Repository: UIHistories Project: War Publications - WWI Compilation 1923 - Article 20 [PAGE 2]

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TERRITORIAL PROBLEMS O F TOE BALTIC BASIN In these days we often think of seas, rivers, and other waterways as natural boundaries separating nations and peoples, and affording a certain security against attack and invasion. But in earlier centuries in the age before strategic railways, this was not the prevailing belief! Three generations ago the seas were not regarded as barriers: they were connecting influences that served to bind states and regions together. The sea has always been important as the great highway of commerce, 1 and it has also facilitated the exchange of beliefs and ideas. In the past, nations have therefore been peculiarly interested in the seas that washed their shores, and also in the other shores that were touched by the same waters. In spite of changed conditions of travel and transport, the interest in waterways has persisted. Italy seems anxious to control both shores of the Adriatic; and England feels that she must control the entire circuit of the Irish Sea. No nation at present can hope to make the Baltic Sea its own; but such ambitions have been cherished in the past and at times almost realized. Four hundred years ago Denmark was the greatest power on the "Eastern Sea." In the seventeenth century Sweden developed an even more complete hegemony in those waters, but was forced to surrender it to the Russians early in the eighteenth century. In recent years Germany has dominated the Baltic, and for a year after the Russian collapse the shores and the shipping of the entire sea was at her mercy. It should be noted that Sweden has all her sea coast on these inland waters, that Denmark and Prussia have a number of important ports on the Baltic, and that in 1914 Russia, too, had a long "window" looking out upon this same sea. Economically speaking, the Baltic region is to a great extent a unit. In the years before the outbreak of the Great War the exports of Russia were directed chiefly toward Germany, from which country she also drew more than half of her imports. The commerce of Sweden has always traveled chiefly eastward and southward, to Russia and to Germany. It is therefore quite natural that the peoples occupying the shores of this great waterway should be interested in every important change that appears in any other part of the basin. began to mobilize, the sword But now there is chaos in Russia and turmoil in Germany. out 2

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