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No. 6 Vienna, 9 February 1900. Fourth Year

Turkey in World Politics.

By 0. Erter.

It is intelligible that the eyes of the world should be fixed, as though hypnotised, upon South Africa and upon London. What stands to be decided in South Africa is indeed something great, and is by no means exhausted in the question whether and how the two Dutch republics are to continue in existence. Rather, one may measure precisely by the overwhelming interest with which the events of the war in South Africa are followed everywhere in the world, that something is there at stake which reaches as far beyond the local significance of the war as England's world-position reaches beyond the existence of the South African free states. England is fighting for her prestige, for the whole of her colonial power and greatness, for she cannot renounce her supremacy in South Africa without losing one of the firm clamps by which India is held together with the mother country. And India is the pied-à-terre of British power.

If it is accordingly easy to understand how deeply the world is interested in the struggles in Natal — not merely on the surface, but feeling itself, in view of the Balance of Powers, directly concerned in their issue — it is on the other hand less comprehensible that it perceives, as it were only with half an eye, other occurrences, not less important, which are played out indeed in secret stillness upon other scenes, but which in their effect work toward the same political quarter of the heavens as do the South African battles. That Russia, in order to assure herself whether she can in a short time throw troops from Transcaspia to the Afghan frontier, has undertaken the trial dislocation to Kuschk; that she resolved soon afterwards to guarantee a Persian loan upon the basis of a pledging of the Persian customs — this has been recorded with an equanimity all the more remarkable in that the right to build railways in Persia has already passed to Russia as well. It goes without saying that in St. Petersburg it has been proclaimed that it would be an injustice to the peaceableness of Russia to derive from all this the suspicion that England's South African embarrassments were being used to realise Russian plans of expansion. And this assurance may be credited, notwithstanding that certain hot-blooded Russian journals betrayed, by their triumphant animosity, an ardent wish for the contrary. It is not in the least to be mistaken that Russian foreign policy of to-day, in accordance with the intentions of the Czar Nicholas II., has stripped from itself the trait of insidiousness which formerly marked it. But on the other hand one cannot close one's eyes to the fact that, as the signs now stand, Russia and England draw ever nearer to one another in Asia, that the distance between them grows ever smaller, and that the more this is the case, the more tightly is Turkey wedged in between them.

From this point of view the evolutions of which we speak have hitherto not been taken into consideration at all, and we believe that there is occasion enough for precisely that. If England is fighting in South Africa for the inviolability of India and for her paramountcy over Egypt — which is certainly not to be doubted — Russia is securing to herself, by the dislocation of troops to Kuschk and the guarantee of the Persian loan, her Central Asian preponderance. Between the two, however, Turkey stands as between two millstones which may begin their work within a measurable time, and she has need of a great power of resistance if she would preserve herself in time from being ground to pieces. That England as a colonising power draws culture along in her train has been said often enough in these months since the beginning of the South African war; therein lies the narrow platform upon which the shrunken sympathy for England can still move at all. But Russia too spreads culture after her fashion wherever she sets foot in Asia; it is a grandiose piece of cultural work that presents itself in the Trans-Siberian Railway. What has Turkey to set against this, in order to make herself secure as an intermediate power between England and Russia in Asia? The Russo-Persian surprise recalls a famous saying in the French Deputierten-