ASIA AND EUROPE.

Evening Star, Issue 18334, 23 July 1923, Page 6

ASIA AND EUROPE.

It will be fortunate if only sheep are sacrificed by good Moslems in the celebration of the Turkish peaco which is expected to be signed to-morrow at Lausanne. Correspondents are apprehensive of much worse results from the effect upon the Turks’ unruly temperament of the victory they have won over the Allies. They dread what the sequel may be of the withdrawal of the occupying troops from Constantinople, and they have reason for those fears. The greatest danger of all is that it is not only the Ottomans who will regard the concessions that have been wrung from Allied diplomats as a new sign of the weakness of the West. The prestige of Europe has been much diminished since the war ended in the eyes of Orientals, and that circumstance does not promise well for future peace. In a recent article Professor Guglielmo Ferrcro, who is a distinguished Italian historian, recalls how the years since the ; Great War closed have been little else, from the Orient’s viewpoint, than a long series of concessions to the East. India has had the hope held out to her of selfgovernment, which can never be realised too quickly for her extreme agitators. In 1919, after a frontier war, Britain renounced her claim to the protectorate of Afghanistan, making the first triumph to bo won by arms by an Eastern nation. In 1919 a British protectorate was declared over Persia, but the treaty which established it was found too troublesome owing to European dissensions and jealousies. It remained a dead letter, and has since been abandoned. Riots have won self-government for the Egyptians, j who are not more contented on that ac-! count. But the greatest surprise, Professor Ferrcro points out, has come from Turkey. “At the end of 1918 Turkey seemed to have been annihilated. The Treaty of Sevres not only snuffed out the Ottoman Empire, but all Islam in so far as political and military power was concerned. Turkey has since regained Smyrna, Constantinople, and her independence, and the Khalifato is more fanatical in its hatred of Europe and Christianity than before.” Even China, torn as she has been by revolution, has contrived in recent years to cancel a number of rights and privileges which she had granted earlier to the great European Powers, as well as to Japan. It is hardly too much to say, as this authority does, that Asia is everywhere rebelling against Europe at the same time that Asia is becoming Europeanised. Not only European and American weapons, but European and American ideas and doctrines, are being turned against Europe by Asiatics. The rebellion is conducted with the more assurance since Russia, which was for centuries the great bulwark of the West against Asia, has fallen from its position as a European Power. The triumph which the Turks have won vrith their new treaty would have been impossible but for that collapse. The dissensions of the remaining European nations are an incentive to the aspirations and the defiance of every element in tho Orient which hates tho West. It may be, and probably is, fantastic to imagine Islamic races or Turkoman races or “yellow ” races, which are almost as much divided themselves as Europe, combining within any measurable period to make an end of the predominant authority which Europe holds at present in the Old World; but it would bo a rash mind that would view present tendencies with equanimity.