サー・ロバート・モーリアーの英露提携論-パクス・ブリタニカの衰退とイギリス東方政策の再編-

国際政治のなかの中東

抄録

Sir Robert Morier (1826-93) was a lifelong rival of Bismarck, firstly as a friend of Crown Prince Frederick and Princess Victoria in the German court, secondly as an ambassador at St. Petersburg. In his earlyy career, he was a keen Cobdenist who believes in Free Trade as the key to international peace and an advocate of German liberals in the course of German Unification. But the advent of Bismarck becoming chancellor makes him to recognize its danger to European peace because “Bismarck's Peace” by alliance policy consisted of mutual suspicion among great powers. “The dangerous element in Europe is not Germany but Bismarck. He is getting just as dangerous as Napoleon I was after Austerlitz.”
In the Eastern Crisis in the 1870s, he analyzed that an Anglo-Russian understanding would reduce Bismarck to produce influence within Europe. Therefore, he made a proposal of a joint English and Russian occupation of the Ottoman Empire. But the British government chose to threaten Russia and achieved the diplomatic triumph at the Berlin Congress in 1878. But, at that time, “the Eastern Question” and “the Great Game” were beginning to be closely linked. Russia wanted to compensate for their blunder in Turkey by expanding in Central Asia, at Pendjeh in 1885. The rumor was spread that Britain and Russia were on the brink of war.
Although war was avoided, the crisis continued. On November 1885, Morier arrived at St. Petersburg as an Ambassador when the Russo-Afghan boundary needed to be precisely demarcated. Finally, he played an important role in the last phase of the boundary negotiations and the agreement was signed in July 1887. His belief in the necessity of an Anglo-Russian under-standing melted antagonism between two states and marked the beginning of the end of a “Great Game.”
This paper examines analytically Morier's suggestions for British foreign policy from the view of an interconnection of two systems: “the Eastern Question, ” the core of European balance of power, and “the Great Game, ” the global rivalry between Britain and Russia.