Lord Salisbury and Nationality in the East by Shih-tsung Wang

Author:Shih-tsung Wang [Wang, Shih-tsung]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Ethnic Studies, American, Asian American Studies, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780429603747
Google: VAScDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-07T04:56:09+00:00

v The Greco-Turkish conflict

The Greco-Turkish conflict was the epitome of the differences between Oriental system of political authority and Western ideology of national rights, which consistently featured the Eastern Question. The Turkish conquest of Greece was, Salisbury said in 1864, the only parallel to the English conquest of Ireland.142 Owing to religious feeling and the sense of cultural identity, which was sometimes tinged with romantic thoughts and a poetical mood, some of the British people (particularly intellectuals) had a special sympathy for the Greeks challenging the Turkish power. In London the Liberal Unionists (inc. Joseph Chamberlain), who, as Salisbury observed, were very philhellenic in their outlook, called for an absolute abandonment of any policy hostile to the demands of Greece. After his first premiership (1885–86) Salisbury no longer shared those sympathies, at least not with his old warmth: his friendship for Greece and support of her nationalist demands dwindled drastically after the 1880s, which coincided with the diminution of the importance of Greece as a bulwark against Russian advances after Bulgaria had grown stronger and more anti-Russian. Salisbury was disgusted by the Greeks’ incessant pressure and extravagant demands on Turkey, and by their inability to direct their internal affairs properly. The Greek doctrine that their government was endowed with an inherent right of rule over the Greek-speaking districts in the Eastern Mediterranean was to him a totally inadmissible claim. He said in 1889: ‘When I came to the Foreign Office in 1878 I believed strongly in the Greeks. Now that I know Greece better, I regret what I did… . The policy of Greece is to threaten, at each crisis to kindle a European war, unless she is bought off. She is the blackmailer of Europe.’ ‘The Eastern Question will not be solved by them,’ Salisbury affirmed. And he considered that Europe might now do towards Greece what Greece was doing towards Turkey – wait until a suitable opportunity occurred for taking measures which would ‘paralyse her powers of mischief for the future.’143

On the issue of the rectification of the Greco-Turkish boundary, raised at Berlin in 1878 and implemented in 1881, Salisbury made out his case clearly at the Berlin Congress and in the immediately following period. He maintained that Britain would not be a party to the effacement of Turkey in Europe, though she agreed that the Turkish frontiers should be materially reduced ‘so as to relieve [the Porte] of untenable territory.’144 By a ‘liberal’ rectification of the frontiers, he attempted at once to strengthen Greece and to ensure her friendship for Turkey in the future, which would contribute to the erection of an effective barrier to the Slavs. In examining this question, with its strategic and ethnic matters at the core, Salisbury thought much of an approach to a friendly settlement between the two nations. He was inclined to urge the Porte to make a ‘spontaneous’ concession over the territories in question – Thessaly and Epirus particularly – where, he believed, due to the difference of nationality between

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