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Did Britain want the wrong answer to the Eastern Question?

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  Posted by jenny (U14149730) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011

  
  Thinking back to my (long ago!) school history, I can remember l9thC Britain being dominated by two interminable 'Questions' - the Irish Question and the Eastern Question.
  
  The Irish one, as we know, was inherently unanswerable and still is and, like that of the Holy Land, is solvable only by the creation of a parallel universe in which the physical space can be simultaneously occupied by both of the contending parties, but in a different quantum/space dimension etc etc, so they never have to see each other!!!
  
  The EQ, however, did get resolved finally (to an extent!) in the aftermath of the WWI and the end (finally!) of the decaying Ottoman Empire.
  
  I appreciate that the British policy of upholding the decaying OE was soley in order to prevent the Russian fleet getting out of the Black Sea, but was there any attempt by an British politicians to see any alternative to the OE?
  
  The OE was so obviously 'decaying' - with Greece having broken free (hurrah!) in the early part of the century - but did any Brits have the sense to think, hmm, this is an empire dead on its feet, I wonder what history will replace it with? I known, how about some vigorous nation states instead....?
  
  Or had Russian foreign policy scuppered that move by coming on strong with pan-Slavism and making any kind of indepdent nation states in the Balkans, at least, just another thread to the UK?
  
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 28th June 2011

  Jenny
  
  Well the creation of Modern Greece owed a great deal to British sponsorship in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, which can be seen in the context of a long English struggle against the ambitions of Continental Empires. By this time it was said that Britain had lost its first Empire, but- in order to combat the new French Imperialism after 1793- had expanded Britain with the Union with Ireland.
  
  Nevertheless caught between Imperialistic Revolution and Reaction- the Three Emperors League- British Foreign Policy favoured smaller "nation states" and small states altogether. Hence the tremendous British support politically and financially for the new independent republics of Latin America, for Greece and then for Belgium.
  
  There was a widespread view that England provided the best role model for a state, and had been used as such in order to shape the Prussian Revolution that started the dynamic that created Germany later on. And for the educated English Ancient Greek Athenian democracy seemed to be the idea. Small states where all the citizens could feel a real sense of involvement in decision making, and the burden of collective action. So when Marx wrote about "the withering away of the State" to some extent he was expressing the common view of the English people, because -as E.P.Thompson brought out in "The Making of the Working Class"- it was the post-war repression carried out by a heavy-handed Government "machine" forged by 20 years of war that had created an alenated working class.
  
  The reforms of the 1830's which historians often called the period of "laissez faire" were largely aimed at reducing the weight of the British State, so that in the middle of the century one of Gladstone's great aspirations in his budgets was to eventually get the British State finances so low that he could totally do away with income tax, only introduced as an emergency war-time measure. Incidentally in the 1830's Daniel O'Connell- the leader of the Irish cause in the Westminster Parliament also reflected this mood by suggesting the dual state-single monarchy solution. When Victoria came to the throne he suggested that she could be accepted as Queen of Ireland, but that Ireland should have its own parliament and its own politics.
  
  As you have said this "small state" solution informed the Eastern Question during the middle part of the Nineteenth Century, with the Crimean War aimed at curbing the growth of the Russian Empire in the region, which was also likely to suck in the ambitions of Austria-Hungary, through Metternick one of the great forces of reactionary politics in the first half of the Nineteenth Century.
  
  But in fact the Crimea was a disaster showing that British arms were no longer those of Trafalgar and Waterloo. The Turks managed to conduct their own successful negotiations with Russia- Empire to Empire. Britain's ally in progressive politics since c1834- France- returned to Imperialism with Napoleon III's adventure in Mexico. The "Indian Mutiny" when British Indian troops were withdrawn to fight in the Crimean expressed an Indian frustration with Company Rule and the absence of a proper Emperor. So the Indian subcontinent was made part of a new British Empire (Canada having already in the 1830's shown the "way ahead" by becoming a Self-Governing dominion).
  
  But the reality of the times that faced a Britain in comparative decline was that the dynamism of the age was once again Imperialist. The American Civil War had shown that in essence it was not a voluntary conglomerate of states but a form of empire stretching its own imperial sway coast to coast. Similarly Russia was now modernising and doing the same- pushing out its borders, or seeking to, in all directions from the Baltic to the Pacific from the White Sea to the Black Sea and the "Persian Gulf". And by 1870 there was a new German Empire in Europe.
  
