Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/288



It is one of the tragedies of pre-War diplomacy that the negotiations of 1910-1914 failed to preserve peace in the Near East or, at least, to prevent the entry of Turkey into the Great War. But the failure of the treaties between Germany and the Entente Powers regarding the Ottoman Empire can be traced, in general, to the same reasons that contributed to the collapse of all diplomacy in the crisis of 1914. Imperialism, nationalism, militarism—these were the causes of the Great War; these were the causes of Ottoman participation in the Great War.

One obvious defect of the Potsdam Agreement, the Franco-German agreement regarding Anatolian railways, the Anglo-Turkish settlement of 1913, and the Anglo-German convention regarding Mesopotamia, was the fact that they were founded upon the principle of imperial compensations. Each of the Great Powers involved made "sacrifices"—but in return for important considerations. And throughout all of the bargaining the rights of Turkey, a "backward nation," were completely ignored. As the German ambassador in London wrote: "The real purpose of these treaties was to divide Asia Minor into spheres of interest, although this expression was anxiously avoided, out of regard for the rights of the Sultan By virtue of the treaties all Mesopotamia as far as Basra became our sphere of interest, without prejudice to older British rights in the navigation of the Tigris and in the Willcocks irrigation works. Our sphere further included the whole region of the Bagdad and Anatolian Railways. The British economic domain was to include the coasts of the Persian Gulf and the Smyrna-Aidin line; the French, Syria; the Russian, Armenia."[34]

In the scramble for concessions in Asia Minor, Italy had been overlooked. The proposed extension of the