article: Back in the early 1990s, when I was on my way to join the first British troops despatched for peace-keeping duties to Bosnia, I stayed overnight at a Vienna hotel. In the lobby, there was a series of 19th Century maps of the Hapsburg Empire. There they were, all of the old names - Bosnia Herzegovina, the Croat lands - names, long consigned to the history books, that were now the currency of nightly news reports, marking out the boundaries of this latest tragedy in the Balkans. Later, standing in Sarajevo's old Turkish market, one had the clear sense of being in a historic border zone; a frontier between Europe and the old Ottoman lands to the east. It was a reminder that for much of the 19th Century, Western diplomacy had been obsessed with what became known as "the Eastern Question." This was the fear as to what might happen as the Ottoman Empire - then seen as "the sick man of Europe" - slowly relinquished its grip on its various possessions. Who might step into the breach? One obvious concern was Russia. Britain and France had already fought one campaign to bolster Turkey and limit Russia's influence in the Holy Land - the Crimean War of the 1850s. Do you see a pattern here? Again those familiar names and themes; the Crimea; Russian influence in the Middle East. Times change - but geography doesn't, and strategic interests have as much to do with geography as they do with anything else. Thus, Europe now faces what might be called "a new Eastern Question". It is not so much Turkey's weakness that is the problem today; it is maybe more a question of Ankara's over-reach. Turkey has seemingly achieved the impossible. I remember some years ago interviewing the then Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. Bookish, a former professor, he was the proud architect of Turkey's new foreign policy, one of zero problems with any of its neighbours. Now, Mr Davutoglu is Prime Minister. And in the intervening years, Turkey seems instead to have developed problems with almost all of its neighbours and erstwhile regional partners; be it Syria, Israel, and now, crucially, Russia. Moscow and Ankara find themselves on different sides in the Syrian crisis; Moscow backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, and Turkey in the vanguard of those countries most eager to see his departure. A kind of proxy war has turned hot, with Russia bombing Syrian opposition groups backed by Turkey and encouraging Kurdish forces to press ever closer to the Turkish frontier. Turkey's shooting down of a Russian warplane last November - a plane that on best evidence had only briefly intruded into Turkish airspace - worsened the tensions. More recently, the Russian-backed Syrian offensive on Aleppo has sent new waves of refugees heading for the Turkish border and worsened Ankara's fears about Kurdish success. This "new Eastern Question" impinges upon Western Europe in two crucial ways. First, Turkey is a member of Nato. If it gets itself into a spat with the Russians, this could have dramatic consequences
summary: History has a strange way of imposing itself upon the present.