ABSTRACT
Since autumn 1896 when Luxemburg and Bernstein had challenged Liebknecht's interpretation of events in the Near East, social democrats had not forgotten the crisis in the Ottoman Empire. By February 1897 more unrest had occurred on Crete. Greece dispatched a military force to the island, but the Powers decided in favor of Cretan autonomy and told Greece to withdraw its forces. With Liebknecht still editor-in-chief, Vorwarts continued much the same editorial policy as the year before: The real cause of unrest remained Russia, aided by the contradictory policies of the Powers. In the midst of rising public enthusiasm for Greece and the Cretans, the newspaper observed that at least the SOF perceived the Russian threat. 1
Bernstein presented another view in his Neue Zeit article "Crete," (dated February 18, 1897), which Kautsky thoroughly liked. In the essay Bernstein employed arguments like those used against Liebknecht in the autumn. First, Bernstein defended Greece's assisting the Cretan rebellion. For him, the Cretans possessed as much right to rebel against the Turks as had the Dutch against the Spanish, the Italians against the Austrians, or the Germans in Holstein against the Danes. No violation of Turkish rights occurred, he judged, because Ottoman rule over Crete rested on military conquest; in terms of both ethnic identity and religion, Crete belonged to Greece. Second, Bernstein rejected the supposition that the Czar lurked behind the separation of Crete from Turkey; on the contrary, Bernstein believed that Russia wished to uphold the Ottoman Empire. He warned,
It was Russia that coined the phrase "maintaining the integrity of the Turkish Empire," and those who unconditionally repeat the slogan merely attend to or further the business of the Czar.
