التنافس الدبلوماسي الأوربي في بلاد الشام 1831-1914

الملخص EN

After the French campaign against Egypt in 1798, the Arab region, including the Levant, became a circle of actual diplomatic competition between European countries (Britain, France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia), which faced Muhammad Ali Pasha's control of the Levant 1831-1841 with a diplomatic, economic, and social orientation And these countries did not hesitate to use sectarian and racial conflicts to interfere in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire.

Against the Maronite Christians supported by France, whose task was to resist and eradicate French influence, and to consider this not only a political issue but also an ethical one as he put it, while Tsarist Russia supported the Orthodox Christians (the Eastern Church) in hopes of reaching warm waters.

As for Austria and Prussia, they had more economic and commercial ambitions than political.

And the foreign concessions that the Ottoman Empire granted to European countries at the beginning of the sixteenth century contributed to increasing diplomatic rivalry between them, and although the European consular presence was not present in the Levant before the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha, However, the important thing in the matter is that (the consular mission has shifted from its primary objectives, which is to protect the economic interests of its countries to a political mission aimed at settling accounts between European countries themselves, which negatively affected the Ottoman Empire and undermined it in the future), and foreign concessions have granted European countries the right to The appointment of (consular agents) from the citizens of the Ottoman Empire, which contributed to the creation of a network of spies and collaborators with these countries, because these are their loyalty to the countries that appointed them and not to the Ottoman Empire, It also gave (the system of protection of the Ottoman boredom) a wide opportunity for European countries to interfere in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire, in addition to the interference of the consuls in the public affairs of the people.

European countries culminated in their diplomatic efforts to compel Muhammad Ali Pasha to sign the London Treaty in 1840 to evacuate the Levant and continued to interfere in his internal affairs until World War I 1914 and divide them among themselves later.