed of the days of Stephen Dushan, while the Bulgars went further back to the days of the Bulgarian Empire of Symeon in the early tenth century. However, we must remember that even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century such dreams were found only among the educated minority of Balkan peoples. In the nineteenth century, agitation in the Balkans was much more likely to be caused by Turkish misgovernment than by any stirrings of national feeling. Moreover, when national feeling did appear it was just as likely to appear as a feeling of animosity against neighbors who were different, rather than a feeling of unity with peoples who were the same in culture and religion. And at all times localism and class antagonisms (especially rural hostility against urban groups) remained at a high level.