  Britain continued to support the smaller nation state solutions fearing the consequences of great Empires, so much associated with aggression and expansionism. Garibaldi and Mazini as Italian Nationalists were great heros personally in Britain, where really the ideas formulated by Woodrow Wilson in his 14 points were at least implicit in British policy. What the world needed was small self-determining states where one "race" of people could develop and express the flow of life that was true to their own being, happy as in English freedom to grant to their neighbours the right to just get on with their own lives in mutual peace and prosperity, with some over-arching treaties and agreements that would allow the small to combine against the threat of the mighty.
  
  All of this could be traced back to the Glorious Bloodless Revolution of 1688-9 and its aftermath, when William III ,as joint monarch of Britain, and stadholder of the Netherlands forged a Grand Alliance to thwart and defeat the Grand Design of Louis XIV to make France the dominant power in Europe.
  
  So from 1870 or so one could say that British policy to some extent had to cover the two extemes of hoping for the best, but also preparing for the worst in a world in which the tides of change were incredibly powerful with Empires- the great stable blocks of much of the world- Russia, Austria-Hungary. Turkey, India, China- all threatening to fall apart and fail bringing something not unlike the consequences of the collapse of the Greco-Roman Empire.
  
  Cass
  
  

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 29th June 2011

  jenny
  
  As to the "wrong answer" element in your question-
  
  As I believe that the State emerged as an evil necessity, a lesser evil than anarchy and vulnerability, I feel that it has been correct to seek to keep States as close to the human level as possible..
  
  The emergence of the modern Western State over the last 500 years or so has been very closely linked to the capacity to harness science, technology and finance to its service... . People who run States claim to serve the people, but in so doing they serve themselves first. As Hitler said "Let us get power first. Then we will decide what we will do."
  
  Increasingly science, technology and finance has its own agenda and its own laws that must be obeyed rather than any laws laid down by a God who made humankind in his image.
  
  In a moment of lucidity back in the late Thirties or early Forties Julian Huxley wrote an article "Economic Man or Social Man".. It was a time when socialism with a small "s" became accepted after the free trade and free market ideas of the previous 80 or so years. But the evils of Nazism and the necessary struggle against it brought Statism to its highest development yet- in post-war Britain with a Welfare State that undertook to care for the people "From the Cradle to the Grave".
  
  I wrote a piece "The Re-Discovery of Social Man" about all this ten years ago.
  
  As a species human beings are I believe social creatures and live best in Societies and not States. A Society is a way of living together in which people do things because, when it comes down to, it they wish to- even if only out of a sense that they should.
  
  As a teacher therefore it was always my ambition to make pupils interested in the processes and aims of education, rather than to force it upon them.
  You can lead a horse to the water but you can not make it drink.. And there are some of us who immediately and instinctively when we are told that we are going to be compelled and coerced to do something- which is the special attribute of the State- immediately resolve to make the effort very costly in one way or another.
  
  Cass
  
  

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  Posted by lolbeeble (U1662865) on Wednesday, 6th July 2011

  Just a thought, but I cannot help thinking that vibrant as applied to the successor states of the Ottoman's European possessions is just a euphemism for being territorially acquisitive and willing to sponsor cross border acts of terrorism given the rival ambitions of the various political entities that came into existence. Indeed the model of establishing independent states as the successors to various empires in the Middle East hardly seems to have answered the Eastern Question but rather changed the framework within which it is set.
  
  As the Greek situation demonstrates, the prospect for any real sense of independence was just an illusion as the powers fostered numerous factions sympathetic to their interests in order to derive the greatest benefit when it suited them. Greek aspirations for independence came to be supported by the British and French rather than the international communities favoured policy for the creation of an autonomous tributary along the same lines as Serbia as much because it lessened the possible influence of Russia. The newly crowned Tsar Nicholas looked to play upon his role as protector of the Orthodox faith and later enforcer of the 1829 protocol. Greek representatives were not invited to discuss the drawing of the territories borders however.

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