The Balkans: A Short History (18 page)

In the First Balkan War of 1912, Ottoman power in Europe vanished in a matter of weeks. Serbia and Greece were the main victors, both acquiring huge new territories. Bulgaria won much less, and was soon even worse off after she declared war on her former allies in the Second Balkan War the following year and was defeated by them. An independent Albania was recognized by the Great Powers, and defended against its hungry neighbors. The biggest loser in many ways—apart from the Ottoman empire—was Austria-Hungary, which now faced a successful and expansionist Serbia. Austria tried to build up Albania as a counterweight but could not prevent Kosovo and neighboring lands being assigned to Serbia and Montenegro.

The truth was that after two Balkan wars, Serbia was in no condition for a third. But in Vienna, that summer of 1914, many believed the time was ripe to crush Serbia once and for all. They knew they had the Germans behind them. On the other hand, the events of the 1908 Bosnian crisis made it virtually certain the Russians would back the Serbs, since they could not afford to lose face a second time. Hence the powers were bound to collide. After the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, the Serbian government made almost all the concessions the Austrians demanded. It was not enough. The third Balkan war in three years was started by Austria; within a week, thanks to the system of obligations imposed by the rival alliances of Europe, all the Great Powers had become embroiled, and the conflict became continental in scope.

Taken in isolation, there was little reason that the breakdown of the Austro-Russian entente in the decades after 1878 should have led to war. After all, Austrian and Russian interests lay on opposite sides of the Balkan peninsula. But both powers felt weaker as time went on. The growth of Balkan nationalism and the power vacuum created by the decline of Ottoman authority made it difficult for them to secure vital interests—South Slav obedience in Habsburg domains; control of the Black Sea and access to the Mediterranean in the case of Russia. They needed local allies and proxies and were thus drawn into the confused politics of the region. Matters were not helped by their lack of judgment in handling these allies, whose military and diplomatic skills they often underestimated. Balkan states were practiced in the “politics of oscillation.” In 1914, not for the last time in Balkan relations with the powers, the tail ended up wagging the dog.

Hajduks,
klephts,
armatoles
and brigands were heroes in the Balkan nationalist pantheon. Their exploits were the stuff of legend and oral epic. The prosaic reality was that conventional military and naval forces were more important in determining political outcomes. The 160,000 troops launched by Russia across the Danube in 1877 did more than any
hajduks
or klephts to win freedom for Balkan Christians. Over the two centuries leading to the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, regular armies would always win out over irregulars; the latter could prevail only by obtaining in turn the backing of a more powerful military force. The two Balkan wars of 1912–1913 demonstrated how far all the armies of the Balkans had adapted to the requirements of modern war. The arms race between them lasted right up to 1914. The Ottoman army was reorganized with Western advice and was led by Polish and Hungarian émigrés as well as British, American and German soldiers of fortune (like Mehmet Ali Pasha, a delegate at the Congress of Berlin, who had originally been a soldier in the Prussian army before converting and becoming an Ottoman army commander). Balkan armies too imported Western expertise and weaponry, huge investments for poor new states.

Regular armies bore the brunt of the fighting that followed as well. In 1914 the Serbs had a staggering 450,000 men under arms. By 1916, their strength was below 150,000, and 100,000 men had been killed. After two extraordinarily incompetent Habsburg invasions, and stiff resistance, the Serbian army was eventually forced to retreat to the sea, and abandon the country to military occupation. Turkey entered the war on the German side, and the other Balkan states saw an opportunity for what Bulgarian Foreign Minister Todorov described as “extortion,” demanding territory in any future peace settlement in return for entering the war. Bulgaria took the side of the Central Powers in return for pledges of Serbian and Greek territory, and eventually mobilized 800,000 men.

