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tier of Asia Minör. The exceptionally able and far-seeing Turkish leaderissued an order that the enemy must not be allovved to cross this line andthe British never did. The actual military front at that moment ought toset the outside limit for the permanent political frontier of the futureTurkish state. The linguistical map of Asia Minör showed that the Arabsspread some 20 to 50 kilometers south of the Baghdad railway line. Thusthe advance of the British army was halted at the approximate linguisticalline of demarcation between Turkish and Arab peoples. In the dark andbitter months ahead, when it became necessary to define the national territoriallimits of the new Turkey, Atatürk chose this line, traced, as hesaid, by Turkish bayonets. A common language was not the only possiblebond of modern nationality, yet it was the most obvious and prevalentone. There was Turkish linguistic unity north of the line drawn on 26 Octoberand such a delineation of the border conformed, on the whole, to theprinciple of nationalities. Thus the Mazzinian-Wilsonian ideal of linguisticself-determination came closer to realization in Turkey than elsewherein the Middle East.In the Erzurum Congress of 13 July - 7 August 1919, held withAtatürk's participation and under his direction, it was particularlystressed that the territories which were controlled by the Turkish armieson 30 October 1918 were a single invisible whole and could not be separatedfrom each other. The acceptance of national boundaries at Erzurumwas the fırst big step on the road to the new national Turkish state. Laterthe Turkish leader was to remark: "I confess that I, too, tried to define thenational border somewhat according to the humanitarian purposes of theAmerican President Woodrow Wilson's principles. On the basis of thosehumanitarian principles, I defended boundaries which Turkish bayonetshad already defended and laid down. Poor Wilson, he did not understandthat lines that cannot be defended by the bayonet, by force, by honour anddignity, cannot be defended on any other principle." The judgement ofAtatürk was condescending in its phrasing but apt in its substance 29 .The Sublime Porte, under unrelenting pressure from the British,could not accept Atatürk's definition of the Syrian frontier as the area beingactively defended by Turkish bayonets. Atatürk tried to oppose surrenderto foreign occupation of territory he regarded as geographicallyand linguistically Turkish. He had by this time developed a Western-stylenational consciousness of a sort not uncommon among educated Turks,many of them from the offîcer class. His nationalism, so far as it had atheory, derived it from the French revolution. By 1918 nationalism was adoctrine familiar enough and congenial enough to the Turkish intelligentsiawho had some contact with Western ideas to enable them to seize onWilson's principle of the self-determination of peoples as a means of savingthe Turkish nucleus of the Ottoman Empire after the defeat. In resistingforeign occupation the Turkish leader thus insisted that the Turks29. ibid. p. 83.635