Greece and Romania took longer before backing what turned out to be the right horse. In Romania, the government entered on the Triple Entente side in the summer of 1916 before quickly succumbing to the Central Powers. “To make the Romanian army fight a modern war,” complained a Russian commander, “was asking a donkey to perform a minuet.” Romania was better at bargaining than fighting. Within months, the Romanian army was dissolved and a pro-German government was installed in Bucharest. “Romanian intervention,” according to Norman Stone, “made possible the German continuation of the war into 1918.” Luckily for the Romanians, other armies were better than theirs, a fact that enabled the country to profit handsomely from the Paris Peace Conference.
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In Greece, pro- and anti-interventionists split the country into two before the former, led by Prime Minister Eleuthérios Venizélos, prevailed. Greek, Serbian, Italian, British and French forces—the so-called Gardeners of Salonika—occupied the Macedonian front against the Central Powers. In the autumn of 1918, the Triple Entente forces made a breakthrough there with a successful offensive. Indeed, it was the Bulgarian collapse at the end of September that led German military leaders to conclude that the war was lost. David Lloyd George, one of Britain’s leading “Easterners,” commented bitterly: “Unfortunately, just as there were many who found it unimaginable that events in the Balkans could start a world war, so there were those who refused to believe that events in such an obscure part of the world could end one.”
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In fact, although the First World War ended in 1918, fighting in southeastern Europe continued for some time. The Ottoman empire had begun to disintegrate long before any of Europe’s other multinational empires, but its final collapse came well after the Habsburgs and Romanovs had left their thrones. In 1919 Greek forces landed in Asia Minor. Having secured the backing of the Great Powers for a bridgehead around the city of Smyrna, Venizélos himself saw this as the chance to fulfill the irredentist “Great Idea” and to re-create a Byzantine empire based in Constantinople. But Greece’s Asia Minor adventure ended in disaster: Turkish forces pushed the Greeks back to the Mediterranean coast, and eventually off the mainland altogether; Anatolia’s large Orthodox population was put to flight. Out of the fighting of 1921–1922 emerged the modern republic of Turkey, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, better known as Atatürk. The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, fled Constantinople on a British battleship and died in San Remo in 1926, with debts so heavy that his creditors delayed his burial for two weeks. Meanwhile, Atatürk began the uphill task—which continues to this day—of turning the former heartland of the empire into a Turkish nation-state.
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“The Allied powers,” stated the British foreign secretary in June 1915, “hope that as a result of the war, the political balance in the Balkans will be established on a broader and more national basis.” The eventual outcome was more ambiguous than this. The compulsory population exchange of 1923 between Greece and Turkey—by which Muslims left Greece for Turkey, and Orthodox Anatolians “returned” to Greece—increased the ethnic homogeneity of both countries. Greek Macedonia, in which Greeks had been less than half the population before 1914, thereby became nearly 90 percent Greek. Jewish Salonika became Greek Thessaloniki with the resettlement of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor. Romania, on the other hand, which made huge territorial gains at the expense of former Russian and Habsburg lands, gained new minorities: by 1922, the country was one third larger than before the war, but only two thirds ethnically Romanian: Hungarian, Jewish and Ukrainian populations were all substantial.
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Above all, there was the unique case of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the state created at Versailles that would be better known by its later name of Yugoslavia. At the start of the war, none of the Triple Entente powers intended to dismember the Austro-Hungarian empire to create a “new Europe.” Moreover, few South Slavs aspired to this either. But the collapse of the Habsburg empire and the threat from Italy, which had territorial demands of its own in Dalmatia, left the Croats and Slovenes with little choice but to embrace South Slav union under the leadership of Serbia’s Karajordje dynasty. Suspicions that what they were getting was not federalism but centralized rule from Belgrade and Greater Serbia were alive from the start: there were tensions during the wartime discussions among Serb, Croat and Slovene leaders and armed resistance to incorporation in the new state after 1918 among peasants from Croatia to Montenegro. The 1921 constitution confirmed their worst fears: henceforth, Serb civil servants and army officers dominated the new Yugoslav state.
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By 1923, the Eastern Question had come to an end. A decade of wars had finally destroyed the empires that had ruled the Balkans, and much of eastern Europe, for centuries. But the collapse of empires did not bring the peace anticipated by Western liberals. The successor states appealed to the principle of nationality to claim their neighbors’ lands: irredentism lived on, and few Balkan borders were uncontested. Moreover, the nationality principle cut two ways. All the new states had ethnic minorities whose existence undermined their claims to rule in the name of the Nation. Nor did Europe’s Great Powers succeed after 1918 in patching up the differences that had led them into war. On the contrary, their rivalries were now sharpened and intensified by ideology as fascism and communism took hold. Thus the twentieth century, like the nineteenth, was scarred by the bloody intersection of regional Balkan quarrels and Great Power competitiveness. The era of religion was over; that of ideology lay ahead: nationalism spanned them both.

4

BUILDING THE NATION-STATE

We strained like eagles high above the clouds and now we roll in the dust, in the swamp . . . ! If this is the life a free people leads, then such freedom is in vain. We sowed roses, but only thorns have come forth.

—MIKHALAKI GEORGIEV
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“The claim to set up new States according to the limits of nationality is the most dangerous of all Utopian schemes,” the Austrian Foreign Ministry warned in 1853. “To put forward such a pretension is to break with history; and to carry it into execution in any part of Europe is to shake to its foundations the firmly organized order of States, and to threaten the Continent with subversion and chaos.” Within half a century, the new nation-states of the Balkans had defeated the Ottoman empire; by 1918 the Habsburgs had gone too. The order of European states established at the Congress of Vienna had been superseded by that of Versailles. But as the Hungarian historian Oscar Jaszi observed in a 1925 essay on “The Irresistibility of the National Idea,” the First World War did not solve the nationality problem, since the right of self-determination could not as a matter of practical politics be extended to every national group. Indeed, the existence of both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia testified to the continuation of alternative forms of statehood. In the ethnic kaleidoscope of the Balkans, above all, the principle of nationality was a recipe for violence.
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For Ottoman Muslims, the repercussions of Christian triumph in southeastern Europe had long been evident. After the Habsburg conquest of Hungary and Croatia at the end of the seventeenth century, traces of Muslim life and monuments there were eradicated. In 1826 the powers agreed that so far as Greece was concerned, “In order to effect a complete separation between Individuals of the two Nations, and to prevent collisions which be necessary consequences of a contest of such a duration, the Greeks should purchase the property of Turks.” In 1830, the Turks were ordered to withdraw from the Serbian countryside into garrison towns, and thirty years later it was agreed that all Turks not in these towns were to be deported and their property sold.
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In 1876–1878, a new wave of refugees moved across the Ottoman–Serbian border after fighting around NiŠ led to the expansion of Serb territory. Tens of thousands of Muslim Tartars and Circassians fled Bulgaria when the Russian army invaded in 1877; others were massacred by Russian troops and Christian peasants. Thessaly, an Ottoman province, had around 45,000 Muslim inhabitants when annexed by Greece in 1881; by 1911 there were only 3,000 left. In Crete, the Muslim population dropped from 73,000 in 1881 to 27,850 in 1911. Some fled to avoid war, others to escape persecution by bands or civilians or simply such humiliations as having to serve in armies under Christian officers. Organized official exchanges of population—which would become a feature of twentieth-century Balkan politics—were as yet unknown. When the Ottoman authorities proposed an exchange of Turkish and Bulgarian populations in 1878, the idea was rejected.
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But the problem of nationality went beyond the reversal of fortune faced by Balkan Muslims. The liberal concept of the nation-state aimed to reconcile majoritarian ethnic rule with guarantees of individual rights. The tension between these two elements had already been evident in the struggles over the nineteenth-century Romanian constitution, which—to the anger of the Great Powers—was clearly designed to exclude Jews from citizenship in the new state. In theory, assimilation of the minority to the majority was supposed in the long run to lead to a homogenization of the population. But the theory collided with the realities of politics in Europe’s postimperial states, where tensions, animosities and suspicion among ethnic groups ran high.
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